Sugar Cravings, Red Meat, and Your Health | Max Lugavere | EP 456

And with Alzheimer's Disease, by the time you know a person is diagnosed, your brain's ability to derive energy to create energy from glucose, which is its primary fuel substrate, is diminished by about 50%. Any power outage in that organ is going to lead to failure. [Music]

Hello everybody! Today I'm talking with Max Luga, who flew in from LA to Washington DC to have this conversation with me. He's a journalist who's become quite a well-known scientific researcher and popularizer, but also a creative investigator in his own right. He wrote a trilogy of books, The Genius Trilogy, one on foods, one on life, and one a recipe book on the kitchen. He is also the producer of a documentary that'll be released at the end of June 2024 called Little Empty Boxes.

All of that was motivated by his mother's experience with a form of dementia known as LBD, which involves the degeneration of these neurological tissues known as Lewy bodies. It's not Alzheimer's or frontal temporal dementia; it's another form of dementia. He was very shocked by his mother's illness, which she developed when she was in her late 50s, and also by the dearth of effective treatment that was available to her. He ended up obsessively concentrating on research into the dementias in general, concluding, as have many people in the last decade, that the dementia spectrum of illnesses, and that includes Parkinson's, by the way, might well be preventable with interventions that are early enough in life and that many of those interventions might be dietary in nature. We discuss why that is and talk about the carnivore diet as well as a potential diagnostic investigative tool for the analysis of complex disease in general.

In some ways, we celebrate the possibility that dietary modulation might prove to be the treatment of choice on the prevention side for these terrible degenerative neurological diseases. So join us for that.

I'm interested in diet, I suppose despite myself, I would say, because it's not my natural domain of interest. I'm more interested in psychological matters, let's say, than physical or physiological matters. I know they overlap, but my attention doesn't naturally gravitate that way. But I have definitely learned that many of the things that I would have been tempted to assume were psychological aren't.

I mean, I've known for a long time, for example, that endogenous depression, the schizophrenic disorders, and manic depression—I never thought of those as psychological disorders. I thought, "No, those people are sick; we just don't know what's wrong with them." So I spoke with Chris Palmer in some detail on my podcast, and I just met him again in Boston. He has a couple of research projects finishing up; he has 15 on the go, looking at the treatment of those disorders with diet, and the first three have been spectacularly successful.

So diet, right? So let's start with your Genius work and line for people what those are and what you're doing with them and why. Let's start with that.

Sure! So I've written a trilogy of books, The Genius Trilogy as it were. My first book was called Genius Foods, and it came out in 2018. It's a tome that pays homage to the science of both dementia prevention as well as the burgeoning field that's being referred to as nutritional psychiatry—how the right diet plays a role in mediating mental health. Insofar as it does play a role, there's this really exciting area of research looking at how our diets are able to influence our moods, which I think is incredibly exciting.

I followed that up with a book called The Genius Life, which was more of a lifestyle-centric guide. Then my third book came out in 2022 and it was a cookbook, kind of bringing everything together. My work really, I would say, primarily explores the intersection between diet, lifestyle, and brain health. The reason why I wrote these books is, because I was personally affected by a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia. Prior to even receiving that diagnosis in my family, it’s a condition that my mom suffered from.

I became obsessed with trying to understand all that I could. How old was she when that happened? She was 58 years old when she first started to show these amorphous symptoms.

What symptoms did she show? So she had symptoms that both occurred concurrently; some of them were movement-related—rigidity, balance issues, stiffness. I guess rigidity and stiffness are similar, but yeah, a real lack of coordination. You know, reduced swinging in the arms. I’m not a medical doctor, so I didn't have any framework with which to understand what I was seeing my mom exhibit.

I thought, "You know, movement symptoms—this is a musculoskeletal condition, right? It has to be." But then in tandem with those symptoms, she also displayed stark cognitive dysfunction. It's not necessarily that she started to forget simple things like, you know, who she was or who her family members were, but it seemed as though her—I’ve likened it to when you have too many tabs open in your browser window. It’s just like the frame rate starts to stutter, and that’s sort of what I saw in my mom. She was very much still in the prime of her life, had all the pigment in her hair, you know, raised three boys, ran a business.

I had been a journalist prior to that. I had been a generalist journalist since college, since graduating college. I had worked for a TV network that was co-founded by Al Gore. It wasn't a political network, and I certainly, you know, was never really that into politics. But I was sort of like this young kid who was given the reins of this TV network that reached 100 million homes in the US. When my mom became sick, I—how old were you when she was diagnosed? I was in my late 20s.

Okay, yeah. I had just come off of that position, and I was in between jobs, and more so than being a journalist at the time, I was just a scared son, you know? I was a scared son seeing these awful symptoms. There’s not much worse than a degenerative neurological disease. Yeah, they’re brutal. Those things tear you apart, piece by piece.

Exactly, and I had—there was no precedent in my family, so as soon as that immediate trauma of realizing that my mom had something serious going on with her brain health hit, it was the most profound call to action that I've ever felt in my entire life to do what I could to understand why this would have happened to a woman at the age at which it did.

Why were you so compelled to do—why were you so compelled to transfigure your life to come to the service of your mom?

Love, I mean, you know, my mom was the most important person in my life, and I'm the firstborn in an incredibly small family. I've always had an incredibly close relationship with my mother.

Right, so this wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay whenever I had so much as a cough growing up. I mean, moments later, I found myself in the pediatrician’s office. When my mom became sick, you know, those around her were not all that set up to really understand. What was going on?

I mean, we as a society today, we outsource so many different forms of literacy right? We outsource culinary literacy to GrubHub, to our apps. You know, we outsource financial literacy to our financial handlers. Health literacy is like—it's a huge, you know, area. It’s a huge unknown. We all collectively have these really scary knowledge gaps, which only become apparent to you when you realize how big these knowledge gaps are.

I've never recovered from finding out that the food pyramid was a scam. That was just—that was the degree to which that's a scam. I don’t know—is there a worse medical crime in history than that? No, I mean, telling Americans to load up on 7 to 11 servings of grains every single day? Yeah, and to find out that that was a market ploy by the Department of Agriculture?

They went against the advice even of their own consultants who warned them that they would produce an epidemic of obesity and diabetes— Oh, and not to say nothing of depression and dementia, which is exactly what we have now. Exactly! What do you even do when you find out that that's true?

And the unwarranted demonization of natural fat-containing foods, nutrient-dense foods like animal-source foods, which continue to be demonized even by the American Diabetic Association— Society. I don't remember. Still pushing the notion that diabetics can eat carbohydrates! Like, actually, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a very good idea since they’re converted to sugar, for example, and then they’re essentially glucose intolerant.

It's madness, and you know, with that demonization of these like natural whole foods, I mean, we live in a time where 60% of the calories that your average American consumes comes from what are called ultra-processed foods. So the antithesis to whole foods, right? So the idea that we’re still demonizing whole foods is insane.

Yeah, and it causes insanity too. So it's not just insane; it's a cause of insanity.

Yeah, I mean that is—not—what do you think of RFK, just out of curiosity? Because there—I'm sorry, that's a non-sequitur in a sense, but not exactly. Like, I've never seen another politician make an issue of health. Right, of general health at the level that we’re discussing it.

Obviously, COVID became an issue and public health is an issue, but Kennedy is the only candidate I've ever seen who's calling out the reprehensible, mostly corporate actors who are poisoning, well, everyone fundamentally. Yeah, and yeah, I think he's an incredibly important voice in that regard, and I hope that—no matter what happens in November—I hope that he finds a way to continue his advocacy.

I mean, I’m obviously, you know, completely aligned with the notion that we need to begin doing things differently. Well, what's the obesity rate now? What's the percentage of Americans who are obese? By 2030, one in two, and this is not just overweight; this is like frank obesity.

Right! And so the morbidly obese will be one in five.

Yeah, unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And obesity is a risk factor for everything—pretty much everything.

Yeah, and the cure isn’t fat positivity.

No, no, definitely not. I mean, you can be more or less healthy at any given size, but it's less healthy to be obese than it is to be normal weight. You know, I can understand the fat-positive people in one way. Before I learned what I did learn about diet, I was never particularly judgmental about people who are obese.

You know, I did—I suppose to some degree accepted the idea that fewer calories and a little more exercise—you lose weight, and perhaps that would—you know, some more willpower would be of use. I don't know if I ever really believed that because I dealt with people who had all sorts of different problems, and reducing it to something like inadequate willpower—yeah, you've got to be very careful about doing such things.

But now when I see obese people, I think it’s really too bad that you're ill.

Yeah, it is a disease, and I feel a strong sense of empathy for them because they’re essentially being gaslit.

That's for sure! Because what you hear over and over again is this idea that all foods fit; there are no such things as good foods or bad foods. And that might be true at a population health level. I mean, like—and there’s no single food that's going to cause obesity in an individual, right? It’s a dietary pattern of the over, you know, typically involving the overconsumption of these ultra-processed foods.

Well, you’re more likely to overconsume the foods that are—what would you say? Pathologically delicious?

Yeah, right! They are made pathologically delicious—the high sugar foods in particular. It's very difficult to resist them, and no wonder!

Yeah, there was a seminal NIH-funded study led by Kevin Hall, who's a highly regarded obesity researcher, who found that, you know, when you give people an ultra-processed diet to consume and you tell them to eat to satiation—it's called ad libitum feed in the literature—they end up consuming a calorie surplus of 500 additional calories. So, you do that every single day for a week, and that's a pound of fat gain every single week!

Right!

And conversely, when they gave them these minimally processed foods, they saw them eat to the same degree of satiety, fullness, but coming in effortlessly at a calorie deficit of about 300 calories.

So that's—that's an 800-calorie swing!

I wonder if that has anything to do with seasonality of grain, you know?

Well, because I’m curious—our initial agricultural ancestors, especially in colder climates, it’s like maybe you wanted to pack on an extra 20 pounds before winter hit, you know? So maybe that’s an evolutionary adaptation to ensure that from September to December, let’s say, that you took full advantage of the harvest.

So that if lean times come, it makes sense! Hey, because islanders who've been on islands for many generations are much more likely to become overweight on a North American diet.

And you’re much more likely to go through starvation periods on an island as a population.

And so people who are very efficient in their metabolisms or perhaps liable to overeat in times of plenty would have been people who survived. So you know—it’s interesting, right? If there’s a stable degree to which you’ll overeat high-calorie foods, that indicates that there’s a reason for that.

That’s not just random.

Yeah, so it's an adaptive survival mechanism! Those of us who are the most adept at putting on and storing fat would make it through the famine of winter.

Well, and you can see why that wouldn’t happen in the case of animal products because your cows, your lambs, your goats, etc.—they can survive the winter no problem! You don’t have a storage problem there, and you don’t have a seasonality problem, so there’s no reason to pig out, so to speak.

Right!

Okay, so let’s go back to your mother.

So one of the awful things about neurological diseases is that you're very damaged by the time symptoms show up. I’ve read with Parkinson’s, for example, the relevant neurological tissue is 95% gone by the time any symptoms appear, right?

So that's brutal!

So with Parkinson’s disease, by the time you are diagnosed with the condition, about half of the dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra are already dead, and those are the neurons that produce dopamine—that control movement and the like.

This is a condition, like many other chronic non-communicable conditions today—they don't begin overnight. They begin. You know, simmer; they’re simmering over a span of decades prior to the onset of symptoms.

Well, you can predict the probability of developing dementia with verbal fluency measures taken in people’s 20s, right?

Right. There’s a long-term study of nuns—they had fluency measures taken when they were very young. And so, that’s an early indicator of— we don’t know exactly what—is it that the dementia process is already occurring that young, or is that an indication that the neurological substrate is less robust?

It’s not obvious! Inflammation certainly plays a role in reducing cognitive function.

Being overweight—when people typically lose weight, they see an improvement in their cognitive function.

Yeah, well, you know, I looked for a long time into the literature pertaining to the maintenance of cognitive function across time because there’s a linear decrease in your fluid intelligence—so that’s g, essentially—the central measure of cognitive ability. It starts to decline in your early 20s; it's pretty linear, and so that’s a drag.

Then you might say, “Well, what can you do to forestall that?” There are many companies—none of which seem to exist anymore on the internet—that were claiming that daily cognitive exercises could increase your IQ or forestall cognitive degeneration, but the literature always indicated that your best bet in that regard was both aerobic and non-aerobic exercise because the brain has such repacious metabolic demands.

If you're physiologically compromised, then your brain’s going to suffer first.

So the best thing for your brain is to be a gym jock!

So that’s really hilarious, in a terrible way.

The less your business spends on operations, on multiple systems, and on delivering your product or service, the more money you keep. But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing—everything costs more. To reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle.

NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform and one source of truth.

With NetSuite, you can reduce IT costs, cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems, and improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform and slashing manual tasks and errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. Why haven’t you?

By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com/JBP. That's netsuite.com/JBP.

Okay, so you saw this terrible illness take hold of your mother, and that motivated you to what?

Well, I’d always been interested in fitness and nutrition privately. In fact, when I started college, my intent was to go into medicine, which I ended up pivoting away from when I realized that I really was a competent storyteller and creative person. I ended up switching to a double major in film and psychology in college, which, you know, in one hand kept one foot in the world of science as an undergraduate, but then also I really kind of fell in love with documentary film—the idea of being able to tell important stories.

And that was really my passion, and that's what led to producing content for this TV network backed by Al Gore.

So this is what led ultimately to my foray into the world of smart entertainment—essentially creating content, telling stories, investigating ideas that I felt were under-discussed. And when my mom became sick, I had this lifelong passion for nutrition and for health. I knew where to find quality primary literature, peer-reviewed research.

How do you know that?

Well, in part due to my passion for it. I’d been familiar with PubMed and all those sources. And then as an investigator, you know, as a journalist, I mean, the term journalism today, you know, it’s taken on a bit of a different meaning, but you’re of course not trained as rigorously as a PhD, but you are trained to identify sources that are credible and be able to parse them from sources that are less so. You’re trained to ask questions, to don a skeptic's hat.

Yeah, and those are the skills that I had when my mom became sick. I’m not saying that diving into the medical literature as it pertains to dementia prevention—this burgeoning field of research—was easy for me at first. It's not easy for anyone!

It's not easy for anybody, and also most physicians never do it. The public has an idea that there’s not a lot of distinction between a physician and a scientist, or they believe that physicians are scientists, and most physicians believe that, but they're not correct. Most physicians aren't trained to read research or assess it critically and certainly not to participate in this generation.

The reason I'm bringing that up is because there’s no reason to assume that if you’re a journalist and you have the cognitive ability and persistence to plow through the literature that you couldn't learn how to assess it. You can—it’s hard, because the science presupposes a pretty high level of pre-existing knowledge.

So often if you dive into a new field, you have to go back down into the simpler sources to just understand even the lexicon, but it’s not like it’s impossible.

Yeah, but that’s something that I actually quite enjoy. You know, I would read papers, and I would read the, you know—I started just reading the introductions and the discussions and the conclusions, and I would cross-reference.

If there was something that I didn’t understand—this is prior to AI—I would just cross-reference it in the hopes that some other scientist who is maybe more verbally fluent would have described the thing that I was interested in learning more about in a different way that would lead to it clicking in my brain that aesthetic “aha.”

But yeah, so that was just like a relentless passion that had become an obsession because I was seeing the consequences of how much time—how much do you think at that time, when it was a relentless obsession, how much time do you think you were spending every day doing that research?

Every waking moment.

And I was—for how long? For how many months or—?

It was probably a span of—I mean, it was a span of about six years prior to even the idea of being able to write a book.

That’s about the equivalent of an extremely rigorous master’s and PhD program—six years!

Well, that’s about the same, I would say, for people who really hit it hard. It’s six years of obsessive work!

Now, do you have any idea how many papers you read?

Thousands!

Yeah!

And I also—I’d become friendly with somebody who gave me their academic credentials to log in through their university library, so I could download papers for free.

Yeah, something that should be available to everyone since the taxpayer funds that research!

But then also, along somewhere early on in my journey, I realized that I had an aptitude for what I was doing. For, you know, my ability to not just digest and synthesize into a cohesive narrative what it was that I was reading, but that I was able to communicate in a way that, you know, I started to garner the respect of the physicians in the doctor’s offices that I would attend to with my mother.

Ultimately, I became fairly close friends and collaborators with researchers in the field.

So at a certain point—when?

This was around 2011.

Okay.

I started attending scientific conferences, and I started sharing what it was that I was learning. Yeah, it was just a—you know, it was a journey that was arduous at first, but I kept reading and reading and synthesizing and reaching out to people.

How did you support yourself while you were doing this?

It was very hard; I mean, I wasn't making any money. I actually, because of what my—what it was that my mom was going through, I was living in LA at the time—I ended up basically sacrificing my LA life and moving back to New York to be closer to my mom, to tend to her, and to, you know, in essence, become a caregiver of sorts.

Not the primary caregiver, but to help out with her. And this is what I was going to say. So I also, at a certain point, realized that I had something that very few civilians—very few civilians have, and that is media credentials.

So really early on, I realized that I could exploit my media credentials. I wasn’t famous, but I had been on TV, I was verified on Twitter, and I started reaching out to researchers and scientists whose work I had been reading to ask questions and to essentially get in the room with them, so to speak, to be able to, you know, if there were any lingering questions or I needed, you know, something clarified or what have you.

I ended up forging relationships with these researchers because they saw the passion that I had for understanding this topic, the relative dearth of awareness that there was around, you know, dementia as a potentially preventable condition.

And yeah, that was a journey that began at this point over ten years ago. But yeah, it’s been incredibly fruitful in the sense that not only have I been able to write these three books, but I actually got to collaborate with one of my mentors in science, Richard Isaacson, who’s a—a neurologist at Weill Cornell/New York Presbyterian who from day one has been, you know, really pushing this idea of—his name? Richard Isaacson.

Richard, would he be a good guest?

Oh, he’s phenomenal! Yeah, he’s a neurologist, he’s a neurologist who essentially helped to create the field that is now referred to as dementia prevention, back when nobody was talking about—back before the notion of being able to prevent this condition was even thought of as a possibility!

It was something that he was really advocating for and studying and raising funding for these clinical trials that he himself had run, and so I got to collaborate on a paper with him.

Oh yeah? That’s a good deal!

Yeah, published by Springer in 2019. It was a chapter in a textbook, basically an overview review looking at the clinical practice of dementia prevention and making that accessible to other clinicians.

Because as you referenced, you know, most physicians are in fact technicians, you know, and many, but not all physicians, are essentially have become paper pushers for the pharmacological—well, and you can understand that in some sense. I mean, before the pharmaceutical companies were utterly corrupt, they did serve an educational function for general practitioners, let’s say, who were overwhelmed by their practice.

And who didn’t have the time to keep up on the relevant literature on each disease, and that's not surprising, because that's really hard. But it does mean they can be captured, and that certainly happened. I mean, I worked with pharmacists for quite a long time—in the, I’d say, 2000 to 2010, something like that—watching how they were marginalized—and also with physicians, watching how the pharmaceutical companies educated and then captured them.

And that’s not a particularly pretty sight, although I do understand how it happened, and I can also understand the pharmaceutical companies' economic motives. It’s not inexpensive to produce new drugs; it's also very difficult, and they do have to be marketed.

So that’s all very complicated.

All right, so you wrote this chapter. That’s a hell of an accomplishment for someone who’s not a formal scientist.

And so why don't you let—well, we’ll go back to the Genius Trilogy, I think, in a moment or two. But I would like to hear now that we’re into this a little bit more about what you learned about the theology of dementia in general and about its prevention, because that’s going to be—both of those are going to be news to virtually everybody who’s watching and listening.

So, well, depending on where you look, the estimates are that at least 40% of dementia cases are attributable to what are called modifiable risk factors. So you know, you have your non-modifiable risk factors, which are age. You know, age is still the number one risk factor for dementia. Unfortunately today, gender—women are at twice the risk as compared to men.

And your genes—you can't change your genes; although you can change your expression, right? You can influence the expression of your genes, right? But those three things—age, gender, genes; you know, those are your non-modifiable risk factors.

But then you have about 12, if not more, modifiable risk factors. So these are the risk factors that essentially fall under your control—you have a degree of agency, and that is, I think, what is so exciting and empowering.

And so just to, you know, discuss a few of them—and happy to double-click on any that you find compelling, most compelling—you know, obesity for example, that’s one of them. We know that we have agency when it comes to whether or not we are obese, right?

There’s at least—it's potentially controllable.

Yeah, is it? Okay, so is it obesity per se, or is it—do you know if it’s directly related to pattern of fat distribution? Like, is visceral fat a worse marker for potential dementia than body mass index? Do we know?

Well, there is an association. So, as waist circumference grows, there seems to be an inverse relationship between total brain volume.

So there seems to be an impact of, you know, perhaps the inflammatory cytokines produced by that visceral obesity. We know that, you know, fat is an endocrine organ, essentially. And that the adipose that you accumulate around your viscera—I mean, that seems to be the most pro-inflammatory.

Yeah, right? Okay, okay, so that is the link; it's inflammatory cytokines with visceral abdominal fat.

Right. But also, even subcutaneous obesity is associated with impaired insulin signaling, right? So type 2 diabetes is another modifiable risk factor. We know that many people today are struggling with glucose intolerance, type 2 diabetes, or even pre-diabetes.

Well, we should be able to get that up to everyone suffering from it if we keep on the track that we’re on.

Yeah, I mean, I know that this is a horrible fact. So the blood sugar curves that are used to diagnose you as diabetic when you're 20 are age-adjusted as you age.

So if you take the typical 60-year-old and use the 20-year-old curves, many of the average 60-year-olds would be diabetic by 20-year-old standards or pre-diabetic, which means they’re pre-diabetic.

Like, there’s no reason for those curves to be age-adjusted as far as I can tell.

And so that's—that means that diabetes as a factor among people 60 and older is radically underdiagnosed. And if diabetes is a risk factor for dementia—which we know, because I've heard dementia referred to, for at least 20 years by people in the know, as Type 3 diabetes.

Yeah, right!

Actually, the neuropathologist who coined that term Type 3 diabetes is in my documentary, Little Empty Boxes, which she’s, to my knowledge, not been in any other public-facing content.

I thought that that was an incredible way to frame.

What’s her name?

Suzanne de la Monte.

She’s at Brown University.

And so it’s funny that more attention hasn’t been paid to her because that’s a big deal!

If it’s right, like it’s a big deal. Big deal!

So you talked about non-modifiable and modifiable risk factors, and we went through obesity and diabetes, which are also linked. What else? What else is modifiable?

Hypertension! So high blood pressure—about 50% of adults today have hypertension. We’re starting to see prehypertension in adolescents as well.

Oh good!

But one of the seminal studies in the field of dementia prevention is referred to—it's known as the SPRINT MIND trial, which found that when people with hypertension were aggressively treated via pharmacological means for their hypertension, they saw a dramatic risk reduction for the development of cognitive impairment, mild cognitive impairment, in fact, which is considered like a pre—a prodrome of dementia, a form of pre-dementia, if you will.

But we know that, you know, lifestyle modification—dietary exercise, for example—are all as effective as drugs, and when you're—when you have hypertension, essentially the blood vessels that are supplying blood, nutrients, oxygen to the brain are essentially damaged.

So, yeah, hypertension is incredibly damaging to the brain.

Are you tired of feeling sluggish, down, or just not your best self? Take control of your health and vitality with Balance of Nature! Balance of Nature fruit and veggies are a great way to make sure you’re getting your essential nutritional ingredients every single day.

They use an advanced cold vacuum process that encapsulates fruits and vegetables into whole food supplements without sacrificing their natural antioxidants. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar. The only thing in Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are well fruits and veggies.

Right now you can order with promo code Jordan to get 35% off your first order, plus a free fiber and spice supplement. There’s never been an easier way to make sure you’re getting your daily dose of fruits and vegetables.

Experience Balance of Nature for yourself today! Go to balanceofnature.com and use promo code Jordan for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice.

That’s balanceofnature.com, promo code Jordan for 35% off your first preferred order, plus a free bottle of fiber and spice.

You said there were 12; I think we should—can we go through all of them?

We can go through, yeah. I mean, those are the ones that I think are most relevant to diet. But I think it’s important at this juncture to state that diet is not the only—to say that nutrition is not the only variable here. So I'll never know what caused my mom's dementia, unfortunately, although it's a—you know, it's an investigation that’s going to continue on through the rest of my life.

But, you know, nutrition is one slice of the pie. Among the modifiable risk factors, you have, you know, non-nutrition-related risk factors such as exposure to excessive air pollution on a chronic basis, which, as of the 2020 Lancet Commission on Dementia, was finally acknowledged as being a risk factor for the development of dementia.

We’ve seen studies run in, for example, Mexico City, where they’ve seen pathological changes that are associated with Alzheimer's disease in the brains of adolescents and children. People who have died in Mexico City who have been exposed over the course of their lives to, you know, excessive levels of air pollution, like fine particulate matter PM2.5—for example, they see an undue aggregate of, you know, amyloid beta, for example, which is the protein that forms the plaques that are one of the defining inflammatory consequences too.

Does anybody know?

Yes, it is!

Yeah, there’s an inflammatory consequence; there’s a cardiovascular consequence to being exposed to air pollution. With regard to your cardiovascular system, we know that what’s good for the heart is good for the brain.

Conversely, what’s bad for the heart is bad for the brain, and so air pollution, you know, plays a major role. An area that I think is incredibly exciting, also very scary—but ultimately empowering—is, you know, looking at certain environmental pollutants, like certain industrial solvents, for example.

There’s a compound that—there’s another fantastic neurologist who has become a friend and colleague, and I think his work is incredibly important. His name is Ray Dorsey, Dr. Ray Dorsey. He’s a University of Rochester neurologist who has done a lot of work exposing the link between exposure to certain chemical solvents that are still widely being used in the United States, like trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, and the etiology of Parkinson's disease and related conditions like Lewy body dementia, which is the condition that my mom suffered from.

And so we know that, you know, what we breathe, what we eat—these are all having an impact on our health, but now the evidence is really starting to emerge that, you know, the brain does not sit in this privileged ivory tower where it’s immune somehow to, you know, what it is that we’re eating and the compounds that we’re, you know, inhaling.

The brain sits directly downwind of, you know, a lot of the insults that are being waged by modern life—modern living, you know—the trappings of modern society come at a cost. And we’re starting to see that they now have a likely impingement on our collective brain health.

So, you know, one of these compounds, trichloroethylene, which I just referenced, is still being used to spot clean in dry cleaning applications, and it’s an incredibly volatile compound. It readily evaporates; it easily infiltrates groundwater.

And obviously, occupational exposure to these compounds is really bad. But there have been a small handful of epidemiologic studies that show that exposure to a compound like TCE, for example, is associated with a 500% increased risk of the development of Parkinson’s disease.

This is a compound that was used medically up until the ’70s—it was used to decaffeinate coffee. It was used as an anesthetic for pregnant women. It’s still being used as a metal degreaser, and again, it’s used to spot clean in dry cleaning applications.

Now, I’m skeptical of all my suits!

Well, you definitely want to not dry clean or at least make sure that the dry cleaner that you’re using is a quote-unquote “green dry cleaner” because, you know, I think they’ll be less likely to be using these kinds of compounds. But it’s really scary stuff!

My mom was somebody who worked in the garment industry in New York City, and so, you know, she likely was exposed to these kinds of compounds on a regular basis.

Certain herbicides and pesticides we know are, you know, occupationally linked to these kinds of conditions like Parkinson’s disease. We breathe them in through our nose, right? And they have—they don’t undergo the same degree of detoxification as an ingested compound and can very easily bypass the blood-brain barrier.

You know, they act—the olfactory bulb—actually a decline in the sense of smell is one of the earliest features—a preclinical feature of cognitive decline, dementia, and even parkinsonism.

And so, you know, as far as these conditions are—these compounds are in our environment, I think that’s, you know, on the one hand, it’s very scary, but it’s also empowering. The more awareness that we can have about reducing our exposure to these compounds, I think it’s crucially important.

So that’s, you know, that’s another of the modifiable—

Yeah, that’s on the toxic exposure side, which I think is incredibly important.

My second book, The Genius Life, was really, you know, looked at that—or, you know, how much of the—how much of a overlap do you think there is between the dietary risk and the toxic exposure risk?

Because, obviously, well, and we’ll get into this after we’re done with this section of the conversation, but obviously, there’s the carbohydrate, diabetes, obesity link, but then there’s food toxicity link too.

Because lots of the things that we think are edible would rather not be eaten, and they have—well, I mean, I've known for years that the typical plant—people are worried about the pesticides that are on plants, and fair enough, but they're not nearly as worried about the pesticides that are in plants, and there are plenty of them, because, well, plants don’t like being eaten by bugs, and most of them aren't that happy about being eaten by us either, and so they have got very potent chemical defenses, and they’re not trivial.

And I’ve wondered because of my experiences with diet.

I mean, I lost a lot of weight because of the diet that I’m on, and I kept it off, and that’s quite the bloody miracle, that’s for sure! It’s really something to like—I weigh what I weighed when I was in my 20s, you know? That’s really something when you’re 62!

It’s like, what the hell? Who knew that was possible? And I have about the same bodily composition that I did when I was in my 20s, and some of that, obviously, is from not eating carbohydrates. But there are other improvements that I’ve experienced that have made me wonder—like I had psoriasis; it's gone!

And some of the psoriasis patches had lasted, well, literally decades, and they’re gone! And I think, oh well, I was obviously eating something that was causing that. Is that carbohydrate-linked? Who the hell knows?

But is it food toxicity-linked or immunologically allergic? I don’t know!

Well, I think that most people—and this is where the whole— the, you know, the debate about the carnivore diet and all that I think becomes really interesting. You know, a robust organism such as yourself should be able to consume some of these plant “defense” compounds and garner a degree of, you know, additional strength in so doing.

Right? There’s this notion of hormesis, where, you know, low doses of a certain stressor or toxicant, if you will, might actually cause a response in the system that actually leads to an up-leveling of robustness, of vigor, of strength.

Pharmakon means something like, "A little bit of the poison that kills you cures you."

Yeah, and so that’s where I think if you have a robust, for example, gut microbiome, you know, I think that most people should be able to derive value from these kinds of—of—that’s the theory.

I mean, when you look at the average health state of the typical person, it makes you wonder!

Right! And I’ve wondered how far down the rabbit hole you have to go to get to the bottom, given how obese people are, and well, what I’ve seen as the consequences of a relatively radical dietary shift.

So, well, that’s obviously one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today. Let’s turn then—we went through quite a few of the modifiable risk factors—let’s turn from that, if that’s okay, unless there are any others that you’d like to specifically highlight.

We could turn to what you have been—what you found in relationship to diet and what you’ve been recommending.

So, are there other modifiable risk factors that you think are worth concentrating on?

We went through diet and exposure to pollutants and toxicity—anything else that’s directly relevant?

Yeah, well, there’s a newly identified risk factor, and that is hearing loss.

And that’s, you know, again, newly identified. So all the research that we need to make clear recommendations—other than if you have hearing loss, a hearing aid actually can be a potential boon to health.

Oh! So it’s actually the loss of the auditory input?

Yeah, and not a correlation between the degeneration of the ear and the degeneration of the brain—or both?

No, I mean, I think insofar as we know that social isolation—which is another—yeah, you become more and more isolated, you know, in your own world, and I think that that’s probably harmful.

We have depression, sure!

Depression is another one, uh-huh.

And you know, these estimates are typically conservative. So I said at the onset that about 40%, which was the number that was given, you know, most recently in this 2020 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention.

But I think it’s very likely that the majority of cases—at least with regard to Alzheimer’s disease—and likely also even these Parkinsonian conditions, which you know it’s becoming increasingly clear that there's an environmental toxicant aspect to them.

I think that the majority—and this is just my opinion based on my assessment of the literature—are likely preventable. We don’t have all the data yet, but I think given what we do currently know, we don’t have to sit idly on our hands.

You know, for example, there’s a class of drugs that are widely being used today on a frequent basis called anti-cholinergic drugs, and there are too many to list, but certain, you know, allergy medications, sleep aids—over-the-counter sleep aids have been seen as associated with a starkly increased risk for the development of dementia, which is not something that was considered in this paper.

So, you know, I do think that most cases are potentially preventable.

And another reason why I believe this to be the case is that Alzheimer's disease is not genetic. You know, we have genetic risk factors, the most well-defined mind of which being the APOE4 allele, which about one in four people carry.

Depending on whether you carry one or two copies of this SNP, your risk increases anywhere between two and 14-fold.

But these are not a deterministic gene. So with Alzheimer's disease, 23% of cases are—the early-onset variant or familial is deterministic, but the vast majority… Early on, there’s a certain genetic mutation that in certain lineages will essentially guarantee that a person develops Alzheimer’s disease.

But this is a very rare form of it, and it's a completely different monster than late-onset sporadic Alzheimer’s disease.

Similarly, with Parkinson's disease, the heritability of Parkinson's disease is incredibly low. One to two percent of cases!

So these are all conditions that are, I think mediated in large part by, you know, your environment. You might have a certain genetic predisposition, but, you know, for the vast majority of people that develop these conditions, it’s not due to their genes; it's due to the interplay between their genes and the environment in which they live.

Right, right, right.

Okay, so let’s turn to diet now. You have these three books, and then I—we don’t want to forget your film either.

Yeah, yeah. So these three books in The Genius Trilogy—foods, life, and kitchen. Let’s go—if you think that’s reasonable, let’s go through them one by one: Foods, life, and kitchen.

So Foods. So what were you outlining in that book?

Yeah, so you know, I think my approach has never been to demonize foods, certainly not whole foods. But with Genius Foods, I—you should tell people what a whole food is, just so they know!

Yeah, so whole foods don’t have extensive ingredients lists; they are the ingredients!

So these are the foods that you tend to find around the perimeter of the supermarket!

Right, as you alluded to, it’s the—stay away from the inside of the supermarket!

Yeah, I mean, you could dip in, you know, now and then to pick up some nice extra virgin olive oil, which has a ton of evidence in terms of its, you know, brain health benefits.

We now have meta-analyses that show that extra virgin olive oil actually has a profoundly anti-inflammatory effect, and it shares some of these mechanisms with ibuprofen, which is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.

But chronic use of that drug coincides with heightened risk for cardiovascular events, for example. But extra virgin olive oil is essentially, you know, as an anti-inflammatory—it's like a low dose of that drug, but without any of the negative side effects. Only good!

Okay, so you could go to the aisles in the supermarket for extra virgin olive oil, but that’s vinegar, spices.

Spices are actually—it’s a few people realize this, but spices, aside from being a, you know, no to low-cal way of jazzing up your food, are actually some of the most concentrated sources of some of these hormetic compounds—you know, polyphenols and the like, which we believe play a role in supporting a healthy gut microbiome and the like.

But yeah, generally you want to focus your shopping around the perimeter of the supermarket!

And so I’m a huge advocate of the consumption of whole, animal-source foods and whole plants, which is a very controversial statement to say today.

I don’t know why, but you think it’s controversial?

Well, because we’ve got billions of dollars of—

You know, right. So it’s not controversial; it’s just anti-propaganda.

Exactly, right! With the advertisements being a form of propaganda—yes, although they’re the capitalist version of propaganda.

Yeah, I mean, 73% of the items in your average supermarket are ultra-processed.

So what’s the difference between processed and ultra-processed?

It’s a fantastic and important question! So processing is a continuum. You take an apple; you slice that apple. You’re processing it to some degree.

You know, you blend those apple slices in a smoothie; you’re processing it even further.

Right? The ultra-processing—the whole idea of an ultra-processed food—the term was first devised with this nutrient profiling system in Latin America called NOVA. An ultra-processed food is essentially a food that you couldn’t possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried.

So these are Cool Whip…

Yeah, these are food-like products!

Food-like products!

That’s right, that’s a good one!

That involves—they’re sort of like food, except they’re not edible!

Exactly, yeah!

I think, like we’ve gotten to this place in society where we seem to have ceased to be able to put empirical definitions around anything!

Yeah, right!

Yeah, that's what happens when you live in the Tower of Babel, really. Words lose their meaning, and everyone speaks a different language. It's incredibly anti-human, right?

That’s for sure!

And so, okay, so ultraprocessed—you okay? So you couldn’t make that in your own kitchen? That’s a good rule of thumb!

So if you couldn’t make it in your own kitchen, then perhaps beware of it or be wary of it! Right?

If it comes in a box or a bag, it has, you know, a shelf life that is years away.

If it doesn’t expire, so nothing will eat it except you, then maybe don't eat it! Precisely!

Yeah, and you know, I think a little bit here and there—I like to be a pragmatist. I’ve had the incredible privilege of getting to go on major national media, where I get to reach people that still do, today, live in food deserts.

And so, yeah, I try to temper my message with empathy for, you know, what some people today still in this country have to go through when it comes to finding and accessing and being able to afford even fresh, whole food.

Right, right.

Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever! Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business—from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the “did we just hit a million orders” stage!

Shopify is there to help you grow! Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions!

Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout—up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms! No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level!

Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/JBP. Go to shopify.com/JBP now to grow your business, no matter what stage you’re in. That’s shopify.com/JBP!

Two things—tell people what a food desert is so everybody knows, and second, do you actually think it’s possible to just eat a little bit of ultra-processed foods? Because I’m very curious about that!

It isn’t obvious to me that, like, my experience with that has been that it’s easy to eat none rather than some, because the problem with some is that, well, how about some more?

Yeah, right!

And that’s really a vicious conundrum when it comes to high-fat, high-sugar foods!

Yeah! Because they’re hyper-decadent.

Well, this is where I think the education around the—you know, this topic is crucially important, because people are usually not armed with the knowledge that these foods have a profound impact on your behavior.

So it’s seldom informed consent today! Because we’re told that all foods fit; food is food. There are no such thing as good foods or bad foods!

Yeah! All calories are equivalent!

Yeah, and so people think that it’s a moral failure when they go to the freezer, they take out the pint of ice cream, intending only on having a spoonful, and before they know it, they’re looking at the bottom of the pint!

Yeah!

It’s not due to moral failure; that’s what you’re programmed to do! In fact, that’s what food scientists are paid lots and lots of money to make sure you do!

To make sure that you do, yeah!

Now, is it possible, if you’re able to understand the impact that these foods have on your behavior and cultivate a, you know, “healthy relationship” with them?

Yeah, I think it’s possible, but it’s just very difficult.

You know, well, our rule in dietary modification has always been, don’t have it in the house!

Yeah, right!

Because you’ll eat it! It’s especially if you’re hungry!

Precisely! It’s like that ’90s horror movie—the— I don’t know if you’re familiar or you saw that movie, but it’s like once you open up those floodgates, it becomes really difficult, if not impossible, to pump the brakes.

So with regards to not being able to pump the brakes, let’s say, do you know if—let’s take sugar as an example. One of the things I’ve been curious about, because I know that microorganisms, they’re very sneaky little things, and they can affect complex organisms in ways that are in some ways horrifying and unimaginable, and so I wonder, do you know if there’s any evidence that a sugar-centered gut biome contains microorganisms that produce sugar craving?

Well, I don’t know of any hard evidence, but I would say that it’s unlikely!

I mean, we know that we know that the—the enteric nervous system, the gut, communicates with the brain!

Yeah, well also, those organisms would have a distinct advantage. If they could make their host crave what they need to survive, then they’re going to live!

And there’s lots of evidence that such things are possible in the natural world—not only possible but actually quite likely!

So, yeah, and also your body gets used to what it is that you feed it regularly, and it starts to crave the things that you feed it regularly!

You know, sure, you can see that with foods like olives, and coffee, and alcohol, I suppose, even!

Yeah!

No child likes their first olive, right? You have to cultivate the taste, and it’s partly because the taste and reward systems are quite interesting in their relationship because each—the satiety system and the reward system are separate from the taste systems, which you can tell because you can eat something to satiety, and it still tastes the same, but you don’t want it anymore!

Now, you could imagine a system where the more ice cream you eat, the less you can taste it until you can’t taste it at all, so you quit!

But that’s not how it’s set up!

And the satiety and reward systems are somewhat separate for each taste category!

So when people say, “Well, I still have room for dessert,” what they mean is, well, I’ve satiated the, like, umami system for protein, but not the system for carbohydrates or sugar.

And then that system is also modifiable by learning.

So, you can learn—it’s weird—because when you learn to appreciate olives, bitter foods really fall into this category because they’re very difficult to like on first exposure.

Who? You have to cultivate the taste, and it’s partly because the taste and reward systems are quite interesting in their relationship.

Yeah, right? The satiety system and the reward system are somewhat separate for each taste category!

So when people say, “Well, I still have room for dessert,” what they mean is, well, I’ve satiated the umami system for protein but not the system for carbohydrates or sugar.

You know, and then that system is also modifiable by learning.

So, you can learn—it’s weird—because when you learn to appreciate olives, bitter foods really fall into this category because they’re very difficult to like on first exposure.

Yeah!

You have to cultivate the taste, and it’s partly because the taste and reward systems are quite interesting in their relationship.

Right!

So you can actually learn to crave the things that you don't initially like.

Sounds somewhat nuts!

But maybe we’re designed to be adaptable in that manner to survive in various environments.

So, you know, everyone kind of has their starting point, and there are people who are more sensitive or less sensitive to different flavors, and that potential palatability can evolve based on your exposures.

Yeah!

That said, the typical taste spectrum also lies heavily in your emotional state, and if you think about someone who’s struggling with obesity or addiction, they might still cycle in and out of that food context based on their emotional state—which is something that you addressed.

Right!

As well, the sensory experience can transform at your level of health and well-being, and this is so because—inevitably, a healthier gut microbiome is likely to enhance nutrient diversity over time.

Exactly.

Often today we wouldn’t put much emphasis on that process!

And that’s what I was going to say about the non-resilient populations—you have now added issues of diversity.

So now, you introduce new elements, and if your body isn’t resilient, well, I think that also underscores the need for moderation in your diet!

You should have at least a starting point to provide yourself with adequate nutrition.

And often, the average person is lacking the basic sources, and that’s really evident when we look at obesity trends.

Right!

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, what 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!

And it's not something that I would ever behold anybody— here’s the other thing is that diet zealots, particularly today on social media, they seem to be very emotionally invested in what other people eat. I don’t care, ultimately, what other people eat; I just want—

The same way about that, you know, at 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?

Yeah!

Or overt activism, for that matter!

Yeah!

Or, you know, misinformation or disinformation about what it means to eat healthily today—I ultimately don’t care, you know.

If somebody wants—

Otherwise known as lies!

Yes, precisely!

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 gut microbiome, who, you know, I think people should be able to tolerate and not just tolerate but to derive 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 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!

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’re not going to find 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 risks!

You know, if an elimination diet, where you remove all fruits and vegetables for a time, helps—I think that’s amazing.

Well, that’s a good, useful thing to discuss procedurally.

I mean, when we were trying to address my daughter's immunological problems, which my wife was on at a very early stage because she intuited that there was a dietary relationship, but it turned out to be so complex!

I mean, we couldn’t have possibly imagined that eating nothing but meat was the solution—like who in the hell is going to ever think that?

I knew that fasting was a reliable treatment for arthritis, and that’s well-documented in the literature. Virtually everyone who’s arthritic, if they fast, they go into remission, but then when they start eating, the symptoms come back.

And so, well, and maybe that’s not true if all they start eating again is red meat, but those studies haven’t been done, and still haven’t, as far as I know.

We had tried Michaela on some different elimination diets, but they made no sense.

Like, the food classes that were eliminated and kept seemed random to me and, well, and to Tammy and to Michaela.

And she started to experiment—they started to experiment with more radical elimination diets. And by trial and error—and also because Shawn Baker came to experiment with only beef, which worked!

And we’ve talked to hundreds or maybe thousands of people now who have tried variants of the carnivore diet and had radical—especially weight loss transformations.

Like, I talk to people at my lectures all the time, and they’re shell-shocked, because they’ve lost like 150 pounds in 18 months!

And so, they’re not even the same people physically! And well, they’re happy about it, obviously, but also completely—they're shocked by the fact that that worked!

Now I would say—and you tell me what you think about this—is that if you are suffering from chronic health conditions, especially if you’re also overweight, an elimination diet is worth trying, on the off chance that something you’re eating is causing your symptoms.

Because who knows?

And the simplest elimination diet is obviously just beef!

Yeah!

So why not go down to one variable? And if it doesn’t work, like we’ve talked to many people, and I know people say, “Well, anecdotes aren’t data!” It’s like, “No, but they’re hypotheses!”

And many of the same anecdotes start to look a lot like data!

So anyways, we’ve talked to many people who’ve reported remission of their diabetic or arthritic symptoms within two weeks of an only beef diet!

And so we are thinking that it’s more like three months is a good trial, and if it doesn’t work, well, okay, the loss is some restriction for three months, and that’s about it.

And it’s—it’s not like it’s easy; I’m not saying that!

And you may suffer some complications in the transition to the new and more restrictive diet, but you can live on just beef!

So, like, what the hell? If you’re half dead and radically overweight, three months isn’t much of a risk.

And so I’m wondering, what do you think about that line of logic?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, I think you’re right. And in the sense that beef is—it's an incredibly nutrient-dense food!

It’s highly satiating!

Yes! It’s loaded with protein, obviously! You’re restricting the consumption of large swaths of the most problematic foods accessible to a modern human today.

And so it doesn’t surprise me that, at least in the short term, you're going to see an improvement!

Yeah!

And so I guess my question is—and I think Shawn Baker is very smart!

Yeah!

But I had him on my podcast recently, and I posed this question to him: like, you're performing already at such a high level on beef, and I don't doubt that you're healthy—you seem healthy!

And monster.

Yeah!

And I’m not going to gaslight somebody who’s on, you know, a carnivore diet and asserting that they’re thriving on it like, who am I to say that you’re not?

Right, yeah!

But you know, my question to him was, okay, so you’ve established that this diet is working well for you—why not add in some of these foods that we know have compounds that, you know, might be lacking in beef?

Yeah!

Or like, might give you an additional benefit, you know?

For example, like an all-meat diet might not have very particularly high levels of magnesium, which we know, you know, plays hundreds of roles in the body, right?

Everything from, you know, repairing DNA damage to energy synthesis to—like, it’s a co-actor that, you know, is required in the synthesis of ATP, for example.

Some of these carotenoid compounds that I mentioned earlier, like, yeah, you’re getting—those are definitely open questions!

Yeah!

Maybe they’re getting a small amount of them in your meat-on diet, right?

But maybe a little bit more might, you know, give you an additional cognitive benefit!

And we’re just playing, like, nutritionism here with these, like, individual nutrients that have been studied that I can reference that I know about, but there are swaths of nutrients in the plant kingdom that, you know, have been identified as playing—as having a potential benefit to human health.

Even something as innocuous as white rice, right?

Where it’s had all the anti-nutrients sloughed off, right?

Like for somebody who’s, you know, such a physical specimen as he is, like, maybe adding some carbohydrates into that system might get you a little bit of additional glycogen in the tank before, you know, ‘cause he’s still trying to, like, break records, a madman.

The best possible way!

Yeah!

Maybe that might, you know, be adaptive!

So I can understand that I guess the—my criticism of that to the degree that a criticism is warranted is that it’s extremely complex, too.

And this contradicts to some degree something I said earlier: you know, that you could reduce to a carnivore diet and then add back—it’s very complicated to add back!

Right!

You really have to think like a scientist, and you have to be very disciplined, you know, to experiment with one thing at a time in addition and then also to figure out, well, how do you know if it’s helping?

Like what's your measure and over what time frame?

You know, so like I’ve tried to add things back to my—I added salmon back to my diet, and it turned out that it made me anxious, and I have no idea why!

And it’s a pretty robust effect.

And it took a fair while to manifest itself!

And so you have these terrible complex problems with adding things back, which is—

Well, maybe if you added phytonutrients, for example, of the sort that you were describing, it would take a month to see a difference, and it would be hard to measure except in certain circumstances!

So, like, how do you know?

And that’s the problem with any scientific investigation.

And the advantage to just eating beef is that it’s really—it's simple, right?

It’s like, no, just do this!

And, I—it wouldn't surprise me at all if there would be ways of—I could imagine—that there would be ways of improving your diet beyond what you would get with merely meat.

But man, it really—it’s a conundrum to figure out how to go about doing that!

Yeah, well, everybody’s—the other thing that I think is important is that there’s really no—there’s no such nutritionism hat; there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all pattern that’s going to work for everybody!

And you know, in your family, you obviously have—you know, you have these health concerns, which I think are important to acknowledge, and to, you know, and to recognize.

That you’re a scientist, and you’ve done the work, and you’ve found this one diet—this diet that works for you, kicking and screaming all the way.

And I think that’s amazing!

But, you know, for somebody who, who is not immunologically compromised, right?

And who, you know, was born vaginally, and who didn’t take a ton of antibiotics growing up and was breastfed and who hasn’t, you know, traveled all around the world and had infections and surgeries and things like that—that, you know—these are all like—it’s death by a thousand cuts today!

And so you throw into that milieu chronic, chronic sedentary lifestyles, which, you know, have a negative impact on the gut microbiome.

We know that, you know, obviously an ultra-processed food diet has a negative impact on the gut microbiome.

You know, all of these industrial chemical additives also play a role.

We’ve lost resilience in the gut, I think, and that’s why so many of us do seem to do better, seemingly, on these, you know, incredibly restrictive elimination diets!

Well, we’ve changed our cooking habits dramatically too!

I mean, slow-rising yeast doesn’t produce the same bread as fast-rising yeast!

Right, it has a longer time to break down the gluten, for example.

And so a lot of the traditional ways of cooking things that made them edible have been replaced by rapid, cheap—

Which is advantageous!

Factory mechanisms, but you know, we have no idea what we left behind in consequence!

And so it may also have been that 40 years ago or 50 years ago, when people were cooking more traditionally, things were a lot more edible than they are now.

Now, I would also say—I don’t know what you think about this—like, because I don’t know the science in this, you know, as the world has urbanized and as the cultures have mixed, a much more diverse range of food products have become available.

Now, you might say that was advantageous, but I also wonder about that!

Because, you know, I noticed, for example, when I moved from Montreal to Boston, I developed allergies!

Well, I developed allergies to oak leaf mold!

There was no oak leaves and no oak leaf mold in Canada, not in any place I had been.

And so I moved somewhere that was a completely different environment, and I was not immunologically prepared for it!

I just—I guess I wonder too—is it possibly a consequence of the fact that we can eat so many diverse things that weren’t available before? You know, people would have had their traditional diet and really not strayed beyond that.

Like, I can remember—certainly, I can remember the first time I had Mexican food! You know, I was probably 16 or 17, and that was a real foreign cuisine—which is a strange thing to contemplate now!

I kind of grew up on German, English, and Ukrainian food!

Right?

And certainly, Chinese food was also foreign and not common. We had a Chinese restaurant in this little town I grew up in, but that certainly wasn’t a staple!

So, I know that, in principle, hunter-gatherers had a quite diverse range of food products at their disposal, but they would have been eating those habitually from day one!

They wouldn’t have been introducing new foods along the way.

So do you have any thoughts on that? Do you know anything about that?

Well, what grows together goes together, typically!

Yeah!

And yeah, but I don’t think as a species we would have made it this far had we not been as incredibly resilient and adaptable as we are capable of being, right?

You know, I think we’ve never had to live in factories though!

Yeah, that’s for sure!

That’s an environmental novelty!

Yeah!

So I think—I do think that, that there is—we’re meant to be resilient! You know, the idea that, you know, so many of us statistically—you feed—you take a hundred people and you feed them each a peanut, one or two of them is going to die!

Yeah, right—

From a peanut!

I don’t—I think that that’s a mal-adaptation!

And I think it’s probably due to the fact that, you know, we’re doing many things wrong!

And so, okay, tell me what happened with your mother and then tell me how you eat!

Yeah, well, you know, she—it was really sad. She, for eight years, struggled with Lewy body dementia.

And for most of that time, I was there with her, just a concerned son trying to do what I could to help improve things. But one of the earliest insights that I was able to glean from the literature, which is I think counterintuitive and most people are completely unaware of this, is that, you know, these—as we alluded to earlier, these conditions don’t begin overnight—they take decades to manifest!

So, you know, essentially dementia and many of these kinds of conditions that are now saddling modern society—these are diseases of midlife with symptoms that appear in late life.

But by the time you’re diagnosed with dementia, I mean, you’re essentially in the late stage of that disease!

Right, right!

And that’s why Alzheimer’s drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate.

Because you’re trying to treat the condition, you know, well past the point at which, you know, a simple pharmacological solution is going to have any sort of practical impact!

Right?

So even if the thing is, is that at that point, even if the drug stops the disease cold, a tremendous amount of damage has already been done!

Already done!

So it not only has to stop it; it would have to heal it!

Yeah, I mean—and that’s hard with neural tissue!

Yeah!

Yeah, I mean, you know how are you going to get back the 50% of dopamine-producing neurons, you know, in the substantia nigra?

Right, right!

Like you’re just not!

And with Alzheimer’s Disease, by the time, you know, a person is diagnosed, you know, one of the salient features of Alzheimer’s disease is what’s called glucose hypometabolism.

So this plays into the type 3 diabetes, you know, as it’s been termed—that by the time you’re diagnosed with the condition, your brain’s ability to derive energy, to create energy from glucose, which is its primary fuel substrate, is diminished by about 50%!

And the brain is a ravenous consumer of glucose; it makes up 25% of your basal metabolic rate despite only accounting for 2 to 3% of your body’s mass!

So it’s a ravenous consumer of energy, and so any power outage in that organ is going to lead to failure! And so by the time you’re diagnosed, you know, that’s already, you know, starkly diminished!

And so, yeah, it wasn’t—it wasn’t really positive!

I mean, in every doctor’s office, what I experienced with my mom, I’ve come to call “diagnose and adios.”

And, you know, a physician would essentially prescribe a new drug or titrate up the dose of something that she was already on but minimally effective, if effective at all.

By the time my mom passed in 2018, she was on 14 different pharmaceuticals, and there’s no physician on earth who can predict the way these 14 different drugs interact!

No, not even two! Probably not even two!

Yeah, certainly not 14!

Not even—God knows!

And so the level of toxicity—

Right!

Which isn’t to say if there was that blockbuster drug that came along that I wouldn’t, you know, be first in line at that time to fill that prescription for my mom.

But it’s just very unlikely to be the case!

In fact, there’s, you know, there’s all kinds of fraud, you know, within the field of Alzheimer’s drug research that, you know, came out a couple of years ago, which is something that was incredibly disheartening.

There was a paper, you know, published in 2006 for example that was like completely fraudulent!

Finally, actually over the past week, in fact, they finally are pulling that paper!

They’re retracting the paper, but