The BEST FOODS To Eat To Stay Young & Prevent COGNITIVE DECLINE | Max Lugavere

On this episode with New York Times best-selling author Max Lugavere, we talk about his mom's dementia diagnosis, how he became a citizen scientist, why Alzheimer's is now being called type 3 diabetes, the importance of de-stressing, and what exactly you should be eating to optimize your brain. Everybody, welcome to another episode of Health Theory. I am here today with a very special guest, Max Lugavere. He is a citizen scientist whose new book, Genius Foods, is literally a user's manual for the brain, and he has an amazing ability to take really complex ideas about diet and lifestyle and make them accessible so that everyone can upgrade themselves, live higher quality lives, and avoid humanity's most dreaded diseases. Max, what I want to know, and the thing that I found so interesting, and the reason that I'm wearing this shirt today, how did this all start for you? How does one become a citizen scientist, and maybe more importantly, why? Yeah, that's a great question. Um, you know, I my I had this amazing dream job when I graduated college. I began as a a TV host and producer and journalist for a TV network that Al Gore founded um back in 2005. And so anyway, when I left Current TV to try to try to figure out where I was going to go with my career, um I started spending more and more time in New York City, and I was, you know, I for the past 5 years, I was sort of beholden to the rigorous TV production schedule of a of having a nightly show on on national TV. So I took this opportunity to spend more and more time with my mom and my two younger brothers, and it was at that time that um me and my brother started to notice that you know, my mom had always been a very spirited person, fast-walking, fast-talking New Yorker, but it had seemed almost as if her her cognitive power, her her brain power had downshifted. And you know, we started to notice this when for example, I would be in the kitchen cooking with my mom, which was always one of my favorite things to do with her. I would ask her to pass the salt or a spice that you know, was perhaps closer to her than it was to me. And it would take her an extra beat to register. It would almost be quicker for me to to to traverse the kitchen and grab it for myself than to wait for her to process the command and then act on it. I think we all intuitively when we're talking to a much older person, we know that they're not going to respond as quickly as a younger person. But my mom was still young. She was blonde. She was 58 at the time. It suddenly had seemed as though my mom had the brain of an elderly elderly person. And I had no prior family history of dementia or any kind of neurodegenerative disease. So I was completely at a loss. I was totally ignorant. And it culminated for me, you know, we my family had taken a trip to Miami. And it was one of the few times where my my mom and my dad were together under the same roof cuz they'd been divorced since I was 18. And my mom was standing behind the the breakfast counter. And uh she announced to the whole family that she'd been having memory problems and that she had also recently sought the help of a neurologist. And it was something that you know, was we were I mean, mystified to say the least, but my dad actually chimed in and he said, you know, come on, Cathy, which is her name. If you're having memory problems, what year is it? And my mom couldn't immediately respond. And me and my brothers to break the silence chimed in. I mean, we were completely in the dark and we almost, you know, mocking the the the difficulty that she seemed to be having. We're like, come on, Mom. How could you not know the year? And she started to cry. And in that moment for me, mean, that's when everything changed. That that's when this became something that I was sort of curious about on the periphery to something that I realized I needed to step in and try to figure out what was going on with her. And I started to go with her to doctor's appointments and in every single instance I experienced what I've come to call diagnose and audios. A physician would spend about 15 minutes if we were lucky with my mom, run a battery of strange tests, not once taking the time to explain to me what was going on because I was my mom's patient wing person. It was there at the Cleveland Clinic for the first time that my mom was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. She was prescribed drugs for both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. And I didn't know it at the time because actually the doctor didn't explain to me what the drugs were for, but later on in the hospital uh or in the in the in the hotel room in Ohio where we were staying, I started Googling the drugs. And I learned that they're essentially Band-Aids. I mean, they have no disease-modifying ability and they're barely effective. Um and it was there that for the first time I had a panic attack. I mean, I I thought you know, I was I I didn't know. I was scared that my mom would die. Um I was scared that she would ultimately become decrepit and uh you know, I mean, I just didn't I didn't know what to expect. My own helplessness and ignorance um really seemed to it was sort of like the walls of the room that were just starting to like close in on me. And uh I'm a pretty chill guy. I'd never had a panic attack. But um you know, that was one of I think one of the darkest moments of my life. And as soon as that cleared um I basically became obsessed. I mean, from one from it was sort of like a line being drawn in the sand. I mean, I just became unable to focus on my career. And I just all I wanted to do was learn everything I possibly could about how diet and lifestyle affect affect brain function and ultimately brain health and mediate one's predilection for these diseases. One of the most shocking things that I learned was that oftentimes, like many chronic diseases now burdening burdening society, they begin far earlier than the presentation of symptoms. And it became this major call to action for me not only to try to see if there was anything that I could do to help my mom, but also to prevent it from ever happening to myself. And yeah, that's what really began this journey and you know, just to go back to to go back to your first question, how does one become a citizen scientist? You know, we live in such an incredible time where all of the world's knowledge is at your fingertips 24 hours a day. I mean, if you have a if you have a smartphone, right? I mean, we have PubMed, you know, the primary literature that that is that is what sci- it's our it's our method as a species of asking questions and seeking truth and finding answers is at our fingertips. So, it didn't it didn't seem a barrier to entry for me that I wasn't a medical doctor. You know, I felt entitled to answers as a human being. And I just set out to learn everything I could. Lit- literally I was just writing it out. The that response to what happened to your mom is so powerful and so unlike what other people do. And I I really want to dive into that. So, how did you the walls feel like they're closing in? How do you re-get your wits about you? Um what I assume at that point then you start thinking like a journalist, but how does a journalist think? My mom had symptoms that were more akin to a movement disorder, the most uh well-known of which is Parkinson's disease, which you know, Michael J. Fox has Parkinson's disease. Many people many people know about it. Um but they weren't typical symptoms and my mom also had these memory problems that she had developed and she was prescribed a drug for Alzheimer's disease. So, I think the fact that regardless of the type of dementia a person develops, they they give you these these biochemical band-aids. The fact that it seemed so non-specific to me, um, made me just intuitively think, you know, I had this I had a a theory that there that there had to be a better way. And having a a lifelong passion for nutrition and health just in, you know, general in the sense of general fitness, my hunch was that diet and lifestyle may have had something to to do with this. Did you start pushing back on the doctors and saying that to them when they're prescribing the drugs? Not not at first, certainly, because, you know, in that in those moments of fear, you want to do anything that you can do to help your mom. And I think that we all tend to really put a lot of faith in the the medical establishment. I don't know a single doctor that would give me their email address so I could follow up with them. You know, when something like your health is on the line or the health of a loved one is on the line, I didn't want to wait 3 months to get another appointment to ask my follow-up questions. I just think that that it's so important to become an expert in your own health. And, you know, my mom's generation, previous generations, only the doctor could know about health. Only the nutritionist could know about nutrition. We're of a generation, millennials, you know, that we want answers, you know, we're we're we feel empowered, we feel entitled to them. So, if somebody right now just walked into that, either they're being diagnosed with something that they find terrifying or someone they love is, how like what give me like a just a couple steps? So, is going to pubmed.com, is that step number one? Like what are a few things that people can do to really begin that process? That's a good question. Um, so yes, I do think that go I think using PubMed as a resource is very powerful. Um, I think, you know, you can most a lot of studies are available for free in open access journals. But I've actually written a a what I call assistant scientist handbook because I think uh it's really important to know how to interpret research. I think that I think knowing how to interpret research is you know, science literacy is as important as financial literacy. We there's a a lack of both, I think, among younger people today and that's problematic. All right, so as you start diving in, you're figuring this out, you're going after this stuff, you're building the science literacy if you didn't already have it, you're reading the studies. Um, what do you begin to learn that you think is like revolutionary knowledge? Well, I used to think that dementia was an old person's disease, right? I I like many people didn't didn't care about it. Alzheimer's disease was something that I thought was decades into the future, something only old people get, a natural part of aging. Um, you know, age-related senility was something that was considered an par for the course of just getting older. Uh, but what I learned is that Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain 30 to 40 years, if not longer, before the first symptom. Whoa. Yeah. There are biomarkers evident on brain scans now with, you know, the hyper-advanced scanning technology that we now have uh access to that have shown signs related to Alzheimer's disease evident in the brains of 20-year-olds. So, Whoa. Yeah. So, I mean, this is something that might be a lifelong cascade by the time you uh something I can get checked for right now? Well, there are genetic risk factors for developing Alzheimer's disease. Um, so the most well-defined of them is the APOE4 allele, which is a a variant of the APOE uh gene that you inherit one copy from your mom, one copy from your dad. But your thesis, if I have it right, is basically, "Okay, you may have the allele, the gene, but that doesn't mean that it's inevitable." 100% What can I do to my brain to see if I have any of the precursors of Alzheimer's? Well, one of the top things that you can do is make sure that you are insulin sensitive because peripheral insulin resistance, which is insulin resistance is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, it can uh precede actually the um the appearance of chronically elevated blood sugar. And so, it's been shown that that is actually very uh closely related to um your brain's ability to create energy. So, this is actually one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease, and it might be the one of the earliest uh things to go awry in the brain, metabolic dysfunction in the brain. And it seems to be very closely tied to the body's metabolism. So, I would go to the doctor and have them run what test? Your fasting blood sugar and your fasting glucose, very important. And through with those two biomarkers that any physician can check, they can determine your level of uh insulin sensitivity. Okay. One thing you've talked a lot about in the book and in your talks, and I love this, is so, I hear Alzheimer's, I think, "I know all about this. Amyloid plaques, man, that's the problem." Um I just recently had my cholesterol taken. I like to think I am healthy. And my doctor literally wanted to put me on a statin. And I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." Um I know enough to be dangerous when it comes to cholesterol. Walk us through the the the relationship that you've talked about that exists between potentially what amyloid plaques are and potentially what cholesterol really is. I find that really interesting. Alzheimer's disease was first named in 1906 by a German physician named Alois Alzheimer, but 90% of what we know about the disease has been discovered only in the past 15 years. The only way up until very recently that it could be diagnosed with black and white certainty was on death they would open up the brain of a cadaver and they would examine the brain. They would notice a dramatic brain shrinkage and they would notice hallmark plaques and tangles in the brains of these patients. The plaques were an aggregation of misfolded proteins. The protein is called amyloid beta. And so the amyloid hypothesis that these plaques build up in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease has been the guiding um path. What it now turns out thanks to, you know, advanced scanning technology that amyloid might actually be there at the scene of the crime but in fact at least initially an innocent bystander. um Because, you know, we now have scanning technology that allows us to see things that are happening in the brain well before the presentation of symptoms that might actually be more initial factors in the cascade that will ultimately create Alzheimer's disease. It's led researchers and scientists to take a step back and ask what is causing our brains to become landfills for this amyloid plaque. And so as I mentioned earlier, one of the burgeoning theories that now seems to be displacing, at least from my perspective, this amyloid hypothesis because, you know, drug trials that have sought to cure the disease have a 99% 99.6% fail rate. Yeah. So the question is what starts first, you know, is there is there something that we can measure in the body or brain that begins before this build up of amyloid plaque that we can intervene and say, you know, by taking these steps you might prevent this disease from happening. Well, one of the, if not the earliest measurable thing to happen in the brain is a reduced ability by the brain to create ATP out of glucose. So the brain has a few uh fuel substrates that it can use to create ATP, which is the energetic currency of the cell. And energy for the brain is really important. In fact, 25% of your metabolic rate is used to satiate the energy requirements of the brain. So, 20 you know, every one out of every four breaths that you take, a fourth of all the calories you eat is going for your is being used by your brain to create energy. So, any sort of outage in the brain in terms of its its ability to create energy is going to create problems. Just as a as an anecdote, you know, a newborn uh human, their brains require 90% of their base metabolic rate. Woah. Yeah. So, that uh a newborn human baby, 90% of its oxygen, all the calories that it's that it's using is going to help its brain develop. Because actually human babies are born half-baked. We continue our develop actually in the real world. This is one of the reasons why humans are so smart and we've been able to build what we've been able to build because we complete our cognitive development in the presence of of, you know, other other people. It's called the fourth trimester, right? That's one of the reasons why a baby, a newborn human baby, is so fat because the fat that a newborn baby comes packaged with is actually an energy reservoir for the developing brain. I heard you call it a mophie for your brain. I love that. It's a mophie for the brain. It's been shown that the brain's ability to use glucose is diminished by about 50% in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. So, there's this this really stark metabolic uh problem that's occurring in the brain. And thanks to functional um MRI scans and PET scans, we've been able to see that um there's a a deficit an energetic deficit in the in the brain that's evident from very early in life. Um and it's related to the this uh gene that seems to put people at higher risk for the the disease in the western sort of uh environment, food environment. So, you see that deficit in people that have that allele, not necessarily across the board. about a 10% uh reduction in the brain's ability to generate ATP out of glucose from very early on. And you've interviewed the woman that coined the phrase um diabetes type 3, which is what Alzheimer's is often referred to as. Uh I want to walk through this process cuz often times people will talk about it at a really high level and and I want to drill down. So, um why is it called We'll start with Why is it called diabetes type 3? Well, if you have type 2 diabetes, which 50% of the US population is now either diabetic or pre-diabetic, your cells have an inability to respond to insulin, which is the hormone that allows glucose entry into those cells where the cells can use as fuel. To be used as fuel. Yeah. So, basically, you have, despite an abundance of fuel in circulation, because blood sugar, you know, is chronically high in a person with type 2 diabetes, your cells essentially starve because they have an inability to respond to insulin and therefore glucose has a much more difficult time getting into the cell where it can be used to create ATP, which again is the energetic currency of cells. So, in the brain, a researcher at a Brown University, who I've interviewed, Suzanne de la Monte, uh has coined the term type 3 diabetes to describe Alzheimer's disease because there's a similar inability of the brain to create energy, even though, and often times this is the case, there is an abundance of fuel in the body. And, you know, in people that are overweight, you know, people that are carrying fat around their midsections, your average pound of fat has about 3,000 backup calories that the brain will happily use for fuel, but the brain is unable to because most people on the western, you know, diet plan are eating about 300 g of carbohydrates per day, carbohydrates cause insulin to become chronically elevated, and insulin acts like a one-way valve on your fat cells. So, fat is we you know, we're really good at storing fat, but in an overweight person in the modern food environment, that the ability of fat to be burned is basically blocked. Sugar is one of those things that like oxygen, you know, oxygen oxidizes things. It ages you. You slice an apple, leave it, you know, there on the counter, you'll notice it start to turn brown. The same way that we need oxygen, it also is what's killing us. And the same thing goes for sugar. We need a certain amount of sugar. I mean, the brain still has about a 40% uh energy requirement for glucose. Um but sugar is also very damaging. It's glycotoxic, you know, I mean, it it damages your proteins. This is one of the reasons why type 2 diabetes is so damaging. Um because at that point your blood sugar has become chronically elevated, glycating all of the proteins that make you you. We tend to think about protein as a nutrient in terms of its ability to help us grow bigger muscles, but we are made of protein. Actually, the protein that that aggregates and forms the plaques that characterize Alzheimer's disease, that's another protein that can become glycated. And when this happens, when it when it gets bound to sugar in the molecular sense, it becomes less easily able to be flushed away, um which is something that our brains actually do when we sleep. Our brains actually clean themselves of these of these proteins that can aggregate over the course of the day. So, um one of our best-performing episodes of Health Theory ever was on sleep, which I was totally surprised by. I did not think people really cared that much about sleep, nor did I honestly know how detailed and important sleep is. Why is it that you think sleep is important? It's so important. I mean, there's a newly discovered system in our brains called the glymphatic system, which when we're sleeping actually swooshes cerebrospinal fluid all throughout, essentially cleansing it of these proteins that aggregate over the course of the day. Um they've shown that on one night of bad sleep, there's an increased level of amyloid um measurable in in CSF, cerebrospinal fluid. Um but then also, you know, I think dietary change for most people is one of the most difficult things to do. And it's particularly difficult when we have our hormones working against us. So, sleep I think is so profoundly important because it acts like a master regulator of our hormones. Um it helps to you know, make sure that uh we don't need to use our willpower very often because, you know, willpower is sort of like this muscle that we need to use in order to fight off cravings and things like that. But with good sleep, our cravings diminish. I mean, they've shown that even on one night of poor sleep, you consume an an excess of calories the following day, anywhere between 3 and 500 calories. I've actually noticed So, it's a little off topic, but I once one of the um major breakups I had in my life, I I noticed that I would feel way more sensitive to it um when I was under-slept. You know, you become less able to contextualize emotions when when you're under-slept. On just one night of bad sleep, a metabolically healthy person will be essentially pre-diabetic the next day. Temporarily. Wow. Yeah, you become more insulin resistant. Um so, yeah, sleep sleep I think is one of those things that today we romanticize being busy. Um but it's sort of like the one thing that lifts all the boats in your harbor. You know, and yet we tend to undervalue it. Um You talked on your Instagram about you want to live for a really long time or extend your life, forget exactly how you worded it, which got my attention. And then you said prioritize de-stressing. Yeah. Is that tied to sleep? Like what what do you mean by that? Well, stress is an indiscriminate killer. And today, you know, so many of us um are losing sleep due to stress. Um it's one of the reasons why one in six adults now is on some kind of psychiatric drug. One in six? Yeah. Yeah. Is on or has used. Um Well, self-medicating. And uh and it's not good. I mean, chronic stress is a major major problem. Wow. Yeah. So, give me some tactics. How do How does one destress? You know, I think meditation is really important. Um you know, I'm one of those people that uh I was trained to meditate. Um I think this is really important. I think, you know, being being taught how to meditate is as important as being taught how to do yoga. You know, we don't come out of the womb knowing how to do a downward dog and to hit, you know, any of the number of yoga poses that we're taught to do with a good yoga teacher. Um having a good meditation teacher is very um I think is critical to knowing how to destress. I also think um you know, knowing knowing what chronic stress is and knowing what it isn't uh is really important, you know? So, in my book I I differentiate between chronic stress and acute stress, which acute stress is very beneficial. It's, you know, what we do in the gym. We stress our bodies. Chronic psychological stress is really toxic. It's working under a boss that you hate. It's being stuck in a relationship that's gone sour. By destressing and by um you know, doing physical exercise and things like that, you actually increase your resilience to stress. Cortisol sort of gets a bad rap because it's related to stress, but it's actually a really important hormone. It's the body's chief waking hormone. So, for about 45 minutes after you wake up, cortisol is the highest that it's really meant to be throughout the day. It's part of the body's natural circadian uh hormonal ebb and flow. And in that in that window for about 45 minutes after you wake up, that's a great fat burning window. You've got that cortisol spike, which is really working to liberate stored fats, stored sugars um for use by your body as fuel. It's meant as a way of, you know, allowing fuels to become accessible so that you can use them and and carpe diem, right? Seize the day. Within that window, it's particularly dangerous to consume breakfast in its most standard American form, which is usually rapidly digesting carbohydrates from oatmeal, granola bars, things like that, because that causes a spike in insulin. But going back to stress, this is why consuming carbs in the context of chronic stress is so bad. Because you've got cortisol chronically elevated due to chronic stress. And then we're continuing to keep our insulin elevated with the carbohydrates that we're consuming. So this not only helps redistribute our weight from muscle to fat, but also our our our visceral fat, which is the most inflammatory kind of fat that wraps around our internal organs, actually has about four times the cortisol receptors Woah. on it. So this is actually why, when you look at people that are chronically stressed out, they their bodies take on a very uh particular shape. It's totally different from run-of-the-mill obesity, where people are just eating lots and lots of calories and not necessarily chronically stressed out. Somebody who's chronically stressed and eating lots of carbs in particular, they usually have skinny arms and skinny legs, but a bulging midsection. Because their visceral fat is just soaking up all the excess carbs that they're eating because of the presence of chronically elevated cortisol. That's so weird. It's super fascinating. I always thought that was just like, oh, some people, that's how they put on fat. I like to think of stress as it's sort of invisible and it doesn't really have any lingering effects, but when you see that it can play out into an actual body type, Yeah. That's when it gets really crazy. Yeah. Now, one type of stress you've talked about that is really useful. I want to go a little bit deeper. Thermal stress. I've never heard of that before. What is it exactly and how do we leverage it? So, you know, we've we are our bodies were, you know, we're the ultimate performance machines, right? We all evolved chasing our food. Um and and really being honed to perform physical bouts of uh exercise. But thermal exercise is another form of exercise that we also had for the vast majority of our evolution. And I think chronic climate control, you know, something that we've developed, you know, with air conditioning and heat and things like that, really has been to the detriment in many ways of our of our health. Um So, we can look at research that was performed recently out of Finland uh that I think is very compelling. They found that people who used saunas four to seven times per week had a dramatic risk reduction for Alzheimer's disease. About 65% risk reduction for people that use sauna four to seven times per week. Really, I mean, there's no drug on the market that'll cut your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease by 65%. Finland is the sauna capital of the world. So, in Finland, there's on average one sauna per household in Finland. It's like taking a shower in Finland. It's so embedded into the culture. In fact, there's a great documentary called Steam of Life, which documents all of the weird ways in which uh people in Finland will, you know, create like phone booths abandoned phone booths into saunas. Things like that. It's very strange, yeah. So, they found that in this population that saunas really seem to play a protective role in terms of of vascular function. Um it also was uh related to a uh uh dramatic risk reduction for high blood pressure. Um but then also for for dementia. Seems to really uh help promote what's called vascular compliance and reduce high blood pressure. So, what coincides with Alzheimer's disease is also vascular dysfunction. Um of all of the micro-capillaries that provide, you know, blood, fuel, nutrients to the brain. And so, anything that's good for the heart is going to be good for the brain. And saunas seem to really be good for the heart, as well. What about like cold showers and stuff? Yeah, those are all great. Um you know, they are really good in terms of really dialing mental acuity. I mean, you can feel it instantly take a cold shower. There was a really great study performed where people with type 2 diabetes um were told to uh basically turn the air conditioning down on low to about, I believe it was 60 or 66° Fahrenheit. Wow. Um for 6 hours a day. So, I mean, that's not freezing. It's cold, but it's not freezing. And there was about a 25% increase in their insulin sensitivity. Not changing their diet at all or doing any additional physical exercise, just exposing themselves to colder temperatures. They showed a dramatic increase in their metabolic health. Again, insulin resistance is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes. I'm so surprised by that. Yeah. Cold stress, heat stress, all very beneficial. So, I try to compel people to get out of their comfort zones in in the thermal sense. You know, it's really good for creativity getting out of your comfort zone. Um but it seems to be the case as well in terms of temperature. That is really interesting, and I hate you for it because I hate being cold so much that I can't begin to tell you. Yeah, so do I, actually. But um but you know, I think it's one of those things that um seems to be really beneficial. You know, I uh I go to my mom's house occasionally, and the heat is always blasting. It's like always uh like super warm in that apartment. Not like sauna level temperature, but just always you know, my mom doesn't like to be cold. She doesn't like to be hot. She likes to live only within that narrow range of her comfort. Glad you brought your mom back up. I wanted to talk a little bit more about something you said that I thought was so beautiful. So, I grew up in a morbidly obese family and I really struggle with Wow. I know what they need to do, but that's very stressful for them emotionally and I don't want to stress that relationship out and you said something similar about your mom and you said I don't ever want her food choice to damage the relationship that I have with her. Yeah. How do you deal with that? What advice do you have for caregivers, loved ones of somebody that's going through dementia? Sounds cliche to say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. So, I think at a certain point um you've got you should you should teach, you know, I think that's one of our missions here on earth as empathetic and compassionate beings is to lead you know, lead your neighbor, lead your loved one to a greater vision of life, you know, that's what you're doing with the show. I think you can't do it with force. You can't do it with aggression. You've got to you've got to be I think a bit more gentle and when it comes to loved ones and especially people that are suffering with chronic diseases and that you know, you don't know what they're going through psychologically. I think it's really important to um to provide the information, but then to to step back and detach at a certain point. At a certain point with my mom I would get very emotionally wound up in what my mom was eating and I would become upset if I went to her house and I saw that she had an open bag of chips or you know, sh- cookies or what- you know, whatever. And um I didn't want that to interfere with the time that I was spending with my mom. You know, I would never want to do that and I I value so much the time that I spend with my mom and um I know that I'm really neurotic when it comes to nutrition and health, but I don't you know, I don't judge other people. In your book you do a great job of not spending a lot of time demonizing anything, but instead really being quite prescriptive about, "Okay, if you want to upgrade yourself," which is like the big tag in your website, which I absolutely love. So, if somebody wants to upgrade themselves, knowing that every word that's about to come out of your mouth comes with compassion, and knowing that there's a lot of individual variability, and you get all of that, but like in a nutshell, for somebody that wants to upgrade themselves, what should they eat and not eat? Yeah. So, you know, opt for foods that are nutrient-dense. Um one of the easiest things that I recommend that people can do every single day is to consume what I call a large fatty salad. Um I think it's one of the best ways to really check off so many of your nutritional boxes to get an abundance of uh dietary fiber that the microbes that live in your large intestine love to consume. Um and when I say fatty, I don't mean, you know, throwing on tortilla strips and cheese and ranch dressing. I mean, you know, taking a bowl of dark leafy greens, kale, spinach, which are, you know, top sources of magnesium, which 50% of people do not consume adequate amounts of folate, um arugula. Arugula is a top source of nitrates. Dietary nitrate really important in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain. One single high nitrate meal might actually improve cognitive function. It's that powerful. Um dousing those dark leafy greens with extra virgin olive oil, which research has shown out of Barcelona, Spain, the PREDIMED study. You can consume about a liter a week to better cognitive function, cognitive health, cardiovascular health, and it might even help you lose weight because it's so anti-inflammatory. Actually, there's a compound in extra virgin olive oil that is as anti-inflammatory as low-dose Advil, but without any of the potential for negative side effects. And importantly, you need to have fat in that salad because fat allows many of the most important nutrients in the salad to become bioavailable. So, I talk a lot about in this book, which I think is bringing, you know, especially, um, you know, there's a lot I I think actually that there's a lot, uh, of new information that I bring to the conversation, but I talk particularly about, um, carotenoids. And how research has shown out of University of Georgia that by eating, uh, lutein and zeaxanthin by by supplementing with these carotenoids, you can actually boost visual processing speed by 20% even if you're young and healthy. So, I mean, these are young and healthy people that are already considered to be at the peak of their cognitive prowess. Visual processing speed is so important. I mean, think about in terms of responding to visual stimuli, you know, driving, athletic performance, sports performance, things like that. Video games. Video games. Yeah. Absolutely. So, dark leafy greens are abundant in these two carotenoids and they're only absorbed through the digestive tract only in the presence of fat. You don't absorb any of them unless you're consuming them with fat. So, like that fat-free dressing, throw that in the trash. Extra virgin olive oil, you know, is super key. Eating a large fatty salad, I think it's just really key. People tend to think about salads in terms of like weight loss. I want to lose weight, I'm going to eat more salad. But really in terms of the brain, it's powerful. You also get the benefit of, I mentioned dietary fiber. We now know that you have microbes that live in your large intestine that when you consume, uh, fermentable soluble prebiotic fiber, which is found in abundance in that in that bowl of greens, the microbes churn out a compound called butyrate, which is profoundly anti-inflammatory. It is really, you know, beneficial in terms of the gut ecosystem. It's been shown to boost levels of, uh, growth factors in the brain, which promote neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to change over time. Very important stuff. Um, in terms of lifestyle, you know, I advise, as I mentioned, not eating for an hour or two after you wake up. People today are really obsessed with intermittent fasting, which I think is, you know, really great. At the very least, it it I think has awakened people to the necessity to bring back balance in terms of being fed and being fasted. But, I don't get hung up over the hours. I think it's just really important to honor the body's natural circadian inclinations. You really want to like, after that one, two, or three-hour window, eat your food. And then stop eating for two to three hours before bed. Again, you know, we talked about the glymphatic system. It's a newly discovered system. But, you know, it's been theorized that eating soon before bed might interfere with that. Um that that cleanup process. And then, you know, I try to eat a uh a low-carb diet. I try to avoid um dense sources of carbohydrate with the exception of occasionally eating them in the post-workout window. Um if you're going to eat carbs throughout the day, you really want to concentrate them into one meal. Um it seems that when you consume your carbs concentrated into one meal, uh less insulin is required to clear those carbs from circulation, that glucose from circulation, as opposed to if you were to spread them out over the course of the day, which makes that that old advice to eat six small meals throughout the day particularly bad cuz insulin seems to be able to compound on itself. So, rather than eating, you know, uh 30 g of carbs at lunch, 30 g of carbs at dinner, 30 g of carbs at um breakfast, concentrate them into one meal and there's less of an, you know, insulin AUC. So, less less insulin being stimulated to clear that glucose, which is important because as we talked about earlier, glucose is very damaging when it's uh in the blood. It glycates those proteins. That is really interesting. Everything you've said is really interesting. I mean, yeah, I'm a I uh major nerd for this kind of stuff. Whether or not you're concerned about your risk for disease in the long term, you know, the all these things actually help you feel great in the here and now. You know, we talked about visual processing speed, just in terms of your overall energy levels, um feeling less beholden to your hormones and to your, you know, food cravings, I think is really important. Um and these are all ways of of really kind of I think helping stack the odds in our favor, you know? Um 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. I mean, 60 according to the World Health Organization, chronic diseases now account for 60% of deaths worldwide. Oh, that's incredible. All right, before I ask my last question, what's the best place for people to find you online? Uh definitely um Instagram. I'm pretty active on Instagram. Um people can go to my website and join my newsletter, which um you know, I uh put a lot of time into. Um and uh yeah, I mean, Genius Foods really is, I think, I've been able to synthesize, you know, much of, if not all of what I've learned into the book. Amazing. So, my final question, if people are only going to make one single change in their life to have the biggest impact, what change should they make? Man, that's a good question. Um You know, we've already talked about nutrition, so uh I'm going to throw you a curveball and I'm going to say I think that people really should uh be kind to to one another. You know, I think that's so important. Teach one another to help, you know, um be a shoulder for for others, especially that are less fortunate. Uh Um to to give back. Um whether it's charity, whether it's just to be more diligent and and deliberate about your social media use by posting things that are less inflammatory, more helpful. When I see suffering, I'm profoundly affected by it, and there's a lot of suffering going on in the world both in terms of health, um food scarcity, things like that. So, just, you know, do your do your part. What an unexpected and beautiful answer. Nice. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man. That was absolutely incredible. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Guys, this is somebody, I'm telling you right now, the deeper into their world you go, the more you're going to get surprises like that, not just nutritionally, but somebody that's looking at the world in a new way. I am fascinated by this notion of being a citizen scientist, that he had this moment in his real life, and instead of being a victim, instead of letting the walls close in on him, he really did something about it, and went out and learned and leveraged his ability to think like a journalist, to question things, to go out, to research, to figure things out, to find that intuitive through line where things actually made sense. And instead of saying, "Oh, it's confusing because I don't understand it." he said, "Maybe what's being proposed doesn't make sense." And so, that to me, that is this new wave, this new world that we all live in, where we have access to things, where we can go read the studies, we can look at the press releases, and do the fairly straightforward simple things that he laid out, that he did, that utterly changed the course of his life, and I hope will change the course of some of your lives as you dive in and see that. And then you're going to see that layer of humanity to what he does, where his answer to what the one thing people should change is is to be kind, which he posted in his Instagram feed, by the way. Another place I recommend that you guys go check out. Max, thank you so much for coming on, man. True honor to be here. Thank you. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe, since I know it's over here. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. 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