Max Lugavere on What to Eat to Optimize Your Brain | Conversations with Tom

[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with somebody who i think is an extraordinary thinker in the health space and elsewhere just a really bright dude fun to be around his name is max lugavir uh he was on health theory before and now we're diving into an episode here and he's got a new book out which is right there for anybody who's watching called the genius life um this was really an interesting read man and i'm super curious so obviously there's a meaningful jumping off point with where you started before which is on the diet side the genius foods now branching into the genius lifestyle was i know that the journey began with your mom and what she went through which we covered in the healthier episodes we don't have to retread that but um was that the impetus for pushing deeper into the topic yeah to be honest i mean you know what it takes today to live a healthy a long and healthy life it's so multi-faceted uh and nutrition is definitely it plays a major a major role in that regard but it's just one part of the puzzle and so whereas genius food is my first book i consider to be sort of the ultimate nutritional care manual for the human brain having a brain that functions as well as it ought to requires a lot more than just healthy eating today unfortunately i mean i wish it was as easy as eating you know a handful of blueberries and wild salmon and uh you know some nuts here and there but actually you know the modern world is sort of like the hunger games for for the human brain and i know you love the movie references and uh we're just like we're being attacked from every which way from you know the the industrial chemicals which we are confronted with on a daily basis many of which we've we've been exposed to for the entirety of our lives to the fact that you know leisure time physical activity is at an all-time low to the fact that our food supply has become saturated with ultra-processed foods to the fact that our circadian clocks are completely out of wax so the genius life i really explore all of the facets of what it takes to live healthy i include nutrition and diet as well but it's really packed with sort of the the little changes that you can make in your day-to-day life that are gonna have big wins in terms of your health when you were doing the research what was something that really surprised you well i think it was kind of uh you know it was scary the degree to which um the odds are stacked against the average human and and that was very eye-opening but it was also something what's the odds against us well just the fact that you know whether it's access to healthy food or air pollution or you know the industrial chemicals that we use to clean or even create our domiciles you know our homes um we're just we're inundated with with exposures that are not doing our biology any favors um so those are the uh that's what i mean i mean today uh it's it's frightening when you look around you see people that are you know struggling with overweight with being obese um 66 of the population is either overweight or obese half the population is either pre-diabetic or has type 2 diabetes which we know both of those conditions is actually a late marker for chronically elevated insulin or hyperinsulinemia which can go on for years if not decades before your blood sugar actually starts to inch up you know to a degree that a doctor would measure it um so you know people are not well um if you live to the age of 85 you have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with alzheimer's disease um certain cancers are increasing in their frequency in the 1960s a woman's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer uh was one in 20 today it's about one in eight so there's obviously been a mutation in our environments our genes haven't changed all that much and yet the default state for any organism is health but you look around and people are not healthy people are not feeling well when you look in the mirror i mean i want your listeners to kind of introspect for a minute and ask whether or not you feel healthy whether or not you feel virile and vital and well and i wrote this book and i became obsessed with with this topic and really communicating this message to any anybody who will listen ultimately because my mom was so sick and i feel in many ways that she was the canary in the coal mine for the modern way of life reading the book i didn't realize that she died of cancer so i knew obviously from your last book from talking to you that she had dementia early which is [ __ ] terrifying uh but then to hear that she got cancer on top of that is pretty gnarly um if you like going through that process like what was that like as you're researching the book and you're obviously getting clues as to what is bombarding her how do you process through that how do you think about that yeah i mean all i have are hypotheses so i'll never claim to know what was the cause of either my mom's dementia which she developed at a very young age at the age of 58 or the fact that over labor day of 2018 she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer um ironically in both instances with both diagnoses what i experienced in every doctor's office that i you know went to with my mom was diagnosed and adios uh in in both scenarios the treatment options that were afforded to my mom were were very limited um with dementia you know i mean anybody with a loved one with dementia will tell you that you get prescribed these biochemical band-aids and they do very little in terms of disease management they certainly have no disease modifying effect my mom was on you know all of the drugs that were available to her for her for her memory function and then my mom happened to have a particularly gnarly form of cancer she developed pancreatic cancer and we realized this when over labor day she turned yellow which is um you know if you turn you can turn yellow there's there's probably two major reasons why a person would turn yellow one is if you're eating too much beta carotene uh and then your skin turns yellow but not the eyes the whites of your eyes then there's another condition called jaundice which is when your skin and your eyes turn yellow and that's because bilirubin which is the pigment that is released into your digestive tract which gives stool its color that that dark yellow almost brownish color isn't able to flush out and then backs up it seeps into your skin it seeps into the whites of your eyes and that can be caused by generally speaking one of two conditions one a gallstone and that's what we were all praying that my mom had but when they did the mri of my mom's abdomen what it turns out she actually had was a tumor on her pancreas that was pressing into her bile duct and pancreatic cancer i believe 90 something percent of the time is diagnosed when it's already in an advanced stage and that was certainly true for my mom when it was diagnosed for my mom she was already in stage four which means that the cancer had already spread they found lesions on her liver and you know my mom's quality of life at that point was already so degraded due to the dementia and the parkinsonian symptoms that she also had the movement symptoms the stiffness but still i thought that i was going to have my mom you know you never you never think to yourself that you're that your mom is not going to be here um you know in in any way that's you know that that transmits the urgency of a terminal illness and when my mom was diagnosed over labor day because it was already in stage four and because my mom was already so ill with her dementia there was nothing that they could offer her and so they gave us a prognosis of three to six months immediately she went into hospice care was she able to like grasp what was happening uh you know it's it's really hard to say she the [ __ ] the cognition was really straight you know constrained um at that stage she there were a few windows of lucidity i i remember clear as day you know one they when they did the surgery to unblock the bile duct they put a stent in so that the bilirubin can then go into the you know can can properly drain into the gi tract after that before that surgery she could barely speak um there was there was basically no communication and you know her cognition really was um was affected to a significant degree the other thing is that bile is how we and we can talk about this later in the episode is how one of the major routes of excretion of toxins so if you have dementia and then you have this bilirubin back up into the blood it's basically it's it's hyper toxic to the brain and so when they stented that bile duct and suddenly you know her color began to return to normal there was like a day or two where she seemed almost normal it was shocking um but ironically we we didn't tell her about the diagnosis really in the you know in that in those immediate um hours following the following the diagnosis because we wanted to be sure that it was what it was and they when they do a diagnosis with mri it's not um it's not certain until they they do a biopsy in my mom's case they kind of they thought that it was you know that that that it was pretty clear but we were just so sensitive to to my mom and the mood and life had just become so difficult for her and all of us that we wanted to be sure that it was what it was and so we had to wait for the biopsy you know they took cells when they performed that that stenting procedure and lo and behold you know a week or two later they confirmed that it was cancer and um that's when we told my mom and when we told my mom it was heartbreaking i don't think that she she she understood what she had but it didn't hit her the way that it would hit you or i um she made a couple of comments you know that were just truly heartbreaking i mean how do you tell you know your mom that she's dying like that's the most difficult conversation that i think any human being can possibly have or or any loved one for that matter i mean it's just inconceivable like the whole the whole thing to me to this day is still unbelievable i ca i can't believe it it feels like a nightmare it doesn't feel like real life um but we uh yeah we we told her and her cognition you know started to begin a slow and gradual decline again um she made a comment once that just you know it i'll never forget it she it was a testament to her you know to how much she loved me and my brothers i have two younger brothers um but it's also and and how much she loved us but it just so clearly shows you how evil dementia can be she said something you know after that after the after we told her about the diagnosis she started crying and she she said what am i going to do without you guys as if we were right going somewhere you know not it was clear that it wasn't clicking or or that something was being lost in translation because you know it it sounded like we were going somewhere but in reality you know she was going somewhere and i was thinking in the back of my head what are you going to do without us what the f are we gonna do without you and um and yeah it was i mean that was those were the worst three months of my entire life i mean i can't even it was just awful it was wrought with pain and you know the the palliative care is just you know being there for somebody in that condition and having to to drop you know you know take a dropper of morphine and administer it to it's just like it's it's awful i don't think human beings should have to deal with that i mean i you know it made me intrigue you know more interested in um physician-assisted suicide and things like that because not that not that not that we would have pulled that trigger but the end the very end it was just it was terrible it was awful dude so my cousin died of cancer really aggressive cancer he was super [ __ ] young like mid-20s and i went to see him a couple days before he died and i thought the same [ __ ] thing i'm sitting there in the hospital and i i was impressed because his mentality was i will never give up not to the bitter [ __ ] end and i respect that dude i respect that that's my [ __ ] mindset like all the way get across the finish line do whatever the [ __ ] it takes and i'm watching him though literally struggle for every single [ __ ] breath of air and i'm just asking like where is this going and at what point do you say actually what i want is peace i want to rest and i get it like when there's any element of maybe maybe if i just fight hard enough i can pull out of this and like you said i don't know would i pull the trigger i i really think in my own case i would and when i look at and i don't know um enough about robin williams case to know how deep he was into the disease and all that but like i kind of get it man like there there's just no joy to be had at the end for anybody and at some point to me like i'm not a i'm not a person who thinks that um if all that's left is extreme suffering that the life still makes sense i think that's a choice the person should get to make for themselves 100 like i would never make that decision for somebody else but [ __ ] me man for my own sake if i had been in his position watching it i'd be like yeah this this is a no-brainer like i want to kiss everybody goodbye i want to have one last laugh and and thank you book at night like that that is just the only thing that makes sense to me having witnessed that now going through it maybe i'll feel different maybe like that sense of fighting is the right answer but whoa like from the outside it looked super super gnarly it's super gnarly i mean there are things you see that that just change you you know i mean the fact that i that i'm not more traumatized from it uh is is almost a shock because it's just you witness things that are so barbaric so inhuman um i mean to i was there with my mom until until the end to to witness somebody dying and not just somebody but the person who you love more than anybody any uh human being on earth um fade away it's just uh it's gutting to the nth degree there's really there's really no words and you know the hospice nurses that worked with my mom they were angels they were amazing but um it it reaffirmed to me the value of taking care of yourself while you can you know in the words of john f kennedy the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining because when you're sick it's just it's a lot harder to undo years of of you know damage that oftentimes we do to ourselves i mean not all the damage is is something that we have agency over as i mentioned you know the modern world we're flush up against myriad industrial chemicals that are probably not helping the cause but you really have to do what you can while you're young and healthy to avert these kinds of conditions and it's been just this lifelong journey of trying to unravel what it was about my mom's life my mom's circumstances that led to her becoming so ill was she just a genetic fluke that she was so ill for so long i don't think so i mean i don't i you know and i hope not because that would that wouldn't bode well very well for my health but um but yeah i mean i think i think we really ought to do what we can and so that's why i've dedicated myself to learning and communicating as best as i can these principles yeah now i want to hear how you sort of rebound from that and if if you're doubling down on the work and that's a way out because i had a my roommate former roommate from college he was on a path it was really interesting to see where he was going to go producing film like the whole nine and then his mom got a brain tumor and in the removal of the brain tumor she basically developed dementia-like symptoms and was type 2 diabetic and watching him go through that it it changed him so fundamentally and he he 180 on his life just changed everything up moved took a totally different path and he when he was going through it like he had this daily heartbreak so she's got dementia so she doesn't remember anything but she's type 2 diabetic so she he has to be on her about what she's eating and he was like dude you you can't imagine what it's like every day to have to retell my mom that she's a type 2 diabetic and that she can't have the things that she wants because she keeps coming and asking for a glass of orange juice or whatever and he's like every day i have to tell her again that she can't have it and it was like you know you just get to the point where you're asking that same fundamental question at what point is her quality of life so low that none of this makes sense anymore and to watch him go through that like you said to see the person you love most in the world fading away like it's gnarly and so i i lost touch with him at that point he he just went off the radar this is all pre social media um so i'm curious like as you're going through that how do you rebuild like what is your coping mechanism been it's been i'm so great you know i mean people love to bash on social media but the fact that i have that i've been so transparent and open about my motivations and my story with my followers the fact that they were there to to send feedback and love and this you know this outpouring of love i really felt it um when when i was going through that and my mom passed away i have channeled a lot of the the angst about losing my mom into my work i'm very lucky that i get to do that that i get to write about it that i get to um be that i get to feel creatively expressed in many ways although my work is about health and science and nutrition and all that stuff i also feel very much like an artist and i think what artists are is that they you know what they do is they transmute pain they take pain and they turn it into something meaningful um you know and i've done that pretty much my whole life i've been you know when i went through heartbreak uh in i think was around 2008 i uh it inspired me to become a musician because i found that music was a great way to to communicate the pain that i was feeling in regards to my heart being broken when my mom started going through this the best way that i that i knew to to deal with it in a way that made me feel like this wasn't all going to be in vain was to use it to help and inspire other people to live healthier and to learn more about their bodies about their biology and my intention really has never been to to be called an expert a health expert or anything like that it was really to be an example for people because i don't believe that you need to be a phd or an md or a registered dietitian to understand how your body works and how you enter you know how your food interacts with your biology and how light interacts with your biology and how exercise and sleep and you know all these things that are so crucial when it comes to living well i think uh it's a disservice to humanity humanity to expect these um these these incredible knowledge bases that we have thanks to science to be siloed off into their respective um you know academic fields and so my own curiosity my own thirst for knowledge about these topics especially in the wake of my mom's sickness and ultimately her passing um it's i've just put i've been for the past you know better part of a decade insatiable about trying to understand why this would have happened to her and and what i could do to prevent it from happening to myself so that's been a really great outlet um it's uh it's sort of like an intellectual punching bag you know because science is so complex it's so nuanced and it's so dense and and there's so much to learn you know and there's just like there's no way that you're going to be able to understand everything but trying to trying to wrap your head around the conceptual vastness of of our biology and and and health as a whole it's uh it's a project um that you know that it just it doesn't end and so it's been to be able to pour myself into that and to be able to do it now professionally um for a living it's just uh i'm eternally grateful to to people who have supported my work and um and yeah and i only hope that it provides you know inspiration uh for others it's interesting that you call yourself an artist because reading the book which is dense with very useful scientific information um there were parts in the book where you talk about things like rapamycin that i've heard other people talk about be talked about in a way that was accessible and made it easier for me to sort of grasp and understand and mtor and all that stuff which is super [ __ ] fascinating but um you make it accessible and there was a part in the book where i felt like the human come through into the the whole equation where you were talking about diet and its impact and all that but you said you know at the end when my mom um was really struggling man my trips were to the bakery and getting her things that she loved not that [ __ ] that's so interesting um i'd be curious to hear like in that like the the book i want you now to write is the like how you deal with this stuff because i feel like you dealt with that artfully your ability to speak on it is incredible the fact that you invited your followers in on that journey and all that stuff uh was really really cool so why because that is exactly what i would do and i would feel a little guilty about it but it's like if i knew the end was nigh for someone that i cared about and they wanted the exact thing that i thought was problematic i'd still go out to them well yeah i mean we're that's it's a it's a it's a really important question to ask and it's another area where i've just learned so much you know about about health communication and diet because of what i went through with my mom so you know what you're referencing is the fact that and i think a lot of people in the health space and especially in the keto community whenever the term cancer comes up people are you know can be very zealous about uh you know putting people on this ketogenic diet which is supposed to starve the cancer cell and the reality is it's not that easy like cancer cells are notorious for mutating and using alternate energy energy substrates when they have to um and you know if if you were in an earlier stage of cancer maybe that would be something that would that could be potentially available to you you know dr walter longo at usc is doing you know amazing work on on the role of fasting and how fasting can potentially sensitize a patient uh a tumor cell or or tumor rather to chemotherapy while protecting the patient so there's all these amazing things going on in the world of nutrition um and and and ketogenesis as it relates to cancer and all that stuff but when you have somebody who's in a later stage of cancer they're battling against something called cachexia which is extreme muscle wasting and so for that patient you really want to that patient what they need most is just calories and when a patient has no appetite well how are you going to get them to eat unless it's a really delicious food food you were doing it because when i read that i actually read it totally differently so i assumed it was man she just i can bring a little joy into her world because look obviously depending on where we're at in the journey the answer is very different so if it's you know somebody's just being diagnosed and there's a shot that they can get out of this like [ __ ] i'd have them in the gym eating perfectly doing the fasting like the whole [ __ ] rigmarole yeah but once we're like yo this doesn't there's no reversing this like we know we're at the end then it's like hey bring on what little joys you can yeah and that's what i thought you meant in the book when you said that but you were just trying to battle cachexia well it was both to bring her joy it was that i would go to my mom's favorite um pastry shop in new york which is called vigneros and on the lower east side of manhattan and i would buy her cannolis and strawberry shortcake because i know that those were my mom's favorite things to eat and i knew that there was no dietary intervention in the world that was going to help my mom at that point and for somebody who has no appetite cancer patients don't have an appetite they can barely you know eat you really want to get them the foods that are going to just provide calories energy just so that they don't completely waste away um i had a around that time i i learned kind of the hard way or not the hard way but i you know a lot of people love to hate on inshore which is uh this like sugar slurry of you know unhealthy oils and whatever but it's you know ensure is is marketed on the one hand probably to older adults you know as a protein supplement and for that purpose i think that that's you know not a good product i wouldn't i wouldn't use it for that but on the other hand if it's a product that's engineered to be as palatable as possible while providing you know your basic level of multivitamin support um then maybe that's going to be a better better option than trying to cram a protein shake down a cancer patient's throat that's not going to be as palatable and so i began buying an interesting man it's super interesting i would buy my mom for example protein shakes because i was like all right gotta fight cacaxia we gotta keep the protein intake high because we know that that's gonna you know help maintain muscle which we know you know eating higher amounts of uni first of all protein's essential but and my mom was barely getting any so i was you know on the one hand i wanted her to have a higher protein option but those kinds of shakes especially when they're low carb they're sweetened with artificial sweeteners that are just not as palatable as sugar unfortunately and though i would never drink an ensure shake and i wouldn't i wouldn't you know recommend its consumption to anybody who is healthy uh it actually it's something that my mom enjoyed more and would drink more of than the protein shake that i tried to get her to drink and so that's kind of a that's a that's a mind [ __ ] really because at the end of the day you you're you're trying to basically put calories into a person's mouth um and they're they're withering away at an unforced you know at a rate that you just can't conceive of um because the cancer is just so hungry and so yeah so when i would go to the pastry shop you know i wasn't about to try to put my mom on a ketogenic diet you're just you're past that point um you've you've you've reached the escape velocity at which point you really just need to think about survival you're not thinking about fighting the cancer you're just trying to like buy days you know weeks if you're lucky but really days are there places in america where assisted suicide is legal i believe in oregon oregon is the one state that i know of yeah that's interesting that's one of those things man i'm sure there are people that understand sort of the way religion works its way through america and law that get why it's illegal but i don't [ __ ] get it like i legitimately do not understand how like people are weird about that if somebody if somebody certainly of sound mind decides that's what they want to do then yeah i don't get how that's illegal i'm not going to say that i would have even brought that up to my mom i'm you know i don't know if she would have been into it i you know it's just abstracting it from your mom like that just seems to me like a self-evident thing that you should be able to do that if that's what you want to do yeah first of all you're not going to stop people if they want to do it they're going to do it and then second to make them do like horrific stupid [ __ ] i get it man i wouldn't want people to do it i certainly wouldn't want people to do it because it's a mood disorder but oh man if you have a terminal illness well you know i mean yeah even if it was just a few hours earlier but then you know the the all of the hours that i had with my mom you know i mean i've spent many many many hours thinking to myself since my mom's passing how much i would have appreciated even another second or two with my mom so you know i'm not gonna say that that's a that's an easy decision to make and actually if you think about it in a way when you start giving higher doses of morphine i mean that is in a way physician-assisted suicide because morphine suppresses your respiratory system and so the more pain there is the more morphine you start getting i mean there's some suggestion in the literature that uh morphine actually accelerates um you know a person's a person's demise it's just a it's a horrible drug but it's a it's a one of the best if not the best or it's one of the best pain relievers that we have there are stronger drugs but uh so yeah it's just it's dehumanizing and it's and it's crazy and i'm so grateful that my mom was able to be in her own bed um when it when it happened and that you know we had the hospice nurses that we had that me and my brothers were there for her but it was terrible so my any and i'm not alone so many people are struggling with illness cancer related deaths alzheimer's dementia and so my heart goes out to them it's just a it's a terrible thing and and you know i think we ought to support scientific research we have to uh because we're still a long way away from knowing what causes cancer in each you know each cancer type alone but then in each individual patient it's probably a different slew of of insults that lead to the the you know the creation and and you know growth of tumors and so um got to support the science but also i think it's important to also try to live in a way that is going to minimize your risk one of the things you talked about in the book that it's been on my radar for a while but i know very little about it is environmental toxins what are some of the big things that people should be avoiding what are the ones that are just [ __ ] ever present so environmental toxins i talk about this quite a bit in the book and unfortunately i don't really have a strong sense of how they would have related to what my mom developed but certainly there are certain cancers in the body that are sensitive to the way our hormones fluctuate breast cancer prostate cancer would be the two primary examples but generally speaking we're inundated with industrial pollutants whether it's the fine particulate matter in the air that we breathe if we live in you know a polluted city many many americans live in you know in in polluted areas do air filters work air purifiers can work hepa filters a hepa vacuum and a hepa air filter is one of the best ways of removing um fine particles from the air pm 2.5 is essentially what it's called it's the most dangerous what's pm 2.5 it's basically the uh the measurement of the particles so there's pm size yeah okay so it's particulate matter 2.5 i believe it's nanometers okay so the smaller the more dangerous the smaller the more dangerous that's why vaping is bad vaping's not good for you although but is that part of what the beef is is that it's such a fine particle size that's not why vaping is bad vaping is bad i think because of the vitamin e acetate that's now in these in these you know vaping solutions that people are inhaling and it's it's causing illness uh but fine particulate matter generally is like magnetite and iron and and actual metals that we inhale through the air that are created in the burning of coal in you know vehicle uh exhaust um sloughed off from any number of industrial processes and it's like literally metal for example magnetite they've been able to identify uh magnetite in the brains in mexico city of toddlers essentially because these particles are so small they're able to pierce them they enter circulation easily and they pierce the blood-brain barrier and they're able to actually accumulate in the hippocampus where they cause inflammation they've been shown to um cause the aggregate of plaques that are associated with alzheimer's disease but in young people amyloid beta is one of the primary proteins that's involved in the in the um in alzheimer's disease it's basically it's the backbone of the plaque that characterizes the disease and amyloid beta is not necessarily a bad thing it's bad when it you know creates these plaques that gunk up the brain but i think the the current sort of understanding of what this protein is meant to do in the brain it's sort of there to actually initially protect it against inflammatory insults how's it protecting it so is it uh like finding a particle or a virus and like wrapping it like one like a pearl does a grain of sand is it something like that that's a very that's a very good analogy yeah basically it basically encapsulates it and the the research that they're doing on this is coming i think predominantly out of harvard um they're showing this with the herpes virus that people that have herpes or people with alzheimer's generally they can find herpes in the brain um and that it's amyloid seems to basically like protect the brain it's initially trying to protect the brain from this virus and so it wraps it up and it causes the proteins to cross link and and aggregate and misfold and uh form these plaques so the same thing conceivably can happen with um and it seems to be happening with fine particulate matter and there is an interesting relationship between exposure to air pollution and one's risk for developing uh alzheimer's disease and though alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia it's not the only form of dementia and my mom lived throughout her life in new york city which is you know now i think the air is a bit cleaner but um it's a city that for many many many years has had uh problems with with air pollution so yeah that's a major one i mean clean air and there are a few things that you can do to to protect yourself against this i think you know getting a good air filter especially in your um personal breathing space uh there was a there's a great book i'm forgetting oh dr wolverton i think it's his first name was bill bill wolverton he was a nasa research scientist and he looked at plants and um he analyzed the rate at which plants are able to sort of clean the air and he did this because you could essentially put a plant on board of a space shuttle and provide clean air to you know to the astronauts and so there's actually did that he i don't know if they actually went through with it they may be but that's what he was studying with his time at nasa and since then he's written a book i believe the book is called how to have clean air or how to clean your air or something like that or how to plant fresh air or grow fresh air or something like it's a really cool book i cite it in in mine and he basically lists out all the plants in ascending order and i have the top ten in my book genius foods or the genius life plants that are basically able to clean the air for you which is great they're able to reduce uh levels of formaldehyde which leeches out into the air from you know wood furniture and carpets and couches and things like that another big problem for people well i would say plastic related compounds are some of the most common um everywhere compounds that uh that we're just inundated with on a day-to-day basis and they do affect the way that our hormones work compounds like phthalates and bisphenol a are what are called xenoestrogens they is bisphenol a bpa bpa yes um although now consumers are starting to get wise to the potential dangers of bpa and so you'll see a lot of products that are bpa free but that doesn't mean that they're free of chemically similar compounds like bp s and bpf so essentially it's created this chemical game of whack-a-mole where as soon as consumers become aware of a compound you know industry is very quick to pivot and then use actually they're able to sort of hijack the fears of the consumer to then make health claims about their products like this no bpa but um but a lot of them do you avoid plastic like at every conceivable turn um i try to without driving myself too crazy so if i'm traveling and i don't i can't find water in a glass bottle then yeah i will drink from plastic even though i know it's not ideal because the reality is you can't escape these compounds so trying to is a completely futile effort so by you not drinking you know avoiding drinking water when you're thirsty because it may come in a plastic bottle doesn't make a lot of sense because we're just inundated with these compounds the best that we can do is to minimize our exposure to them and to help our bodies to facilitate the purging of toxins that we have already accumulated how do we do that so when it comes to detoxing a lot of people are spending money on overpriced teas and supplements and things like that but the reality is uh what i like to talk about the three p's of detoxing it's peeing pooping and perspiring and this is literally i mean crucially important because whether it's heavy metals or phthalates or parabens or bpa or pfas chemicals which basically include um it's an umbrella category for the chemicals that are sometimes used to create teflon pans or non-stick pans uh which are also incidentally found in dental tape so if you're using dental tape not dental floss you want to switch over dental tape yeah i've heard of dental tape like it's the glide dental dental floss that's like it's actually called dental tape it says it right on dental tape yeah interesting yeah okay so no dental tape all dental floss all dental floss it's gonna be better cleaning your teeth and you're not using teflon essentially yep interesting yeah and they've shown that they can actually enter circulation um you want to be very careful with your do you cook with teflon what do you cook with i don't know i use a cast iron pan i use stainless steel it doesn't stick uh it not if you if you cook with them the right way what about ceramic ceramic can be good do they make ceramic uh frying pans they do make ceramic frying pans yeah yeah yeah interesting you just want to be careful with the coating the most teflon ever don't use dental tape yeah but i cook in teflon pans there is a product and i have uh no affiliation with them whatsoever but they're called green pan and i've discovered them on my own and i've i've purchased you know one or two of their pans with you know with my money um they claim to not have any of these of these chemicals in them um and i think that the that they that they claim that they're free of all related compounds as well so i think the jury is still out but it may be a better option i don't know but generally yeah you want to you want to support your body's own detox detox detoxification and you can do that by eating in a way that's going to support digestive health you know consuming lots of uh vegetables fiber in general but especially cruciferous vegetables i'm a big fan of because of their ability to stoke our body's own detox pathways um and i heard you talking about one of your favorite is baby uh broccoli sprouts broccoli sprouts i've never even heard of broccoli sprouts yeah baby broccoli um i've heard of broccolini but this is different broccolini yeah so you've got baby broccoli at the sort of those are the infants and then you've got broccolini and then you've got full adult grown broccoli i think that's pretty much how it goes don't don't quote me but but broccoli sprouts are baby it's you know it's like three or four day old broccoli and you can just buy broccoli seeds and you can what is it high end that makes it so useful so broccoli sprouts are very high in a compound called sulforaphane in fact one pound of broccoli sprouts are the equivalent of a hundred pounds of broccoli in terms of their capacity to produce this compound and this is useful in the detoxification yeah so it basically it's a very effective um up regulator of a gene pathway in our body is called the nrf2 pathway which is a detoxification pathway it increases levels of glutathione in the body which is our body's master antioxidant and detoxifier when something is detoxifying because whenever i hear people talk about detoxifying they sound crazy yeah so what is actually happening in detoxification well for one it's you're basically telling your liver to create more glutathione which does what so if amyloid plaques go into the brain surround a virus or a particle i get that yeah i understand how that works you can't detox viruses you can't detox amyloid but you can detox certain of these compounds that are fat soluble and doing well the liver does the liver makes them water-soluble so they can be more easily excreted and the liver what are they doing are they running around grabbing things like what are they what are they removing from the body like this poor kid in mexico city who's breathing in metals it's crossing the blood-brain barrier the only way to lock that up or can that be detoxified i know people get heavy metal poisoning like and then they supposedly detoxify like what is actually happening at a cellular level they can be detoxified so so something is going on certain heavy metals can be chelated by your body chelated is that wrapping procedures when you basically wrap a heavy metal and you excrete it okay and you're wrapping it in glutathione uh you could wrap it in glutathione they can be disarmed by selenoproteins which are selenium-based enzymes in the brain this happens with mercury um so there's for each compound there's sort of like a different way in which they're detoxed some of some compounds are not as easily excreted through our poop and our pee and we have to sweat them out like cadmium cadmium is a good example of that um so it's different for every compound and i can't you know i don't pretend to know the detox route for everything but the is sending out the things yeah things you like how technical that is it's sending out the things that are gonna go and grab all these and it it somehow takes it to if it's cadmium it's taking it to sweat if it's something else it's p if it's something else it's poop like that's the yeah i mean you have so your liver has two detox phases there's phase one detox and phase two and in the first phase i believe it's making these compounds water soluble that's so that they can be more easily excreted it's making the toxins water-soluble yeah somehow yes um and then yeah they can be excreted by the kidneys in our pee or you know they get excreted into our bile which is another reason why you know i think that when my mom had these this biliary and this bile back up into her circulation it was essentially causing a buildup of toxins because um that's one major route of exit for these for these toxic chemicals and that's why eating fiber is so important because it basically traps them in your poop and this also actually happens interestingly with cholesterol so a lot of people struggle with i mean we could debate um high cholesterol versus low cholesterol and and what that really means from the standpoint of health but i think if you have very high cholesterol you know there's probably it's probably a marker that something is not going right in the body give me what what do you consider high like to talk about cholesterol intelligently don't you have to start talking particle size and fluffiness and all that stuff yeah so i talked about that quite a bit in um genius foods and i think that your normal calculated ldl that you get on a on a blood lab it's not super um telling when it comes to your overall health i think uh and i'm not a medical doctor so i don't you know diagnose uh you know or or or talk about individuals you know risk for heart disease or anything like that but yes i think the the particle number generally speaking gives you a better sense of the recycling machinery in the body and how effectively your liver is is recycling lipids like ldl cholesterol which if allowed to back up in the blood and linger in the blood for too long it's more prone to oxidation it's more prone to becoming a small and dense particle that can more easily get stuck to the endothelium which is the lining of your blood vessels and then form what ultimately becomes a foam cell and that's the beginning of an you know atherogenic plaque but cholesterol is actually used to create bile acids which is how we digest and assimilate fats through the digestive tract and your liver uses cholesterol that it sucks out from circulation to create these bile acids and it gets squirted essentially by your gallbladder into your gi tract and when you consume certain types of fiber i've actually become interested in psyllium husk because psyllium husk has been shown to actually do this it's able to sequester cholesterol so they can't be reabsorbed back in to circulation at the lower end of the small intestine and that's the exact same mechanism by which fiber can help us better excrete environmental toxins i think it's also one of the reasons because the cholesterol grabs it and then the fiber grabs the cholesterol because the fiber just grabs the bile the bile acids which contain these toxins so it basically disallows for the reabsorption of toxins that are contained in the bottle and i think it's probably one of the reasons why dietary fiber consumption is associated with reduced risk for certain cancers so breast cancer is one of them um eating more vegetables allowed because the toxin is not reabsorbed into the body yeah interesting yeah so just when i was going to give up all vegetables and i'm not going to go carnivore dude i'm a lazy carnivore so i don't go out of my way to avoid things so i'll have stuff like avocado um i'll have if i'm at a restaurant and there's some delicious broccoli i'll have that because i dig broccoli or brussels sprouts i'll have that but i i easily will go a week 10 days without any vegetable intake whatsoever that's not quite true almost every day i have unsweetened coconut that's true i have pecans almost every day so i get that but it's not really not vegetable yeah um so not fully carnivore like i said it's lazy but i'll say that i don't know 80 of my calories come from red meat just to really freak people out yeah um i eat a lot of red meat too but i also eat a lot of vegetables i think that's where i'm like th this is the one thing like normally when people like oh there's so much conflicting information i'm like yeah yeah yeah but like sift through it you'll find that people say like a lot of the same things but this one like people go back and forth very convincingly i might add from the camp of no no vegetables hey they're stuck their only defense mechanism is to develop these toxins and eating them you're eating the toxins and that's why cultures have done things like um you know take the husk off or the skin or make sure that the seeds are absent or soak things or you know pressure cook whatever the hell the answer is to detoxify this stuff yeah i think that there's there's definitely some truth in there but sulforaphane which is what we were talking about before is one of those chemicals it's an insect anti-feeding that's there literally to protect this the plant against predation by fungus by critters and things like that in fact sulforaphane is only created when you chew the raw plant because it actually doesn't exist endogenously in the plant it's created via the enzymatic conversion of a compound in the plant cell in a certain cell compartment called uh glucoraphanin it's a glucosinolate compound and an enzyme which is found in another compartment in the cell called myrosinase so only when you chew the raw plant which is what a critter would do essentially do these two compounds get to combine in your mouth and in your digestive tract to create sulforaphane which is this mildly toxic compound that uh in us because we're so robust in comparison to a fungus right uh or or an insect for that matter um it actually works to stimulate um detox pathways in our body because it is a mild toxin so how does that simulate detox if it's a mild toxin i get a hermetic response where a little bit of bad is good but how is it actually detoxing well because it it's basically it's that hormetic response it's a xenohormetic compound that meaning it's a compound from outside that we ingest that is not you know it's not a nutrient it's not a macronutrient or a micronutrient it's a plant you know insecticide essentially that do you when when you talk hormetic response so this is one of those where like we'll hit a point where it goes into black box territory for me where i can give you the it's hormetic the body like responds to a mild stressor by getting stronger but i don't actually know what the [ __ ] is happening yeah do you know what is happening in a hormetic response is it vary depending on what the thing is or are there like your breakdown of rapamycin and mtor and all that like i can follow the train of logic but with this yeah how does something that releases a toxin how does that become a detox pathway i think because our bodies over compensate i think because our bodies what by by upregulating the nrf2 pathway creating detox compounds like glutathione um that just make it water-soluble or bind it so that we can urinate yeah it basically creates more glutathione than would be needed to disarm this compound and that has an overall protective you know effect on the body right so sulforaphane has been shown to boost glutathione in the brain um which is amazing glutathione a decrement of glutathione is associated with depression dementia and things like that um and then also i think that and this is sort of a the new frontier for science um it probably is also having a hormetic effect on the microbiota like the bacteria that live in our large intestine and this is sort of you know unexp relatively unexplored territory but uh you know certain compounds like polyphenols which also act as hormetic stressors you know xenohormesis um are actually not all that bioavailable uh to us like their absorption in through the digestive tract into circulation is actually pretty low and yet the consumption of foods with polyphenols is related to all kinds of good things in terms of your health so it's probably not you know 100 percent the case that these compounds are being absorbed and you know we're even detoxing them but it's probably via their you know consumption by you know gut bacteria that's releasing all these metabolites that then get released into circulation so there's all these different potential mechanisms but uh but that's what i think where i'm kind of at odds with people that are on the carnivore diet because it's like you know when you heat meat for one you're creating all kinds of toxic compounds and you know i think in isolation is that true if you're not charring it you're saying no matter what heat um no i mean charring is probably the worst but i would be a very poor uh excuse for a carnivore because i like to cook my meat on a barbecue occasionally and so inevitably you're going to be creating heterocyclic amines you're going to be creating ages you know which is the mylard reaction which is why meat browns and and those compounds and others you know those are not necessarily good for you i think the benefits of eating meat outweigh any potential negatives that you get from those compounds especially when you know you eat the meat in the context of a diet that includes vegetables and fiber and things like that so um so i think it's important to have both yeah that man that debate goes back and forth and i find it so if i'm really honest it's a convenience thing so because i find it so convenient to not have to prep vegetables um and i so enjoy the way i feel when i'm eating red meat that i go in on it pretty hard yeah i go on and go in on it pretty hard i would say um i mean i do think that that dietary fiber is important uh you know and it's like in a way you're kind of grasping at straws when it comes to nutrition because you have like the gold standard of research that can prove cause and effect is a randomized control trial and we're never going to have long-term large population rcts in humans that uh that can prove the benefits of one diet over another especially these niche diets like carnivore diets versus a more omnivorous paleo diet um and so i think on the one hand you want to kind of like hedge your bets but on the other uh you know i think that there's enough information where we can say that certain plant compounds are in fact very good for us and um and i also think in terms of like just your overall happiness quotient and dietary diversity uh you know and the microbiome the microbiota i think it's important to include these you know these kinds of one thing you talk about in the book though is that just diversity of diet is not necessarily that important in that there's a few things that if you go and you buy them and just cycle around on these things that you're probably better off yeah what are those things what are the like five or ten things that we should be buying and eating um yeah so that's a good i'm glad you brought that up so darius mozafarian he's a nutrition researcher he's done a study and i cite it in the book where um you know most people say you know they they parrot the old adage of eating everything in moderation but when you look at a person's diet um people that tend to have more varied diets tend to be including more confectionary products sugar sweetened beverages and things like that so what i found is that the healthiest people tend to buy an hour or narrower range of foods and just eat the same foods on loop and so i try to highlight books that are books foods that have the highest capacity for nutrient density that are going to basically give your body what it needs because when you look around statistically most people aren't going to be nutrient deficient in at least one essential nutrient whether it's a vitamin or mineral or you know essential fatty acid or the like 90 of people actually are deficient in at least one essential nutrient and so for me when i'm going to the supermarket i'm really making an effort to shop around the perimeter um and this is probably advice that you've had on your on your show many times it's not rocket science but i think it's important to reiterate that most supermarkets are designed the same way that the fresh perishable food is found around the perimeter and it's the aisles where the ultra processed foods lie in weight and those ultra-processed foods they're tempting but we now over consume them about 60 of the calories that your average person consumes comes from these kinds of foods and for all the variety that the modern supermarket might present you the illusion of most of the calories that we're consuming are coming from just three plants wheat corn and rice pulverized and ground into a dust and devoid of essential nutrients in fact they often have to be added back in in their synthetic form that's why if you look at most commercial breads or wheat snacks they're all fortified with niacin with folic acid with all these because most people are nutrient deficient and that's because the the standard american diet basically encourages that you know those nutrient deficiencies so i advocate for you know grass-fed beef wild salmon dark leafy greens cruciferous vegetables nuts seeds berries things like that but in this book i think where i where i depart from genius foods is i talk a lot about the value of dietary protein i think dietary protein is crucially important uh especially for a population that is by and large um overweight i think protein is a crucial thing to try to prioritize at every meal uh it's not only the most satiating of the macronutrients you think more than fat i think more than fat for sure in fact there's uh a hypothesis it's called the protein leverage hypothesis that our hunger mechanisms are basically dictated by our requirement for amino acids so when you're able when you eat the protein that your body requires it basically turns off your hunger mechanisms and people who under eat protein tend to eat more carbs and fat not only that but protein is thermogenically favorable in fact um you burn what do you mean by that well fat has nine calories per gram yep protein and carbs have four calories per gram but actually protein has three calories per gram when you consider that about a third of um the calories that uh you consume in the form of protein are burned off via digestion it's the thermic effect of feeding and protein has the highest thermic effect i have literally never heard of that how's that possible yeah it's basically three calories per gram so you're saying the energy that it takes me to run the cycle of digesting the food yeah interesting yeah so interesting it's satiating so sorry as a percentage of the calories that it has it is harder for me essentially to digest protein takes more energy i don't want to use the wrong words here yes so because obviously um that's interesting so round numbers you're saying it takes a calorie to burn protein yeah how many calories does it take to burn fat uh i build i believe it's about five to ten percent so like a fraction of a calorie wow so it's 25 to burn protein what about carbs it's about 30 yeah 20 to 30 percent carbs similar to fat it's about five to ten percent very low yeah interesting carbs are easily assimilated um because glucose is important for survival so i mean basically when you consume a complex carbohydrate the carbs are cleaved um the it's a complex carb carbohydrate is basically a long chain of glucose um that are essentially broken down i mean even as you begin chewing a starch the amylase enzyme in your saliva begins to break down the carbohydrate and fat has a very low thermic effect um as well but protein yeah about 30 percent so no idea yeah it's also um as i mentioned it's satiating uh it fills you up and it's crucial for maintaining and building muscle mass which you know we know is important um and i think people tend to you know under appreciate protein but if you think about it it's rare that you tend to it's rare that you'll that you'll over eat chicken breast or a piece of fish that doesn't happen with protein it happens with hyperpalatable processed foods it happens with you know a baked potato that you throw butter on top of like it's very those are very easy foods to over consume protein is not all that uh difficult to overconsume so interesting so i i agree that you're not likely to overeat protein um but i i did rabbit starvation for about two years so for people that haven't heard that term before rabbit starvation is where you're basically getting i probably was intaking about 85 percent of my calories in the form of um literally chicken breast so it's just protein wow and it's a miserable way to live but i would say that it was boring but i was probably in terms of calories it's hard to say because you're right i could probably eat more calories of fat but like when you're i did a four to one ketogenic diet for a while far more miserable than doing rapid starvation it was grotesque all of your meals um are soft and gross and that was like i didn't want to eat that was the first diet where and when i say four to one i mean for every combined gram of protein and carbohydrate at four grams of fat is a horrifying way to live wow and i hey i was in ketosis homie and i was also doing caloric restriction so there was that that added to the misery i had never been fat adapted so there was keto flu like all of that i get it that was part of the not fun but in terms of like the actual meal itself they were kind of gross um so i did not find myself compelled to overeat at that stage i was just super oily oily meals super oily yeah super oily yeah i'm not a big high fat advocate i mean i think it's i'm gonna need you to define high fat yeah because that that is the one this is all anecdote i fully get it high fat changed my [ __ ] life forever because when i did the four to one diet i went from dude i had iced my wrists every night for 15 years wow because i was just in a chronic state of inflammation which trust me when i die young i'll be very angry about those years of just knowing nothing about diet um so for 15 years have all this inflammation just think hey that's the way that i am tough break kid and then i meet peter ratia and dom d'agostino and they're like hey [ __ ] eat fat and i was like dude i don't want to get fat i just spent two years getting lean and they were like basically they were so kind but more or less dumb ass fat does not make you fat i can't believe i had to go through all this so the the thing that everybody goes through where it's like what do you mean fat's gonna make me fat like i get it if it had been named anything else uh i think people wouldn't misunderstand it the way that they do it's literally called the thing that people don't want to be so i had to go through that i do the four to one because i'm thinking cancer protection so um i really like the we were talking before about change or die i'm one of those people dude i can make any change i need to if i think that it's going to give me something that i want so definitely want to live as long as humanly possible so when i was told hey do a therapeutic ketogenic diet four to one get in this range where the basically the ratio of your glucose your blood glucose to your ketone levels i forget now what the percentage was years ago but i did that totally misery like i said but my joint pain went away in two days and so i was like holy [ __ ] like i had no idea that that was possible i didn't know there's anything i could do to get rid of that pain i had tried everything do you know prolotherapy i do not know all right so they inject a dextrose solution into the joint and i went and had it's basically sugar water so the thinking is we make it's low-grade inflammation your body is sort of numb to it it's no longer responding with resolving the issues so let's hit it with this sugar water solution cause massive inflammation and the body will go and resolve the issue so i was doing that for a while and like didn't help nothing helped like it just seemed like a forever thing so in 48 hours to to go from this is a a chronic issue in my life where i have to ice i was icing so much i had burn marks on the back of my wrists from just having ice on them so often and to my wrists feel normal it was like taking a drug so i immediately um after i did it for i forget ten days three weeks something doing the four to one as soon as my the time that i had committed to doing it was over i stopped but i was like i will never take fat out of my diet again because this seems incredibly powerful that was i'm going to guess close to 10 years ago i haven't had the joint pain since dude it's bananas so in terms of like that the uh the evangelical person who has lived through it i am like a born again christian with this [ __ ] i am so diehard to get people to try ketogenics i think everybody has to try it it may not work for you i fully get that there are definitely people that respond either don't respond or respond negatively that's all real the amount of diversity of reaction is [ __ ] staggering i 10 years ago you could not have convinced me that like humans have such a varied response like we have a kid here name's will vietnamese kid he can [ __ ] pack away carbohydrates like there's no tomorrow and whole food but he can pack away rice by the pound and he's lean as the day is long i if i ate that same amount of rice you would hear me get fatter i'm not joking like i've run these experiments so i i can't do it um i'll get inflamed i'll start getting joint pain so he and i could eat the same thing and have wildly different responses my wife and i we can eat the same thing and have wildly different responses legitimately eating the same thing for us will put her in the hospital i don't mean that as an exaggeration i actually mean it will put her in the hospital because she has microbiome issues so can totally [ __ ] her up but even before she had that problem if we ate the she is half my size dude half if we ate the same amount of calories literally bite for bite she wouldn't gain weight but she would sweat at night and i would gain weight wow and i was like i'm twice your [ __ ] size i crazy so the the level of variability is massive so i get that but i think everybody should try it because if you're anything like me and for decades you're eating damaged fats and those damaged fats are causing inflammation so i have a high inflammation response strike two in the my desire to live forever high inflammation response so i have uh there's a name for it it's something graffia on the skin so you can write in my skin not as much now but when i was younger you could take your fingernail and write your name and it would welt up on my skin so i have like a very high inflammation response which explains the wrists but i was eating damaged fats i had no concept that like trans fat was a thing all you ready for you want to hurt a little did you hear how i grew up i do actually so thank you uh so my mom didn't want me she wanted me so i argued about food i had like real food trauma as a kid and i was a super picky eater and so finally at 13 my mom was just tired of arguing with me about it so she said fine you can make your own food so i wanted to make chicken nuggets because of course we had a deep fat fryer in the house as you do in tacoma and she said no way you can't have chicken nuggets they're not good for you but you can't have turkey nuggets and french fries so i ate deep fried turkey nuggets and french fries almost every night for five years wow from the time i was 13 until i graduated high school and that of course was exactly why i was inflamed and then i go to college and don't know any better so i keep eating bad food like when i first went low carb i would go to panda express i would get orange chicken but no rice because i had no concept that sugar could hide in a sauce that didn't make sense to me so i had just i had years of in taking things in places that i didn't realize i was in taking them so getting your fat source right not taking in damaged fats getting healthy fats i think for a lot of people that struggle with inflammation it is admittedly a game of not eating a lot of things but then because i went for two years literally dude this is so close to accurate that i'll just make this statement all i ate was steamed broccoli and boiled chicken breast so i'm not the guy that's like i'm eating chicken and broccoli i don't understand the problem and then you watch me eat it and i've got orange sauce on it and you know i'm putting like all these different sauces and dressings and it was boiled [ __ ] chicken breast and steamed broccoli and i got shredded shredded so i've seen the photos on your instagram it worked from that perspective but from a joint inflammation perspective it was a nightmare so for sure it was the addition of fat because i had already removed all of the pro-inflammatory stuff so this was a deficiency in either just the fat or whatever all the other things are the red meat contains and maybe that's it maybe it maybe it's not the fat but well there's no there's no doubt that certain fats are good for you so i guess i should clarify i'm not i'm not against high fat at all because i am very interested in a ketogenic diet and in fact i think i advocate for seasonal ketosis um or or at the very least intermittent ketosis whatever that means to you i think it's important to you know on a maybe daily monthly seasonal basis to uh you know allow your brain access to ketones which are you know a quote unquote super fuel that can supply 60 of your brain's energy which um you know is now being studied for it's been used for over a century for you know to treat hard to treat epilepsy and now it's being studied for its efficacy in improving memory and alzheimer's disease patients and things like that uh but i'm not a pro i'm not very big on the on lots of added oil in the diet which i think you know once people started becoming becoming interested in high fat diets you know now suddenly the pendulum swang in the other direction where people will that you were all about olive oil i am so to a point i think it's important to integrate olive oil into your diet i'll use you know a liter a week i use it fairly liberally but when it comes to like throwing coconut oil in my smoothie or butter in my coffee i do occasionally enjoy butter in my coffee i like the taste but um but you know i think it's important to remember and we've been saying this in the fitness community as i'm sure you know for for years don't drink your calories you don't want to do the same you want to basically adhere the same adhere to the same advice when it comes to oil too because oil is not a very nutrient-dense food it's very calorie-dense it's not nutrient-dense but i don't make any restrictions on the fats naturally contained contained in whole foods so nuts seeds grass-fed beef dark meat chicken things like that do you eat uh well i'm actually i mean people will debate about phytic acid and things like that but what do you eat well i like almonds almonds are a great source of magnesium vitamin e i like them raw okay i'm not too concerned with the with the you know phytate in almond skins or you know anything like that i'll try to soak them you know when i have the opportunity but often you soak them if you soak them they're gross they become gross what do you do with them you dry them cause like my wife when she went through the whole microbiome disaster the doctor was like hey try soaking the almonds inside it was [ __ ] gross she was like i'd rather not eat them they can get slimy the last time i did it which was a few weeks ago i soaked them and then i tossed them in olive oil and then a little bit of sea salt and i roast and i roasted they were still wet they actually came out really good um if you if you just soak them they can become i think a bit slimy but you soak them and then get rid of the slime by just putting olive oil on them i don't understand i keep waiting for some drying process yeah no drying have you ever had sprouted nuts maybe that's well i think maybe that's what i did i was sprouted nuts i'm almost certain go through a drying process at least when you eat them they're dry as [ __ ] so you soak them in a jar and then you pour out the liquid and then they they dry during the last for how long i think i did it for three days okay maybe we just [ __ ] did it wrong but they were gnarly now sprouted nuts which i think they sprout by soaking uh but it's by the time they are packaged they're dry and delicious and this is one of those where i would not have believed so if you take pecans that have been just they do every bad thing to them you can imagine they put all the wonderful delicious and deadly oils on it which tastes [ __ ] awesome i actually like the sprouted pecans better so it's one of the few times where the thing that i like better is actually better for me but i get down with sprouter nuts so what else you've got almonds that you soak uh yeah although i'll often if i'm if i'm traveling and i buy you know i'll occasionally buy a bag of raw almonds so i'll eat them like that uh i'll use slivered almonds as a condiment sometimes i'll throw them into a salad um but i get a lot of fat from i ate a lot of red meat i ate a lot of fatty fish ate a lot of dark meat chicken so wait a second i want to go back to the nuts you only eat almonds so when you say nuts you mean almonds macadamia nuts are great because they're very high in monounsaturated fat uh i've been eating a lot of brazil nuts uh lately for the selenium i can't deal with those i love those actually i used to not what does selenium help with selenium is an important antioxidant in the brain it's crucially important and it's also crucially important for thyroid health so it actually helps can't you eat too many brazil nuts yeah i heard that somewhere yeah so how many are you eating a day uh three to four you want to be kind of conscious of of your you know selenium intake it's similar to vitamin a you don't want to like over consume retinol which is you know the active form of vitamin a super weird vitamin a story is it true that polar bear liver yeah has some like obscene amount it'll kill you vitamin a okay that's what i heard like there was some crazy story about these guys trapped in a cabin in like antarctica do you hear about this [ __ ] polar bears are evil man wow straight evil have you they're like the fact that they're on coca-cola as like the sweet cuddly thing those [ __ ] are wildly intelligent and they will [ __ ] you up doesn't surprise me and so there's this whole story about these guys trapped and the [ __ ] polar bears would trick them and they oh god what'd they do they would have like one standing out front and then the other one would actually attack through the back door i don't remember the story well but the punch line is they finally [ __ ] kill these things they're so like raged out about how they've been picking them off one by one they eat the [ __ ] and they but then one of them like dies or something from eating the liver because there was toxicity vitamin a vitamin a toxicity yeah it's uh it's super concentrated in bare liver it's so weird that's so random so random but well i mean it's not that unusual because actually that's one of the reasons why liver from beef or chicken why don't other animals have that same level of toxicity well it uh i don't know i don't know i don't know exactly what my hypothesis would be that bears are going to store a lot more stuff in the liver which is a storage organ because they hibernate so maybe they're storing vitamin a and all i mean you store vitamin b12 in your liver you store all kinds of things it's a it's a storage organ for you know choline for different nutrients i just read something and it may have been in your book i just came across it but forgive me if it wasn't in your book talking about bears and they have some specific reaction because of their need to hibernate they don't have the muscle wasting they store something in their fat no it wasn't anybody i don't remember the exact factoids it was pretty interesting about something that bears um oh god this is a waste because i can't finish this off but it was something the mechanism by which bears spare their muscle there was something for us to interact in terms of amino acids i mean growth hormone is pretty probably pretty conserved throughout the animal kingdom or at least among mammals and growth hormone one of the things that that helps to do is to preserve lean mass during a fasted state it's one of the reasons why growth hormone becomes pretty sharply elevated when fasting um fasting is [ __ ] interesting you go pretty deep on that in the book yeah he went into that if i remember right in the timing section in the timing section yeah because i have a section where i talk about our relationship with time and light but also food so light is the primary time setter that our brains use to you know to to get a sense of what time of day it is which is important for the you know operation of pretty much every system in the body you talk about there being ancillary clocks which i thought was really interesting so it's not just the light it's it's also food yeah it's also food food is a time center because we have peripheral clocks the master clock in the brain is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus and it's housed in the hypothalamus which is a very primordial region of the brain and within that structure which controls everything from hunger to our drive for sex it's at the base of the brain essentially which is where you'll find things that govern you know aspects of our behavior that are important for survival is it in is it in the hypothalamus it's actually wrapped inside of it yeah it's a little chocolate chip sized uh region um in that area and it interfaces directly with our eyes with proteins interesting in our eyes called melanopsin proteins which are light sensing but they're not involved in vision and that's pretty much our body's master clock setting apparatus so when we perceive light at an intensity of about a thousand lux or higher that sets off the 24-hour rhythm that guides essentially you know the run of show for uh you know every system in the body um i had the the privilege of interviewing uh dr sachin panda who's a luminary in this field over at the salk institute for biological aging and he was part of the team that um that discovered the melanopsin protein it's very interesting because uh there's only a few of the you know of of these proteins in the eye in the retina and they are really there to kind of interface with that with that master clock system um and i think that's just another area of our biology where uh modern life really you know seem tends to do a disservice to us thrusting us all into a perpetual state of jet lag that's an interesting way to say it what time do you eat your last meal i try to eat my last meal about two to three hours before bed i think you're making a mistake why would you what's your so i have a hypothesis you this is one of those things that are you saying i should be eating way earlier oh yes yeah so i eat my last meal at 2 p.m i'm done chewing at 2 p.m so this all started i could um eat and go to bed literally within seconds and have no digestive problems whatsoever my wife used to say i really think i need time between my last meal and when i go to bed and i was like that doesn't make any sense and she was like no i really feel like that sometimes because she four years ago just got debilitated with digestive problems and it was crazy it was emergency rooms it was like what the [ __ ] is happening it was malnutrition are you gonna die like i was really scared so we start looking at every [ __ ] aspect and she has this guess like oh i think that and people weren't talking about this yet at least not like the way that it's being talked about now where you you can't avoid hearing about this um you haven't written your [ __ ] book yet so let's start with that for letting her suffer now i'm kidding um so she starts talking about like hey i think timing really matters it didn't make sense to me and she starts doing it and making me stay up for three hours because i'm not gonna go to bed and leave her hanging so like if we're on vacation or something she would say hey you know is there any way like if because she likes to eat actually quite late is there any way that we can stay up like if we eat at nine we step till midnight yeah of course maybe i'll we'll do it and she was like i really think it's helping and so it just naturally put me on that same rhythm and i thought huh that's interesting like now even when i go like hardcore i don't get an upset stomach so like at christmas time i go off the rails i'm having a lot of ice cream all that and i wasn't sure is it the intermittent fasting because if i'm eating bad and i make sure that i fast for at least 16 hours i'm golden i can get away with murder and so i thought is it the length of fast or is it the number of hours because i find it much easier just if i'm going to clock because i when i'm really in it i try to do 20 hour fast daily and that i feel i can stay lean easily it gets a little hard the last hour or two admittedly is like i have to like focus and alter my lifestyle so i'm not trying to do something really cognitively demanding for the last two hours but like i find that's a that's a good rhythm for me 19 to 20 hours and so i started wondering though like i definitely feel better i can get away with more um but is it the length of fast is it the number of hours because if i'm going to go that long i find it easier to just eat my last meal late rather than trying to wake up and go six hours or seven hours without eating um and because i wake up so [ __ ] early like i'm usually awake between three and four am so with no alarm it's just when i wake up i go to bed at night i wake up and so this christmas when i went off the rails again but this time i said okay i'm not going to worry so much about length of fast but i'm really going to be hyper conscious about clocking five hours before i go to bed dude cash money felt [ __ ] amazing yeah so i really want my wife like if i feel a benefit and i'm somebody that's got a pretty robust digestion i want my wife to try five hours i actually think most people think they're being just a [ __ ] rock star at three i have a god instinct that you're actually better like four and five hours before bed well i think you're probably right i think that the ideal time to stop eating would probably be around seven p.m i mean it depends on the time is that ideal is that a sunset thing or yeah yeah because well you know i think we're diurnal creatures right we're diurnal we're meant to you know eat and do most of the things that we're going to do that are going to require the greatest energy expenditure during the day um and you know we know that as night approaches and the sun begins to set and melatonin levels start to creep up and cortisol levels start to drop that uh daylight associated activity sort of is you know becomes less supported in the body and that includes digestion and metabolism and that's one of the reasons why we become less insulin sensitive sensitive later in the day but also digestion um falters to some degree i mean peristalsis slows which is the transit of you know uh food components through the through the gi tract so i think it's probably you're probably better off stopping eating by like six to seven pm and in fact the few but the the growing body of research in humans that's being done with early time restricted feeding also seems to back this up that when we eat you know earlier dinners it seems to be the to the benefit of our metabolic health independent of weight loss now for somebody like you who's eating only within a four-hour window it's almost impossible i think within those four hours to over consume calories so i mean you're my friend come over i'll show you how really do you not know about slippery foods homie i'm interested well what are you eating whole healthy processes the the reality is i in my four hour window i don't overeat and because if i overeat then i can still put on fat for sure in a four hour window no problem i could i could if i wasn't cognizant of um what i'm eating i could easily clock and i'm talking every single day of my life i could easily clock in that four hour window four thousand five thousand calories that'd be pretty easy i'd have to have ice cream there's no question so this was uh the term slippery foods comes from the gastric bypass community or lap band community where they have a smaller amount of space so they get tricky like the ones who sort of give up on staying on the straight and arrow realize that if you eat things like ice cream that's like really sort of liquidy that you can pack a lot of [ __ ] calories well that makes sense because ice cream is an ultra processed foods and ultra processed foods are defined in part because of the fact that they are so calorie dense and it's one of the reasons why we see the obesity epidemic that we're now seeing because these foods you know essentially short-circuit our brain satiety checkpoints so if you're trying if you're trying to eat for example the genius foods you know super nutrient-dense foods within that four-hour window which we know are the foods that are gonna be the best for you um you know which unfortunately doesn't include ice cream uh in that under that umbrella i think it's probably gonna be pretty difficult to overconsume calories so i mean that is a good way of of basically uh drawing a line in the sand and and maintaining some level of of calorie control and probably what you're seeing are some of the benefits of calorie restriction which we know are numerous you know you can you it's a great way to reduce inflammation in smaller organisms it's one of the few ways of extending life um in a rat or a mouse well they've done that the caloric restriction they've done across like dozens of species right like ring worms and yeast and fruit flies and things like that yeah it seems to be pretty you're not going to be able to kind of prove that in a human i don't think but yeah calorie restriction you won't be able to prove the longevity because people won't comply and because it's such because people live for a long time but i mean the it seems that the that you know if humans are anything like other mammals or smaller organisms or or you know i mean because it seems to be a very consistent uh thing in the literature that that calorie restriction is you know one of the few ways to extend the lifespan of a of an organism um so you're probably getting some of those benefits what back when i first started doing and you know science is continually evolving but when i started doing the research on on fasting i was less convinced that the feeding window really mattered but the more the research comes out the more research comes you know comes out i've sort of refined my thinking a bit on it and i do think that it is probably wiser to begin your feeding sort of earlier in the day um and to stop eating earlier in the day as well because we're these diurnal creatures and the day is when our insulin sensitivity is most primed and when you know our metabolisms are most primed to you know burn off ingested energy store ingested energy and digest food in a way that's that's as efficient as it's going to be yeah my thing with that is this is not you know the thing that you can turn into a scientific paper but just going by experience so originally i was like oh i'll skip breakfast you know i can stay busy i'll go work out work out fasted all of that like that'll let me sort of draw this out but i found myself naturally wanting to eat pretty soon after a workout like just the impulse was there now i can override the impulse like i said the change or die mechanism of setting a line in my life and being disciplined about it i'm very good at that but i did find myself distracted by hunger if i tried to push you know six eight hours after i woke up before i had my first meal so i thought like would i actually be better off front loading my calories and then seeing how i do because because my calories were still clocking in i say 1800 or 2 000 calories a day i would start getting hungry right around bedtime but i wouldn't have any trouble falling asleep i wouldn't have any trouble staying asleep and then when i woke up my hunger had reset so i didn't wake up hungry like i went to bed hungry so i would essentially have sleep for dinner so i thought let me try it and see how i do and it worked [ __ ] awesome and so that was when i went from like struggling to make 16 hours to i could push and i could do 18 pretty easily and with some effort i could get up to 20. and so i probably averaged 19.5 hours a day fasting for [Music] 90 days or something like that like i i found that relatively easy 18 i can do as a no-brainer um but it's much easier for me to have my last meal done chewing by two in bed by nine up by three four first meal around eight nine yeah that rhythm works for me yeah i think you're also at an advantage in that scenario because you're going to bed at nine i go to bed at like midnight or 12 30. i go to i go to bed a bit later wouldn't the timing sleep guy say that that's a bit too late you know it's probably not ideal um is that your natural rhythm though because what do you believe in chronotypes is that a thing for you no i'm not i'm i don't really uh i'm i'm not familiar with any potential research there but um but all the sleep authorities i think seem to advocate for eight hours of sleep you know seven and a half to eight hours of sleep what do you get if you don't have that that's what i do you get that seven yeah so even though i go to bed late i get generally you know seven and a half to eight hours of sleep if not more every night i'm a very good sleeper um and i orient my life in a way that you know my sleep is sacred so my room is very dark i keep it cool um how cool do you keep it i keep it around 65 degrees do you not wake up cold or do you just blank it up i feel like i'm not i feel like i'm suffocating unless i'm breathing in cool air i hear that yeah but 68 for me is the max i start going below that and i just wake up in the middle of the night i can't [ __ ] sleep because i'm so cold so cold i mean i use a warm blanket and i sleep with a uh a pillow on top of my head that's interesting so i sleep with the blankets over my head entirely i i have since i was a little kid people always like girlfriends and obviously now my wife look at me like what the [ __ ] are you doing how do you breathe i love it sometimes i will put the blanket over my eyes because i want that cool air in my mouth yeah but for the most part it's just [ __ ] under the sheets so it i definitely blank it up and i love that i'm under the covers but at south of 68 that cold seeps in and so do you still get the benefits of the cool air because i could do more blankets obviously but am i getting any benefit at that point because i'm not actually cool yeah um that's an interesting question i don't think that you're i think that it's really you know being cool as you're winding down you know because your body temperature begins to to lower uh right before bed um so i don't think that you have to i'm actually i'm not sure i mean i know a lot of people that are now using these cooling mattresses or these cooling covers um and they're reporting you know anecdotally you know improvements in their sleep you know for that but uh yeah i don't think that your body necessarily has to be the temperature of the room but i do think generally just being in a cooler environment there have also been some really interesting studies um and i and i cite a few of them in the book where uh people that sleep in these sort of cooler environments overnight they tend to see a greater proliferation of brown fat brown adipose tissue which is very healthy metabolically active and in those studies they were not sleeping without covers they were not sleeping exposed to the air they were just sleeping in a cooler room did you hear about that chick that swam the bearing straight i did not i really need to look her up because i brought this story up several times i can never remember her name but to do that she had to transition her adipose tissue into brown fat and she was living in alaska if i'm not mistaken and she she took exclusively cold showers think about how cold the water would be in alaska yeah and then slept through the winter with the [ __ ] window open and no blankets that seems like you're just gonna get hypothermia and die but she was able to swim the [ __ ] bearing straight that's the space between alaska and russia it's pretty nice crazy that's cold water i do i do regular cold water immersion and so i will attest that you do acclimate it does get easier as you start to cultivate walk me through your uh your strategy what do you do oh man well i'm a so as i mentioned you know the three ps of of detoxification and perspiring so sauna is a huge aspect we're going to get to that in a minute because you talked about that in your book i've i've gone deep on cold stuff but not the heat so i want to go full blown on that in a minute but what's your cold setup uh so i go into i you know have the the i'm fortunate enough to be able to go to uh gyms and spas that have um cold you know cold pools cold pledges what are they at 55. they're at 50. 48 to 50. 48 is that'll get your attention yeah and very recently i had the opportunity to do 42 which was which was that's got to hurt like at that point it's not just cold it's actually painful i think it's but it's very much a mind over matter thing because even even i was able to do four minutes under 42 degrees and i feel like once you're able to do your neck yeah up to my neck you really want to make sure that your chin yeah for those uh not watching at home that that wasn't just neck yeah it's like basically up to here okay yeah up to the up to the chin 48 degrees you accumulate brown fat it's not everywhere that you find brown fat it's around the collar bone it's in the back of the neck it's along the spine under the armpits so if you're just going up to waist depth in this in you know do in in your in the pond or whatever it is that you're that you're using for your cold water immersion i don't think that you're getting the full uh range of benefits so yeah so i'll sync myself you know i'll do four to five minutes i do it until i basically can't do it anymore and the level of mental acuity that i feel afterwards is just like almost pharmacological in terms of it's like you know how how powerful it is it's amazing how long does it last for you that acuity uh it i mean it lasts for a while and i would contrast it to so if i were to do sauna i feel really good after asana but i do feel kind of lethargic yes you know and that can persist for through the rest of the night pretty much that's my next question so now i want to know your whole heat routine and well so let's wrap up the cold so you do the cold it's immersion it's up to your chin it's as long as you can take it it's roughly 48 to 50 48 to 50 degrees yeah and we do that how often i do that three to four days a week i don't do it after um exercise directly after exercise there seems to be a growing body of literature that's suggesting that it's actually sort of counter to the anabolic stimulus the inflammation yeah you want a little bit of the inflammation but i actually do it then before late at night i'll do it hours later or on days where i'm not doing like resistance training but i actually have i have like low back issues and so for me countering that inflammation yeah how did you get low back issues from uh from like a just being stupid and not warming up uh under the squat rack a couple years from squats yeah i thought you were going to say deadlift for sure no and this is persisted it's persisted yeah it's it's getting it's way better though thanks to like all these different modalities eating an anti-inflammatory diet in general uh you know exercising as much as i can staying active i mean ironically staying active which you know people with back pain are going to be like oh you know it's like it's grown interesting but it's the best thing that you can do the only time my low back ever hurts is when i stop dead lifting yeah well i mean you can dead lift heavy and really [ __ ] yourself up so super careful but um mid-range stuff that i can do 12 reps of that kind of thing if i'm doing that consistently i'm fine never have back pain when i stop then i get trouble yeah yeah staying active is crucially important but and you know cold immersion is a great modality for pain relief it's it's just amazing um it's good for mental acuity it's good for i i find that it's it powerfully improves my mood if i'm anxious or i'm feeling depressed um i mean and i'm not the only person to talk about this like wim hoff you know he's talked about the mood boosting effects of cold immersion but but for me i think it's it's super powerful and the metabolic benefits i think are among the most interesting and most important aspects of cold immersion so whether it's just ambient room temperature or doing regular cold immersion um they're showing that just modulating the ambient temperature of your environment can boost uh glucose or you know glucose tolerance insulin sensitivity in the body can help you know boost your metabolic rate and things like that so for anybody struggling with slow metabolism or insulin sensitivity issues um i think that this is a really underappreciated modality that can help potentially boost your health yeah and and you really go into it in the book um this is one of my favorite sections so now take me into the heat so this is one of those it's been on my radar but because it's not and maybe i just haven't done it because i've never done a sauna and maybe that's the you've never done a song no never and i have one in my house damn um so i'm gonna try it like after reading the book i was like i legitimately can't believe yeah so anyway i need to do it it's [ __ ] ridiculous so the reason i haven't done it though is because warm is deeply comforting to me so the cold sucks cold hurts i don't want to do it therefore i do do it i don't have any fears around heat um so it's like it just seemed too easy it seemed too easy to be beneficial so i've just never done the research so reading your book i was like [ __ ] like there's actually a lot going on like i'll say that you sold the heat exposure even better than you sold the cold exposure so like the you put the um the list down of like people that do like two to four two to three hours a day like a week excuse me versus like the reduction in um alzheimer's or heart disease in in in stroke crazy disease dementia yeah i mean a lot of this research is coming out of the university of eastern finland which is an amazing place to have this research being done because finland is the sonic capital of the world and they do dry sauna right so no steam so actually dry and wet sauna are different from steam rooms a steam room is a steam room and then you have dry and wet sauna a dry sauna basically just means that you can't throw water on the rocks and a wet sauna is you know what's the difference in terms of its impact uh i think it's just a uh com like a a preference personal presence okay so from a study perspective because you specifically call out in the book that it was a dry sauna so i was like oh [ __ ] i won't do the water thing well that i believe is where is what they sort of looked at in the research in finland it's the most common i guess sauna modality although it's a combination of dry and wet but i think in the u.s most people think about wet sauna as steam and in fact that's what i thought uh i thought a steam room was a wet sauna so today yeah to be honest but it's actually it's actually not so i think i i think i refer to saunas in general as being dry saunas because um most people in the u.s sauna is not as common most people have at least in the gyms that i have access to all that's available to me are steam rooms and they have different impacts or it's just not studied yet not studied yet so probably similar impact i personally like to my personal preference is well the research is on the side of the of the sauna um it's coming out of finland people in finland are using dry dry saunas uh for the most part they're not using steam rooms and so if you want sort of the research on your side you know you've got to do the dry so walk me through the benefits because they were legion yeah they're legion i mean on the for one using a sauna acts like an exercise memetic and what temperature are we talking about here about 200 degrees you know 175 to 205 degrees it's like it's like the rain 205. yeah it's great it's like a russian bunya it's like amazing not for very long it's going to say like uh so you're not a doctor blah blah consult your physician yes but um uh give me ballpark temperature cause i'm gonna do whatever you tell me to do yeah i mean i was in a sauna last night and it was about 203 jesus degrees yeah it was very hot it was a russian i don't know what that means it's like classic old russian old school like very hot pretty much okay so 203-ish degrees and you sit there for how long um i mean it's like an oven dude i know it's an oven it's my if it's my first go-around i'll be able to stay in for you know 15 20 okay 25 minutes so it's not you know an extreme amount of time but as you do a couple of rounds your tolerance sort of diminishes and that's when you know you've diminishes your tolerance [Music] yeah if you're i think over the macro your tolerance does increase you acclimate and that's been i think shown in the literature as well um but in the micro it's just like exercise i mean like you're you're not as strong on your last set as you are on your first set and sorry you were saying that it's an exercise mimetic so it mimics some of the effects of exercise of aerobic exercise like mild to moderate aerobic exercise you can feel this if you sit in a sauna you put your finger over the radial artery in your wrist and you'll notice it starts to beat you know like if you look at your heart rate it's similar to what it would be if you were jogging on a treadmill really yeah and in fact i've been in a done this is ridiculous it's amazing it's truly i think medicinal and there's even been moments in the sauna where you know one of the uh indicators of high-intensity exercise that's reaching like a lactic threshold is you fail the talk test you're no longer able to talk while you're exercising right i thought you were saying in the sauna i was like jesus it can i mean i've been in the sauna where it's been so hot or i've actually had to get out because it's like it's so hot i can't even like talk anymore so but that's the point of which you want to like exit this pass out in these [ __ ] things i've never seen it you don't want to pass out yeah exactly um but you do want to bring your body to a point of discomfort because this is a another 205 degrees you're going to be deeply uncomfortable arizona is uncomfortable so there you go jesus it's hot now i'm scared that's good that makes me want to do it more it's hot but you schvitz you sweat and sweating you know so aside from the fact that it kind of gives your so you get like a cardio workout and it boosts blood flow it increases nitric oxide so i mean if you've ever had just to sort of um paint a picture if you've ever had a an injured joint or a swollen ankle and you put a hot compress on it it brings blood to the surface right it gets really warm and red and it promotes healing because it boosts nitric oxide and it you know brings nutrients uh to the area of injury the same thing happens on a full body scale when you sit in a sauna because you're essentially applying a hot compress to the entirety of your body so it's amazingly healing and um and that's one of the reasons i think why it's been associated with such dramatic risk reductions for stroke for heart disease um [ __ ] at night the morning midday where am i well heat actually raising my heart rate so it makes me worry about doing it too close to bedtime you probably don't want to do it too close to bedtime because yeah for that reason because it can be an exercise memetic exercise acts like a time setter as well you don't want to do it too close to bedtime in fact i would say if there is an optimal time to do sauna you probably want to do it post-workout because actually heat seems to potentiate uh the you know the anabolic effects of exercise exercise adaptation and the like um but i'll do it you know when i do it i tend to do because i'm i'm i go to a place that has a hot and cold i do what's called contrast therapy so i'll sit in the sauna for 25 minutes and then i'll go cool off in the cold and then i'll go back and forth and so is there is there research on that because i worry that that's a bit like doing the cold after the exercise where if you're gonna do the hot do the [ __ ] hot and if you're gonna do the cold do the cold yeah and that mixing the two sounds like and i'm wildly ignorant on this so i could be totally wrong but intuitively that feels wrong yeah like one would negate yeah they're going to like you're sort of on the path of one your heat shock proteins are kicking off and then you go cool down yeah i'm not actually aware of any research that would like show that that would be a negative thing if anything i would think because it's this accumulation of stress if you're doing it on a day where you haven't gone to the gym for example i think probably the net is positive um but i couldn't tell you contrast therapy i haven't seen any direct research on on contrast therapy but it is a modality that's been used traditionally you hear people talk about it all right yeah i mean they do it in finland you know and that's where they're where you know they're seeing all these benefits they come back in yeah in fact i had the i had the ability i had the privilege of getting to do it and filmed recently it was so much fun um and then i think you know it's pretty clear that perspiring you release you know all kinds of heavy metals certain heavy metals cadmium i'm told cadmium um bpa phthalates you sweat out bpa yeah that's interesting you can easily find um if you go to pubmed and search for blood sweat urine studies uh you can look at a lot of this stuff like the data is out there you can you know find what we are excreting through our um through our sweat what seems to be excreted you know in higher concentration in urine um and the like so it's uh it's out there for people to see but it's a major you know i think it's super interesting and the fact that this research is being done in finland i think is very telling because if you were to do a study you know an observational study on the population of sauna goers in the u.s there's probably a very strong healthy user bias you know people who are using saunas are probably you know people who have it in their homes so they're affluent or they have access to fancy gym memberships or they're spending a lot of time in the spa taking care of themselves but in finland you know finland saunas are as common as showers there's on average one sauna for every household in finland so it's just a super commonplace ritual that's just embedded in the culture so that's where i think this research uh you know where there's a lot of sort of credence to the notion that saunas can be beneficial to health because they just do it it's you know it's such a it's so ingrained in the culture there um and whether or not you're health conscious or not i mean i go to like a traditional russian sauna in la and i'm surrounded by people from all walks of life when i go there and you know most of them actually are not the picture of health and i would imagine that the same would be true in finland so you get a really nice picture of like what your average person stands to gain when regularly doing sauna at different uh you know doses so to speak dude super interesting the book is chock full of interesting [ __ ] like that thank you so much for coming back and hanging out it's a lot of fun thanks um where can people get this bad boy yeah anywhere books are sold amazon barnes and noble check it out and come say hi to me on instagram at max lugovir yes indeed awesome man thank you for coming out and everybody thank you for watching and listening peace out thanks so much because when it comes to nutrition what i've found is that the mainstream medical system has very little to offer and nutrition really is so important when it comes to preventing you know all of the diseases that i think we're seeing skyrocket today