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Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist, filmmaker, and author. His latest project is the documentary “Little Empty Boxes." Look for it on June 27. www.maxlugavere.comhttps://littleemptyboxes.com/
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I know what's cracking oh man just uh first of all honored to be here thank you
love you and your
work and yeah I mean just a national treasure say that's very nice of you go
out on a limb and say
it but um no I'm super super excited because I've been working on this
documentary for the last 10
years of my life and um it's finally out today which uh I'm super pumped for
and it's called
Little Empty Boxes and we talked about it the last time I was here and um it's
a project that
means the world to me I think it's the most important thing I've ever done and
it's the
first ever dementia prevention documentary about the science of dementia
prevention but it focuses
it's a very emotional and personal film for me because it follows my mom who
for many years
suffered from a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia which is akin
to having both
Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time that's what Robin
Williams had that's
what Robin Williams had yeah and it's a it's a rare condition it affects about
1 million people in the
United States but it's a um it's a dementia and dementia is now a soaring
public health problem
and there's a lot of controversy in within the field um the last time I was
here we talked about
you know fraud in the um in the research space with regard to the prevailing
hypothesis as to what
causes Alzheimer's disease which is the most common form of dementia and
actually finally over the past
month that paper was finally retracted it took two years but um could you
explain to everybody what
the fraud was yeah so basically among the dementias Alzheimer's disease is the
most common form of it
and that affects about 6 million people in the United States and since it was
first named in 1906
by physician Aloise Alzheimer the prevailing hypothesis as to what causes
Alzheimer's disease
dubbed the amyloid hypothesis has been that this plaque formed by a precursor
protein called amyloid beta
accumulates in the brain and by finding a drug that can potentially remove
extract that that those plaques
from the brain from the extracellular space around neurons that we could
essentially cure the disease that
that the that the causal factor in the condition was this was ultimately this
amyloid
beta protein which forms the plaque and trial after trial has been a dismal had
been a dismal failure and it wasn't looking good
until in um 2006 a paper was published in nature which for any scientist
publishing in nature it's like winning an academy award and that paper
essentially what that did was it it allegedly identified this variant of amyloid
beta that connected the plaque to the cognitive dysfunction so the most
important clinical feature of Alzheimer's disease because for a long time
it was known that cognitively healthy people accumulate plaque in their brains
and that plaque doesn't seem to correlate with cognitive impairment or anything
like that
and so that was very deflating for researchers in the field until this 2006
paper came out
and what it did was it renewed faith in this in this hypothesis which
was always a hypothesis and continued to send billions and billions of dollars
worth of funding down this path
and what turned out to be the case just two years ago was that that paper was
essentially fraudulent
and it represented about 16 years worth of wasted time wasted money which was
hugely deflating for
not just the research community but also for any patient who's ever suffered
from alzheimer's disease
and you know the way that the field is now slowly starting to turn but this is
a drum that i've
been beating for the past 10 years is that we really need to start talking
about these conditions in terms of
prevention and that's what inspired me to set down this path of creating this
documentary little empty boxes
what was the fraud like what what how did they do it so basically the in the
paper there were
they identified these proteins that they isolated in rat models of the
condition mouse models of the
condition called a bay a beta star 56 again amyloid is amyloid is there at the
scene of the crime so to
speak so when you have alzheimer's disease somebody who's died of alzheimer's
disease what they what they
find inevitably in the brains of cadavers who've died from alzheimer's disease
are two features they see
this aggregation of these plaques amyloid beta plaques and tangled proteins
called tau and so
it was a very seductive narrative that this plaque causes the condition right
for years the problem is
they've succeeded at reducing the plaque in the brains of people with alzheimer's
disease but that
hasn't led to any improvement in the clinically meaningful features of the
disease that we that we
aspire to improve for sufferers of alzheimer's disease right the cognitive the
cognitive function
and in tandem with that we see that amyloid is produced naturally in all brains
and people who are cognitively healthy have amyloid in their brains there's a
degree of amyloid burden
that seems to be inevitable as a as um as a just general phenomena due to aging
and so it it was very it was becoming very clear that amyloid is not the causative
feature here that
there is some other factor or factors at play which lead to cognitive degeneration
until 2006 and then in 2006 what happened this paper basically found this subtype
that when injected into
a mouse caused profound cognitive dysfunction and what they did was they
illustrated these proteins on
what are called in what's called a western blot analysis which is basically
basically a graphical
depiction of proteins and um the peer review process for papers i mean they
people go in and they crunch
the numbers and stuff but they don't look at like imagery and they don't they
don't look with a they
don't go through the imagery with a fine tooth comb to make sure that it hasn't
been photoshopped
essentially but one sleuth who is a scientist himself um this researcher uh
from vanderbilt named matthew schrag
actually identified that a lot of these images had artifacts that made it very
clear that they were faked
yeah so full-on fraud full-on fraud and by the way it was it's been two years
it took two years for
that paper finally to be retracted are there any consequences towards people
that publish that paper
i mean it's obviously they have a lot of egg on their face so to speak i mean
it's very it's it's
hugely humiliating um but no i don't think that there's they're still employed
they're yeah the lead
researcher still employed i mean they're they're investigating sylvain lesney
who's the university of uh
he is a i want to say michigan not michigan um it'll come to me but the the the
the primary
researcher is being investigated um as far as i know so the primary researcher
they're connecting to the
photoshop they're saying this person might have been the one that released it
it was very clear it was
very clear and that you know that's it's so dirty it's so dirty it's so evil
for all the people that
are looking for some sort of relief yeah and that you know you have this
scientific paper you publish and
you knowingly release these photoshopped images in order to validate your paper
there's a ton of
fraud and god yeah it's so evil when you think about how many people suffer
from this so many people and
you're giving them this false hope just to boost up your academic career yeah
it's awful the lost time
and by the way that paper has been subsequently referenced thousands of times
in the medical
medical literature basically you know negating a ton of research i mean like
count countless papers that
have been since published that have referenced that paper in 2006 that nature
paper that was finally
retracted i mean think about the lost time think about the needless suffering
yeah and it's my view that
dementia essentially by the time you are diagnosed with dementia we'll say alzheimer's
disease you are in
late stage alzheimer's disease whether it's mild whether you were just
diagnosed yesterday it's it's
this is a disease of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life and so that's
why the field is now
slowly hopefully i hope pivoting more towards prevention and where the money i
think needs
to go is i in into identifying that golden biomarker that's associated with the
onset of the condition
so that clinicians can intervene earlier because right now when you catch it it's
sort of like
pancreatic cancer which incidentally my mom passed from in 2018 but it's you
know pancreatic cancer most
of the time it's diagnosed and it's too late the can't the tumor is already metastasized
and so this is
kind of similar with alzheimer's disease by the time it's diagnosed it's
already you're already very late in
the game there's widespread neuronal uh dysfunction glucose metabolism in the
brain is diminished by 50
so it's again you're you're catching it in its latest stages ultimately and
that's why i think
alzheimer's drug trials have a 99 99.6 fail rate because by the time you catch
it i think reversing it is
you know impossible i think it can be slowed with exercise with diet with a
with a multimodal
dietary and lifestyle intervention but um but yeah it's really it's really sad
and so that's why 10
years ago when i saw this developing in my mom and i stumbled upon all this
research and i began really
diving in it became very clear to me that this is something that that anybody
with a brain needs to
be aware of and talking about and what what's the factors when it comes to
someone eventually getting
alzheimer's is it purely genetic is it lifestyle is it diet are there
environmental factors and toxins
like what is it yeah so there are what are called risk factors so the the heritability
of alzheimer's
disease is very low it's like two to three percent and the variant that is hereditary
is early onset
familial but that affects that that makes up a very tiny proportion of overall
alzheimer's incidence
and similarly with parkinson's disease the heritability of parkinson's disease
is very low
i mean this is and i definitely want to talk about parkinson's disease because
there's a lot
of really interesting new research in that in that field but by and large with
regard to alzheimer's
disease you have what are called your non-modifiable risk factors which are
your age you can't change your
age your gender you can't change your gender and your genes you can't change
your genes
although you can affect how your genes express themselves which is known as epigenetics
but then you have your modifiable risk factors which i think is so exciting
because these are the
the risk factors that you have agency over you can you can control obesity
hypertension type 2 diabetes
i mean these are all nutritionally mediated obviously which i love talking
about nutrition and nutrition
insofar as it can prevent or reverse obesity i think that's incredibly
empowering type 2 diabetes if
you have type 2 diabetes your risk for developing alzheimer's disease increases
between two and four
fold they're actually now um we interviewed in my documentary the researcher
who coined the term type 3
diabetes have you heard that are you familiar with that no concept no i haven't
so it's looking a lot
like alzheimer's disease might in fact be a form of diabetes of the brain wow
which is a mind-blowing way to
think about this condition um and in fact we see that peripheral insulin
resistance so the the hallmark
of type 2 type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance and we see that the more
insulin resistant a person is
the more difficulty their brains seem to have with regard to creating atp which
is the primary energy
currency of ourselves and the researcher who coined type 3 diabetes her name is
suzanne delamonte she's a
brown university researcher and she is in no way in the public sphere she's a
you know purely a bench
researcher she's actually in my documentary it was like incredible to get to
interview her and speak to her
but it seems that insulin resistance causes the brain to suffer in many ways it
damages the blood vessels
ultimately when you have type 2 diabetes it damages the blood vessels that
supply the brain with
oxygen nutrients energy but it also seems to impair there also seems to be a an
aspect of
insulin resistance that reduces the brain's ability to generate energy okay so
when you first started
becoming aware of this when your mother develops this condition you first start
being aware of it what were
the first things that you noticed that started to get you to question whether
or not the conventional
applications of drugs and things or on the right path yeah i mean you know i
grew up in new york city and
when my mom first started to show these symptoms and how did you notice it like
what what were the symptoms
she would i mean we would have i was living in la at the time and so we would
we would touch base every
other day via phone and she started to complain to me about brain fog and there
was some aspect of
what she was sharing with me that i thought was just a natural part of getting
older but ultimately
she revealed to me and the rest of my family that she had sought the help of a
neurologist
and that seemed odd you know why would my mom i hadn't had any prior family
incidents of dementia anything like that why would why was my mom suddenly
going to see a neurologist
and but you know like i was still in la living my my life i was in my late 20s
at the time
but it wasn't until a trip to miami my family went down to miami to hang out
with my dad
because my parents had been separated and my mom was in the kitchen and she
confessed to the family
that she'd been having memory problems at this point so it had been described
as brain fog but
she revealed that she had sought the help of a neurologist and you know me and
my and my brothers
and my dad we were in total disbelief that my mom was having anything outside
of the could could
possibly be having anything outside of the realm of ordinary and so we were
kind of mocking her in a way
um and we said well if you're really having such such profound problems what
month is it
or i think it was like what year is it or something like that and she couldn't
recall she couldn't
recall what the month was and she started to cry and at that point for me that's
when i knew that
something was really wrong that i needed to step in because you know when you're
sick
it is a really that's a really scary place to be it could be frustrating it
could be confusing and you
know when you're in these doctors offices and they're you know oftentimes they
don't have the best bedside
manner and they run a battery of esoteric tests it can be incredibly
overwhelming and it becomes really
hard to advocate for yourself i've learned as somebody with a chronic illness
not least of which a chronic
illness that's affecting your cognition and so i decided at that point um
essentially that i had to
pack up my la life i moved back to new york and i started going with my mom
from doctor's visit to
doctor's visit and again you know i'm pretty privileged grew up in new york
city my mom had health insurance
resources we started going you know to all of these different cathedrals to
western medicine academic
medical insight and in every instance i experienced what i've come to call over
time adios diagnose and
adios a physician would you know run these tests titrate up the dose of a
medication that she was
already on one physician actually thought that all of her symptoms were due to
depression right there's
this like idea of the hysterical woman today one in four women over the age of
40 are on
an antidepressant drug you know so one in four yeah over the age of 40 christ
yeah
they're i mean i'm not saying there's no use for them those kinds of drugs but
they're very over
over prescribed um that's not that's not i don't think that's controversial and
so my mom was given
one of these drugs without full informed consent i don't think i mean
ultimately we tried to get her
off of them which we found out was incredibly difficult to do titrating off one
of these ssris is
really really hard actually and it turned out obviously to be to be the case
that my mom that these
symptoms were not due to depression they were due to degeneration in her brain
and we went from
doctor's office to doctor's office ultimately culminating in a trip to the cleveland
clinic
so just imagine like we're in new york city right we have like multiple
hospitals that are at our disposal
we had to book a trip to the cleveland clinic and it was there that for the
first time my mom was
diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition so she was prescribed drugs for
both alzheimer's disease and
parkinson's disease at that time and that to me was i'd never i've always been
a pretty chill guy but
that was the first time in my life i'd ever i've i've ever had a panic attack
just googling the drugs
you know like a scared like any scared kid would do when their mom receives a
life changing diagnosis
and um and that was the moment for me that i realized that my life had to pivot
and i i had no
choice but to dedicate myself to learning all that i could about these
conditions and so you find out
about the fraud and how long into your research did you find out that most of
what people understood
about the condition was based on this fraudulent study well it's not even just
the study it's the
fact that these conditions begin decades before the emergence of symptoms so
you know again it's a
disease of of midlife essentially they did the alzheimer's disease begins 20 to
30 years if not more
before the the first symptom and so to me it became very clear that we were
approaching these conditions
in the wrong way you know trying to acting in a in a reactionary way to
something that had taken
decades to manifest to me just seemed wrong and i stumbled upon the work of a
neurologist at weill
cornell new york presbyterian who was talking about alzheimer's disease as a
preventable condition
which is not something that i'd heard prior to coming across his work and i
realized at that time that
this was like considered 10 years ago a fringe idea dementia prevention was
like a fringe idea except
for through the lens of this neurologist who was working within the confines of
you know rigorous
randomized research and you know and checking all the boxes for scientific
credibility and um
and so to me it became really it became really clear that this is a topic that
i needed to help amplify
using my skill set as a non-medical doctor as a non-academic scientist and i
also learned really
early on that it's not a genetic condition that we have genetic risk factors
but that um that we have
a say when it comes to our cognitive destiny that this is not a natural part of
aging i mean you know
everything in the body as you get older tends to falter in its functionality
you know like our joints
don't work as well and you know there is a degree of forgetfulness that i think
is in in a way a
natural aspect of getting older but cognitive impairment that's not natural degeneration
of our of our
neurons of you know of for example the portion of the brain that that drives
movement the substantia nigra
which is which occurs in parkinson's disease that's not normal and so it began
this investigation for me
trying to understand because i was seeing the person who meant the most to me
of anybody in life
you know degenerating every day in front of my face getting worse and worse and
worse it it instilled
this this burning desire in me to understand all that i could and to share to
protect in the hopes that
it might prevent it from happening to others and um and yeah it was also very
odd because my um my
maternal grandmother did not have dementia so it was really sad and and surreal
in fact that my mom
was increasingly requiring around-the-clock care while her mother who lived in
the same home
and was 30 years older was cognitively totally healthy it was just that it was
just the oddest thing
my my my grandmother my mom's mom was in her 90s and totally cognitively
healthy able to form cogent
sentences and my mom was struggling to express an idea to get out of a bathroom
and it just to me it was it
was so shocking that i you know it was like it was traumatic i mean i still
have ptsd i think from from
those days but it it's yeah it's motivated me to to do what i can to help and i
saw all in in every
you know by the end of my mom's life she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals
and i'm not i'm not anti-pharma
like if there was a drug that would have actually helped my mom i would have
been first in line at
the pharmacy to to fill that prescription for her but the drugs don't work at
all and physicians are
very quick to you know to write a prescription it's like add a new drug to the
arsenal they're they're
very um reluctant to deprescribe i've i have never seen a prescription deprescribe
to my mom and by the
end of her life she's on 14 different pharmaceuticals and there's nobody on
earth that that understands how
all of those different drugs are interacting in an you know in a in a system
that's going growing
increasingly frail it was just really sad and you know so i started to
investigate these modifiable
risk factors you know whether it's diet dietary diet related which it you know
in my mom's case it may
have had something to do with her diet over the years it might have had nothing
to do with her diet
over the years i'll never know but also now we're starting to see that air
pollution is a major
contributor to neurodegeneration we're starting to see now that well as of 2020
it was acknowledged that
exposure to air pollution is actually one of these newly identified model modifiable
risk factors for
alzheimer's disease so exposure to fine particulate matter pm 2.5 actually
might cause alzheimer's
disease for some patients and then most interestingly and this is one of the
things that i want to talk
about with you which i came across the work of a of a neurologist named dr ray
dorsey who's over at
university of rochester who's done a lot of work publishing on the link between
environmental
toxicants and parkinson's disease parkinson's disease is now the fastest
growing brain disease
and my mom's condition actually had more in common with parkinson's disease
than it did
alzheimer's disease she had lewy body dementia which is has more in common with
parkinson's even though
they're they're both dementia um lewy body and and and and alzheimer's but
there's data now linking
exposure to certain herbicides and pesticides to parkinson's disease
dramatically increased risk
anywhere between three two and a half to six fold um increased risk which herbicides
and pesticides
so there's a pesticide called paraquat that there's a great article written in
the guardian by um
a journalist named carrie gillam and i got to speak uh on a panel with her
recently at a at a
scientific conference in dc called brain and environment and paraquat is this
compound that it's a it's an
herbicide that's produced in china but its use is banned in china we import it
here yeah it's crazy
we use it here and exposure occupational exposure to this compound is
associated with between two and a
half to three times a risk for the development of parkinson's disease related
compounds are literally
used in mouse models to create parkinson's disease and the company that has
that creates it
is has been under investigation for years and what has now come to light is
that they knew about the
fact that these that these chemicals accumulate in the brain in brain tissue
and they seem to selectively
target the region of the brain associated with parkinson's disease the substantia
nigra wow it's very scary and um
you know what um crops are these used on is it specific crops is specific foods
to avoid or
how do you know if those pesticides or herbicides are being used well it's it's
the the residues and the
the exposures that you get from eating them is very low but we don't know what
long-term exposure to
those low levels is doing to us i mean my my mother is somebody who never
believed in organic produce
right and organic is not perfect and natural compounds some of them are the
most dangerous
compounds on earth so i know you know some people listening might say oh you
know here we go with the
appeal to nature fallacy but it's very clear that occupational exposure is very
hazardous you have to be
licensed you have to use this stuff very carefully but it some people actually
use it to to to off
themselves i mean it's like a it's a really toxic compound and we're now we we
now have data suggesting
that it creates this condition that it selectively targets and destroys
dopamine producing neurons that
that that mediate movement and um and it's used yeah it's used in in cereal
grains things like that um
why does uh cannabis oil have a profound effect on parkinson's patients you
know i don't i don't know
about cannabis oil but i can tell you about nicotine and nicotine is a very
interesting compound from the
vantage point of parkinsonism and i know i mean a lot of people you know love
nicotine obviously for its
its cognitive boosting effects um i'm not going to say that it's a it's a
healthy compound i mean
i think that it has cardiovascular repercussions um and the like but there
seems to be a and it and of
course smoking is terrible for you but cardiovascular with the delivery method
or just across the board
nicotine by itself raises heart rate and it raises blood pressure acutely not
by much but um presumably
uh and it's vasoconstrictive as well so it you know there's some evidence
suggesting it it impedes wound
healing um i will occasionally use nicotine as a as a cognitive enhancer but i
also have
i have chronic low back issues and um i think that you know for people with
disc issues this is
just a speculation but i think that it's probably not a good idea to chronically
use nicotine if you
have disc issues which are already your discs and your back are already poorly
vascularized and nicotine
is a vasoconstrictor vasoconstrictor um and smoking you know increases your
risk for alzheimer's disease
um i'm not i don't think that there's a uh that we've identified a relationship
between pure nicotine and
well pretty much anything the the the research on pure nicotine by itself is
pretty sparse most of the
most of the research on on the health effects of nicotine is confounded by
smoking which is obviously
obviously not good for you but interestingly there does seem to be an inverse
relationship between
nicotine use even via smoking and parkinsonism so people who smoke cigarettes
seem to be protected
to some degree against parkinson's disease which is very odd and they've shown
in mouse models
that nicotine actually when they use some of these mitochondrial toxins some of
these poisons like
paraquat right or another one called mptp which is has been used as a as a
street party drug but it's
actually profoundly neurotoxic it's been shown to create chronic parkinsonism
with just acute use
nicotine actually prevents that in those models so it's been shown to somehow
protect the brain from
in in some in some regards um against parkinson's disease so i wouldn't
recommend using nicotine
unless somebody and this is again a speculation but my my hypothesis is that if
you were if you were
exposed occupationally to some of these compounds like paraquat or rhodinone or
um there are there are
other compounds that are being directly connected to parkinson's disease too
like trichloroethylene i would
say maybe nicotine is a is a potentially disease modifying intervention in
those contexts so in these
when they've studied patients the was there a small like a noticeably smaller
instance of people
that develop parkinson's who were smokers or was it non-existent like they're
they're just i'm not sure
the the relative risk um decrease but it's one of these odd things that seems
pretty consistent in
the literature that smokers are less likely to develop parkinson's disease by
what factor i'm not
sure i'm not sure the factor but it's significant it's significant but smoke
but smokers are more likely
to develop a whole host of other oh yeah it's terrible for you yeah but that's
the interesting thing is that
nicotine it's thought that nicotine protects this one region of the brain in a
significant way i'm
sorry have they looked at people that are in taking nicotine in different ways
like cigars uh gum
patches things along those lines not a lot of the a lot of the research on nicotine
is in animal models
unfortunately um but it is i mean it does seem to do if you set the vascular
effects aside
which might play a role um in neurodegeneration because you know the brain
relies on its vascular
network the brain you know is a very hungry organ and vascular dementia is the
second most common form
of dementia actually but nicotine does seem to have some really protective
effects on the brain it seems
to reduce neuroinflammation um it might act in a way as an antioxidant in the
brain i'm not recommending
it because there are risks of course but um but they've shown that it seems to
be protective in
these animal models against against these poisons that would otherwise cause
parkinsonism and
some other cool facts about nicotine actually because i did do a little bit of
a deep dive recently into
it because because i do notice a cognitive benefit when i when i use it nicotine
how do you use it i just
use it i i use it like before but what in what form a lozenge like a little
like you know lozenge um
and and i don't have an addictive personality so for me i'm not like you know
it's not something that i
feel compelled to do every day but i do it uh before like i have to go on like
a tv show or do a big
podcast or something and um and i do see you know i do definitely see like a a
cognitive bit like a you know
it's a stimulant that's um that's pretty well known but um but yeah nicotine
also it has a very short
half-life so it's half-life is only about two hours i mean you compare that to
coffee coffee is
like eight hours so it's it's relatively transient in your system but then i
think the more interesting
compound is uh is its primary metabolite which is called cotinine which it's
cotinine's half-life is 20
hours long and it seems to also boost cognitive function mental health insofar
as animal models
can show us that these compounds boost mental health um might even enhance what's
called fear
extinction so for people with ptsd it might play a role so it's a it's a really
interesting compound but
you know again it's it's highly addictive and um what is cotinine it's nicotine's
primary
metabolite in the body so when you ingest nicotine nicotine lasts in the body
only about the half-life
is two hours so it lasts presumably about four hours um but it converts to this
compound called called
cotinine in the body and the half-life of that compound is about 20 hours so it's
in your system
for a long time and and that compound doesn't have any of the negative side
effects of nicotine it just
seems to do all these interesting cool so it has all the positives and none of
the negatives it seems
to it i mean it's not a stimulant short and long-term effects of oh that's codeine
bro oh it's uh c-o-t
i was trying to spell it and i fell down the different compound yeah that stuff
will
you up that's in cough syrup um cotinine yeah how do you spell it c-o-t-i-n-i-n-e
i believe
yeah it's super interesting stuff
and do people take this as a supplement no but it your body readily will create
it from
i don't know if it it it doesn't have the um cotinine yeah there we go produced
by the body
after exposure to nicotine the main metabolite of nicotine 70 80 of nicotine is
converted to cotinine
cotinine is often used as a biomarker for exposure to tobacco smoke can be
detected in urine okay
cotinine can remain in the body a day or more nicotine disappears within a few
hours
yeah but you can google like cotinine fear extinction or cotinine um cognition
which is probably why people
will say that cigarettes relax them yeah definitely i mean it's an anxiolytic
it reduces anxiety
interesting yeah see i mean it does seem to be this select it's like this
really interesting compound
where it does all these you know it has all these effects in the body that many
of which i'm sure
are negative but it does seem to do some good stuff for the brain which is
fascinating you know
um so i i think i'm again i'm not promoting it but if you're able to forge as
an adult
a responsible relationship with it you know then maybe it's worth experimenting
with if you know
particularly because of its you know its its potential to i don't want this to
come off as an endorsement
for nicotine but its ability potentially to protect against parkinsonism is
very is very interesting
and so when a person you're saying so this is something that starts to happen
in midlife and
then it really expresses itself in dramatic ways years later what are other
than the environmental factors
what dietary factors contribute in except obviously pesticides and herbicides
that are
unfortunately a part of our food system now yeah i mean here's the thing like
or organic is uh
as i mentioned it's not a panacea and the today on social media if you even if
you
in so much as mention organic and that debate organic versus conventional i
mean there's there's so much
controversy but you know i think the as we've seen right with paraquat and this
chinese company that
has shrouded the data and in fact they they've assembled internally a swat team
to basically to
essentially suppress data suggesting harm due to exposure to this to this herbicide
even though it's
banned even though even though it's banned in china yeah wow just so they can
keep selling it just so they
could keep selling it but there was there was another there was another article
that came out recently in
the publication pro publica written by i believe her name was sharon lerner
another journalist who
i connected with at this dc event that i was at recently who it was this crazy
3m has been hiding the
health harms shrouding the health or suppressing the health harms due to
exposure to these pfas
pfas compounds that are forever forever chemicals known endocrine disruptors in
band-aids yeah so
there's there's like all this corporate collusion and shrouding of the truth
and i'm just like
i think insofar as you can reduce your exposures to these kinds of things and
and and and selectively
you know if if money is is is scarce you know selectively buy certain things
organic i think that
makes sense you know do they have organic band-aids that's a good question i
don't know but they
recently identified these compounds and yeah yeah i read the study about the
band-aid thing and i was
like jesus christ is anything safe it's not fucking band-aids we've all got
microplastics in our balls
these days microplastics in our atheromas right like they found in our in our
arteries that the presence
of microplastics was associated with two to three two to three fold increased
risk of cardiovascular death
so here it is uh partnering with environmental health news a consumer watchdog
sent 40 bandages of
different brands u.s environmental protection agency certified lab the lab
found that 65 of the bandages
campaign contained detectable levels of synthetic forever chemicals or pfas
yeah wow yeah and that is so
crazy because it's an open wound yes it's like literally mainlining right into
your bloodstream
it's nuts and you talk about this stuff today on social media and you're
accused of fear-mongering
of being alarmist you're not it's yeah what is that though is that trolls from
pharmaceutical companies
i mean they're they're that's something that i guarantee you corporations use
if if nations use it and we
know they do and we know we do we know that there's troll farms in russia we
know this is a real thing
why wouldn't corporations use that too especially if they could farm that off
and be removed from it as
far as like being able to trace back the paperwork i mean we see it all i mean
even within our own you
know within our own government the usda the the dietary guidelines for americans
95 of people on that
committee have had have or have had conflicts of interest with the
pharmaceutical industry and the food
industry yeah at least 50 that i'm aware of today you know working on the 2020
2020 2025 issue um
we see all the time there's been a number of uh great um journalism done by
done in the washington post
um exposing how the food industry pays dietitians to promote you know certain a
certain ideology around
food that all foods are cool you know you just have to eat less and move more
all foods fit there are no
good or bad foods which yeah hilarious it's hilarious it's crazy yeah i mean
these companies they they pay
these people that are body positive influencers as well you know so they're
they're basically paying
people that are ill because of eating these things to tell other people it's
okay to eat these things
and then it's somehow or another phobic whether it's fat phobic or whatever it
is to not encourage body
positivity and it's stupid it's just stupid it's stupid for the people that are
getting it it's
it's stupid for the people that are promoting it it's stupid for our culture to
be inundated with
this nonsense and misinformation where we have to sort through it and try to do
deeper research and
conduct conduct you know consult people who actually understand what's going on
it's so disheartening
that we live in this world that's so compromised by money that information
about key things like your
own health is so distorted that it's hard like you know you talk to people and
so many people have like a
basic misunderstanding of what is good and not good for you and all of it is
because of this kind of thing
that it's just so prevalent and it's so confusing and you're getting expert
advice from people
which is one of the wildest ones for me when you look at oh thank you did some
coffee in your system
there fella thanks cheers sir cheers good to see you same um one of the things
is crazy to me is that we
get expert advice from people that are clearly sick how many times have you had
nutrition or dietary advice
from someone who is obese yeah you're fat you're you have no muscle your body
looks like it's just
in decay and you're the person giving advice yeah i mean most of the social
media you know personas
that i've observed that purport to be experts or that you know that that seem
to have i don't know whether
it's through credentialism a degree of authority i mean i wouldn't send a loved
one to you you know
it's just gaslighting on a on a mass scale because you know your your average
person today comes across
this ideology that all foods are fine it's all good and they try to reduce
their consumption of the crap
that they're already eating and they end up failing at that because it's really
hard to moderate your
consumption of these foods which have been engineered to be consumed quickly
and regularly
and then they feel as though they're you know they feel they feel moral failure
and and then it just
creates this vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting we're not being honest about the
way that these foods impact
behavior and today 60 of the calories that your average person consumes comes
from ultra processed foods
which are foods that are highly calorie dense they are nutrient poor they are
minimally satiating they're
uber delicious i mean they push your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-controls
is seemingly impossible and by the way it's these ultra processed foods that
are a major
route of ingestion for these kinds of chemicals that we're talking about these
industrial
chemicals forever chemicals you know ultra processed foods are you know if you
want more phthalates in your
body consume more ultra processed foods there was a study that recently was
published that found that
for every 10 increment in ultra processed food consumption pregnant women were
ingesting about
14 higher levels of of these phthalates right i mean you had you did such an
amazing episode with
shauna swan a couple years ago talking about the fact that our exposure to
these chemicals
are reducing the anal genital distance in boys right which is a which is a very
easy i don't know about
if easy is the right term but it's a very it's it's a very simple uh proxy to
use to identify how these
compounds might be affecting us right but that's only what you can observe like
how are these chemicals
affecting us in other ways right you know and um and so it's crazy and and
these are the kinds of these
are the kinds of foods that we're just eating and mass day in and day out and
60 is the average children
consume about 70 percent ultra processed foods today on average black americans
unfortunately consume
80 percent ultra processed foods and there's obviously this is not all choice
there are systemic
issues many people today still live in food deserts accessibility is an issue
cost is an issue
i know all that but the messaging that we're getting from our most trusted
sources is essentially that
everything's fine just eat less move more yeah and it's so difficult for the
average american to access
information from people that they can trust or to figure out who to trust you
know you get experts
that tell you oh you don't need to take supplements you just need a well-balanced
diet and you go oh
vitamins are bullshit and you have people expressing that yeah it's just how
could someone say that when
there's so much data on the efficacy of vitamins and the benefit of vitamin
supplementation of course and
vitamins i mean we we need vitamins supplements can be really helpful and i get
asked this a lot like
who do you know who to trust on social media i think a really good heuristic is
you know somebody actually
i was giving a talk recently and somebody somebody uh um
highlighted that
one good indicator of somebody who is
is likely trustworthy is somebody who
is willing to present the opposing viewpoint and not straw man the opposing
viewpoint but actually steel man the opposing viewpoint like
to actually make clear what the opposing viewpoint right and then to refute
that viewpoint so they're not ideologically connected to the
exactly exactly exactly yeah so i try to do that i try to you know share where
i've changed my mind
in the past um or where i've evolved my viewpoint um i try to be clear about
the things that i don't know
i don't know you know i'm also not trying to be one of these people on social
media that like
purports to know everything to have the magic routine or protocol you know for
for every for everything you
know as as like some kind of um you know all-knowing um arbiter of of health
information because i feel
like there are still so many unknowns and i could easily one day develop what
it is that my mom developed
i hope i don't i had a health scare in 2022 that um you know just proved to me
that you know there is a lot
of like luck that goes into this you know into this equation as well my back
hurts i don't know how to fix that
like you know what have you been doing for your back um well i try you have uh
bulging discs what do you
have oh man i have um like mild or it's probably progressed but it's like disc
desiccation between
l5 and s1 and then um so it's like basically a dehydrated disc and uh which i
got from just squatting
improperly 10 years ago and my back's like never been the same since um have
you ever used a reverse
hyper no you don't know about that no uh it was uh a piece of machinery that
was uh designed by um
west side barbell louis roberts simmons louis simmons sorry louis simmons from
west side barbell
developed this machine that strengthens the back and actively decompresses the
back and what it is is
your body weight with your chest down sits on this bench and underneath it you
hook your legs to this
thing that's like a leg curl and you lift up which strengthens your back and on
the d-cell when it brings
it down it's actively pulling your back and it's phenomenal whoa it's really
good it's really good
at decompressing your back it's really good at strengthening all the muscles
around your back
to keep your back stable this is the machine right here we have one yeah we
have the rogue version of
it out there in the studio i could show it to you after we're done here but i
love it it's phenomenal
and it's it's great for developing leg strength and hamstring strength and glute
strength but really
i use it for lower back for decompression show a video jamie if you would so
you could we could see
how it worked this is louis uh he was on the podcast back in the day he was an
amazing guy
and very innovative so he was a power lifter and developed some back problems
himself but you see
how on the downswing it's it's actually pulling your back and you can feel it
pull your back
so you can feel it like separate everything you feel like little things pop in
there and it provides
relief and for him they were telling them he had to get his disc fused because
he had too much
compression he said well what about decompression and they were reluctant to
consider that and so
he's a genius a fitness genius and so he designed a machine that would actively
decompress the spine
while strengthening the muscles around it whoa that sounds awesome yeah have
you done any decompression
stuff i bought this thing that you like hang upside down on it that uh you know
i mean this was like
a couple years ago um i don't know if it helped that much you know what
actually has helped me a lot
what i took up uh during the pandemic boxing really yeah okay so what's going
on is it's strengthening
your lower back which is helping you that's helped yeah yeah you need to
strengthen it for sure
this is better um another thing when you're talking about the hanging you're
talking about a teeter
right which teeter i like that that unit but teeter makes what i think is a far
better unit which is
the decks whoa and so we have that outside too and what that does is instead of
hanging from your
ankles so your legs tense up and your legs resist the weight of your body
instead of that everything
hinges down from your hips and you will like and immediately feel when you get
down there your back
popping and decompressing i use that every day it's called the dex d-e-x-2 and
uh you know just buy it
off amazon it's not expensive you also could do back extension exercises on it
it's very versatile
machine but man for decompressing the back i've never found anything better
changed my life that's awesome
and i also use those kinds of things with weight so what i'll do is i'll hold
uh two 20 pound dumbbells
in my hands and i'll do back extensions so i'm developing strength around all
those lower back issues i've
had a lot of back issues from disc degeneration from jujitsu you know 20 years
of wrestling with men and
getting your neck strangled and it's like it does a lot of stuff to your to
your back that's not good and
you've never had surgery right no everyone that i know has had problems i do
not know anyone that has
had back surgery that's like that's the best thing i ever did everyone like daniel
cormier
ufc champion you know he's like i was never the same once they cut my back open
it was never the same
there's ways to also deal with it with stem cells and one of the things they're
doing now because
the fda has such restrictive rules on stem cells people are going overseas and
other countries to do it
and i have some friends that run a clinic down in tijuana the cellular
performance institute and i know
many people including a good friend of mine my friend shane dorian who is a
world champion surfer who's
had pretty severe back problems he went there and they they're injecting
directly into the discs
and there's a very strict protocol of recovery you're not doing anything
physical for like a couple of
months after that you can walk essentially they don't want any stress on the
back anything that's going
to impede the healing process he said within six months after that all of the
issues that he had went
away wow getting up in the morning it was always like oh just stiff no stiff
like a new back now wow
wild yeah wild and you could do that again and you could do it again and you
could do it again like
it's not like a thing you could only do once right it's not like a surgery they're
going to go in and
remove part of your disc so they do that the disectomy they'll take a chunk of
your disc out that's
pressing against a nerve but now guess what now you have less disc tissue you
have less cushioning in
between your spinal column which is not good and this is a way that they're
doing now that seems to work
and it's certainly at least worth a try you know for people that are
considering something that can
have life-changing effects hmm yeah i mean whenever i sneeze i have back pain
tilting over a sink
putting on my underwear it's it's uh but i live with it like i mean i mean i'm
strong i'm you know
the strongest i've ever been i mean you know good shape but it is my it is sort
of my achilles heel
um do you ever do uh windmills like kettlebell windmills no another phenomenal
lower back exercise
great for the entire core but it's you you clean and press a kettlebell and
then you turn to the side
with like you so if i'm holding the kettlebell up with my right arm my left
foot would be pointed that
way uh with your knee bent and you drop down like this whoa yeah and then all
the way up like that and so
it's on both sides it's strengthening all those supporting muscles around your
spine and it just
gives you much better range of motion i could feel things like sort of pop and
move and twist around
when i do it it's great whoa love it yeah phenomenal i'm gonna do that yeah turkish
get-ups another one
do you ever do those not not a very sexy exercise but phenomenal for your core
and just your overall
ability to move things you know because it it it strengthens all of the
connecting areas instead of
strengthening different specific muscle groups it's it really is working on
strengthening all the
weaknesses in your system you know you know turkish get-up works yeah so you're
lying flat on your back
you press this up you sit up you get to one knee you post the other knee you
get up you stand up straight
and then you lower yourself back the same way damn very very difficult exercise
difficult to do
but phenomenal for the whole thing wow and i think one of the problems that
people have when it comes
to weightlifting and developing problems and you know i've certainly had plenty
is that you're overloading
certain muscle groups and then all the stuff that connects things together the
lower back the neck all
these different issues they they happen because your whole system is not strong
uniformly like you're
you're developing strong muscle groups like quads you know but you know how
what how are the hamstrings
how are the things behind your calves how are you know how are your tib muscles
how was how's your lower
back like what's what's going on what exercises have you done to make sure that
your spine is protected
hmm i find that unilateral movements are really helpful like um bulgarian
splits split squats oh
yeah as painful as those are to do um i find that those help a lot and they don't
aggravate aggravate
my lower back at all like i can't i can't barbell squat i can't even really
because my range of
motion is now so limited do like leg presses like on the machine your range of
motion for your back
well you do leg presses it's just limited in the sense that like my i don't
know what i don't i don't
know the terminology but it's like hip mobility or something like my legs only
get to a certain point
where i get that butt wink thing you know like my lower back starts curving up
okay words on the
leg press and that's like strain do you um do slant board exercises no i don't
know what is that okay
there's a guy called the slant board guy that made this dope product and one of
the things i love about
his go to slant board guys page one thing i love about his is his has these
little hooks on the side
where you can add bands to it as well whoa and so what a slant board is is a
board that you do squats
on where the back of it is raised so your toes are pointing down your heels are
pointing up and what
this allows you to do is get a very deep bend of the knees and you get your
knees that push out over
your toes and you really lower you know ass to heels and what i do with those
that's it right there
that's i have that one at home he made me one of those so you can do this he's
they're doing it with
different exercises here these are just calf strengthening exercises i do them
with body weight
squats and one of the things i do them with is goblet squats um i have very
strong legs but i never do
deadlifts and i never do like regular squats the heaviest thing i squat with is
100 pound kettlebell
so i hold a 100 pound kettlebell in in front of me and then i do goblet squats
on that and what that
does is it strengthens when you have a heavy weight like a hundred pound kettlebell
and you're holding
it in this position just to hold it there your whole body wants to go forward
right because it's like
it's all this weight out in front of you so you're stabilizing it with your
lower back you're
stabilizing with your abs and then you're dropping down very deep into this
body weight squat and then
up for this goblet squat and i do it on that on the slant board phenomenal and
it doesn't put a lot of
strain on your back that's awesome i've noticed that front squats or yeah maybe
i guess i've used um
dumbbells to do goblet those are great too yeah yeah a lot less load on the
spine so that's how that's
helped me a lot too and really hard to do yeah so this is it right this
gentleman's doing it right
here perfectly so he's doing a bunch of different variations of it so he's
doing you know oh look yeah
oh yeah he's going sad side lunges so the goblet squat is there so he's got
this is a who's this guy
right here oh it's on the slant board guy's channel so slant board guy like i
said he sent me
that and he's he's been doing this he made these quite a while a long time ago
and i i think it's
just a phenomenal piece of exercise equipment that i i don't i have in every
gym i have here i have my house
that's freaking awesome yeah yeah i mean fitness is a huge part of my life but
it's uh i've been
limited for the past decade because of the back because of the back yeah i'm
after this podcast
i'm gonna take you next door and show you that reverse hyper and you get to
experience that decks
yeah just those two things alone i think will provide you tremendous relief so
excited and the
decks you just have in your house it's like simple easy to set up i'm so down
yeah yeah i mean
you know there's a lot that i you know obviously don't know but uh but i know
what i know and i
know that from a from a nutritional standpoint from an environmental exposure
standpoint
your average american today is inflicting self-harm unwittingly on a daily
basis yeah via the foods
via the exposures yeah we're just constantly taking in things that give us
inflammation
yeah and you know we're our circadian rhythms are all dysregulated we're more
sedentary than
we've ever been we're exposed to i mean the i believe it was the environmental
working group
identified 217 industrial chemicals in cord blood you know of pregnant women we're
just we're being
exposed you know from from every which way and it's not necessarily that it's
like one compound
that's causing all of our problems you know but it's it's cumulative injury it's
like we our bodies
are resilient but they can only contend with so much so you you throw all these
exposures against
the backdrop of widespread nutrient deficiencies you know unprecedented sedentary
behavior chronic stress
poor sleep and it's a it's a recipe for chronic disease i mean it's not to me
it's it's very clear
as to why so many of us seem to be suffering yeah and it's very difficult for
someone who's
swimming in a sea of that to figure out how to course correct yeah and i you
know to to to quote
unquote detoxify which has become one of these contentious words now on social
media granted maybe
possibly for good reason because it's used to sell detox supplements and things
like that but i mean our
bodies can detox we just have to make sure that we're giving our bodies the
right the right raw materials to
to do that and that's actually one reason why i think you know i'm not a carnivore
dieter i'm i'm
i'm a big advocate of consuming grass-fed grass-finished meat i'm a you know
huge protein guy but i do think
dietary fiber plays an important role in terms of helping us you know detoxify
release some of these
compounds when we go to the how does dietary fiber play a role in detoxifying
so the three primary means
in which a body detoxifies is via peeing pooping and sweating and when you
release bile acids into the
lumen of the gut with those bile acids come compounds of the liver has has
essentially deemed has has
marked for removal from the body and fiber dietary fiber soluble fiber um
specifically sequesters these
bile acids and they they're because they're absorbed by the soluble fiber they
disallow reabsorption and so
you poop them out that's one of the reasons that's that's actually the
mechanism by which soluble fiber
reduces can reduce ldl cholesterol it will be because it sequesters bile acids
which your liver creates using
cholesterol and um so you you essentially like poop out lipids toxins i mean if
you're not pooping on a
regular basis you're harboring you know toxins that's why i think that that's
probably one of the mechanisms
by which fiber seems to be so consistently associated with health span lifespan
um you know and those
observations are not necessarily causal like there's healthy user bias there i
think you know obviously
people who eat more fruits and vegetables today they likely have other healthy
dietary and lifestyle
habits like that's that's clear right but i do think there's a mechanism for
fiber to help
um remove some of these toxins and and the like and is the idea behind that
mechanism that fiber
encourages defecation fiber the soluble fiber like traps it basically bile
acids get released into the
the lumen of the gut which help break down fats right you need these you need
these compounds to break down
and assimilate fats from your diet right but there's a very small i believe it's
at the end of the small intestine where these
acids essentially would otherwise get reabsorbed but because they're trapped by
the soluble gel forming fiber
they get passed and so how is that different than what would happen if you just
ate meat and you have these compounds
that's a big question mark but i think that that's uh something that is not
often discussed and should
be discussed one of the potential benefits of fiber is the fact that it helps
trap toxins in the gut and
meat does not no meat is meat is a low residue food food meat is largely
absorbed in the small intestine
i mean when people you know the bulk of stool is made up of fiber and dead
bacteria and cells that have been
sloughed off the you know epithelial layer of the um large intestine small
intestine um
but yeah fiber is generally what makes up you know the majority of a of stool
and if you just eat meat
then what is your stool well i've never personally done a carnivore diet and i'm
not a gastroenterologist
but um you know carnivore dieters say that they poop fine but um but i think it's
a missed opportunity to
not be getting fiber in your diet i i don't think that the carnivore diet long
term
is is optimal short term and also i will say that people that that see reprieve
from
awful conditions like you know crohn's or you know ibs or whatever these autoimmune
conditions
are that people who adopt carnivore diets like i would never i would never say
stop doing this
diet that seems to be helping you like i would never say that so the primary
function of fiber
that you think is beneficial versus having a carnivore diet is the fact that it
can absorb
these compounds inside the gut whereas if you're just eating meat it's that's
not going to happen
correct i think that's one of the benefits of fiber i think fiber fiber has a
few benefits so for one
fiber is satiating it's not as satiating as protein but it does mechanically
stretch out the stomach
which you know turns off the hunger hormone ghrelin so fiber is is fiber
containing foods are satiating
because it's you know are beneficial because they're satiating two for this lipid
regulation
hormone regulation toxin removal function that fiber plays um but then three
fiber seems to promote
um gut bacterial diversity um there are some studies that suggest otherwise
that it's not necessarily the
fiber it's fermented foods that play a larger role in promoting gut bacterial
diversity um but we know
that fiber feeds gut bacteria and as a result we get beneficial postbiotic
compounds like sodium butyrate
which is anti-inflammatory feeds cells in the gut um that use it as a fuel
source so i think there i think
there are a few benefits to fiber consumption um you know i i'm not like one of
these like you know i don't
think that fiber is the primary thing that we should be looking for in the diet
necessarily i'm i'm i
prioritize protein i think eating you know a protein rich diet there seems to
be many benefits of that
um and fiber is not a it's not an essential nutrient um but it does it does
seem to do good things in the
body so i mean i'm i'm not anti-fiber yeah it's one of the weird arguments from
the carnivore diet
side is that fiber is not necessary and you know when you see these people that
have been eating nothing
but meat for five ten years and show an alleviation of all sorts of symptoms of
different autoimmune conditions
and different issues that they've had it's it's interesting totally well first
of all there's no
such thing as a one-size-fits-all diet and plants people have different um
tolerances to different
plants you know it's red meat for example is much more well tolerated by the
vast vast majority of
people i mean there's a complication of lyme disease known as alpha-gal
syndrome where people
develop a sensitivity to red meat but by and large red meat like you provided
you're producing enough
stomach acid you should be able to is that officially a lyme disease or i
thought it's from the lone star
tick it's a different that yes yeah yeah i believe you're right i believe you're
right um i'm not
100 sure but it's uh it's associated it's one of these tick-borne i had a buddy
of mine got it yeah
my friend evan had it for a year and it actually went away and then came back
again crazy yeah for a year
he couldn't eat red meat he was allergic to red meat i feel for those people
yeah it was rough he's
a hunter too wow crazy so he's eating chicken yeah i mean i i love i love my
steak but um
um yeah so you know like red meat generally very very well tolerated chicken
very well tolerated
but it's these plant products these these plant items that seem to you know
very people have different
sensitivities to them so i wouldn't say like you have to eat broccoli or you
have to eat spinach like
people have different you know and and we're also today there's widespread gut
dysbiosis so people
have problems with their guts they have immune systems that are not fully
competent as evidenced by the
the soaring prevalence of autoimmune conditions and allergies and the like
today which i think is
attributed to there are many factors that that play a role you know it could be
over use of antibiotics it
could be the hygiene hypothesis we've just become so sterile as a culture fewer
people today are being
our kids are being breastfed or being born via c-section travel can play a role
you know you travel
to some foreign country you get an infection that changes the microbiome um and
so i think like we
have these sensitivities that are not that are not surprising but i think by
and large for most people
these plant plant foods have a lot of good to offer you know that the benefits
generally speaking outweigh
outweigh risks i'm glad you brought up the uh overuse of antibiotics because
there's a very
interesting case uh that belt on the wall up there the the abu dhabi combat
club that's uh the most
prestigious grappling um competition in the world and the guy who won that is
the greatest grappler of
all time his name is gordon ryan and he's a guy who's he's only 28 years old
which is really wild and
he's hasn't been beaten in like forever whoa and it's not whether or not he
beats people it's how he beats
them it's he's that good he's that he's one of the most dominant athletes of
any sport of all time
but he had staph infection which is very common amongst grapplers it's very
common people get a lot
of staph infections well he was getting it so often that he was essentially on
antibiotics for a
whole year and his gut is up like real bad to the point where he's like
constantly nauseous he's
seen a bunch of different doctors they've tried to fix it in a bunch of
different ways and no one can
really figure it out like when someone has developed a really destroyed gut biome
because of antibiotics
and a long-term like really irresponsible long-term use of antibiotics what can
someone do to try to
come back from that yeah i mean most most people would reach for a probiotic
but there was actually
a study that came out a couple years ago that found that probiotics after a
course of antibiotics i
believe the antibiotic was cipro um actually delayed recolonization of the gut
by healthy bacteria
how so you know i don't know but it's just the the microbiome is a big buzz
term and there are still
so many more unanswered questions and there are answers i think based on based
on my assessment of
the literature and i've written about it in my in my books i think that the
best thing to do would
probably be just to you know to to slowly get back to a diet that contains it's
you know that that
contains fermented foods i think fermented foods have been shown to be really
supportive of gut
bacterial diversity yeah that's what i like yeah kimchi more so than than
probiotic supplements i think
fermented foods are really what's up um kimchi i'm a huge fan of natto raw sauerkraut
raw pickles you
have to make sure that they're raw you know not pasteurized um but yeah that
that seems to be
really helpful and then essentially just feeding eating because what you feed
you breed you know so
eating um we have a hard time even keeping food down yeah he's in this position
where he's like
constantly nauseous and he tries to train but he gets nauseous while he's
training sometimes
hmm that's rough what would you recommend to someone like that yeah i would say
i mean
it depends you know some people do really well on low fodmap diets so like you
know these fermentable
carbohydrates that are that include fiber but also include other specific
carbohydrates that are that
are easily fermented those you know like there's there are certain prebiotic
carbohydrates
that are found just across the um you know like throughout the the produce
section of the supermarket
that are uh usually eliminated when attacking sebo bacterial overgrowth in the
small intestine
um there's a people can google like there's a whole list of like it's it's a
low fodmap diet um
because gordon has been doing this trying to deal with this for like a couple
of years now here it is
low fodmap diets so vegetables fruits uh dairy alternatives these are all high
high food fodmap
groups these are low down here and the low stuff is vegetables like uh eggplants
green beans bok choy
bell peppers fruits cantaloupe capes okay so all sorts of different things that
you can eat that can
potentially help you but yeah so i would he's on a bunch of medications it's
like nothing's happening
i mean i would i would probably adopt a low fodmap diet and at a certain point
you know again this i'm
just speculating but um so i mean this could be the the worst advice so don't
take take with a grain of
salt but i would probably adopt one of those diets and then you know first
maybe even like an elimination
diet like a really aggressive one um because people with with with serious gut
issues i mean again i'm not
like a carnivore advocate but seem to do really well yeah at least in the short
term on these carnivore
diets so i would say maybe try something like that um if that is too
restrictive then i would try maybe a
low fodmap diet um but you ever thought about trying a carnivore diet just to
see what's up
i've thought about it uh i would do it i have nothing against it i would do it
i just you know i think
i i enjoy dark leafy greens i think there's benefit in them um but just to see
how i felt on it i would
try it but uh it's very interesting yeah one of the one of the interesting
things you do it every year
right yeah i i pretty much do it most of the time now um i i but i'm not strict
i i'll eat fruit
uh i certainly like kimchi i like to eat kimchi and steak together that's like
a
nice combination i love that but uh most of my meals are meat and eggs like the
vast majority 85 90
of my meals are meat and eggs and it's like the regulation of my energy level
is incredible it's
just changed everything like i used to get tired in the afternoon you know it
used to be like the
afternoon i'd be like oh then i'd have to power through get a cup of coffee
wake up figure out what
and then go to a show um that's not the case anymore like i'm wide awake all
day long it's
very different it's very different and when you eliminate uh essentially most
carbohydrates from
your diet and then your body starts to produce glucose via gluconeogenesis
through you know absorption
of protein and meat the whole thing changes like you have like a steady
manageable level of energy
throughout the entire day and cognitively it's been one of the best things i've
ever done when i first
started doing it again i'd gotten off of it for a while and i first started
doing it again
all of a sudden i was like jesus christ i have like a extra gear in my brain
because it's like
conversationally it's it's like for podcasting for me i found it very
beneficial that's awesome
yeah you know i'm like i don't but again you said like there's no like one size
fits all yeah for me
that seems to work i eat a i i would consider myself carnivore adjacent in the
sense that i am a huge fan
of i think red meat's a health food which i know i mean that saying that in and
of itself is a
controversial statement today um i take a very protein forward approach with my
diet like i think
that protein there are many benefits to prioritizing protein it's the most satiating
macronutrient
you've got a six-fold higher thermic effect of eating protein as compared to
carbs and fat
it obviously your body is made of protein it supports muscle protein synthesis
it halts muscle
protein there's so many benefits to prioritizing protein which i do
but i do think that you know like dark leafy greens for example is known to be
one of the most nutrient
dense forms of produce because of its low calorie density and it's a great
source of vitamin c folate
but also i think dark leafy greens i mean take kale kale is the top source of
these carotenoids called
lutein and zeaxanthin which we know directly support eye health and brain
health and so i don't see a
reason to deprive myself of these greens that i know have these compounds that
literally migrate up to the brain where they help to reduce oxidative stress
they might even improve
the way you know cognitive function and the like um i think the arguments
against eating those to me
always are like some of the silliest is that plants are producing these
chemicals to avoid predation
yeah and that these phytochemicals are bad for you like jesus christ in a world
today where there's so much
that's bad for you to concentrate on salad yeah seems crazy i don't think
anybody's dying from salad
you know i don't think you should live off salad and everybody that i know that
tries to eat only
vegetables winds up feeling like and there's only a few exceptions to that and
again there's no one
size fits all diet but the people that i know that have gone into a vegan diet
almost
all of them get bad blood work oh yeah and they try to figure out what's wrong
and then
many of them try to supplement and then one day they'll have a piece of salmon
and feel like their
body just returned on then they go oh okay i gotta stop doing this i hear that
all the time yeah veganism
is a psyop to me it's a it's a it's an ideology it's an ideology just like any
other cult and once you
become a part of that you lose all objectivity and you're no longer willing to
talk about these things
in a rational way you're defending your religion yeah i think one thing that's
really interesting is
that you know even within the nutritional orthodoxy saturated fat still
continues to be demonized right
but only three percent of the saturated fat that your average american intakes
ingests comes from
steak comes from meat the vast majority of saturated like if you were just to
accept that saturated fat
is the worst dietary nutrient one might ingest by the way that's a psyop that
yeah literally from the
sugar company because saturated fat a fat isn't a fat like are we talking about
saturated fat in dairy
because that seems to have no negative cardiovascular impact right but three
percent comes from red meat
excluding mixed dishes the vast majority of saturated fat that your average
american ingests comes from
desserts comes from mixed dishes like pizza lasagna egg rolls things like that
stuff dairy yeah
but it's like we've demonized steak right which is like one of the most
nutrient-dense
things a person can eat right yeah it's we're in a very strange position this
country at least is uh with
regards to our understanding of what is actually good and not good for you you
know when i tell people
that i'm that i eat mostly meat they're like what about your cholesterol like
it's like to try to walk them down the rabbit hole of good cholesterol bad
cholesterol the balance of
cholesterol cholesterol as it relates to plaque in the arter in your arteries
like what's really wrong
and is it actual food that most people eat is that really what the problem is
because i doubt that it
is i doubt that it's meat i doubt that it's eggs i doubt that that's the
problem and when people are
willing to readily consume this processed on a daily basis but then demonize
steak i'm like that is one of the
dumbest things that we have become accustomed to this idea that a steak is
delicious but it's
ultimately bad for you yeah no it's um we should consume less meat bill gates
saying it with a big
pot belly yeah like jesus christ no it's it's it's crazy i mean i you know
especially contextually today
with the you look at health statistics right like one in two people are almost
obese today 40 of people
are obese today and by the year 2030 half are going to be not just overweight
but clinically obese okay
half of adults today are have some degree of insulin resistance right we know
that 90 of adults have
some degree of metabolic dysregulation if you if you factor in things like
waist circumference low hdl
triglycerides and things like that and so for for a health expert today to
demonize any whole food any whole
food to me is just absurd and and actually really unethical and red meat is is
you know again and
again it comes up on these lists on you know in the data as one of the most
nutrient dense foods i mean
it's the most but it provides the most bioavailable source of iron heme iron
right i mean iron deficiency
anemia is still a major global health problem last i checked and red meat is
the ultimate iron supplement
it's highly bioavailable it provides zinc it provides creatine it provides carnosine
carnitine all these
really incredible and valuable micronutrients and again when talking about
steak that's worth three
percent of the saturated fat so what's wrong with steak what's the big problem
with it from a health
standpoint i don't think there is any and yet there's people that will tell you
you need to eat less
yeah which is like so strange like well our beef consumption actually over the
past few decades has
declined our chicken consumption has gone up but we're we are eating less red
meat and look at our
health is trending worse and worse and worse where today your average american
is largely on a plant-based
diet it's a plant-based diet of ultra it's not a whole foods plant-based diet i'll
concede that
it's a it's a largely ultra processed plant-based bread and ketchup yeah yeah
but i mean but it really is
a huge problem and you know foods like eggs i mean you know there was this like
thing where
for a while it was like all animal source foods are bad right the the anti the
antidote to disease is to
is to is to um shun all animal source foods right but then we started to see oh
wait a minute fish is
actually associated with better health outcomes so let's like eat more fish and
then the data came
out showing us that oh wait a minute cholesterol this nutrient that we've demonized
for decades
actually has no that negative downside no downside with regard to
cardiovascular risk for the vast
majority of people consuming dietary cholesterol very little impact on serum
cholesterol right and then
dairy turns out that oh my god wait a minute it's not low fat and reduced fat
dairy that seems to be
associated with better health it's full fat dairy that seems to be associated
with better health what
the hell right yeah and and so i think i i mean i do think it's just a matter
of time before we
realize that there is a lot of good to be gained from foods like red meat um
but you know there's so much
pull it is it politic politicization yeah and then people they sort cite things
like the china study
which is very flawed yeah i mean this is it's a narrative it's just a narrative
and um
yeah i mean i think like insofar as red meat is uh is it's highly nutrient
dense it's very satiating
it's i mean the perfect antidote to boxed mac and cheese i mean how many people
for dinner in
this country are eating boxed mac and cheese for dinner noodles with butter you
know or margarine worse
and um and i just think it's a it's a huge shame and i i grew up in a household
that was largely um
you know we my my mother had a bias towards vegetarianism she wasn't a
vegetarian she ate
chicken she ate occasionally fish but she was very concerned about heart
disease and so she
you know growing up we were like she never ate i never saw her eat red meat and
she never ate any eggs
and when she served me my first egg when i was a child she served me it with a
warning to to not eat
these with any significant frequency because they they have the potential to
clog your arteries wow yeah
she was psyop she bought into you know the advice at the time she didn't have
the internet she wasn't
you know online but she whatever the magazines or the tv you know the the nightly
news would share about
healthy eating and certainly whatever the marketing you know in the supermarket
as she was pushing her
shopping cart around the supermarket aisle anything with a red heart healthy
logo on it would end up
in my shopping cart at some point make its way through my kitchen and so i grew
up on a diet that
was largely ultra processed and and mainly uh you know i was encouraged to eat
um low a low cholesterol
low saturated fat diet i mean i grew up eating consuming margarine and i
remember the big top the big
plastic tub of corn oil that we always had out by the stove yep crazy crazy
yeah crazy they trick people
into taking that stuff and that's also when you see like incidences of alzheimer's
kick in like a lot
of that starts to happen right when ultra processed foods get introduced into
the american diet you see an
uptick in alzheimer's yeah well we now have data so like even when i wrote my
first book genius foods
um this data hadn't even yet come out yet but we now see for every 10 increment
in ultra processed
food consumption there's a 25 higher risk of of developing alzheimer's disease
crazy yeah crazy
it's it's like it's the craziest scam to ever get pulled off that the commonly
known foods that people
have eaten for eternity forever are the ones that are the problem and that
these ultra processed foods
that have recently been introduced fairly recently been introduced into the
american diet those are the
things that you should gravitate towards and you still have these personas on
social media credentialed
social media personas going to bat for them yeah you know acting as apologists
and getting paid and
getting paid and getting paid which is the dark part of it it's like they're
they are committing a crime
against humans it's an information crime against humans and it will result in
those people taking
choices that are negatively going to affect their life there was a hundred
percent there was an umbrella
review just published people can look it up ultra processed food consumption
linked to 32 negative health
outcomes in this in this review they looked at all of the available research
linking ultra processed foods to
poor health out to negative health outcomes they couldn't find one single
benefit of ultra processed
food consumption it was all bad and um and again i think it goes back to the
the fact that these foods
are you know we we tend to over consume them and they're a route of of ingestion
for these you know for
these forever chemicals and the like um they yeah they they it's they're they
yeah it's just not it's not
good they drive obesity they drive insulin resistance when consumed in mass i'm
not saying that you can't
consume any i think you know like i think it's important to be a pragmatist and
and it's not like
my diet is 100 free of ultra processed foods but we consume too many today and
i think part of that has to
do with the fact that we're not adequately taught it's never informed consent
we're not adequately
um taught how these foods influence behavior and uh yeah it's very unfortunate
well i think people are
more aware of it now fortunately because of people like you that are spreading
this information and
people hear podcasts and they get it like an adjusted sense of why they've been
they've been misinformed
and uh that's that's a new thing you know and the the ability to access
information from unofficial
sources now it turns out to be real information and very beneficial that's a
new thing and uh so in
that sense we're lucky but boys in an uphill slodge yeah you know there's there's
so much
you have to deal with and so many people are just so their their informed idea
is so incorrect
that in order to shift that it takes so much effort and then they have to deal
with all the people
around them like oh my god cholesterol oh my god you're gonna get this and that
and
you're having a heart attack you're gonna have a heart attack like what yeah i
know there's so many
competing voices and misinformation out there on social media and fear-mongering
today i mean fear-mongering
with regard to animal source foods which i think is a problem i mean as i've
said i'm not i'm not a
carnivore diet or i think it's just uh it's just yeah it's really insane that
today anybody would
would fear-monger uh you know any sort of whole food and and i think that
really you know like i used
to be more interested in what's the appropriate for example ratio of carbs and
fats to one's diet for
optimal health and i really do think it's you know for most people the big
lever diet dietarily speaking is
to is to reduce your consumption of these kinds of foods he's like what are
essentially vending machine
foods um things you can just sit on a shelf forever and still be edible yeah
and there are
other tools you know i think intermittent fasting is something that a lot of
people are talking about
today i think that's like you know there's nothing magic about it but it can
that can be used as
too there are lots of tools at people's disposal and it frustrates me sometimes
on social media where
you see you know people especially those in the so-called evidence-based
community that seem to be
that that gets so down on what they're simply not up on you know they they tend
to write these tools
off as being trivial or you know they'll they'll even talk disparagingly about
them and and i think
whatever whatever tool is at your disposal that you have the ability to use
today i mean i think that's a
that's a great that's a great thing you know the more awareness we have the
better so for your
documentary when you're um discussing the causes and the um what you can do to
sort of mitigate the
effects of these things um what what is like what's the primary concern and
when does some so you say this
is a disease that starts to show itself in middle age or begins and then by the
time you see the
symptoms it's already you're in late stage yeah so it's by the time you've you've
you present and
you're diagnosed with alzheimer's disease i think that it's it's irreversible
at that point um
so i think the sooner you can get a handle on your risk factors you know some
of which include nutrition but
also social isolation is a risk factor um that's interesting yeah and what what
is it about that
that causes it to become a risk factor well i mean there's that 80 year long
ongoing study at harvard
the study of human development that found that that loneliness is a toxin on
par with smoking cigarettes
or drinking alcohol and um you know i think humans are first and foremost we're
social beings that's one
of the reasons why you know a human neonate is born half-baked i mean we
continue our development
in the presence of others you know they call it the fourth trimester relative
to other animals in the
animal kingdom a human is born with with zero capacity to survive you know we
we need those around us
and so i think that's it's just hardwired into who we are as a species that we
are social beings and
today whether it's attributed to you know living in cities and remote work or
social media
it's taking a huge toll on us from a from the standpoint of of mental health
and that creates
downstream biochemical consequences i mean this is not just a you know an
emotional phenomena this is
something that actually has real life a real life health health impact what
about exercise in terms of
like seeing people who develop uh alzheimer's or dementia um what how many of
those people are
sedentary and how many people develop it that are avid exercise enthusiasts
that's a great question i mean
exercise is is medicine when it comes to the brain when it with regard to the
you know the epidemiology of
exercise and dementia risk um i don't think that's clear because also as people
get older they tend to become
more sedentary um but we do know that exercise does have a profound impact even
just light activity
is there uh in instances or like a measurable decrease in instances of people
that have dementia in
alzheimer's with people that are enthusiasts that have never stopped exercising
like people that are
like 70 year old marathon runners yeah i mean people with greater cardio
respiratory fitness particularly in
midlife seem to have reduced risk in late life for an alzheimer's diagnosis
because again it's about
being healthy in midlife that really seems to move the needle so midlife
obesity is associated with
increased risk for alzheimer's disease down the line um being actually heavier
in late life is associated
with lower risk because people tend to become less well nourished as they get
older so the obesity and
alzheimer's disease connection is actually quite interesting so midlife obesity
is associated
with increased risk for alzheimer's disease but
people who are of heavier weight as opposed to more frail in late life seem to
be protected
interesting yeah so just by virtue of one of the things i've always said about
heavy people is if
boy if you can get that person to lose weight they're going to be so strong
because they've been
carrying around all this weight all the time yeah you know like my friend ralphie
may ralphie was
how big do you think ralphie was his heyday i have no idea 455 easy right yeah
maybe 500 pounds easy
safe guess yeah easy over 400 pounds wow the guy had these massive legs and i
was like ralphie
if you could just lose weight you'd be kicking holes through people like your
legs are
fucking machines they're carrying you upstairs i couldn't walk up those stairs
whoa what ralphie may used to weigh over 800 pounds i don't know if that's true
ralphie
might have exaggerated that he was a little bit of a 350 when he did that's
like worthy of the tlc show
down to 350. he got down to 350. interesting he had a couple of gastric bypasses
he ate through them
whoa yeah he had a real problem oh my god he's not with us anymore i mean a lot
of this research is uh
done using the bmi which we know is imperfect yeah i'm obese yeah according to
the bmi right yeah but
you're obviously not i have 10 body fat and i'm obese that's crazy yeah i mean
it's not a good it's
obviously a shitty diagnostic tool but as a screening tool that's how they do a
lot of this research so people
with higher bmi and late life seem to have a degree of protection yeah um but
that's because frailty
is like the worst thing right particularly um sarcopenic obesity so like you're
actually you're fat
but you're under muscled and so this is one of the reasons why why being well
muscled is so important
from the standpoint of longevity and that's where protein plays a role
obviously resistance training
plays plays a really important role so but the key is to make sure in midlife
yeah that you're
that you're healthy midlife healthy and fit and then later in life you just
have to make sure
you don't get frail yeah at a certain point you could you could ride the wave
of the health that
you've you know the the the robustness that you've cultivated in midlife but
that's why we should
the earlier you start with these dietary and lifestyle principles and adopting
them and living them the
better yeah that's one of the craziest statistics that significant muscle mass
has a reduced impact on
all-cause mortality having significant muscle mass yeah having like real strong
muscles like you'll
notice like significant decrease in all-cause more oh yeah but it just makes
sense because you're
stronger you're healthier your body's more vital it's more robust it can deal
with all kinds of things
because it's gone through significant stressors on a daily basis in order to
achieve this muscle
right so you're forcing your body to work you're forcing your body to stay
strong you reduce the effects of
atrophy and all the confounding effects yeah i mean your muscles produce bdnf
which is brain derived
neurotrophic factor which is like a miracle grow protein for the brain it helps
to promote the growth
of new neurons it it encourages the survival of your existing neurons it's
pretty it's a compound that's
produced in your muscles and passes its way through the across the blood-brain
barrier and we also know
that your muscles are the primary site of glucose disposal um you store sugar
in your muscles your muscles
are obviously for for mobility super important improving insulin sensitivity
there's no better way to to
cultivate insulin sensitivity than to resistance train regularly and we see
again that insulin
resistance is related to glucose hypometabolism in the brain which is the one
of the hallmarks of alzheimer's disease
another thing they've found is that exercise training with weights specifically
strength training is one of
the best methods to reduce anxiety it's great yeah yeah there's lots of
evidence now meta-analyses even
showing us whether it's resistance training i mean cardiovascular it's just it's
it's such an important
tool for brain health and that's part of the reason why i i mean i love fitness
and you know most of
it is what is due to what fitness does for my for my brain my brain health my
mental health me too
i can't imagine i mean i've taken a couple of days off just a couple of days
off which like the most
i ever take and by the end of the second day i'm like jesus i feel fucking
weird
like i feel like i have to do something or my body's gonna fall apart like i
just feel gross
feel anxious anxious anxiety's coming on like just don't feel good and then i
work out i'm like huh
i'm okay yeah i'm fine totally it's like your body telling you like this is you
want to exist in
like a robust state there's only one way there's only one way you have to work
out
it's the only way you're not going to be strong unless you work out it's just i
mean you have
there's certain genetic factors certain people that have like really great
genes and they they're
strong they don't do anything it's crazy yeah but they would be better off if
they worked out
they would be healthier think about how crazy it is that like older gen because
i feel like we're now
we we obviously can appreciate this and and younger generations we have gyms i
think was it like
arnold schwarzenegger that helped popularize the gym like that gym culture
probably maybe
but like my mom's lane yeah but like my mom's generation there was no i mean
nobody was resistance
training for fun certainly not women right right and then and they were the one
they were the targets
of like they were that they were the bullseye of that of precisely that
messaging avoid cholesterol
avoid saturated fat you know low fat this low fat that and they weren't working
out and it's it's
really sad when you when you look around and you see that generation yeah and
their health yeah and
the difference is between i mean there's been a bunch of internet memes about
this the difference
between like an 80 year old woman who regularly strength trains and has been
doing it her whole life
and another 80 year old woman who's in a chair you know and she's rolling
around on a scooter because
she can't walk right anymore yeah yeah it's really sad so i mean i think we're
we're definitely making
progress i think that's one of the one of the upsides of the wellness industry
and the and the and
this i think this fervor surrounding wellness and whether it's group workouts
or gym culture i think
it's just it's amazing that that people across the age spectrum now have
embraced fitness as a
lifestyle and women are lifting weights and i think that's it's just incredible
how bad is tap water
i mean i'll say that i grew up drinking tap water i grew up in new york city as
did i
yeah grew up drinking it garden hoses yeah i think yeah same i think you're you'd
be well suited filtering
your water um because also i mean so one of these compounds that um has been
directly linked to
parkinsonism that uh has rate dr ray dorsey from university of rochester has
published on
um it's called trichloroethylene and it's still being used in dry cleaning
today but it has been
you it was used since until the 70s in for certain medical applications it was
used as an anesthetic
for pregnant women it was used to decaffeinate coffee it was used to extract uh
oil vegetable oils
readily infiltrates groundwater and about 30 i believe of groundwater in the
united states is
still contaminated with this compound trichloroethylene and um we know that
there are traces of
pharmaceuticals and various you know compounds in tap water that i think you
know the dose makes the
poison to some degree um so now and then i think it's probably fine but i do
think you know filtering
your water running it through a charcoal filter um maybe even a reverse osmosis
purifier is probably
beneficial does that get the fluoride out a reverse osmosis pure purifier does
yeah but not a charcoal
filter no there are some there's one brand i don't remember the name but there
is there are some pitcher
filters that do claim to uh remove fluoride but um does the reverse osmosis
remove the minerals from
the water as well though yeah it removes everything so that's not good yeah so
you need minerals you do
need more minerals what is hard when you get hard water from a well you get
that white stuff too much
what is that too many yeah too many minerals is that bad for you you know i don't
know um probably
i mean it's probably you know in some way if that's all you're drinking and um
and who knows what else
that water has been able to leach through the pipes or what have you speaking
of which have you seen
uh the recent study that came out it was very recent on um these dishwashing
pods
damn yeah no dishwasher pods are putting forever chemicals all over your
glasses and plates and
can you find that see if you can find that um i think it just came out very
recently
this is not recent gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents
and rinse aids yeah
is that what you're talking about i think it's one of them yeah which one when
was this study
published december 22 22 um there was something that uh i read uh i believe i
read yesterday but
that they're they're starting to seriously consider health news bloomberg okay
so you know what one of the
major problems with with endocrine disruptors are to joe what is that in the
field of toxicology there's this
maxim that the dose makes the poison right right like that we establish the
what's called the no
observed adverse effect level for a given compound and then we assume that
below that exposure is safe
right and so that's why you always say the war why you always hear that
exposure to these compounds is
fine because the dose makes the poison and they're very small you know in terms
of the doses that we're
being exposed to but the problem with endocrine disruptors and this is not
fully appreciated i
think by the vast majority of people is that unlike most compounds which follow
a linear dose response
where you know you consume too much water at a certain point fast enough and it'll
kill you but below that
you're fine a lot of these endocrine disruptor disrupting compounds have what's
called a non-monotonic
dose response so a non-monotonic dose response means that at a low level you
might have effects and you
might not have effects at a for a a period above that dose and then you might
have toxic effects
at a much higher dose you might have completely different effects at a low dose
so low dose toxicity
that's the issue and hormesis is a perfect example of this working in our favor
and it's a it's a perfect
example of a non-monotonic dose response that we actually want like broccoli
sprouts like broccoli
sprouts yeah so at a very low dose broccoli sprouts this compound sulforaphane
and produced by block
broccoli sprouts creates a uh a beneficial effect in the body a response where
you know it causes our
livers to increase production of glutathione and we seem to have this
protective adaptive response to
it right but if you were to consume too much sulforaphane it would kill you
right and so one of the
issues with these compounds like phthalates and other endocrine disruptors but
phthalates in particular
is that they have what's called a non-monotonic dose response which makes them
really difficult to
study and it makes guidelines surrounding them really tricky and so the idea is
that we might be
you might experience effects due to a low dose exposure that aren't necessarily
killing you right but that
are still determined deemed safe you know so it's not quite a linear dose
response it can be you know
a u-shaped curve for example um and so that's a that's a big issue that makes
it makes these chemicals hard
to study um and that's one of the major concerns within the field of toxicology
surrounding these kinds of
these kinds of compounds the hermetic effect is very interesting right because
something can be bad for
you in large doses but beneficial in small doses and like this is similar to
like what's going on with
cold plunges and saunas as well right like your body has a response to this
thing that you stay in that
cold water for a long time it will kill you yeah stay in that sauna for a long
time it will kill you
but if you can get a healthy dose over a determined period of time and you
build up to whatever that
is then you have these great benefits yeah where your body has to go through
that stress and then
responds to that stress and creates a more robust body exactly so you see a you
have an effect at various
dosing um with various dosing uh you know exposures and you know in the case of
sauna with hormesis it's
actually a it's a beneficial thing but some of these endocrine disrupting
compounds the way that they
impact hormones the way that they impact receptors on cell surfaces um i don't
necessarily you know
it's it's not it's not so clear that a low dose is necessarily safer than a
high dose and that's one
of the problems that's why i think you're better off you know when people say
that oh well the the the
level of phthalates and these ultra processed foods they're in the parts per
billion you know we don't
actually know how those you know how those even as minute as they are doses to
that degree are affecting
us you know in the short term certainly not the long term but also you know
when when combined with
all of the other exposures that your average person you know incurs over over a
day-to-day basis it's
just um yeah it's a it's a looming question mark and so that's why i think it's
better to be better to be
safe than sorry and practice the precautionary principle and to reduce your
exposure when you can
so for pretty much anyone listening to this that's concerned about alzheimer's
and you know any form
of degeneration whether it's a lewy body or any kind of dementia so first of
all be healthy be fit
stop eating processed foods start exercising limit your exposure to whatever
these chemicals are whether
they're you know the all the endocrine disruptors what what else can someone do
yeah air pollution um air
pollution how much of a factor is the air pollution it's a big factor it's and
is it break dust is it
yeah so this is known as fine particulate matter pm 2.5 um and we're now
starting i mean there were
studies there have been studies in mexico city where they've taken they've
looked at the brains of
cadavers across the age spectrum and even in children they see pathology that
looks a lot like alzheimer's
disease in young children just from the pollution just from the pollution yeah
they've identified
like these whether break dust or other industrial byproducts of burning coal
have you seen this new
study i'm sorry to interrupt you but that that's showing that electric cars
unfortunately produce
more of that in the production of electric cars or just in the in the brakes
yeah and the brakes
because they're heavier whoa because it's a heavier vehicle and there's more of
that and i wondered
like if they included teslas in those because my i have a tesla and it has
regenerative braking
right so what that means is like it doesn't coast like as i'm driving like so
if i'm driving 60 miles an
hour and i see up ahead there is a stoplight that just turned yellow and i know
it's going to turn
red and i have a few hundred yards i just let off the gas and my car slows down
slows down considerably
to the point where i barely have to use the brakes so a lot of people when they
talk about driving teslas
they talk about one foot driving because you're you you have to use the brakes
you have to stop short or
something's going on but for the most part if you know how the vehicle works
you rarely touch the brakes
it slows down a lot when it comes near a red like as you come close to red
light let off the gas
it slows down a lot wow yeah i don't have an electric car and that that's
shocking um i know that the
that the production you know has there's obviously an environmental toll to the
production of these of
these vehicles what is this generally produce less brake dust than gas powered
cars because the the but
that's just teslas my wife has a porsche that doesn't have regenerative braking
and it's an electric
car regenerative braking converts the vehicle's kinetic engine you're right but
what about the ones that
show that electric cars produce more brake dust um evs can produce more tire
dust because they're heavier and
have more torque which can cause them to wear out tires faster i mean i think
that what they were the
saying in the one study that i read though was that with many of them because i
don't think most electric
cars use the regenerative braking aspect i don't think that's as common it's
just wild to me that i mean
it's like hubris you know we think one day we think we're doing good for the
environment and then the next
day you know we find out that there are all of these downstream it's it's kind
of like you know people
don't i think can't wrap their head around the fact that plant production
actually leads to crop death
um you know critters and moles and bowls on sure and but it's just like works
if you're partaking in
modern life today there is blood on your hands and i don't think there's any
way to get around it you
know you're you're you're you're leaving a footprint and i actually think that
the focus on greenhouse
gas emissions super important but i think it's it's unfortunately taken the
focus away from
corporations who seem to get a a hall pass when it comes to releasing these
kinds of volatile organic
compounds and these forever chemicals into the environment i think that's a
real major environmental
concern that not enough people are talking about yeah for sure we're breathing
it in i mean the nose is
the front door to the brain and that's why i think air pollution you know is is
now being linked to
alzheimer's disease parkinson's disease and the like and it's really concerning
so um the uptick in
highly polluted environments like mexico city and the like what how much of a
an effect does that have
statistically i mean the data that i've seen proportionally i'm not sure but i
know that it's it's
significant and it depends obviously on parts of the world and more research
needs to be done because
obviously a very polluted somebody who lives amid serious um air pollution
probably there are other
factors at play you know they might live in a very industrialized part of a
city that might not
they might be lower on the socioeconomic spectrum you know so they might have
other risks um like
confounding risk um but you know i think for it depends on where you are and i
don't think there's
one cause of dementia for for every person with dementia i think there are
different causes but
certainly when you see that that you know when you look at these studies and
you see that they had
pm 2.5 in their brains and around the pm 2.5 these particles
there's the aggregation of these plaques that we associate with late onset alzheimer's
disease
i mean that's startling so i don't know that i don't know the proportion but i
do know that it's
it's a it's it's a significant concern i don't know if it's you know here in
the united states where we
have where we have better regulations now i mean la used to be very polluted it's
a lot less so
these days for example i live in la um and yet people are still developing alzheimer's
disease
unfortunately in southern california um i don't know if if that's as big of a
contributor in la but
um still very polluted right i mean yes i mean relative to a rural area well
also not only that the
the the especially in the valley just the way the topography is like it accumulates
all the
shit in the valley yeah you see it sometimes i gotta yeah it's thick yeah i
mean i bought a
i have an air purifier in my house i i think it's really important to you know
to reduce your exposure
to buy you know i think an air purifier makes sense i think making sure that
your hvac system has a
change that filter regularly make sure that it's a good filter i think um i
mean there are ways to
mitigate exposure you can damp you can wet you can wet dust so as opposed to
using a dry duster that
just redistributes dust i mean dust oftentimes harbors a lot of these chemicals
that we're talking
about whether it's trichloroethylene or plastic plastic related compounds you
want to sequester the
dust in a damp cloth throw that cloth away or wash it vacuuming i think is is
really important make
sure that your home is well ventilated um because homes are now becoming
increasingly
um insulated as a cost-saving measure which has led to an increase in exposure
to certain volatile
organic compounds in the home so yeah i mean the the you might not be at risk
in your house for
exposure to fine particulate matter per se but you know you're breathing in all
this other stuff
yeah which isn't great for you and so when you set out to do this documentary
were you uh trying to just
highlight all the issues were you trying to present cures or potential mitigating
techniques that people
can use like what were you trying to do yeah so i wanted to on the one hand
capture what it was that
my mom was going through and as an artist i mean it was incredibly painful for
me and my family and so
i felt in many ways that by documenting it it was giving meaning to the whole
experience for me
which would otherwise just be purely traumatic and um and so i wanted to to
document what my mom was
going through and pay tribute to her and and also to pay tribute to the science
of dementia prevention
which again 10 years ago nobody was talking about and so in the film it's not a
it's not a i wouldn't
consider it a diet film there's no magical diet that's proposed it's just kind
of the hope with
the film was to unravel a lot of this sort of misinformation that i think we've
been doled out
over the past few decades with regard to what we should and shouldn't be eating
but it's not there
are other factors that are covered um in the in the documentary of course but
um but yeah there are
it does paint with broad strokes how one might live or eat to reduce risk for
dementia and as i mentioned
we you know one of the interviewees that is in the film is um dr delamonte at
brown who coined the term
type 3 diabetes and she she talks a little bit about why we see rates
increasing so starkly today
and she talks about how it's unlikely to be genetic due to genetics it's likely
to be due to exposure to
whether the standard american food and standard american food environment um or
something else
and uh we also have um one of my mentors uh richard isaacson who's the um alzheimer's
prevention
specialist who you know was at new york presbyterian while cornell whose work i
i stumbled upon really
early so it's it's really to kind of like drive home the notion that this
condition doesn't begin
overnight you have decades to set yourself down a different path if you you
know simply become aware
of you know the fact that your choices do impact your your brain health and um
and so it's it's in
part informational but it's also it's a tribute to um my mom and it's a tribute
to anybody really who's
who's ever experienced dementia both as a as a patient or as a caregiver it's
it's a film that i
you know people will find solace in and um and yeah it's really cinematic it's
you know it's it's
it's it's hard for me to watch but it's a it's a film that is um i think really
emotional really
it's a really intimate look into what that's what dementia is like and and my
mom is such a charismatic
light you know and she's so relatable and she's young you know she's like in
her early 60s in the film
and so for anybody who thinks that this is something that you know only affects
old people you know
people grandma grandpa i think it's going to shatter a lot of um unhelpful
misconceptions that
people have about these conditions was there anything that your mother found or
that you found that helped
your mother and mitigated some of the symptoms exercise definitely helped i i
think it slowed the progression
of the condition but um but it also in a significant in a significant way
lifted her spirits because i mean
we know that exercise is really important for mental health and um and it
certainly helped with hers
but it also i mean there is there is evidence that exercise whether parkinson's
disease or alzheimer's
disease it's i mean it's profoundly effective as a you know i mean potentially
in terms of slowing the
condition improving symptomology improving quality of life and so yeah i mean
we we got her on an
exercise regimen i we hired a trainer um and that was really the first time in
her life that my mom ever
really took exercise seriously which is crazy to think about but um but yeah we've
got there's a whole
generation that didn't think it was necessary it's it's it's wild to me i mean
it's such an important part
part of my life and um it's it's just so good for you from a mental from a
metabolic health standpoint
mental health brain health cardiovascular health it's just like and we've
become so sedentary generally
we have to schedule our our activity today um so yeah it's not you know there
is no magic bullet
unfortunately it's a it's a multi-faceted problem but and we don't we don't yet
have all the answers
unfortunately but my intent was to show people to convince people that you know
even though
we don't have all the answers we don't need to sit idly on our hands as we you
know particularly
with the degree of self-harm that your average person is self-imposing on a day-to-day
basis with
the foods that they're eating with their lifestyles like we can do things a
little bit differently and
the research tends to support that by changing the way that we're doing things
it'll buy us additional
years or maybe even decades of cognitive health well that alone i mean that's
that's an amazing thing
that's a hope i mean what my family went through was awful i wouldn't wish it
upon my worst enemy
and and i think that if there's a way that my work can you know affect people
and prevent
one additional case i mean that would be amazing right but are there any
medications that have promise
well there's research now looking at these um like semaglutide these peptides
um
semaglutide for decades was used as a uh type 2 diabetes medication and now
obviously it's being
used for weight loss and they're now pushing it on children and people are
using it for vanity reasons
which i i don't support but insofar as it's it can lower blood sugar um
they're looking now to see if it reduces risk for the development of alzheimer's
disease they've already
shown that it can reduce risk for cardiovascular events which i think is great
i mean if it's a last
line of defense for you and you need that medication i'm happy that we have it
and they've shown that it
can reduce cardiovascular events they're looking now to see if it can reduce
risk for alzheimer's disease
and there have already been a few a few trials showing that it might improve
cognitive function
now the reason for that is that um semaglutide actually increases insulin
secretion and this
is i think just a band-aid this isn't a fix for the condition but they've shown
that we've known for
a decade now at this point that intranasal insulin can actually improve
cognitive function because the
brain has become essentially insulin resistant so you're just like hitting it
with insulin
and it seems that that can lead to an acute improvement in cognitive function
in patients with
with alzheimer's disease i believe so has anybody ever done it like for a
performance enhancing drug
that i don't know but there are there are studies suzanne craft is one of the
lead researchers who's
published a lot on this over at uh i believe wake forest university nasal
insulin intranasal insulin yeah
like a like a yeah squirt squirter yeah wow yeah i mean it's it for somebody
with with because in the
in the brain of somebody with alzheimer's disease glucose metabolism is is
dramatically constrained and
so you're basically like you're shooting insulin straight up into the brain
because whatever goes up
your nose is like you bypass the blood-brain barrier because you've got these
olfactory neurons
that extend into the nasal cavity so this is one of the reasons why air
pollution is so harmful when
we breathe it in through our noses and one of the reasons why people sniff coke
there you go
so they're blowing insulin up the nose and they're they're seeing that that can
improve that improves
cognitive function and it there i think they've already i could be wrong but i
think they've already
shown in um in a phase one and phase two trial that it it leads it leads to an
improvement in
cognitive function in patients with alzheimer's disease some semaglutide and so
you know i think that's potentially
acute administration of intranasal insulin beneficially affected spatial memory
and executive
function healthy normal weight adults interesting while the longer term
application is also improved
decorative memory what's the difference was decorative memory memory rather uh
i think it's
i mean i'm actually not sure i think improved gait interesting they're walking
better yeah i mean how
weird verbal memory but the thing is in the in the brain of somebody with alzheimer's
disease so the
re one of the reasons why why they're calling it type 3 diabetes is because
there's insulin
deficiency and insulin resistance so it kind of has the hallmarks of both type
1 and type 2 diabetes
interesting memories that are directly accessible to conscious recollection
okay interesting facts data
experiences that are required through learning retrieval of this information is
usually intentional and
requires the awareness of the individual interesting decorative memory
so it seems to you know you're basically shooting up the brain with a peptide
insulin is a peptide
that causes it to dramatically you know maybe uptake glucose um insulin's role
in the brain is
is different than its role elsewhere in the body for example skeletal muscle it's
not
it's it it serves it plays multiple functions in the brain um but yeah intranasal
insulin has been shown
um in some studies but who knows i mean maybe spraying insulin up into the
brain on a chronic
basis increases insulin resistance and then you become dependent on that you
know right so as a last
as a last line like maybe maybe it's it's helpful you know in some capacity but
i think that's one of the
reasons why semaglutide might help um for somebody who's already experiencing
cognitive decline um
but then also i mean yeah there's i wouldn't there drugs that are helpful in
the setting of somebody
who's already been diagnosed there really there isn't much there isn't much i
mean
there were these drugs that were um were approved and have recently been
essentially abandoned um one
of the drugs being aducanumab by biogen because they found it to be effective
at reducing the plaque
in the brain but it led to first of all there were awful side effects um it
actually increased these
drugs increased brain atrophy and didn't lead to any significant improvement in
cognitive function
so i mean those were a big fail and and i and the and the the drugs prior to
these monoclonal antibodies
like aducanumab and the like minimally effective like my mom was on pretty much
all of them they
didn't do anything for her so it's uh it's it's unfortunate it's you know i i
don't i don't think that
drugs really have a fighting chance when it comes to a condition that has taken
decades to develop
so the only thing that really seemed to help her was exercise exercise helped
um exercise helped
uh and then you know it's not like i it's not like i put her on some crazy diet
i mean there's there is
really no evidence that any dietary pattern other than maybe the ketogenic diet
um would serve any
purpose i mean the ketogenic diet potentially particularly earlier on in alzheimer's
disease might
improve certain quality aspects of quality of life but it's not a cure and it's
a very difficult diet
to adhere to is this because your brain starts functioning on ketones rather
than glucose so
up to 60 of the brain's energy needs can be furnished by ketones normally you're
under under fed conditions
your brain is using glucose 100 as a fuel source but your brain also can can
use ketones and it seems to be the
case that the brain of somebody with alzheimer's disease their you know their
their ability to generate
atp from glucose is diminished by 50 but their ability to generate energy from
ketones is unperturbed so
you can basically supplement the brain's energy needs with ketone bodies but as
a per when a person develops
alzheimer's disease their their preference for sweet foods increases they
actually develop a sweet tooth
which is thought to be the brain essentially crying out for sugar because it's
it's starving essentially
for energy and um and so getting somebody with alzheimer's disease to adhere to
a ketogenic diet
incredibly difficult to do i would imagine
um interesting um what about exogenous ketones i think those might might help
there's not
there's not good data on exogenous ketones but there is an fda approved medical
food i believe
it's called axona which is a medium chain triglyceride based product medium
chain triglycerides are
converted by the liver to directly to ketones whether you're in a fasted or fed
state um and that's
actually an fda approved medical food um we now have various ketone products on
the market that i would
suspect might have an impact but i don't i don't know for sure there is one um
pediatrician she's a
neonatal pediatrician named dr mary newport who's been an advocate for this
research for decades at this
point um whose husband steve developed alzheimer's disease and she knowing what
she knew about neonatal nutrition
she started giving him coconut oil before the availability the widespread
availability of mct oil and these ketone products
and this is an anecdote but she
has written about and and reported that when she initially started giving her
husband these ketones
he had alzheimer's disease she saw a dramatic improvement in his cognitive
function wow like
dramatic um she kept giving it to him did you say what the dosage was of this
coconut oil multiple
multiple tablespoons a day but now we've got better options than that and i'm
not is that a bad option
is coconut oil a bad option it's not bad but it's not purely um so coconut oil
is there are a few
fractions of coconut oil there's it's predominantly lauric acid and then you've
got capric acid caprylic acid
there are all these other components of coconut oil but now you can buy um
i believe the most ketogenic fatty acid that comprises coconut oil is caprylic
acid c8 i believe
and it's just a more potent ketone precursor and
there's really no like this is you know basically based on anecdote but
um at first she started giving him coconut oil and she reported a significant
improvement
and um but now we have all these other you know ketone products on the market
like c8
which you know might play a role we we i would love to have more research on
this obviously
but um certainly worth a shot the one caveat i'll say is that
you know it can cause diarrhea when you over consume this stuff
so just you know be mindful of that be careful kids yeah nobody wants that um
what other things
can be done hmm i mean you know what about cold exposure heat exposure does
that any of that
cold plunge and sauna have any effects and it obviously has a big effect on
dopamine and norepinephrine and
yeah there's research out of um the university of finland showing that sauna
use is associated with
pretty dramatically uh reduced risk for alzheimer's disease also stroke
hypertension cardiovascular disease
all cause mortality all cause mortality yeah now that's an observational study
but i think it's it's potentially more telling that it was a study done in finland
because in finland
finland is the sauna capital of the world there's one sauna on average per
household in finland
and so it kind of removes a bit of the healthy user bias that you might see
doing that same study here
you know people here in the united states people who regularly use saunas maybe
they're
more well off they have spa access you know they've got fancy gym memberships
or they can afford to have
a sauna in their homes but in finland it's like one sauna it's like a shower it's
like one sauna per house
and in that observational study they saw consistent health benefits due to
regular sauna use two to
three times a week i think it was like um i want to say close to 20 reduced
risk four to seven times a
week 35 to 50 reduced risk again observational but mechanistically saunas they
do get your heart rate
going they do seem to ultimately reduce blood pressure even though they raise
it acutely when you're sitting in
a sauna it's like it's like a workout that you can self-impose while sitting
absolutely still
yeah which is amazing yeah it is amazing stationary cardio stationary cardio
exactly it's a great way
to put it and it's good for mental resilience yeah i love i'm a huge fan i don't
get to do it as often
as i as i would like and it's also when you sweat you're releasing like you you
sweat out phthalates
you know you release a lot of these chemicals that we're being exposed to on a
daily basis through your
sweat you poop them out you pee them out and um and so i think it's a really
great uh health modality
i mean it's not we don't yet know for sure that it's causally related to you
know to alzheimer's
prevention but i mean i would i would assume that there's a real effect
happening there
um when you look at all of the different things that are available today to
improve your health when
you look at lifestyle choices dietary choices exercise choices what is uh is
there a way like
if a person's listening to this like what's the best step forward like if you
if you're listening
this you know what i am i'm making a choice my life is a disaster i eat like i'm
sedentary
yeah well i think how do i jump in how do i jump in well i think you don't want
to you don't want
to break off more than you can chew right um i think that's a big mistake that
people make you want to
try to adopt one new habit at a time and after that habit cements then you can
try adding in another
habit but for some you know for some people it might be as simple as drinking a
glass of water
before your first cup of coffee in the morning you know just like hydrating
yourself before that first
cup of coffee and then once you start doing that maybe start to look at
breakfast you know breakfast
there's all this data now coming out showing us that i used to think and this
is an area where my
thinking has evolved i used to think that breakfast was non-essential some like
you know that the the
later in the day we can push our first meal the better you know we would get
some kind of like
autophagy brownie point or something like that but actually the data has come
out showing us that when
we eat a protein-rich breakfast first thing in the morning and we consistently
eat that every day it
does a really good job at regulating our hunger levels throughout the day we
subsequently when we
eat a high protein breakfast we eat fewer calories over the subsequent 24 hours
and i think that's
really important i mean how many people today start their days with a you know
coffee drink from you
know and then maybe a bowl of cereal yeah it's like starting your morning with
dessert right
that's how so many people start their mornings today right a bowl of sugar
sweetened cereal coffee
with sugar and um fruit juice you know yeah and it's a i mean that you're
setting yourself up for
hunger dysregulation um it's just no bueno stress you know and uh and so start
try starting your day
with a with with a protein-rich breakfast you know try to hit 30 40 maybe even
50 grams of protein with
your first meal of the day it's a great way to assuage your hunger to make sure
that you're going to be
you know come lunch time you're not going to be up against the wall looking for
the quick sugary fix
from the vending machine or from the you know the rec room or the cafeteria or
whatever i think it's a
it's a great first healthy habit to adopt and um and that's going to influence
your behavior
subsequently down the down the you know down the line i also think it's really
it can be really useful
to try to be as present with your food as possible i mean i'm guilty of eating
on the run just as much
as you know anybody else today but studies show that when we're distracted when
we're eating we tend
to consume more calories about 15 more calories which doesn't seem like a lot
but you consume
you know 15 more calories with every meal every day and that's that adds up to
a spare tire over
time you know um you want to you really want to major in the majors and as
opposed to the minors which i
think many people do today so you know prioritizing whole foods it's like that's
like the if if there's
one dietary tip you know i really think that that's it because in so doing you
are optimizing for satiety we
know thanks to nih funded research research that when people eat largely an
ultra processed diet
they tend to over consume their calorie um budget for the day by about 500
additional calories and
this is intentional i mean this is something that's been engineered into these
over processed foods
engineered yeah it's engineered and nobody's being honest about this you know
that these foods are
literally designed to be over to be over consumed it's not as you're not a
failure for over consuming them
right that's the way that they're that's how you're meant to respond to those
foods yeah and it's the
food industry right they're they're certainly playing a role but it's also your
own biology it's
like how your brain and your taste buds have evolved because food the ubiquity
of food hasn't always been
a thing you know we've for the vast majority of our time on this planet food
scarcity was a real issue
there were more underweight people walking the earth than underweight now that
seesaw has flipped
now we are living in the for the first time in human history there are more
overweight people walking
the earth and underweight due to you know this phenomena this westernization of
of our diets i think it's also very important what you said about not biting
off more than you
could chew and just try to take on one healthy habit at a time and build up to
that
because it it's been shown that habits
if you can continue them for a predetermined period of time
i think it's 90 days or something like that once it gets to around 90 days
those habits become sort
of cemented in to who you are yeah i mean i started making my bed a year ago i'm
for in my 40s i i've
never made my bed until about a year ago and it's a habit that now i've cemented
you know so you can
teach an old dog new tricks that's a funny one yeah i've started making my bed
yeah and that could also be
walking around the block it could be you know having an exercise routine you
start off just
simple push-ups and sit-ups and body weight squats or something every morning
get your day going with
that exactly and if you can do it every day over a long period of time you'll
see results and if
you're if you're really sedentary like if you've never stepped foot into a gym
you don't know what
to do first of all gyms are the most welcoming places to newbies so don't be
intimidated by that
some of the most jacked guys in my gym are the sweetest dudes and are always
willing to you know
that's their thing that they enjoy doing they're happy when more people do it
yeah i mean i i don't
know if it's because the way you know this is revealing but i've never been
asked for my advice in
the gym you know but but you know i'm happy to i'm happy to give it but
generally like people in the gym
are friendly they're nice you know um they're also experiencing the endorphin
rush of the exercise
and they're happier i love giving out unsolicited advice i i do it sometimes in
the gym and i get
weird looks i probably shouldn't because i live in west hollywood but um but it's
uh yeah i mean
people get intimidated by the gym environment and i think it's it's really a
shame because some of the
nicest people you know are most people don't know where to start you know that's
the problem and it's
so intimidating to like walk into this place where everyone's so familiar they're
they're already so
far on their fitness journey path that you know you look at their body like
that this is not my body
i can never be like that i can't i'm never going to look like that they had to
start somewhere they
had to start somewhere and here's the thing about about fitness is that it's
like it's not it's not
once you adopt it into your life and you embrace it and you embrace the
lifestyle it's like the rising
tide that lifts all the boats in your harbor because the discipline you know
the the the discipline that
it takes um that you you know that habit once cemented i mean you can apply the
things that you learn
in fitness to so many other areas of life um it's just such a it's so powerful
and if if if lifting
weights is intimidating to you if you know if if you're not even walking on a
daily basis then start
there maybe just you know go on more walks yeah but um just to walk around your
block it's good
so it doesn't seem like you're doing much but you really don't walk that far on
a normal basis
yeah you know you walk to your car you walk to your office you walk to the
lunchroom like whatever
you're doing if you can just force yourself to walk a mile just one mile that's
like so much more than you
ever walk in you know in one unbroken period of time oh yeah i mean i i living
in la it's really
difficult sometimes to get those steps in but the whole 10 000 steps thing is a
bit uh that kind
of came from nowhere actually 10 000 steps as sort of like six feet distancing
yes
yeah just like that actually um although unlike six feet distancing there have
there has been some
research to come out since that kind of hit the cultural zeitgeist yeah showing
that you know it's
actually a pretty good target you know um somewhere in the range of seven
thousand to ten ten thousand
steps a day and it's doable and it doesn't kill you it's not that hard yeah
like if you listen to a book
on tape and you go for a walk or a podcast it's easy it's not that bad yeah and
if you can just do that
every day and then work your way up to some other stuff and then once you get
the courage up take a
class take a yoga class take a martial arts class do something where it's fun
to do and you're getting
your exercise in exactly which is a really great way to do it i go to the gym
and i just walk on the
treadmill i'm not a runner i've never liked running i know many people do and
power to them i've never
liked it and now with my like low back stuff it's like become even more um
aggravating but i just i
get on the treadmill and i walk like i walk on the treadmill and uh it's
incredibly gratifying you know
you can put that put that incline up you know to six seven eight nine and it's
a it's a fantastic
cardiovascular workout it really is yeah yeah especially with a high incline i
do it with a
weighted vest and a high incline rocking yeah yeah that's yeah and just watch a
movie just
fucking suck just suck trudging it's amazing how hard it is on your feet that's
what's kind of crazy
like your feet get tired yeah you know but it's so good i mean it's like you
know when you're your body
is i mean it's very intricate network of tubes and pipes and not every fluid in
your body has its own
heart you know so the movement is actually i mean it can help prevent cancer um
exercise is a powerful
cancer protective modality because you've got you know these immune vessels
your lymphatic system is
is relies on movement right flexing your muscles actually pushes fluids around
your body
that don't otherwise have a pump and um your brain when you're sitting for an
extended period of time
blood literally drains from your brain and just a brief walk um every 20
minutes of sedentary time
brief walk just you know it oxygenates the brain and you can feel it what's one
of the reasons why
writers like to go for walks after they write it helps them review their
material like a lot of guys do
that they they'll write early in the morning and then they go for a walk and
they'll bring a tape
recorder of their phones they can use the voice notes and as they're walking
they'll start reviewing
their material and thinking about their material as they're walking and then
like maybe a new idea will
come and because you know you're getting the heart rate the oxygen all the endorphins
and then you're also
in this thing where you're just walking and just thinking and as you do that
ideas start to sprout
very common amongst writers to go for a walk after the initial right of the day
yeah also helps blow off steam and um yeah it's it's incredible reminded me of
this post of ronda
ronda patrick ronda patrick 10 body weight squats every 45 minutes is more
effective at blood sugar
regulation than a 30-minute walk well that's even better how about that easier
to do also oh yeah 10
body weight squats every 45 minutes is that for the whole day uh i mean during
an eight-hour period of
sitting yeah not hard brief intense bursts of activity often called exercise
snacks offer a potent
strategy to mitigate the health risks associated with our sedentary lifestyles
yeah exercise snacking
yeah that's a thing that's a thing that's been referenced in the in the
exercise literature and
seems to be super effective i know a friend who did that that radically
improved his pull-ups
and so he put a pull-up bar in his house and he would just walk by the pull-up
bar and just do a couple
wow and he would just do it throughout the day just every now and then do a
couple of pull-ups
i mean it sort of like lines up with the strength first philosophy of uh pavel
tatseline and all the
the talk of kettlebell work like do you do any that stuff do you know what his
ideas were no not really
the idea was uh you should never do anything to failure and that this idea of
doing things to failure
is uh you're just trying to rush results by you know forcing yourself to do
that and that strength should
be thought of as a skill and the way to practice skills is to not be tired and
so when you do
kettlebells like i i follow these principles so say if i'm doing um clean and
presses with 70 pounds i
could probably do 25 reps if i wanted to get to failure if i really want to get
to like the last
like so i don't do that i do 10 and at 10 i'm fine i could totally keep going
but i put it down
and then i walk away and then um it looks like i'm lazy because i'll just like
watch tv i'll watch a fight
on on tv and i won't do a thing for five minutes so in between my sets i'm not
the guy that like
unless i'm doing endurance training i'm not the guy that like goes through
these sets like all right
let's go next one push it i don't do any of that and i've gotten significantly
stronger i i just wait
a long time in between sets and my workouts like my kettlebell workouts might
take two and a half hours
wow so i'm lifting weights for two and a half hours but in between i'm drinking
electrolyte filled water
i'm taking uh i take this uh alpha brain pre-workout that has beta alanine in
it a lot of different
things i drink that stuff and i get all the reps in that i would if i just
burnt myself out by
sandwiching them together but i'm doing it in a point where when i'm doing like
my third set of 10 reps
i'm not tired i can do that third set no problem and i put it down and then i
go to my next exercise and
i follow the same protocol for my next exercise exercise so whatever that is
whether it's renegade
rose same thing i don't go to failure i get like whatever the rep number is
with whatever the weight
it is over time i figured it out and then i take a big break big break five
minutes ten minutes even
maybe sometimes if i really want to like for the last set i really want to be
fresh and then when i'm
hitting these i'm not fatigued and it's decreased my soreness substantially it
is allowed me to get all the
repetitions that i would get in a shorter workout but um i'm never in a point
of fatigue where i'm
having a difficulty controlling the weight and i i think and the russians use
this strength training
method you know a long time ago and they've they've realized that this idea of
like train smarter not
harder now is this optimizing for strength or hypertrophy strength strength
primarily strength yeah i mean
hypertrophy a lot of times like bodybuilders if you've you've ever observed
they'll do really
lightweight and extremely high repetitions like a hundred curls with like 15
pounds you know because
they're just trying to blow out those muscle fibers but i don't necessarily
think that contributes to
strength the same way lifting things that are heavier does hmm yeah i mean i've
always heard that lower on
the rep range um you know as opposed to higher in the rep range tends to
promote more strength and then
hypertrophy you can achieve across the rep range right now yeah i think we we
now understand but
i wonder how it reconciles because for hypertrophy i've never i've never been
all that strong and so
my workouts have been you know i've primarily focused on hypertrophy but i've
always thought that
while you don't necessarily need to go to failure on every set you do want to
get close to it and
maybe even hitting failure you know on the last set seems to promote
good gains in terms at least in terms of muscle growth yeah maybe if you want
to get jacked
i just want to be strong yeah and i want also to be strong functionally i don't
do anything in isolation
i don't have any isolation exercises not not a single one that i do no preacher
curls no nothing
everything that i do involves the whole body are you familiar with uh this
concept of stretch mediated
hypertrophy that people i'm talking about i am but explain it to people it's
super interesting so
obviously you know working through the entire rep range of a movement is
beneficial um and should i think
generally be the default but my understanding is that when the muscle is in its
you know most lengthened
position under load you seem to get a lot of bang for your buck and that's
where the benefits of
um lengthened partials comes into play um but also really kind of emphasizing
that stretched
position of any move you know of any exercise whether it's like the bicep curl
or the chest fly or
even the chest press you know making sure that you're really stretching out
that that muscle
seems to there seems to be a lot of reward um to be gained from that you know
whereas opposed i think
like what's what's maybe what's what's most interesting about it is that we
tend to think of
most of the gains being achieved when fully contracted you know like we squeeze
the full contracted position
for example of the chest fly whereas i think what this research is starting to
suggest is that you
actually get more benefit from like that stretched position so really
emphasizing that and making
sure that you're really as opposed to kind of just doing like this like partial
range of motion
like really kind of extending out and carrying that kind of philosophy to you
know on through
you know every lift i think there are some there's some thinking that you know
the when you're like certain certain exercises there might be some risk you
know incurred with
that like for example preacher curls for example like i've seen some like
horror story videos on
instagram where people oh yeah snap their biceps you know yeah but just
generally speaking um
that that's sort of like a big buzz thing now within the fitness community um
the you know stretch mediated
stretch mediated hypertrophy which is which is interesting it kind of makes
sense because it's kind of the most
vulnerable time of the lift it's like especially if you have a chest fly in
your back this you feel
so vulnerable whereas like here you feel pretty strong like once you have
achieved like a certain
amount of uh distance pulling the cables you get to here now you feel pretty
strong and then at the end
yeah you really feel vulnerable in the beginning in the beginning everything
feels like i got to get past
this where it's enjoyable and it's kind of enjoyable in this rep range like as
you're bringing the hands
together yeah yeah i mean i'm not i'm not definitely not like an expert on the
topic but i'm a student
of of it of fitness science and um and i've put it into practice and i've seen
some pretty significant
gains as a as a result you know it's it's uh it is interesting but primarily
you know you generally
want to stick complete the full range of motion but then just maybe throwing in
some length and
partials or um just a few extra reps at the bottom yeah you can go past failure
you know um adding more
volume always seems to be helpful from the standpoint of hypertrophy provided
you're not adding junk
volume you're not just building fatigue you're actually at adding stimulus um
seems effective i think
that's one of the biggest mistakes that people make in the gym is that they don't
train with adequate
intensity i see a lot of people in my gym they're lifting weights um when they
i see them putting
the weight down but when they clearly had you know five six additional reps in
the tank there and
they're not lifting weight that's all that heavy compared to how you describe
your new lifting style
they're kind of just going through the motions of the exercise right they're
not actually sending that
the adequate stimulus to the muscle that it needs to adapt grow stronger or we're
going to die and then
they wonder why they don't get any results exactly they're half-assing it yeah
that's what a lot of
people do with everything in life yeah you know unfortunately and uh you pay
for that whether you realize
it or not what you don't pay in the gym you pay for with the rest of your life
yeah 100 yeah
so true anything else max you want to bring up while we're here oh man um i'm
just super psyched to uh
yeah to be here to get to do what i do to you know share evidence-based
research with people um but in
a way that's practical and that acknowledges the limitations of the research
that i share and and
just the general landscape of nutrition science which tends to be incredibly
weak
um i think that's not often acknowledged um that a lot of our you know
nutrition studies are incredibly
weak you know built on epidemiology which has many flaws um or not flaws it's
good for what it's meant
to do but i think we tend to over interpret it um and we use it to influence
others which i think is
not smart borderline unethical um and so yeah and so far as i get to provide a
uh you know a more
authentic high integrity
highly actionable path for people um yeah i'm just i'm just grateful that i get
to do what i do and i do
it on my podcast the genius life and i'm super excited for people to watch the
film which i've worked on for
the past 10 years and again i think it's the most important thing i've ever
done and i'm super proud of it and
grateful to be here so thanks for i'm grateful to have you you are a really
important resource and i think
it's uh it's a great pleasure to have people like you available to you know to
provide free information
for people to learn about all these different ways that they can benefit their
health and uh you know
it's just so important to have someone like yourself out there that really
focuses on it and does a great
job of disseminating that information thank you brother appreciate you very
much um tell everybody
how they could see your documentary little emptyboxes.com little emptyboxes.com
you can
as of today you can buy it you can rent it we've got some cool limited time
bonuses like a signed poster
but i'm so excited for you guys to see this film i've put my heart and soul
blood sweat and so many
tears into it and um listen to my podcast the genius life and i've got books
the genius life
genius foods and genius kitchen and your uh instagram and twitter what are
those addresses yeah at max
lugavere come say what's up spell it to people m-a-x-l-u-g-a-v-e-r-e all right
beautiful man joe thank you max
appreciate you brother thank you all right bye everybody
Thank you.