The Health Expert: The One Food (WE ALL EAT) That's Killing Us Slowly: Max Lugavere | E223

we know that as your waist expands your brain shrinks what yeah it's related to Max lugavier he's the author of The New York Times best-selling book genius Foods a brain food expert is this the best in the world at what he does there is a lot of misinformation out there and so my passion is to know what's true so when it comes to Sugar your average adult today is consuming 77 grams of added sugar every single day that's almost 20 teaspoons Jesus Christ but the issue is we're designed to over consume those Foods so you're

fighting against millions of years of evolution how do we solve that I haven't gotten asked that anywhere else so controversial new research surrounding meat in our diet red meat is not associated with the health problems we've been told for decades people will try to censor you in talking about it but we know that animal products in particular contain nutrients that are very supportive of good mental health and there have been a number of studies that have shown that particularly vegan diets put people at increased risk for depression at least a doubling of risk I mean

food is so powerful it's medicine I get passionate about this because my mom was a vegetarian it's clear that her low meat diet didn't protect her there was a period where she got really bad really fast and then she passed away it was just so incredibly hard there were times I thought about suicide it really showed me how fragile life is we have incredible agency to change our destiny and to change the way really ultimately most of us are aging today so how do we change that [Music] um foreign [Music] why do you do what

you do and what do you do oh man what a place to start I um well I do what I do because the most important person in my life my mother uh was very ill from a very young age and that was the most traumatic seeing seeing her go through what she went through was the most traumatic thing I've ever had to endure in my life and ultimately it led to me losing her and when a loved one gets sick you know had I struggled with any kind of like health condition it probably wouldn't have

been the motivating force in my life that um that my mom was for me but because it was my mom because it was somebody who uh really was such a a beautiful person and and who aspired her whole life to be healthy seeing her succumb to illness it was a call to action to me to learn as much as I possibly could about health and nutrition and to share that knowledge as I was acquiring it with ultimately anybody who would listen and so what I do is I consider myself a health and science journalist with

a point of view I suppose I'm a filmmaker I'm a podcaster I'm an author but ultimately my my mission in life I think my purpose in life is to um is to help people is to help people feel better live longer live healthier and to avert ultimately the kind s of conditions that my mom struggled with for so many years zooming in on that then can you take me to the day that you found out your mum was sick and what was was there a phone call was there were you at the doctors with her

and what was the diagnosis it was uh it was around like 2011 she was 58 roughly at the time and I was I had been living in Los Angeles and my mother was home in New York City and I would routinely check in with my mom on the phone and at a certain point she started to complain to me about uh brain fog and I thought you know that that was just a was par for the course of getting older um it's not a term that was in my lexicon but you know brain fog you

kind of have a sense of what someone's talking about when they when they say that I started to spend more and more time in New York I was actually in between jobs uh at the time and because of that and because my mom's symptoms seemed to be a little bit worse than just like you know some some passing phase I started going with her to doctor's appointments and nobody could give us answers and I'm from as I mentioned New York City and so we have access in New York to Cathedrals to academic medical Insight right

and so in all of those in all of those instances I was just met with a total lack of clarity and um and it was really frustrating for me and my family you know one physician would think that it was uh depression for example and prescribe my mom a a non uh you know like an SSRI drug which are so commonly taken these days but her symptoms continued to get worse and ultimately we had to take a trip to the Cleveland Clinic so in the United States the two I guess highest regarded hospitals in the

country are the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic I mean there are probably others in that tier as well but um the reason why we felt the need to travel to the Cleveland Clinic was because they're known for taking on very complex medical cases and so we had a we took out a couple nights at a Holiday Inn across the street from a hotel and we show up at the hospital they assemble a team around the patient and it was there that week that my mom was diagnosed for the first time with a neurodegenerative condition

the the diagnosis was unclear but she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time and so not knowing anything about either of those conditions I mean I what I did know about those conditions were misconceptions and you know some of them were for example that their old person's conditions that they are you know some somehow genetically predetermined but doing what any Millennial with a data plan would do I went home and I sat on the or I went back to the hotel and I sat on the couch um in

the suite and I started Googling Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's disease because those were the indications for the drugs that my mom was given and that was the first time in my life that I had ever had a panic attack like I you know I felt um short of breath I felt the room starting to close in on me and it was uh that was a real turning point in my life learning that my mom had an incurable Progressive condition um and uh and that was a point at which I I really out of I mean it

wasn't even a it wasn't even a choice I just I that you know I couldn't focus on anything else anything but trying to understand to the best of my ability why this happened to my mom and I'm not a medical doctor I didn't take an academic route I didn't you know get a PhD but I had always been passionate about health and nutrition and fitness and exercise science I actually started college on a pre-med track and I I'm not saying that that is a you know could ever be a replacement for the rigors of you

know going through the academic channels but I knew where to find research because I had worked as a journalist after college and so what I did was I just immediately dove into the medical literature and it was really difficult to understand at first but it's something that like you read and you read and you read and you cross-reference and you watch you know you read books you watch TED Talks so like I left no stone unturned I was like you know I didn't I didn't like a year that first year I wasn't even sleeping I

was just trying to like read anything I could get my hands on and um and then ultimately that search broadened out where I I started reaching out to experts like actual scientists who are now ushering ushering in the concept of dementia as a preventable condition and I started asking them questions and so yeah that was a journey that began about 10 years ago but it was really motivated by by that that sort of initial incident where my mom was first diagnosed and uh and it continued to you know watching my mom decline over the following

years was really I mean it was just so incredibly hard that um that it just further cemented my my mission you know to try to understand all that I could about these conditions Because by the time you show up to your doctor's office you know a lot of people ask why me right it seems like it seems like these diagnoses are something that like you know that that the condition that we're being diagnosed for happened overnight right but it's not like most of these conditions the kinds of conditions that are now saddling modern society take

years if not decades to develop and so to me what that suggests is we have an incred we have incredible agency to to change our destiny and to and to change the way really ultimately um most of us are aging today and uh and so yeah so I just I became obsessed um and uh and I still am so so let's talk about genius Foods then yeah chapter three of this book you talk about sugar yes sugar is something I've thought a lot about recently I'm on a bit of a food Journey myself trying to

correct a lot of things in my diet and to be honest I find it all absolutely like intimidating contradictory to the point that I'm not sure like where I'm yeah I feel like I'm being pulled and pushed from Pillar To Post so I'm very keen to try and simplify um my understanding of some of these sort of basic nutritional Concepts sugar I'm going to ask you if it's good or bad and I'm asking that because I'm a neanderthal and I just want things you know my a lot of my questions on this subject matter will

be very simplified and hopefully the whoever's listening to this at home shares an equally primitive brain so I can be a bridge to them but sugar good or bad it depends I knew you were going to say that and I know it's a stupid question well that's the kind of that's the kind of answer that you should expect from somebody who really knows what they're talking about the biggest problem I think today with regard to sugar is added sugar so it's not sugar that's naturally found in food all plant foods have some quantity of sugar

even kale has a tiny amount of sugar um mostly you'll find it you'll find it most concentrated in Fruit obviously which is like the primary source of naturally occurring sugar in the produce section of the supermarket in in whole fruit but the most pernicious source of sugar today is the added sugar um the sugar that is added by food manufacturers to ultra processed foods usually with the intent of making those Foods hyper palatable basically these Foods one of the major problems with most Ultra processed foods is that they push your brain to a bliss Point

Beyond which self-control becomes really difficult if not altogether impossible I can relate yeah it's like the pint of ice cream right we've all had that experience of going over to the freezer breaking out the pint of ice cream flipping the top taking a spoonful only intending on having that Spoonful and then before you know it you're looking at the bottom of the pine right I've been there everybody I know has been there it's just uh the problem is that people tend to think that it's a moral failure right that they screwed up when they're unable

to moderate their consumption of those kinds of foods whether it's ice cream or cupcakes or cookies or what have you but the issue is the real understanding here is that it's not a moral failure we're designed to over consume those Foods because they light up fireworks in our brains reward centers because they're so calorie dense and now we live in a time where we've solved for the food scarcity problem right we have food over abundance this is the first time in human history where there are more overweight people walking the planet than underweight people so

we've solved that issue but our brains I mean they're still operating on version 1.0 of the operating system that told them that when we encountered sweet Foods or even Savory Foods for that matter because salt is actually a very valuable nutrient as well that we shouldn't stop consuming them because we don't know when the next Feast is going to be right it was like there were periods of feast and famine and so our brains and our ultimately our palates and and our our willpower are doing exactly what they're programmed to do so you're fighting against

Millennia you're fighting against millions of years of evolution when you try to moderate your consumption of those foods and I think that's the real problem with added sugar we tend to over consume it we don't Tire of eating it it gives Foods this quality of being hyper palatable and it also has a number of um you know inconvenient let's just say hormonal effects that when we really go overboard um you know aren't doing our health any favors but for your average person today I mean we live in a world where at least here in the

United States one in two people is trending towards obesity not just being overweight but like obese one and two so out of every other person you know that person has clinical obesity and one in two people also have some degree of glucose dysregulation um and glucose is essentially sugar so for that for your average person more than for most people um most people today have some degree of metabolic dysfunction the vast majority in fact do and so for that person sugar really is something added sugar in particular is something that really ought to be minimized

if not altogether avoided now a little bit here and there it's not going to be a problem no single food can sway your health in any One Direction both you know either towards health or towards disease but it's really um I think important to be mindful of all of the many different places of added sugar in the in the modern food supply the other problem which isn't necessarily a health problem um but it's a it's a it's a problem with regard to dose because as I mentioned dose makes the poison one of the biggest issues

with added sugar is that it's um our consumption of it is Insidious meaning it's just hidden everywhere whether it's commercial bread products or sauces or sugar sweetened coffee drinks we tend to just consume a ton of your average adult today is consuming something like 77 grams of added sugar every single day if you want to just like visualize that that's almost 20 teaspoons of pure sugar Jesus Christ teaspoon 20 teaspoons of pure sugar this is sugar extracted from the food Matrix so this isn't sugar and fruit this is just the added sugar that we're consuming

by way of these uh food-like products that Americans and Brits and people you know increasingly around the world in in developed societies are over consuming today when I see you know fizzy drinks that say they don't have sugar in them or other things that say they're sugar-free should I be skeptical because some some of these things I I'm like I'm eating this this chocolate bar and I'm thinking this is too good it says sugar-free or like really low sugar but it just tastes like heaven yeah that's a great that's a great question um and I

haven't gotten asked that anywhere else uh it's definitely worth talking about so a lot of like sugar-free products today we'll use there's a number of ways to make a product palatable and still say that you have that there's no added sugar so one way is manufacturers will use a compound called maltodextrin which is essentially sugar it's very sweet it's technically a complex carbohydrate so they don't have to list it as uh as sugar but it breaks down almost immediately into pure glucose so it's actually a glucose polymer so it's like molecules of glucose bound together

in a way that's very easy for the body to break down um other ways they'll add fake fibers like chicory root fiber or tapioca starch fiber the FDA is currently investigating whether or not these fibers because the whole point of fiber is that we don't uh digest it it's something that passes through us maybe it gets fermented by gut microbiota and our large intestine but it's unclear as to whether or not these purported fibers actually act like fiber once in our bodies and so um over consumption of those fibers uh can cause all kinds of

digestive upset a lot of people will get like incredibly bloated like all kinds of inconvenient digestive issues when they over consume them and you'll see those a lot in like sugar-free products um then you've got artificial sweeteners you've got other non-caloric sweeteners like Stevia monk fruit there are sugar alcohols which um sugar alcohols are an umbrella category and underneath that umbrella you've got sugar alcohols that I think are pretty good actually like erythritol and Xylitol and then you have others like maltitol and sorbitol where if you over consume those again more digestive upset so you

just really want to be careful with the the non-caloric sweeteners that you're ingesting making sure ultimately that you're not ingesting too much particularly of like these fake fibers and some of the artificial or some of the um you know the sugar alcohols because they can really wreck your wreck your gut what's your personal sort of diet regime as it relates to sugar do you do you have sugar in your diet um not a ton uh to be honest I try to minimize my consumption of um Ultra processed foods which are I can Define that if

you want because it's a term that I I feel like I use a lot these days and you know people I I tend to use it as if everybody knows what I'm talking about but essentially you have unprocessed food which is like what you'll find around the perimeter of your Supermarket right meat fish eggs vegetables fruit then you have minimally processed foods so uh ground beef for example has been minimally processed right um when you uh cook that beef you're essentially processing beef right you're processing food when you cook it a fruit smoothie is essentially

processed fruit because you're you're taking a few you're taking some of the steps away um with regard to the assimilation process right with a fruit smoothie you no longer have to chew fruit you now suddenly get to drink your fruit um Ultra processed foods and you can do all of those by the way in your kitchen so that's the distinction Ultra processed foods are foods that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen they tend to be shelf stable they tend to so you tend to find them in the aisles of our supermarkets they have

long shelf lives they come in packages they tend to have long ingredients lists um oftentimes with ingredients that you don't recognize so that right there is a key you know some people listening to this might say oh well that's a naturalistic fallacy not everything that we can pronounce is good for us and not everything that we can't pronounce is bad for us right I think that's a pretty poor argument I actually think that um it's reasonable in a time where 60 of the calories uh a person your average person is consuming is coming from these

Ultra processed foods and we know that people are metabolically unwell um and we know also that like the food industry has lied to us so many times in the past as they continue to put profit over um you know consumer health and well-being I think it's totally reasonable to want to know what's in your food um and uh and so yeah so if you can't identify and therefore recreate the product in question chances are it's an ultra processed food product I was going to ask the question then are all Ultra processed foods bad Greg Westman

um so I would say that uh as a as a screening tool um Ultra process foods you generally want to avoid them as a diagnostic tool um you know our individual food products that happen to be ultra processed necessarily bad by virtue of their processing not all the time and some examples of some Ultra processed foods that I think are actually um quite good although again they are in the minority would be for example like whey protein you couldn't make whey protein or most of us couldn't make whey protein in our kitchens right uh fat

free Greek plain Greek yogurt I think is a great high protein low-cost low calorie food you know you couldn't generally you couldn't make that in your kitchen like you would you know you could if you really like wanted to put in the the time and effort dark chocolate is something that you know tends to be made in a in a plant right but um we know that there are significant benefits to the consumption of dark chocolate I think food manufacturers are becoming wise to uh to this and so now you'll find like various high protein

options that that are shelf stable and the like and you know it really has to be determined on a case-by-case basis um but just in general Ultra processed foods are are a big problem because they tend to be not the best for us like the mo the majority of ultra processed foods that people are consuming are refined grain products packed with added sugar um excess sodium sodium is not bad but like you know we tend to over consume it today because of its presence in you know in in uh in these Ultra processed products as

if used as a flavor enhancer um so yeah so most Ultra processed products are bad and it's sort of like the analogy that I'll draw it's sort of like the BMI um I don't know if you're familiar with BMI but BMI is a way that it's a screening tool for obesity so when you look at the population level um most people with a certain BMI um past a certain level are either obese or severely obese um and it's a screening tool it's not a it's not a tool that any physician would use to diagnose obesity

because you have to look specifically at a person's body composition you hear stories all the time like the rock being technically obese right that's why BMI is not a good diagnostic tool but it is a it is a fairly um trustworthy screening tool so similarly Ultra processed foods yeah there are definitely some exceptions but in general they're a food category to be minimized I've been um I'm just off the back of trying to trying to have a ketogenic diet I tried for about two months yeah went well in terms of The Superficial results I think

I was seeking um felt great as well in terms of my Focus my performance I just felt really good I felt lighter I the the digestive challenges I was having and the pains and the bloating had completely vanished for those two months but I couldn't stick at it because maybe you know maybe I have fragile willpower or something but and then I had two guests come on my podcast who talked about the ketogenic diet and they both alluded to the fact that the issue with it is your human's ability to like stick to the thing

yeah what's your position on the ketogenic diet and you know I know in your in your book I think chapter 11 you talk a little bit about um you seem very pro-ketogenic diet yeah I'm Pro I'm Pro the ketogenic diet in certain contexts okay um I'm not a pro I'm not necessarily Pro the ketogenic diet um in every context I you don't need to be on a ketogenic diet for weight loss um I think that's a big misconception um but the reason why I talk about it I mean you have to understand the context of

the ketogenic diet Within genius foods which is that from the standpoint of the brain it's a very important diet it's an important diet to study it's an important diet to talk about as I've mentioned we've been using it to treat certain types of epilepsy for a hundred years at this point and that's because it's the only diet that changes the the biochemistry of the brain like it does that in a very um significant way it provides an alternate fuel substrate to the brain which normally relies on glucose but in certain in certain uh situations um

the brain can't rely on glucose for example with traumatic brain injury or um certainly in the setting of Alzheimer's disease where the brain's ability to generate ATP from glucose ATP is the brain's primary energetic currency um is diminished by about 50 percent and so you know if you're able to essentially keep the lights on so to speak by providing the brain with this alternate fuel source then that's a really uh powerful idea and needs to be studied and there have been a number of studies um on you know in the setting of Alzheimer's disease that

have shown that um at least in the short term the ketogenic diet seems to provide some degree of uh symptom Improvement which I think is is is really important now does that mean that the ketogenic diet is going to be right for every dementia dementia patient certainly not because you know it's a it's an it is an incredibly hard diet to adhere to and particularly for somebody with dementia I mean putting somebody with dementia on any kind of diet outside of the diet that they're used to is virtually impossible right but in Alzheimer's disease specifically

patients with Alzheimer's disease will actually start to develop a sweet tooth and it's thought that that's in part the brain a response to the brain crying out for energy because its ability to create energy again from sugar is diminished by 50 percent and so getting somebody you know with dementia to adhere to that diet it's just really difficult to do but if we can you know if if for example the reader of my book you know were to one day have some kind of neurological condition and want to experiment with that then that's a great

thing you know we also have various uh ketogenic Therapies like whether it's MCT oil or powder or these exogenous Ketone supplements um I know people tend to roll their eyes and think that these are like a fad now but there's actually an FDA approved medical food on the market for the treatment of uh dementia called Axona which is basically based on these medium chain triglycerides so this is uh this is like real science um there's uh there's now lots of evidence um suggesting that ketogenic diets can be useful in in the setting of various types

of mental illness so yeah so that so I mean I just think it's it's so crucially important to talk about now does your average person need to be on a ketogenic diet for for good health no does the average person need to be on a ketogenic diet to prevent dementia no similarly you know it's the same thing with like a uh for for type 2 diabetes which is now super common it's not that sugar in the diet caused type 2 diabetes it's the over consumption of calories and the like and it's the overfilling I mean

we that's a whole different rabbit hole but the overfilling of a person's fat silos that then causes fat to accumulate um in other organ tissues um and so carbohydrates are part of that problem but does that mean that carbohydrates caused the issue not necessarily however for somebody with type 2 diabetes who essentially has gotten to a point of glucose intolerance yeah being on a low carb diet might actually be a good therapeutic option it's not fixing the issue um so to speak but that's the same I would say that's the analogy that I would draw

to the ketogenic diet it's a it's a powerful therapeutic diet and um yeah and we have to we have to keep talking about it there's a lot of there's a lot of people that will like you know that will try to censor you and talking about it um now from the vegan camp like the the the you know people who who advocate for these plant-based diets because the ketogenic diet tends to be a diet that is inclusive of animal products you know in some iterations of it it might even be in a high Animal product

diet right um but they're they they're just like against it because it includes animal products but if you're talking about neurology and you're not also talking about the ketogenic diet then you're doing a massive disservice to uh to patients I think around the world on that point of vegans vegetarians vegans one of the things you've said is that you think they're putting themselves at increased risk of mental health problems and dementia because some of the important chemicals to avert those diseases are found in animal products like fish and eggs and meat and stuff like that

um is that is that Acura yeah well certainly um certainly eating fish is associated with reduced risk dementia yes yeah um but also now we're starting to see uh other forms of animal products like beef chicken Dairy are associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline we know that animal products are the richest source of choline and we've seen that higher consumption of choline is associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline there were just over the past year there have been a number of really uh important studies generally observational in nature that's kind of one of

the uh issues with nutrition science it's really we we have very few long-term you know randomized controlled trials to to show us with certainty that these connections are causal but the UK biobank study which is a very large population 500 000 people um observational study found that uh a dose response meaning the more um I believe uh animal products were consumed the lower the risk of dementia and Alzheimer's Disease by a pretty significant margin we see that red meat is not associated um with the kinds of health problems that you know we've been told for

decades cancer and stuff and yeah I mean it's dietary quality as a whole there was a great study people can look up maximova is the first author I believe the the year it was published was 2017 or 2018 they looked at all cause cancer and they found that when people were eating meat on a low quality diet meaning meat in the context of fast food right that yeah there wasn't increased risk for cancer but one once diet quality was high meaning that people's people were eating meat with fresh fruits and vegetables clearly a dietary pattern

indicative of Health Consciousness that that risk of cancer was completely abolished um so yeah like you know early on in in nutrition I think it was you know with with poor quality studies um sponsored by people that have a dog in the fight yeah exactly it's it's very easy to zoom out at the population level and to see links drawn between meat consumption and anything bad imaginable right because most of the time first of all most people people who consume more meat especially in this country tend to be more sedentary and they tend to smoke

more they tend to this is the whole concept of healthy user bias which is so crucially important you have to know if you intend to know anything about nutrition you have to know about healthy user bias people who eat more red meat they tend to smoke more they tend to be more sedentary you know they tend to eat more fast food like most meat products consumed in this country are hamburgers they're chicken nuggets you know like they're like they're those kinds of foods Ultra processed meat products conversely if you look at the consumption of fresh

fruits and vegetables you see healthy user bias there too favoring fresh fruits and vegetables and that's you know it's pretty obvious to understand why most people today are like obese they're consuming Ultra processed foods day and night fast food shelf stable convenience Foods the kinds of foods that you Foods in quotes that you would get from like a vending machine for example those are like that's those are the foods that are like the base of most people's food pyramids so to speak and so if you were to take a food like quinoa for example which

first of all if you know how to pronounce quinoa you're probably reading Health blogs right you've probably listened to a health podcaster too right consumption of quinoa is probably Associated I don't I don't know if this study has been done but I would bet I would bet 500 today that consumption of quinoa is associated with robust health is it because the quinoa is so healthy or is because the person that's eating quinoa on a regular basis that person probably a pretty health conscious person that person probably shops at Whole Foods that person is probably has

a gym membership you know so that's healthy user buys right there and so it works um in the inverse sort of way with red meat there are very few health conscious like red meat eaters I mean there are more now but we're like sort of a niche you know like where people on the paleo diet so to speak uh most people who consume red meat yeah they're eating it in the form of hot dogs and hamburgers and Subway sandwiches with the fries with the large Coke so all that is to say is that it's very

easy to find like links and that's why there's this funny truism in like nutrition science is that if you look in the nutrition literature you can find a study to back up anything that you want to say I'm always hyper conscious of that um but that's certainly the case with me because you know these observational studies they just they they're so difficult to do but now newer studies are showing us that when you control for these kinds of things like Diet quality that there's no association you know that there's that that meat actually is a

very nutritious food um and with the small uh slew of randomized controlled trials that we have with regard to red meat we see no negative impact with regard to an actual like real clinical outcome and oftentimes we see benefit because it's a pristine wonderful source of protein It's a Wonderful source of many micronutrients that we know are people tend to under consume today nutrients of of concern so to speak like zinc vitamin B12 nutrients that we know that people directly need iron iron deficiency anemia is a real Global problem one in four people globally are

anemic in half of those cases are due to iron deficiency and red meat is like the ultimate iron supplement you know so yeah so I get passionate about this I think in part because my mom was a vegetarian and um there were many times as I was uh you know reading about all this stuff that um I wanted to like shake my mom and be like you know Mom you're you're you're letting your ideology impact your biology you know that's like not something that you want to happen and um and you know I would never

go so far as to say that I know what caused my mom's illness like you know I I don't even know if it was her lack of consuming meat I don't know but um it's clear that her you know low meat diet um didn't didn't protect her you know and I'm pretty convinced at this point that um that sum is certainly better than none you know it doesn't I don't I don't Advocate I think some people think that I advocate for a high meat diet or even like a carnivore diet I don't I just I

really think it's an important um part of a balanced diet um and uh and a highly nutritious part of a diet it's actually like red meat and animal products in general they they tend to be our most nutrient-dense Foods there was a paper by um Ty Beale who's a nutrition researcher whose work I follow um that found that if you looked at the top six or so most nutrient dense foods available to us they're all animal products with the exception of maybe uh dark leafy greens which are also very nutrient dense so yeah I'm pretty

um Unapologetic in my my endorsement of um of animal products yeah you in um speaking of dark leafy greens and animal products and such in um in your book in on page three engine one you talk about clearing out your kitchen now I'm I'm well aware when I asked this question that if you if you were clearing out my kitchen you'd first throughout all of the ultra processed foods probably maybe yeah I mean I would want you to do whatever's in my best interest I'd be yeah I'd be gentle okay next all sources of Wheat

and gluten is the point number two yeah all sources of gluten um that's all my bread gone yeah well my noodles are gonna go as well I think that my my stance has has softened a little bit since I wrote that I like the Savage let's keep it moving yes um sources of industrial grade emulsifiers what is an industrial grade emulsifier and why is it got to go yeah so specifically um in the book we call out polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose which are uh synthetic emulsifiers that are used to create pleasing mouth fuels in Foods

usually combined that that combine hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances so oil and water or fatty substances and more aqueous solution and so the you know the the archetypes of those Foods would be nut milks and ice creams and what they've shown in animal models to be clear salad dressings and stuff as well yeah yeah salad dressings um what they've shown in animal models is that those substances um degrade the mucosa this like really important lining that separates the inner contents of our GI tract from the uh from the up our gut epithelial cells um which you

know there's a a chapter in genius foods that I'm very proud of on the gut microbiome all the new science surrounding the gut microbiome and how you know the gut brain axis really in many ways influences not just brain function but might have an effect on our predilection to disease and so anything that inflames the gut the gut isn't like Vegas like what happens in the gut doesn't necessarily stay in the gut and so these two compounds were shown um in animal models to uh have a profound inflammatory effect um on the on the gut

and so I recommend uh looking out for them and avoiding them now they're also a sort of a proxy or surrogate if you will for Ultra processed foods like Ultra processed foods are going to have those two compounds in them um as opposed to Fresh Foods so the dose makes the poison um but uh but yeah I would recommend uh avoiding them because that study was like pretty pretty eye-opening um and The Chronic the consumption of those two uh compounds I would say probably worth um you know avoiding I'm looking at this list of stuff

that you you've asked me to check out my kitchen and there's a lot of things here that are currently in my kitchen beverages fruit juice been a big fruit juice Drinker my whole life when I was younger they told me that [ __ ] they told me that orange juice was healthy I was guzzling orange juice thinking I was doing my body a a huge service and doing so and then over time I've come to learn from having conversations like this that these fruit juices I thought when I had a fruit when I had like

a fruit smoothie I thought I was like you know I was paying homage to my body but I've come to learn that I was probably doing my body a disservice in many respects because of the the sugar the available sugar yeah I mean you can squeeze the fruit sugar from five six oranges in one glass of orange juice I mean think about it the last time you like ate a whole Apple did you feel afterwards that you wanted to go and eat another Apple no I mean I only ever eat one apple at a time

there you go right yeah well I think the reason for that is probably that whole fruit is self-limiting because it kills you a bit more than it fills you a bit more yeah first of all you're eating it there's a speed at which you're eating it that's a lot slower than when you drink the fruit juice so it takes a lot you know it it allows your body or stomach to realize that it's it now has food in it to turn off some of those hunger signals like the hormone growing you also when you chew

it you know you leave large particles of the Apple that might take you know an hour to to fully digest um the food Matrix has fiber in it like the fiber from that Apple so it slows the the transit of um that Sugar it slows that it blunts basically the blood sugar Spike um you're also getting lots of water along with the you know the the sugar that you're consuming when you consume that Apple it's a lot different when you're just drinking juice you know it's a lot easier to like to get the fruit sugar

from you know if you're drinking apple juice for example you can easily drink the ju the sugar of five six apples in one glass but you know after eating a delicious even the most delicious Honeycrisp apple which I love it's like one of one of my favorite foods I've never felt the need to go and try another one another one the way that when I'm eating tortilla chips you know while I'm chewing on one tortilla chip I'm already you know lusting after the one that's in my hands right I'm not even like focused on the

one that's in my mouth and so why is that I'm like that with so many foods like if I have one Pringle I there's it's going to take a lot to stop me getting to the bottom yeah and I don't know why it's like suddenly I become a pringle addict and I've always wondered why that is because you know brussels sprouts broccoli you know I have one I have two I have three okay we're done yeah but the Pringles I can I'll get to the bottom unless I'm in a social situation where I feel slightly

embarrassed by eating an entire like tube of Pringles well they're I mean it's Pringles once you pop you can't stop that is a that is a truism with scientific backing like that we know that Pringles are Ultra processed we know that they're minimally satiating there are three characteristics that make a food satiating and Pringles lack all of them so one is protein protein is the most satiating of the macronutrients So for anybody struggling with hunger pangs or whatever prioritize protein in your diet increase the amount of protein that you're consuming for a person with healthy

kidneys there is absolutely nothing to worry about with regard to high protein consumption it's the most satiating macronutrient and it is a really important macronutrient for nourishing or musculature and ultimately yes washing our hunger like when you eat more protein you eat less carbs and fat and carbs and fat are energy protein is it's very difficult for your body to store protein your body doesn't your body doesn't want a storm there's so many uses for protein in your body whether it's to create neurotransmitters or to rebuild your muscle tissue or your bones or ligaments like

to create enzymes I mean protein like there's protein has so many roles in the body carbs and fat for the most part are Just Energy I mean there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate that's not to say that carbohydrates are bad by the way because a lot of people will hear that and say oh I don't I could you know get by on zero carbohydrates carbohydrates are important for optimizing hormones for optimizing exercise performance but there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate it's essentially energy and so too is fat I mean fat is

energy as well um we have a minimal daily requirement for essential fats um and we see that higher fat can support um energy you know as I mentioned you don't want to go low fat because fat supports hormone production we see the people on low-fat diets tend to have lower testosterone it also facilitates the absorption of very important fat soluble um nutrients like vitamins AED and K and various fat soluble plant compounds but it's carbohydrates and fat that our energy very easily stored um by the body you know if we uh we can easily store

carbohydrates in our liver as sugar glycogen um and in our musculature and we can easily store fat um in in fat so protein very difficult to store uh so that's the other that's that's the first factor that makes a food satiating Pringles are a low protein food the second factor is fiber Pringles are devoid of largely devoid of fiber fiber slows you know like we saw in the in the Apple example it slows the transit of food in the stomach it makes us feel more satiated it also absorbs water and it mechanically stretches out the

stomach which turns off um certain hunger hormones like ghrelin for example is it good for weight loss yeah it's good for weight loss to prioritize protein and fiber dietary fiber and then um water so water is the number one enemy of shelf stability and so Ultra processed foods they want long shelf lives that's like key to a profitable Ultra processed food product right it can be shipped overseas it can stay for months on the Shelf very little waste and uh and so products like uh Pringles devoid of what they're completely dehydrated right and water sometimes

when we're hungry we're actually thirsty it's just that those wires are getting sort of crossed and miscommunicated but your average hunter-gatherer didn't have access to you know running water they couldn't just pop into their local like gas station and buy bottled water you know where did uh hunter-gather find water when it wasn't uh readily available um they would get it from food they would get it from fruits and vegetables and even animal products are a good source of hydration so oftentimes when we're when we think that we're hungry we just need a little bit of

hydration so all those three factors the protein the fiber and the and the hydration are all like severely lacking in Pringles and other Ultra processed foods not to call out specifically yeah um yeah but uh these kinds of foods that we Now consume to our detriment today in the 21st century would have potentially saved the life of a hunter-gatherer one of our ancestors back prior to the ubiquity of food stability so yeah not to hate on your on your Pringles addiction no it's fine they're out ladies and gentlemen I am so excited um to introduce

and to announce that we have a brand new sponsor on this podcast and it's a brand that I've used for the last decade um across business across personal life when I'm holidaying when I'm traveling for works even at times when I haven't had somewhere to live and that is Airbnb the thing with Airbnb is most people when they think about Airbnb they think about the guest side of the the product they think about staying somewhere and scrolling through all of the incredible homes that you can stay in but the entrepreneur in me has always thought

about the other side which is what space do I have what space am I living in that I could add from a supply side and to create a revenue stream from that's what I'm fascinated by and I'll be sharing details about that side of Airbnb in the coming episodes thank you Airbnb for supporting us on this show means a lot reading through your your work was the first time I encountered this distinction between Health span and lifespan in your own assessment like what is the just difference between someone's Health span and their lifespan great question

so we're I mean today we are living longer right thanks to Modern medical advances not all of us my mom you know my mom didn't have a a lengthy lifespan but generally we're living longer but we are also dying longer and what I mean by that is that we're spending our health spans are shrinking so our lifespans are expanding but we're actually spending more of our life especially particularly in our latter years sick burdened with with chronic disease and disability and so I think it's really important that we not just have um a lengthening lengthening

of lifespan in our crosshairs but that we also aspire to lengthen our health spans so we want to we want to prevent chronic disease and disability to the best of our ability and I think that's that's just crucially important so what that implies is as we age you know that we we continue to be mobile and to move about the world and to be free of depression and we stay connected in our in our communities and I think you know eating a healthy diet exercising staying socially connected I mean you know averting loneliness uh these

are all crucially crucially important and um and yeah unfortunately today I think we tend to think only in terms of lifespan I just want to live as long as possible but um you know today for many people particularly in the western world it's you know it's like uh it's a double-edged sword because yeah you're living longer but you're you know most most people in Elder age today are frail you know they have chronic chronic health conditions um and uh and it's a big problem you mentioned depression there um I've I've been learning a little bit

lately about the role that our diet plays in our mental health um you you referenced earlier that your mother was given antidepressants yes her eyes when she was going through her her period of ill health what's your what's your assessment on the role that food plays in mental health what foods are typically in your view good for our Mental Health helping us to avoid depression anxiety whatever else and what foods are typically bad for our mental health oh man yeah mental health is so I I learned this recently which is just shocking that um the

number two cause of death for people between the ages of uh 15 and 35 in that sort of ballpark demographic the second cause of death is uh suicide and that's just shocking to me the first is unintentional injury so it's like drunk driving and just you know doing stupid things but yeah when it comes to mental health I mean our our mental status is highly responsive to the outside to our to our environment and our environment includes how we're living Our Lives the people that we surround ourselves with on a daily basis and indeed the

foods that we're eating so you know I think when it comes to mental health there are a number of really interesting observational studies that show us that vegan and vegetarian diets but I think particularly vegan diets are put people at increased risk for depression by the latest data that I've seen at least a doubling of risk now the question that always arises there is is the vegan dietary pattern causing the depression or are people who are more prone to depression gravitating to the vegan diet I think it's probably bi-directional because we know that animal products

in particular contain nutrients that are that seem to be very supportive of good mental health um there was one study out of deakin University's food and mood Center that found that women who didn't consume the nationally recommended three to four servings of red meat per week were at twice the risk of developing major depression and they didn't see that Association for other animal proteins so they didn't say for chicken and pork and they also saw an increased risk when people when women ate much more than the than that three to four serving recommendation um and

when you actually look into what red meat contains in it um it contains a lot of nutrients that we know directly support the brain whether it's zinc or vitamin B12 you could look at a food like beef liver which is one of the best sources of folate we know that low folate consumption is associated with depression um so I think that's you know I think animal products super important eggs you know a rich source of choline um fatty fish but generally like Whole Foods I think Whole Foods a whole food dietary pattern so you know

minimally processed again like the foods that you find around the perimeter of the supermarket that you cook for yourself Mediterranean diets Mediterranean Salt yeah I Don't Care What proportion of animal products or plant products you know you have although I think including both to some degree um is probably better than not uh provided you're not allergic or or have any specific sensitivity but um they're now using diet as an intervention to improve symptoms so the same food and mood Center which is actually one of the institutions that's really um that's really kind of championing this

field of nutritional psychiatry published the first ever randomized controlled trial where they used a dietary intervention to treat depression major depression so it was called the smiles trial and anybody can look this up but they used a a Whole Foods diet Mediterranean style diet that was inclusive of red meat fish dark leafy greens berries olive oil eggs things like that and they found that um in the patients with major depression compared to controls that were treated with the standard of care they saw they saw something like a three-fold increase in remission from the dietary intervention

now these were patients obviously that or or I guess not obviously but they were patients that were on a junk food diet right so if you're on a junk food diet um which most people are and you're seeing you know and your mood is not where you think it ought to be I absolutely think a first line of defense should be you know adopting more of these or integrating rather more of these um these these Whole Foods and cutting out the ultra processed foods and then of course I mean like sort of uh you can't

really talk about um lifestyle and mental health without mentioning exercise exercises you know I mean there's like a bounty of evidence at this point showing us that exercise is like literally medicine for the brain soon is something you talked about as well soon as being having a positive impact on cognitive function I believe the chemical is called norepinephrine norepinephrine yeah that's what I said or uh I believe on your side of the pond it's called noradrenaline it's the same you're adrenaline okay yeah it's the same same compound and that has a cognitive relationship that has

a relationship with cognitive performance yeah so norepine norepinephrine is actually produced in a part of the brain called the locus ceruleus which is like one of the first structures to become damaged in Alzheimer's disease and so that's sort of like the Hub of norepinephrine release and we see that when we apply um physical stress to the body of which saunas are one type um that there is a an up regulation of norepinephrine release and um and yeah so that might in a way sort of help uh you know Prime the body to to adapt and

become more resilient because that's essentially what stressors do to the body that's the whole concept underlying hormesis that hormesis which is like low doses of low to moderate doses of a stressor actually are as opposed to being rather than being than being harmful to the body actually elicit an Adaptive response that makes the body um come out on the other side stronger and more resilient and so that is the um that's essentially the mechanism um the proposed mechanism underlying why it seems that saunas are beneficial to our health and but also exercise and also cold

water immersion and also um intermittent fasting and also even some of these like plant compounds you know like we we consume Myriad uh compounds and plants that if we were to consume big doses might actually have a Toxic effect but in small doses actually are thought to benefit our health via this same hormetic pathway but yeah sauna use a lot of the research is coming out of the University of Eastern Finland which is a a great place for This research to be done because saunas in Finland are like taking a shower so you could say

if that study were done if those studies were being done here in the United States you could easily write them off to healthy user bias because somebody who's regularly saunaing is um or taking Asana as the Finn say is probably has access to a gym probably you know is going to the spa regularly probably is like putting a great deal of attention on their own physical health right but in Finland that's not the case people aren't doing saunas as like a health modality they do it because they love it because it's a self to the

you know to the cold temperatures there and it's just a part of like the normal like routine and so what they're finding is that um you just using Asana two to three times a week is associated with a 22 risk reduction for dementia and using it four to seven times per week is associated with a 65 reduced risk for the development of dementia so that's like a dose response the more you use it the more robust the health effect seems to be and it's not just for dementia they've seen a reduced risk for hypertension which

we know is really important we know that the brain that blood pressure is really important from the standpoint of brain health so you want to make sure that your blood pressure is healthy also um all cause mortality now just to be clear these are these are still correlational studies but mechanistically there is plausibility there and that is you know we know that when you use Asana it does have a positive impact on your blood pressure we know that it can reduce inflammation we know that it gets your heart rate up I mean I know this

when I whenever I use this on I put my finger on the artery in my wrist and I can see that I'm getting like almost like a mild aerobic workout and so we know that that's like that's saunas are essentially like the best workout that you can have while sitting absolutely still you're also purging toxins through your um through your sweat compounds that aren't as um as effectively excreted via stool in urine so it's like you know there's there's a lot of good stuff going for saunas and of course more research needs to be done

um but all indicators seem to point towards a a positive Health effect it's really interesting that um you know our ancestors probably had natural stresses on them at all times and we've kind of built a life around mitigating stresses so you know living in very warm like room temperature houses sat on sofas use this piece of glass to order my food my date to talk to my friends it's almost like with we're optimizing our lives away from stresses and these stresses seem to be so critical to the natural hormone and physiological responses that make us

healthy human beings totally yeah it's like I've heard it referred to as like the Comfort crisis yeah yeah it's it's a it's a big problem whether it's like constant you know constant climate control um so I mean just like so few of us are willing at any point to venture out of our comfort zone and to be uncomfortable and I think our biology suffers as a result this isn't just um you know this is like there's actual now basic science underpinning this concept that when we apply stress to the body or even via the foods

that we consume this like mild hormetic stress than we get that we get from certain compounds whether those compounds are in turmeric or kale or broccoli or what have you that um what doesn't kill us makes us stronger and it Fosters a degree of anti-fragility which um I love you know I think it's like I think it's so important I mean if you think about it we didn't evolve over Millennia to arrive here and be taken down by a peanut you know or like or all of these like you know we're seeing this this crazy

Inc uh like spike in in autoimmunity in incidence of autoimmune conditions and allergies and the like and you know I think it's a it's a testament to how disregulated our lifestyles have become how removed our lifestyles have become from the kinds from from the world in which we evolved and um and part of what's been lost is the stress is the beneficial stress as you've mentioned what is the unbeneficial stress and the impact it has I you know chapter 10 you talk a lot about about chronic stress one of the one of the things you

said was um ever see a person with a bulging midsection but surprisingly skinny arms and legs this is the picture of chronic stress yeah chronic stress is a killer it I mean we evolved to see a threat have a stress response respond to that threat and then go back to our Baseline level of functioning right today our stressors come not from physical threat right from the lion on the Savannah that's running towards us or towards our progeny um where the the stress that we that most of us experience today it's a new breed of stress

it's from you know it's from work it's from it's from chronic consumption of the news media it's from being stuck in relationships that have gone sour working jobs that we hate Financial stress I mean there's all different kinds of stress and not all of that stress is avoidable just to be clear I mean when I was going through what I went through with my mom I couldn't avoid that stress but what did I do as a as a way to cope because I couldn't avoid it I built up my own resilience and we see that

um you know whether it's exercise or these hormetic stressors that we were talking about that you actually can by exposing your body to physical stress you can bolster a degree of psychological stress there's what's called a spillover effect um and and a cross-adaptation effect that occurs but chronic stress I mean one of the problems is that it's like it's sustained and it causes a change in our hormonal milieu that suppresses immune function it um causes our adipocytes so our fat cells to release pro-inflammatory compounds um pro-inflammatory cytokines it causes this you know chronic release of

the hormone cortisol which is not a bad hormone by any means but you know that can over time have a negative effect on um brain function on on memory function it impairs digestion when we're chronically stressed and we know that um you know the gut is crucially important when it comes to modulating inflammation in our bodies helping us to assimilate nutrients from the foods that we're consuming and if you're chronically stressed you're just not doing that as well also people who are chronically stressed I mean they have digestive symptoms right as a result whether it's

like diarrhea bloating like I mean this is people like before public speaking they often see a um they often have like digestive symptoms right that just goes to show you how intricately connected like our our perception of of a of a of of like you know stress and how that can affect our biology um and so that example that I gave in the book about that apple shaped torso one of the most harmful places to store fat um in the body is in our midsection so that apple shaped body that is attributable to an excess

of visceral fat and this is fat that essentially hugs our internal organs and is particularly pro-inflammatory so it secretes as I mentioned we know our that our fat is an endocrine organ which is essentially an organ that secretes hormones um it's not just an inert storage site and those fat cells have um I believe uh four times the cortisol receptors as compared to regular run-of-the-mill subcutaneous fat that you store in your like you know underneath your arms and you know on your thighs and we know that visceral fat is um associated with dramatically you know

worse cardiovascular health increased risk of cardiovascular events we know that as your waist expands your brain shrinks yeah well it's it's probably related to cortisol because we know that cortisol causes that when cortisol is chronically elevated and particularly when we're we then self-medicate with these Ultra processed foods foods that are high in sugar right which we all reach for when we're stressed out right to emotional like to to soothe ourselves right with food we tend to store fat um there like in the midsection so it's not that stress uh causes us to store more fat

necessarily I mean fat storage is largely regulated by energy balance but what it can do is dictate where we store that fat and as I've mentioned it's the storage of fat in our midsection that's particularly dangerous and so um and so yes so that that the effect that cortisol can have there it also it has a negative effect on other tissues um it can have a negative effect on our um total brain volume as we've seen in some studies um just to be where does Cortisol come from our adrenal glands adrenal glands yeah and there's

certain foods that stimulate the production of cortisol more than others not Foods um it's just it's stress you know and there are certain conditions that are associated with um hypercortisonemia um but um but no food it's not food that I would it's not the foods Foods actually can like bring down cortisol you know so some people like like sugar like sugary foods like you know like a lot of people um anecdotally at least will uh see an improvement in their sleep when they consume a little bit of like honey before bed for example because that

can sort of bring down cortisol right if they hadn't if they pre you know for example skip dinner or had they they had an earlier dinner or they had a particularly like low carb dinner or maybe they're in like a calorie deficit um so that can all cause cortisol to kind of inch its way up and um and carbohydrates are good at sort of like pumping the break on on cortisol release that's one of the reasons why we tend to reach four sugary Foods when we experience chronic stress so it's like this vicious cycle right

but the way to pump the brakes on cortisol release is not to like just keep eating sugary Foods it's to find and uproot the cause of the stress you know get out of the job that you hate break up with the person who's driving you crazy on a chronic basis you mentioned honey though and sleep um something again I've been thinking a lot about ever since I bought myself a whoop um which tracks my sleep and gives me some data in the morning about how I slept is how to improve my sleep via my diet

um what advice would you give me there if I wanted to have deeper deeper uh more quality sleep what should I be eating not eating avoiding what times Etc yeah I mean generally you just you want to not eat too close to bedtime [Music] um there's sort of like a Goldilocks Zone where you know I think we're met as diurnal creatures meaning creatures that are that typically eat during the day you want to eat your last meal about two to three hours before you go to sleep you don't want to go to bed hungry I

mean people people obviously have different um you know different preferences and I think preference in many ways uh Reigns supreme but what we know from circadian biology is that we're meant to eat about two to three hours before we go to sleep and um and you don't you know like that's to give space between your last meal and sleep because sleep is a time for rebuilding and restoring we see this like interesting hormonal shift in the body that is really like it's why sleep is you know we rejuvenate in many ways like our bodies our

cells our tissues when sleeping part of like how we get there is a change in body temperature and you know we see this like this this dip in body temperature right before we go to sleep um or just after actually we we go to sleep if you eat a like a really like meat heavy meal right before you go to sleep um a lot of people notice that doing that can negatively impair sleep and I think one of the one of the proposed mechanisms why that happens is that we have the thermic effect of protein

is quite High particularly compared to fat and carbohydrates and so you've got this like internal furnace like burning in your gut like to try to break down and assimilate all of the precious amino acids that you've just ingested and so I think that can sometimes be at odds with um with like that wind down process that circadian you know wind down process so yeah just I would try not to eat too close to bedtime many people um feel like eating carbs before bed does help them sleep for that same reason like maybe they have cortisol

you know still like [Music] um you know a bit of of cortisol dysregulation and carbs before bed uh seems to seems to be able to help with that um what do you when do you eat if if not before bed like you know sometimes I've been guilty of eating while I'm falling asleep this is old Steve not new Steve um but when do you eat you talked about intermittent fasting I read some things that said you start eating roughly at like 11 o'clock in the morning yeah what's the window in which you you eat I

generally will yeah I don't I generally won't have my first like food until um these days it's about 10 30 10 30 uh 11 in the morning I've been experimenting with um carbohydrates before exercise for a long time I was I really enjoyed fasted workouts and um and lately I've been experimenting to see what a little bit of Perry workout carbohydrate does for my for my lifts because I'm really into I love Fitness so um so I've been kind of experimenting a bit with that but the general rule of thumb that I practice is that

I don't eat for an hour to an hour and a half after I wake up part of the reason for that is and again just to like preference you know personal preference is uh is really like key here so you know a lot of the like recommendations that I'll make like you might see a smidgen of benefit but at the end of the day like if you can't you know work out at the optimal time or you know eat in the optimal Windows like you know still what you eat and making sure that you are

getting exercise is better than like not because of like a fear that you're not doing it you know optimally like work exercise is crucially important eating a Whole Foods you know animal inclusive plant inclusive diet I think optimal um but you know what circadian biology is is showing us is that when you eat immediately after waking up um you know you might not have had your melatonin for example uh fully subside which is a sleep hormone when melatonin is elevated as it starts to um you know it starts to rise once the sun begins to

set that sends the signal to our bodies essentially that the kitchen is closing that the kitchen is closing and that you know we're now approaching the time where you know we're gonna change the guard it's like a Changing of the Guard essentially where we're going to focus on Rejuvenation and repair um when people wake up in the morning that hormone hasn't fully necessarily subsided yet and that can have the um consequence of making us not as insulin sensitive so it might impair glucose regulation um while it's still elevated and um and so like eating carbohydrates

in that window particularly like as they typically appear in the standard American diet the bran muffin the glass of orange juice like that's I don't think uh you know like an appropriate breakfast for that time of day you know I mean you might be able to get by with something like that later on but generally like after you wake up you want your melatonin to fully subside and also cortisol which is your body's you know we talked about that as a stress hormone cortisol is not bad it's also your body's Chief waking hormone that's the

highest that it's going to be throughout the day in the morning and I mentioned that cortisol is catabolic well one of the reasons why cortisol like one of the effects that cortisol has is it helps to liberate stored fuels in the body whether it's you know sugar stored in your liver or even fat you know people tend to wake up in a fat burning State and so I like to just give my body like an hour and a half to like let the my hormonal U adapt and get ready for like for food do you

go outside yeah as almost immediately after I wake up I like open my blinds so I have like a really big window it allows like light to come in you really want that Morning Light um it's crucially important I uh I've been a fan of um Sachin Panda his work for a long time he's a circadian biologist down at Salk the Salk Institute um and um and he's published a lot of great research actually I think he helped to uh uh discover the melanopsin proteins in the eye that interface directly with this region in the

brain it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus so it's it's like it's like a switch gets set when we expose our eyes to Bright Morning Light that essentially starts a 24-hour timer that influences our energy levels our alertness our coordination our body temperature and then at the end of the day when we are you know like when we start to feel sleepy and when that sort of diurnal or nocturnal rather melatonin um curve begins to pick up so yeah like setting setting your circadian rhythm first thing in the morning with with bright light exposure is super important

even on a on an overcast day the ambient light is more than enough to um to flip that switch so yeah that's a crew that's crucially important my morning routine is essentially like I wake up I open my blinds I get like I make sure that I'm whether it's like you know checking my phone or whatever it is emails like by the window so that I get that nice ambient bright light to Anchor my body's circadian clock um and then generally like I wait uh an hour and I'll have like morning coffee and then that's

you know when I'll like eat something these days you know it'll be a mixed meal with like protein and carbohydrates and that's when I I will typically hit the hit the gym soon after that I've been asking everybody you just mentioned coffee that I've been asking everybody this question to try and figure out someone can uh give me a a new answer but you know coffee seems like this kind of miracle drug because everybody can point to the upsides of having coffee in the morning whatever but nobody has been able to really articulate to me

the cost and all these things in life have a cost right we live in a society now where many people will have multiple cups of coffee before 12 o'clock before midday and nobody seems to be able to tell me what the cost of that is so there must be one because nothing in life is free yeah so so what is the cost Well everybody's different so you know people metabolize some people are slow caffeine metabolizers others are are not um and so you know you have to you really have to like determine for yourself whether

or not coffee is something that works well for your body it is a type of stress I will say that so for people who are chronically stressed adding coffee to the mix is probably uh you know just adding fuel to that fire and it's not that I want you to get rid of the coffee I'd rather see you get to the root cause of where that stress is coming from um but you know it can stimulate cortisol release and it's it is uh it is a powerful stimulant we know that it can also negatively impact

sleep it actually affects your brain similarly to Bright Light so that's why you know I mean for many reasons you want to make sure that you're you you are consuming it um you know far far away from your from bedtime but it it it honestly is hard to find um a downside to Coffee I mean there really is good there is good research on it recently it was discovered that the caffeine in coffee acts like a natural pcsk9 inhibitor so I know that's like an unfamiliar it's like a mouthful but there's a new class of

um I think relatively uh you know benign cholesterol lowering drugs on the market called pcsk9 Inhibitors now I'm not anti-cholesterol or anything like this some of our most healthful Foods actually act like natural Pcs pcsk9 inhibitors dietary fiber in a way is like a pcsk9 inhibitor but they found that high dose caffeine actually um at about a dose of about 400 milligrams uh can actually act like this drug where it makes your liver more effective at recycling cholesterol carrying lipoproteins like LDL and so that that kind of like adds a mechanism to the observation that

we've seen that people who regularly drink coffee uh seem to be protected against cardiovascular disease and even neurologic conditions like Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's and Ms so it there seems to be this this protective effect of coffee but it's always important to caveat these findings with the fact that these are averages so an average coffee seems protective but certainly within those those cohorts that are being studied some people are doing really poorly with coffee as well so you just you know it's it's something that you really have to like regularly take inventory and ask yourself like

is this working you know for me I think one of the healthier ways to ingest coffee is to not consume it immediately after waking up which you know I'm guilty of doing many days but like you know it's it's generally something that's like you're better off consuming like an hour or two after you wake up um and again not you know not too late into the afternoon um either and and like also you know the dose I think is really important um people that develop caffeine dependency you know they think that they're they're improving their

performance with caffeine but what they're really doing is they're treating their withdrawal from caffeine so another way that I like to kind of um make sure that I'm consuming it in the most mindful way possible is I'll take like occasional uh weeks off from caffeinated coffee and I'll switch to decaf um yeah and it's I feel like it sort of helps like re-sensitize my brain breaks the dependency a little bit and then I bring it back and when you bring it back man you see what a drug you know what a potent drug coffee really

is you know but in general I'm a fan I'm a fan of of coffee everything is in polyphenols it um it's a natural activator of our body's Nrf2 pathway which is like a detoxifying pathway in the body that's also stimulated by cruciferous vegetables nobody can say anything bad about coffee it's like everybody's part of the conglomerate and everyone's got like an affiliate link or they're on payroll or something but yeah so it's actually it's actually changed my perspective because I just assumed that anything that was such a such a powerful stimulant must have a real

significant downside but I've asked a million people this question not a million but this is maybe six people this question some of which have written books about coffee and I'm still yet to hear a compelling argument against having coffee in and amongst your diet as you say um a few hours after you wake up so one of the things that really did catch me off guard was it was in your um your book The Genius life where you talk about this study with the mice and you make the case that travel is a has positive

relationships with health it has health benefits not something I've ever heard anybody say before that travel is good for our health yeah wow I'm glad you brought that up um because this is this that also kind of parlays into another concept that I've been lately thinking about um a lot for the first time well first of all so the study that I talk about in the second book The Genius life is the fact that they you know the just how important novel experiences are for the brain they will take mice and keep them confined to

you know like a very a limited area and they see that they suffer they suffer in terms of their bodies and their brains and then they let that Mouse or they let um you know intervention mice go and explore what they call enriched environments and they see something like four-fold um you know like they see like a an up regulation in various indicators of neurogenesis which is really important it's like the creation of new brain cells so all that is to say like you know it's important to do novel things and as I say this

you know this is something that I struggle with in my in my in my own life because I am a creature of habit and I would routinely get the sense this gnawing sense that I'm living Groundhog Day over and over and over again where I I wake up and I do a few things like work related I work out but ultimately like I've got like this routine that I love and I tend to do that on script every day but I started to get this feeling like I'm just like waking up doing a few things

going back to bed waking up doing a few things going back to bed like before I know it like I'm my head is just like on My Pillow again and it's it it started to get like really frustrating to me until I discovered that Groundhog Day syndrome is actually a thing and um essentially what it is is you know our brains are and this ties back to the mouse study our brains are efficiency machines right it's conservation of energy our brains and bodies don't want to do any more work than they absolutely have to right

because I mean now we know that food is like ever present always at Arm's Reach but for the longest time that wasn't the case and our brains are massive energy consumers our brains speak for 25 percent of our basal metabolic rate despite accounting for only two to three percent of our body's Mass so anything that the brain can do to make its functioning more efficient it'll do so when you do the same things every single day what does your brain do it prunes away excitement joy happiness like the dopamine response is just completely blunted and

that's why as you get older people universally right is like a human Universal people report that time just accelerates right like where did the last decade of my life go it's not the time accelerated right it's just that your life has become so routine it's interesting you say that because there's also the other stereotype that you get grumpy yeah the word yeah it's quite typical in The Stereotype that people will get older and a little bit more grumpy yeah well they get grumpy they get stuck in their ways they get I mean yeah that's that's

definitely the case but they probably are getting grumpy because their lives lack the joy and excitement that they once felt right time is just like accelerating that moving walkway that we are all on towards the inevitable decrepitude of old age right like it seems to go faster and faster and faster the older we get but it's not because time actually is moving any faster it's because we get so stuck in our ways like we get so our routines become so cemented and what we fail to realize and hopefully this you know me saying this like

shakes people out of their out of their comfort zones you know and and inspires people to shake things up a little bit this Groundhog Day syndrome it causes our brains to just like sheer away for the sake of efficiency I mean it's got It's it's got good intentions right but it shears away like all the joy so you just become like this rote automaton and and the joy the excitement it's just you know it's something that like you cease to experience you know you cease to experience it whereas when you look back at like your

youth for example it's not that like time actually moved slower it's that every day was different and um and so that I think is is really important and uh and yeah we should challenge ourselves whether it's to travel I mean travel is like to me the epitome of exposing oneself to an enriched environment because everything is new but if you can't travel you know like go to a different gym every once in a while look you know try shopping in news in different supermarkets or change up your wardrobe or take on a new creative project

like start a new hobby there are all kinds of things that you could do to shake yourself out of this like Perpetual routine that I think has a real cognitive and health cost so I I was looking at a study um they did on rats and habits you probably know the study with the rats the chocolate and the maize I think so where they get the the rats to run through a maze to a piece of chocolate but the first time the rat runs through the maze to the chocolate they they monitor the rat's brain

and there's a ton of cognitive cognitive activity right you you see the rat observationally scratching around sniffing around um eventually it finds the chocolate against the reward when they put the wrap back into the maze for the second time cognitive activity is gone because the Habit has been formed so that as they as I looked at the brain scans of those rats it was just completely flat because they were on autopilot again the brain is yeah conserving its need to function so that it can focus on other things other threats it can conserve energy as

you say um and that's what our lives become like we don't when we get out of bed in the morning I'll root from the bed to the kitchen is not one that requires me to have any sort of cognitive um activation I fly and therefore also I don't remember the journey yeah I just I just fly down there yeah you're on autopilot yeah and our lives become autopilot and it's interesting I'm trying to figure out as you were talking there like you said sharing away the like the happiness what why why does being on autopilot

cost me happiness and why does it make my did you say it made my brain smaller not smaller okay thank you well it probably I mean you know if if that Mouse study holds true in humans it probably doesn't um it doesn't support neuroplasticity yeah yeah there's no need for my brain to yeah yeah I mean it's a it's an efficiency machine after all so the happiness point now why why does that why does living a life on autopilot have an impact on my on my happiness well there there are probably I mean there there

are definitely benefits to routine right like there are not to like some of the benefits to routine is like are can be that you you know you have your for example your your diet dialed in or you have a you know you have great connections in your community you know so I'm not telling everybody to like throw their lives into into upheaval but um but you know it's just like when we start to do the same things every day we we it's the scientific term is habituation yeah yeah we habituate right it becomes habit right

and we feel this way like we we see this with that car that we've pined for and suddenly it's sitting in our driveway and yeah it's exciting for the first month or two months or three months but after a certain point you know that that level of excitement that we once felt towards that car or maybe even it's if it's maybe sometimes it's the person that we're sharing our beds with you know like this is just an inevitability an unfortunate inevitability of The Human Condition and so I think there are ways to hack it I

think there are ways to you know travel with your with your significant other or break the routine with your significant other um or you know invest in things um that have emotional value for you for example so I mean the car might have not been the best example because like some people do have emotional connections with cars like I bought a guitar you know recently that I love and I have an emotional connection to it because it was played by one of my favorite artists you know um so are you talking about that really it's

the decline of meaning that is associated with habituation yeah and that makes us unhappy because as you know creatures of meaning we do need things to remain meaningful in our lives yeah it's it's like it's the it's these like rote routine behaviors that are not all that um productive or meaningful um those are you know it's like driving the same route to work every day shopping in the same Supermarket every day eating the same foods every day like challenge your your preferences you know like there are foods today that I enjoy that I didn't like

15 years ago and I'm always willing to challenge like my own preferences about things but it's like when you do the same things every day um you tend to start to overlook them it's it's it's difficult if not impossible to maintain an appreciative relationship with something that's always there it's funny it reminded me of a study I am I was reading about regarding music and how there's almost an optimal point with a song that we love where it can be repeated over and over again so say if we're listening to it on the radio it's

repeated say we listen to it 50 times there's a point where we've heard it so many times and it's become habituated that we love it at an optimal level and then it declines when we we've heard it too much because it loses that sense of meaning and I just remember reflecting on that how the record industry um want to put things in our lives that have a certain level of familiarity but not too much familiarity because then we'll dislike it this is why they do remixes because there's a level of familiarity there so we like

it but it has that novel nature which we also really value to to make us interested yeah which habituation obviously kills like habituation and novelness are inversely correct you know yeah no it's true it's um there's this quote that I love I'm a huge uh James Bond fan we're talking a little bit about like you know before before we started rolling but like in the latest film there's this wonderful Jack London quote at the end of the film that they uh that they use to to kind of um commemorate Bond and the quote is something

like I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them I shall use my time and I I love that line so much and I think it's such a it's such a good um you know like it's it's so emblematic for I think the life that we all deserve you know that we all ought to be living I think like it's occasionally in this conversation about how do we live longer like that's a Nuance that gets lost you know it's not just about living longer it's about living more fully and um and so yeah I

think that that's like that's part of it you know it's like breaking the routine and and like getting back some of that joy and excitement that we have about life you know maybe after listening to this it'll be you know going to the supermarket and loading up on healthful food you know blueberries and and avocado and dark leafy greens and grass-fed beef um things like that or maybe signing up for a new gym membership and sustaining that because of what you now know it does for mental health exercise so it's it's it's a balancing act

as you as you kind of alluded to earlier on between familiarity Community Comforts and those kinds of things but keeping your foot one one step outside of your zone of comfort so you have the like stimulation and the joy and the spontaneity of Life at the same time and that's like a constant subjective balancing act that we're all trying to you know like where I like my Comforts but there is you know as you say the Comfort crisis I can get a little bit too comfort and that'll have adverse effects on a lot of things

yeah and that's one of the things that I challenge with in this life is like I love my routine and I love comfort and I love you know but I also um I love travel I just don't I'm not good at planning travel and I you know have all these like hang ups in my not what if I'm not able to like find a gym that I want to go to in this new place or find a healthy you know Supermarket or something to shop at like these are all the things that I my neurotic

brain is like okay we maybe we should just stay put you know but um but whenever I do whenever I get like pushed to to do those kinds of things like to travel I I never regret it you know you said something earlier when you're talking about habituation about the person lying next to you in bed yeah that was a brave thing to say yeah well I'm uh I'm you know maybe that's why I'm single I don't know I uh I think that that's a common human um struggle you know and I've struggled that with

I've struggled with that in relationships um in the past and it's a it's a getting bored of someone um yeah just like not necessarily getting bored but like taking what's always around for granted I think that happens to all of us it's a big problem it's a big sad unfortunate awful thing that our brains do you know like it's there's an evolutionary reason for it and again it's it's conservation of energy um so you know like it's not um I think like it occurs for a for an Adaptive purpose but I think it's it's one

of these things that can become malignant if we're not like aware of of it and um and we don't actually take uh like make an effort in our lives to to challenge it to challenge that tendency that we all have you know so I'm not I'm not I didn't like I'm not endorsing that I'm not saying that there is any um you know reduction in value for somebody for somebody or something that we're that you know that we are like that's that's always around that's not that's certainly not the case um but yeah it's it's

a constant fight it's a constant battle you know I think everybody everybody experiences this are you um hoping to find one person and settle down with them for the rest of your life I am yeah I don't I mean I cross your arms though what in my body language look like a shield oh man yeah well I've been in I've had a therapist like for the past year and a half and I'm trying to like um yeah like you know kind of like unravel some of my own like you know early childhood like drama that

you know that like I think has led to a more avoidant attachment style and has you know given me challenges with like with regard to commitment and things like that in relationships um and uh and yeah but I'm also very lucky in the sense that like I feel like I have a very rich life like I have a very close family I've got a great community of friends I I love what I do for work um thankfully I feel very fulfilled by um by my work and so it's not like it's not like a major

priority for me but I yeah I would like to like you know like be in a I do want to call that in like that is like something that is a is a goal for me but um but yeah we all have like our our our stuff you know and I feel like for me it's like one of the I was um incredibly close to my mom like that was like a you know we talked about that I was incredibly close to my mom I loved my mom it was so hard to see what you

went through and and that was an incredibly traumatic um experience you know but uh but that kind of like attachment that I have had from childhood to my mom you know it's made it like difficult and you know some of the things that I witnessed in their relationship my mom's relationship with my dad and their marriage and how how bad that was at times some of the things that I saw um it didn't really set me up uh you know to like have the easiest time um in relationships but uh but yeah I'm like working

through it I think therapy is wonderful I mean you know I've had a great therapist I'm doing all the work I'm like reading all the books and things like that have you been able to identify because I can relate to many things you said about like learning the model of love as being a imprisoning one or a toxic one or an unsafe thing like learning from from our parents at a young age that like love is unsafe it is violent or it is this or whatever have you been able to identify through therapy what you're

sort of limiting beliefs are as it relates to like love and relationships have you gotten that oh man um I yeah I mean that I'm I think the limiting yeah the limiting beliefs that like you know that you can't have the kind of relationship that you want that you don't you know maybe deserve the relationship that you want I mean this is a totally different like rabbit hole but for me you know like one of the one of the things that I learned about in therapy is that when you're really my mom divulged things about

my parents relationship to me that she you know probably shouldn't have at a at a young age my mom was the best mom just to be clear but nobody's perfect and we all make mistakes and I think that like she probably shared some stuff with me about her relationship that she shouldn't have at the age that I was essentially making her making me a surrogate partner back when she didn't have the emotional shoulder of my dad you know when my dad was um not being the best partner to my mom and um there's a term

for it the term sounds worse than it is but the term is covert incest so it's not it's not sexual but it's like they make you their emotional partner in a way when when they shouldn't um and that's something that like at the time you feel like you're getting you're receiving really privileged information you're like your mom's confiding in you you know and that's how I felt when I was like growing up um and yeah she was an emotionally she didn't really have support from my dad and it was it was sad looking back you

know I'm not blaming her or anything um her her mother was kind of a cold woman also so she you know she like unloaded some stuff on me when I was a child frequently actually and and so that like you know it created like a very strong attachment to her but it has kind of like disallowed me at least this is like and I don't want this to become a limiting belief for me but like the insight that I think has been like helpful to just like kind of understand where my patterns come from is

that that's created a difficulty for me attaching emotionally to like other you know other like women and I've I've I'm getting like better I've gotten better you know but it's uh it's just a very fascinating thing because we tend to think about like childhood trauma as being like Big T trauma like I was sexually abused or something like that which you know I had a wonderful childhood I never would have used the t word to describe anything that happened to me in my childhood but then there's like nobody escapes childhood social injury-free we all have

trauma whether it's like we're not picked up at the right time or we're you know ignored at the wrong time or or what have you and so um we all we you know nobody escapes childhood trauma free is what I've learned and so those traumas they have it's like a butterfly effect they have a way of creeping out you know in in ways that are not often obvious when we're adults an effect and they affect our relationships and sometimes profound ways and so you know for me like why you know I'm I feel like in

in many ways I'm a very sensitive guy I'm I'm I'm you know I I relate to women I love you know women I've had relationships with women where is this like this this disconnect and I also had a relationship with one woman for a very long time it was an on and off again relationship and I loved her um and the feeling was Mutual but I wasn't able to commit to her and so you know it's it kind of inspired this like journey of Investigation like where you know if I've got like everything seemingly so

figured out how come I don't have that figured out like where's the where's the deficit coming from you know like what's the where's the nutrient like deficit you know with regard to like my relationships and um and yeah so maybe I mean that's it you know I saw a really brilliant therapist and I highly recommend for men you know and women for everybody everybody should like go see therapy it's been really helpful the key I guess is to not let that become like this Perpetual like limiting thing and to continue to do the work and

to like unravel and to keep peeling back the layers of the onion all super helpful we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest also a question for the next guest not knowing who they're asking it for and the question that has been left for you is this is quite an interesting one I actually really like this question because it's it's very interesting and Slightly bizarre um but I love it if you could summarize your journey so far in life into one I am affirmation what would it be and why whoa so

a previous guest came up with that question for me 100 they didn't know that it was for you yeah but they left it knowing that it was for the next guest whoa [Music] um I am love how hippy is that I feel like everything I do is really out of love and uh so that is how I would answer that even though it sounds so hippy that it also kind of makes me throw up a little inside where does that come from it's I don't know it's a little too like that sensation it's it feels

so if it feels too self-aggrandizing and I'm not that way you know like I'm uh I I feel like I'm you know I can be self-deprecating like to a fault you know like I I like the fact that like anybody pays attention to my work you know it's like it's such a gift to me I'm so grateful for it you know [Music] um but everything I do like out of out of love like you know I started doing this out of the love that I had for my mom it continues both for the love that

I I have for her but also for the love for what I'm doing and for the research and how much I love nutrition science as well as for how much I love generally people and how much I want to see people thrive and um and so yeah it really has been a a powerful compass for me you know as I navigate this crazy thing called life love really has been a you know it's been a it's been a really uh it's been a really um reliable North Star you know for me Max thank you thank

you so much you've taught me so much but um your story is is is incredible and you know I have absolutely no doubt not only that you know your mum got to see you on that show but also that she is just a [ __ ] insanely proud of you insanely proud of you for for everything you've done for all the people you've helped with these New York Times best-selling books um but it's not just it's not just it's not just the information you're sharing it's it's how you share it not I'm not at least

in an engaging way not at least because you're so you seem to be so incredibly humble but um there's a real sincerity behind your message that I having sat here a lot you know a long time having spoken to a lot of people don't always see but I see that at the very heart of you and to be fair someone that didn't qualify in terms of getting like a medical degree or whatever would have to be driven by a pretty deep sincere sense of curiosity and Mission to go as far as you have and to

sound way more articulate and educated on subject matter that people with great academic backgrounds in the field have so thank you and you know I I have a real sense that you're just at the start of your journey wow I really do mean that I really feel like you're just at the start oh man and that's just a testament of how far you're clearly going to go so yeah thank you for your time thank you for being here and thank you for the generosity of everything you've shared thank you Stephen Phil you're a brother at

this point it tends to happen when I have conversations with people here thank you brother thank you Max quick word from one of our sponsors I've got a tip for all of you that will make your virtual meeting experiences I think 10 times better as some of you may know by now Blue Jeans by Verizon offers seamless high quality video conferencing but the reason why I use blue jeans versus other video conferencing tools is because of immersion their tools make you feel more connected to the employees or customers you're trying to engage with and now

they're launching one of their biggest feature enhancements to impact virtual events so far called Blue Jean Studio I actually used it the other day I did a virtual event using the studio which I think about 700 of you came to TV level production quality all done by one person with very little technical experience on a laptop so if you've got an event coming up and you're thinking about doing it virtually check out blue jean studio now let me know what you think because I genuinely believe I know this is an advert and I'm supposed to

say this but I genuinely believe it's the best tool I've seen for doing really immersive simple but high quality production virtual events you know I never really usually pick the chocolate flavored heels my favorite are the banana flavor I love The Salted Caramel flavor but recently I think I in part blame Jack in my team who's obsessed with the chocolate flavor heals I've started drinking the chocolate flavor heels for the first time and I absolutely love them my life means that I sometimes disregard my diet and it's funny that's part of the reason why I've

had a lot of guests on this podcast recently that talk about diet and health and those kinds of things because I am trying to make an active effort to be more healthy to lose a little bit of weight as well but to be more healthy and the role that heal plays in my life is it means that in those moments where sometimes I might reach for you know junk Foods having an option that is nutritionally complete that is high in fiber that is incredibly high in protein that has all the vitamins and minerals that my

body needs within Arm's Reach that I can consume on the go is where he always been a game changer for me [Music] you got to the end of this podcast whenever someone gets to the end of this podcast I feel like I owe them a greater debt of gratitude because that means you listen to the whole thing and hopefully that suggests that you enjoyed it if you are at the end and you enjoyed this podcast could you do me a little bit of a favor and hit that subscribe button that's one of the clearest indicators

we have that this episode was a good episode and we look at that on all of the episodes to see which episodes generated the most subscribers thank you so much and I'll see you again next time