The Health Crisis Is Manufactured | Max Lugavere

Do grains qualify as a whole food? Well, certainly not in the vast form in which they are most frequently consumed today. Most people today, you know, the form of grains which most people consume are refined grains—muffins, yeah, exactly right—health cake! Even if you were to go to Google Images and look at the image of the food pyramid, which thankfully has been retired, you know, what’s been replaced by it is not that much better, um, although it is an improvement. I mean, it was literally the Illustrated USDA food pyramid. It was like pasta, it was like loaves of bread. Yeah, like you're telling me that that's essential for good health? That I need to be eating seven to eleven servings of this on a daily basis?

So, if you actually look at what a grain is, I mean, most grains today, actually in the supermarket, are fortified because they're so nutrient-impoverished that they have to have added nutrients. Nutrients added to them to make their basic form serve any sort of dietary value at all. But they're essentially pure. It's essentially pure energy; it's cattle feed. Now, I'm not saying that grains can't play a supportive role to health. I mean, certainly you look at, you know for example, bodybuilders who are in fantastic physical shape. You know, it's not, they do—uh, you know, many of them on social media, the more prominent ones do use performance-enhancing drugs.

But I mean, grains can be used to facilitate exercise performance and the like. And I think if—well, and you can say too, like socially speaking, you know, the first order problem that our society had to contend with was getting everyone enough calories. Yeah, right? And you could see some utility in generating cheap calories. I always think about corn syrup in that regard. Corn syrup is a very cheap source of calories, but when the problem is obesity and not starvation, corn syrup seems like a very bad solution, correct? And so, you know, I'm willing to give the Department of Agriculture, let's say its credit for ensuring that calories per se are in plentiful supply, which is the case. But man, we're playing a vicious price for it on the other side of it.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is it. We live amidst the first time in human history where there are more overweight people walking the Earth than underweight. Right? And so we've solved the food scarcity problem. I mean, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody in a state of energy deficit today in the Western world, yeah? Especially, and increasingly in the developed world. Except when that's used for political reasons—like most of the starvation in particular in the developed world is purposeful, not the consequence of economic inadequacy, right? It's targeted. And so, yeah, and that's a good thing that we solved that problem. But these problems are not trivial either, yeah, and they're getting worse, correct?

And I'm not saying that grains cause, you know, Alzheimer's disease—that's never been my stance. But, you know, we do have to look at this as a food quality problem, and grains I don't believe are, you know particularly when you have all these options in the supermarket—like grass-fed, grass-finished beef, wild fatty fish, salmon for example, um, sardines, eggs. You know, eggs are one of Nature's cognitive multivitamins. A study was just published that found that, you know, just consuming— they were demonized too. They were demonized too!

Yeah, and interestingly, and this is again to preface, I'll never just—to reiterate, I'll never know what caused my mom's dementia. I don’t know if it had anything to do with nutrition. It could have had everything to do with, I—I don't know. I'll never know. But, you know, my mom was somebody who for the entirety of her life was concerned about heart disease. And so whatever the messaging was around heart disease is something that my mom adopted and ingrained essentially in not just her diet but my diet growing up.

And so, you know, my kitchen was always filled with low-fat, fat-free, cholesterol-free food-like products that had adorned by the red heart-healthy logo on them, which you still see ubiquitously in the supermarket, right? And eggs were one of those foods that we threw out essentially in lieu of these more, you know, processed high-margin replacement products. An egg is literally a cognitive multivitamin. I mean, it contains a little bit of everything required to grow a brain, right? So it's postmarked by Nature. You know, this is here—this is what you need to grow a brain: an egg yolk, right? Even if it's a chicken brain. Even if it's a chicken brain, yeah.

But studies are now starting to show that they're an incredible cognitive multivitamin. A study was just published that found that, you know, all it takes is one to two eggs a week in this one study, and there was something like a 50% risk—close to a 50% risk reduction for the development of Alzheimer's disease. Wow! We know that choline is one of the most important nutrients. In fact, about 40% of the effect that they saw in this observational trial, they thought was attributed to the fact that egg yolks are the top source of choline in the standard American diet.

And yet 90% of adults today don't consume the adequate intake for choline on a daily basis. And so, that's the consequence of demonizing eggs! There you go! You demonize eggs, great! 90% of adults don't consume adequate choline, which is crucially important. It's the backbone to acetylcholine, which is the neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory, right? It forms the, you know, skeleton molecule of our neuronal membranes, which are crucially important for our, you know, brain cell communication, our ability to perceive the world.

Um, so it's a fantastic food. And, you know, I remember when, when my mom first served me, you know, that egg—my first egg—she was like, you know, she warned me not to consume them with any, you know, significant frequency because they might clog my arteries, right? And we know the dietary cholesterol—that well, the data was there a long time ago showing that this—I knew this in like the 1980s. The decreased risk of heart disease reported as a consequence of cholesterol lowering was swamped by the increase in suicide that was caused by the fact that cholesterol is a precursor to serotonin.

So even if fewer people died of heart attacks, which is probably not true anyways, more people committed suicide. So that's part of the problem with the complexity of dietary studies, right? You need to control for a lot of variables, and you need to measure a lot of outcomes. Yeah, but with these observational studies, I mean, there's always residual confounding. Like, yes, always. There's no way of controlling it. No, no, you can't do correlational dietary studies. Yeah, you just can't. No, no, they should never be published.

Yeah, I mean, I'm pro-plants, you know? That's a flag that I've planted, no pun intended. Yeah, but um, but it's not hard to imagine a world where, you know, all of the, you know, the mountains of evidence that we have observationally looking at, you know, how fruits and vegetables impact human health—the positive effects that we see at the epidemiologic, you know, scale—that that could potentially be a false positive because everybody in my mother knows that fruits and vegetables are good for you, right?

And eating fresh fruits and vegetables today is an incredible privilege in a time when, you know, 60% of the calories come from these ultra-processed foods. It can be really difficult to find you access to fresh fruits and vegetables, right? I mean, we do have RCT data showing us that there are beneficial compounds—I’ve talked about some of the phytochemicals in it—but conversely, red meat, it's also very easy.

Okay, so let's talk about that a bit because I was obviously at some point we're going to get into the issue of the carnivore diet. Yeah, and so I guess the first thing I'd say is, and you're making some allusion to it now, obviously, what are your thoughts about the carnivore diet and its potential advantages and dangers? I think, I mean, I think it's potentially a great therapeutic diet for people that have, you know, a predisposition to autoimmunity. Yeah, um, and it's not something that I would ever behold anybody.

Here's the other thing: diet zealots, particularly today on social media, they're very—they seem to be very emotionally invested in what other people eat. I don't care ultimately what other people eat. I feel the same way about that, you know, at say a moral level, right? But like, or emo, you want people to be able to make informed decisions, not decisions clouded by what I call covert activism, right?

And, yeah, or over-activism for that matter, yeah! Or you know, misinformation or disinformation about what it means to eat healthily today. Ultimately, I don't care; you know, somebody wants—otherwise known as lies, yes, precisely! Um, so yeah, I mean, I would for people that have seen a reprieve of symptoms from some of these awful conditions that people suffer from, yeah—like keep doing it!

Yeah, I think that for somebody with a robust microbiome who, you know, I think people should be able to tolerate and not just tolerate but to derive, you know, a health benefit from, you know, many of these so-called plant defense compounds. You know, even cruciferous vegetables, which have become demonized in certain carnivore circles, you know, due to, you know, certain glucosinolate compounds or compounds like sulforaphane, which you know, there are actual randomized human trials that show that these compounds can actually help us detoxify from some of these environmental pollutants that we know, you know, play a role in disease.

Um, obviously, you can get a certain dose, if you will, of phytochemicals from eating animal-source foods, but you know, carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know are very beneficial to brain health, you know, you're not going to see a better source of them in the supermarket than kale, for example, which people love to hate on. But foods like kale, spinach, dark leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, I think that the—I do think that for most people, the benefits outweigh the risk. Yeah, mhm.