#215 Optimizing for a Genius Life w/Max Lugavere

Max Lou Guevara is a man on a mission much like myself to help change the way that we think about food and the way that we think about Healthcare. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Genius Foods. He's got another book in the works as well and it was great to sit down and talk shop with Max.

Max hey, what's going on man?

Showing man, it's good to be here and to finally get to to co-create some content with you. You know, we I agree. We've got a lot of mutual friends. I'm a big fan of the show.

So thank you brother. Yeah. Yeah, and we got introduced originally by our publisher, right? Well, yeah isn't Karen the first one to to make that ya got intro.

We're like we're labelmates. Is that the term

we it's kind of like Eskimo brothers, but it's

much less sexual thing. Well, I mean God that the the edited the writing process the editing process. It's like an intimate you feel like you're tearing apart like it's true fibers, you know, it's to put up

again. I remember I was talking with Ryan holiday when I was finished the first draft of the book and you know, he's like, yeah, you know probably got a smooth them things out and you know get it all tie and he's like smooth things out we're talking about a skin graft here bro. I know smoothing anything out after the first draft. This is going to be fucking an

evisceration. Oh my God. Yeah. It's I mean the irony is that we both talked about

Obviously and wellness, I mean writing a book is probably one of the least healthy things to do because you're sitting you know or standing I mean, but you can be sedentary while you're standing obviously and just the amount of stress and time sedentary and you know, it's a lot it takes a toll.

I mean I was I would spend right right right right circle circle like a mad person just thinking walking and then right right right right Circle. Yeah food and caffeine, you know have tobacco of right right right shit, right you guys like the weirdest lifestyle when you're in and I had to go all the way in like the people who can like write two hours a day and finish a book like I don't know that's that's like a leprechaun to me. Like I don't know who how that person exists. Yeah. It takes me two hours to even get my tone and get where I was back in the book. It's like going into a cave dive.

Yeah, you know, I got to get back to depth hundred percent and it's draining and it's you know,

I find myself spending hours sometimes on just like one sentence or even a paragraph days even I mean I you know, I've like had to like give up on trying to finesse, you know, certain paragraphs in my book and then I've had to sort of come back with fresh eyes because you just got burned out, you know, like your brain you only have so much cognitive capacity to focus on the same thing before you lose objectivity, you know, you're just like yeah, it's it actually is probably an altered state of consciousness that you go into. You know, it's like sort of flow but then I feel like you reach a point where it's not Optimal Performance anymore. It's just like you and the ego and the self-criticism and it's hard writing is difficult and you do it in isolation.

It's a weird form of flow because sometimes it can flow but there's also the Watcher that's always available and like one of the key elements of like a true flow state is The Watcher goes away but like the Watchers still seems to stay present when you're riding because you're like having to keep things.

In line, there isn't like doesn't necessarily always feel like radical Freedom. Yeah, especially in a book like the book. So we write I mean lots of citations lots of research lots of like it's different than like free writing a journal entry or my newsletter or sometimes I can just fucking let those rip, you know poetry occasionally will come out. Yeah, very flowy but like a 400 citation research heavily researched bucket like nope. Yeah, that's not going to be flow man that exactly a fucking a little bit of flow intermixed with a lot of

grind. I know. Yeah, I mean, there's like constraints. I forget who it was it said it but you know, you want to try as much as you can to write drunk and you know drunk can mean whatever, you know, whatever substance or state of mind you need to be in to achieve that sort of ego dissolve but then editing, you know is best on sober. I think that's where you go over it in your like did what I said just make sense. Yeah, does it does it pass like

Muster because you know, I mean the thing that I worry about when writing is people can take any sentence, you know, which is actually commonly done in the media today. And it's one of the reasons why everybody is so sensitive they take they can take a sentence out of context and you want to make sure that everything that your writing is like holds up to Snuff, you know, and that you're not saying that ridiculous because they got because they'll pick that

one little piece out and then out of your whole argument and then they'll blow that up and then you'll die by this one thing that you said terrifying it is and then probably with you and your process. I mean, there's probably foods that you had some colloquial wisdom about that you thought were like, oh, yeah. This is a good one. I'm going to write about this ingenious foods and you go to the research. You're like damn that food wasn't as good as I thought it was and then conversely some other ones because I was learning shit like that when I was writing my book all the

time. Yeah. So I mean nobody knows this, you know, you're the you're like, I think the first person but I'm now in the process of finishing up my second book so genius Foods when I wrote

His Foods I had been obsessing over the content in that book for about four years prior to writing it. So, I mean a lot of the content ingenious Foods. I knew like the back of my hand. I mean it was just stuff that I'd been regurgitating and talking about and lecturing about and I was working on a documentary am working on a documentary on the topic. So it was all very familiar content and obviously, you know, a lot was sort of left out of Genius Foods in regard to the lifestyle. I sort of consider it to be a nutrition Bible, right, you know a care manual for the human brain, but my current work is more sort of lifestyle and you know, that is a whole new research process for me because it's like uncovering all the things that are also important when it comes to the mind-body connection. So it's a lot of work, you know, yes, it's reading research and cross-referencing and interviewing people and but it's amazing. Like I'm just I'm so humbled and grateful that I get to do what I do like you get to do what you do and where we're in an amazing space.

We've been able to I don't know just be perennially curious and find a feedback loop in our reward system that allows us to do what we love for a living. It's

amazing. Well your book isn't that much of a secret because I went to look at genius foods and they also are already promoting genius life on Amazon. So it's out there. Yeah it mannequin out there. It's always wrong with the 2020 release date and everything. Yeah, so that's out there in the world. So if you want a super early pre-order, yeah, you can get in on that. Yeah, the genius Life The Genius life, but you had a you had a really important family reason that drove you into Gene these Foods in the first place. Right? Like that was like one of the driving factors having to do with your mother.

Yeah. I mean actually I was just talking to Ryan before we got started. I was like almost about to cry thinking about it. I lost my mom six months ago. And the reason why I do what I do and why I wrote genius foods and why I'm writing my next book is because

As I lost somebody who was very important to me not just very important the most important person in my life my mom and about eight years ago. She began to show the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a form of dementia and she was very young. She was 58 at the time and I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease, you know, like most people I think are familiar with Alzheimer's disease. It's the most common neurodegenerative condition and many people kind of assume that it's an old person's disease. You know, it's I don't think it's uncommon to have a grandparent with the condition. But when my mom, you know, initially started to show these changes that caught me in my entire family off guard we couldn't chalk it up to aging because my mom was not old she was blond hair and you know, she had all the pigment in her hair. She was very youthful and she also had gate changes meaning the way that she moved and

Seem to seem to you know, take on subtle changes and me and you know, at first my family we went to different neurology department with her starting in New York City. But ultimately when we couldn't find answers in one hospital, we broadened out the search and it led to me going with my mom to the Cleveland Clinic and to Johns Hopkins and ultimately what I experienced in every instance with my mom in trying to find answers trying to understand why my mom was showing these these strange symptoms. I've come to call diagnose and audios and that's because the tools that mainstream, you know, Western medicine has to treat neurological condition as complex as dementia are very limited. And so what would what would often happen, you know would be a physician would prescribe some, you know, unpronounceable new drug to my mom and ultimately send us on our way in none of those instances was diet or lifestyle broached.

And as somebody who's always been passionate about health and nutrition and science when my mom wasn't was first diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition at the Cleveland Clinic after the initial trauma subsided and you know, I had a panic attack. I was you know, the fear in the helplessness that I was feeling for my mom. I basically kind of rolled up my sleeves and went to work digging into the literature and I had an ability that I think few people in my shoes and going through that with a family member had and that was I had media credentials. So I started as a journalist, you know, I had no sort of academic background in science. I was you know, I'm not a medical doctor, but I had worked for news and information TV network for six years a really sort of lauded one. It was one co-founded by Al Gore and you know, we covered really serious topics and when my mom got sick, I basically kind of exploit it all the skills that I had gleaned.

That TV network to try to reach out to scientists and reach researchers around the globe to try to get up close and personal with the research because I mean just on my initial perusal of PubMed. You know, what I what I began to read in the literature was ass was a stark contrast to the kind of Bleak desperation that I was experiencing those doctors

offices. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I just became I became like obsessed. You know, my mom I was I was watching my mom have more and more trouble with daily chores just moving around the house and it was it was just horrible to see and one of the most shocking things that I that I discovered is that

The most common form of dementia which again is Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain decades before the first symptom and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody listening because when we look at, you know, all of the kinds of chronic non-communicable diseases that are now burdening Society cancer type 2 diabetes heart disease, none of these conditions bubble up overnight and similarly with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of Dementia or you know, neurodegenerative conditions when you show up to the neurologists office. I mean, that's probably a decades-long disease process that manifest by the time you walk through your doctor's door and so that to me became a really strong it was like a call to action, you know, because I I'm I knew that I myself and I'm a pretty well read person. I knew nothing about Dementia or Alzheimer's disease when I first started and I certainly didn't know that that the window that there's such a long window in which we

To in a way influence our cognitive Destiny and so I took it upon myself to read and research and speak to these scientists and begin putting out information to help my fellow pure, you know, that's that's really what it all became about for me is helping people and one of the most amazing things so I mean like, you know, I've created all this content, you know genius foods, but probably the most the most incredible thing about it is that I've actually been able to influence research and partake in studies as well as lecture Healthcare professionals. So I've lectured as a you know, in a continuing medical education I've been able to talk at very prestigious academic institutions like the New York Academy of Sciences and all that stuff and it's you know, kind of unbelievable that I've been able to do this but on the other hand, it's not that unbelievable when you consider that most medical doctors get an afternoon of nutrition training. So there's like this huge knowledge

Gab and I don't know I just think where the brain is concerned. We should be doing a lot more and we can be doing a lot more to protecting our brains. I don't think that I don't think that that's gonna

I'm going on a you know, a little bit of a tangent, but I think that we've suffered as a society because we like to Outsource, you know various aspects of Our Lives, you know financially, we love to Outsource our finances to our bankers and financial literacy is a lost. You know, it's something that's been lost on Millennials now thanks to food delivery apps we can get our food, you know, we can go to restaurants. Nobody knows how to cook in our generation or few people do and health is just one more type of literacy that I think we love to just like outsourced to our you know, our doctors. Our nutritionists are registered dietitians. And I

don't think was the one random person with the six-pack that exact number Ten's no stuff exactly like the

celebrity influence or right like and her fit T So, yeah, so I mean like I just I think like it's kind of a it sounds like a crazy idea but I think that Healthcare is really something that begins with you, you know, it's something that like

You're practicing health care when you're pushing your shopping cart, you know around the perimeter of the supermarket and you're avoiding the aisles which is where all the packaged processed foods lie in wait tempting you write your it's health care when you're debating with yourself whether or not you want to get off your butt and go to the gym after the you know, the crazy day that you you had had that's what it is because when we get, you know, by the time we show up in the doctor's office, it's sick care. Yeah, and and you know again like I don't think that I don't think the medicine mainstream medicine is setup to really treat effectively the kinds of conditions that we're now seeing just like an overwhelming amounts.

Well, I think this is the this is the sign this is the Bellwether that's showing us like hey something is wrong in our system and you know, unfortunately the way that human beings work and in the individual and the collective often times, we need things to get a little fucked up before we realize like, oh we better do something. Yeah, like I even eat even think to on a totally different subject even Environmental.

I like some people are kind of getting fired up but it's not quite bad enough here in the US for people to care enough. Yeah, you know what? I mean? Like we can show some straws fucking up some sea life and like a few things that are happening that you know, kind of get the people who are particularly motivated to do something but like unfortunately, it's probably going to have to get worse and I think we're already at that point in the Healthcare System. Where is that bad? Yeah with the conditions are bad enough. We're now it's like okay, we got to take a fresh. Look at this Paradigm because the people we love like people like your mother people like we all have these people in our lives that are being affected, you know dramatically, so and that it could have been prevented by diet lifestyle a lot of these things most of the time

100% a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, I love the term Bellwether that used I you know, I consider my mom sort of the canary in the coal mine for the Western diet and lifestyle again. I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative condition and

Deeper inquiry, you know, we did, you know some 23andMe work, but ultimately most people that that will develop dementia. They don't have what are called determining genes. They have genes that influence one susceptibility, but it's really about the way that the environment interacts with your jeans right genes are not Destiny,

but they do help

determine what the standard American diet and lifestyle will do to you. Yeah, so it's on I think that's perhaps frightening but it's also very empowering and and that's really where I think you know, it's up to us each and every one of us like medicine is great. I was pre-med in college. I have you know utmost reverence for people that make it through medical school and that come out on the other side and are out there trying to help, you know, treat patients and helped them, you know come off their drugs and and and you know attain healthier diets and Lifestyles, but you know medicine was really remarkable back when like the

When they discovered, you know, when scientists discovered penicillin, right and one pill could basically save your life and help avert pathogenic disease from knocking you from taking you out. But today we're experiencing different kinds of conditions that are wrought by Decades of eating poorly and being sedentary and not effectively managing our stress and not sleeping well and we show up after doing all that to ourselves to a doctor's office and we expect them to undo the Decades of damage that we've done to

ourselves. Yeah. Now look if you got chlamydia go to your doctor. Yeah. That's great. I got a great fix for that. Right, you know like you don't need to go to your Supermarket to fix your Lydia. What are your doctor? Yeah, but if you're talking about something that's like important, you know, like maybe that's take a more holistic view of the human organism. Right? Like it's not and I think that is an important Point like we're not saying that there's no purpose for Western Medicine. Of course, there is core service, you know, and it plays a nice it plays its role nicely, but when you become so wildly, depending

On that and then the fear mechanisms that are at play that you're even afraid to stray from that standard course of action, you know, because if your doctor doesn't say it, then you're afraid that if you don't follow your doctor's orders like there a magic Genie something bad's going to happen, right? It's just empowering people to have information and understanding that can help influence the decisions that they're making it something like Travis Kristofferson is doing as well when he's talking about restricted ketogenic diets both in conjunction with chemotherapy and independent of chemotherapy treating like over ninety percent of cancers and is now becoming adopted but guess what most of these on colleges aren't even looking at that research. The research is fairly new even if they are pairing it with chemotherapy like they're not recommending a ketogenic diet to go along with it. Even though the efficacy rates go way up. It's just we have to understand its fallible these the People Are People and if they're ingrained in pattern and been doing the same thing for a long time, they're not necessarily pouring over the journals. They're not

Necessarily purveyors of the highest mental flexibility and willingness to admit when they're wrong and something they haven't been doing something that they could have been doing. Like they're people people have egos people have time constraints people have all kinds of stuff. So like empowering everybody to have that information I think is fucking

vital. Yeah hundred percent. I mean cancer is tricky right? Like there's different types of cancers different genes, you know, certain cancers might be amenable to a ketogenic diet other cancers might not so it's just, you know, I think we need to support the science and the research but we also need to empower ourselves when it comes to you know, living in a way that at least at least cuts are risk, you know and especially when doing so is safe and it takes the power away from like the I don't know like the the monsanto's of the world, you know, which not that I'm a conspiracy theorist or anything like that. But at the end of the day like these corporations like don't have your back so I mean, that's why it why I'm

Is willing even if the science isn't fully there yet to defer to the more natural. Yeah holistic

approach. Well, the risk/reward is way in your favor because there's no risk.

Yeah, it's all reward. Yeah.

Okay. You want to try a ketogenic diet for a couple weeks? Well, the reward could be really high. What's the risk? Yeah. Nothing metabolic health is your risk for aquatic? What do you like? What are you worried about here a hundred pennies. So it's that's a it's a cool way to look at things. Whereas if you taking a antidepressant or you're taking some other drugs like suicidality homicide ality. These are fucking side effects of some ssris and some other different drugs. The side effect homicide reality is a side effect of change fucking Chantix. It's which helps you quit smoking cigarettes. Like that's an unacceptable side effect. Yeah. I'm sorry a hundred percent and they shouldn't even be considered side effects. There are facts, you

know, when they're inconvenient, they're called side effects, but I mean, they're just as much

Facts as the purported benefits of those drugs and you know my own experience with medicine with my mom is that you know doctors are very quick in cases of dementia to prescribe, you know pharmaceutical treatments for them, but they're not very efficacious, you know, obviously certain drugs are great, you know, and I'm very sensitive to the fact that some people are on drugs, you know, different Pharmaceuticals not by choice and some can help certain people obviously so, you know, I don't place any stigma on them. But again, I just think it's really expecting a lot to to think that a single pill is going to come out and and undo the Decades of you know, siphoning the standard American diet and being sedentary. It's just it's a tall order and I don't think that there's any mono therapy that can contend with the kinds of insults that were faced with on a day, you know day-to-day basis in my

Book I call it the Hunger Games essentially where you know, the modern brain is basically being assaulted from every conceivable angle, whether it's the ultra packaged processed junk Foods or the industrial additives included in those processed foods. I've recently become really kind of interested in endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment everything from plasticizing compounds to heavy metals to Flame retardants. I mean, you name it to the fact that you know,

we named retardants in our food so our food doesn't catch fire. Yeah.

Yeah. It's it's crazy. I mean these compounds are massive environmental toxins. They end up in our streams. They bio accumulate they're used in pesticides herbicides things like that.

And so what are the results of this endocrine disruption? So what are people what are people experience

Yeah, so basically like your endocrine system

Is the is the network of hormones in your body that guide everything from how you feel to your behavior to development and you can think of insulin which is something that we all know of which tends to respond to carbohydrates in our diet. But there's growth hormone. There's two saw stirone. There's estrogen there's ghrelin which controls our hunger signals and they're involved in pretty much everything. So endocrine-disrupting chemicals are dangerous because they can essentially mimic these hormones in the body and there's this raging debate about whether or not the levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals that we are exposed to are having an impact. But what makes them unusual is that unlike most toxins where the dose makes the poison

The tricky thing about endocrine disrupting chemicals is that they can have what's called a non monotonic dose response. So take any toxic chemical or any chemical for that matter and at increasing doses becomes increasingly toxic right at a high enough dose even water can kill you right? But generally when it comes to compounds like arsenic or you know, any other type of poison, it's assumed that at a high enough dose. It's gonna be harmful but at a dose below that maybe your body is able to contend with it in some way and certainly many there are many compounds found in our produce that are toxic but actually affect us on a positive in a positive way because they serve as hormetic stressors to the body sure the problem with with endocrine disrupting chemicals is that their toxicity curve instead of being linear can be more u-shaped and that's what's dangerous about them. So what that implies is that they might have a dose an effect at a certain dose and then below that they might go quiet for

Bit whereas at a very low dose might actually begin to affect the way the hormones in your body work. And so that's called non monotonicity T and because they have this on you. First of all toxicologists didn't think like didn't think that a toxicity curve like I was possible up until recently and there's still debate about it. But that's one of the reasons why these plastic chemicals like BPA bisphenol a or phthalates which are found in everything from Plastics to fragrances to you know, our clothing basically been able to subvert political and even scientific scrutiny because just finding the dose at which they become biologically active is so so tricky and also they become active at different they're more potently active at different times in one's life. So for example, if you're developing you might have a much more pronounced response to these chemicals, whereas if you're an adult it may be different and not only that but these chemicals are

Are ubiquitous now in the environment, right? So they're affecting animals. It's just

and how do you devise? How do you devise a study for that? Right because you're talking about years of exposure and you would have to isolate placebo group that didn't have any exposure to that and how fucking hard would you have to police them not get influenced by some of these chemicals that are somewhat ubiquitous in the normal food supply. It would be a very difficult clinical study to do so, you have to look at these things more in the Aggregate and kind of look at different ways to do it rather than the classic scientific model that we've become accustomed to just because the to devise that study structure would be really really onerous to try and figure out well you do you

could not study them in humans, but I will tell you that the environmental working group recently published a study where they found that in umbilical cord blood there were up to about 300 industrial chemicals found that shouldn't be there, you know, so I'm not came a phobic like I'm not afraid of chemicals.

You know that are difficult to pronounce but these were chemicals that are related to plastic and the burning of garbage and things like that. So they're just they're everywhere. And ethically I don't think that these chemicals can really be tested on humans. So we're all just part of this unwitting Grand experiment and you know, I think the fact the fact that they've become so increasingly ubiquitous is one of the reasons why I mean we see rates of cancers increasing I mean, so most of these compounds mimic the hormone estrogen are called xenoestrogens and BPA is a fantastic example of that BPA was actually originally identified as being a xenoestrogen when researchers were looking for a pharmaceutical that they or a synthetic compound that they could use to treat female problems like problems with menopause and PMs and things like that. And so it's been known for decades that BPA mimics. The hormone has estrogen

And so yeah, it's just It's Tricky, but after I lost my train of thought but it was yeah, it's just pot. It's just it's just crazy. Oh, so yes, so so cancers that are related to the hormone estrogen, right? So today a woman's risk of developing breast cancer a woman's lifetime risk is about one in six fifty years ago. It was one in 20, so the odds are increasing and it's just like, you know cancers are rampant. A lot of them are obesity-related but even obesity there was a really interesting study and I forget the journal that I came out in but it was very recent where they found that a person today to reach to maintain the same weight as a person 50 years ago would have to consume fewer calories or work out more. So we have all these compounds that are like affecting our hormone systems. And and yeah, there's no concrete answers, but it's definitely worrying, you know, so I hope that we can find a way of studying all this stuff.

But generally like in lieu of of that sort of research. I've definitely made it a point in my life to avoid plastic, especially when I'm storing my food or cooking my food, you know, you want to keep your food away from plastic use glass you want to buy furniture. If you have the choice without flame retardant chemicals in it flame retardant chemicals in our furniture. So, I mean, this is like what's crazy and flame retardant are also commonly found in children's clothing which is again very dangerous, but these chemicals were added to our furniture because smoking in the household used to be a major thing where somebody would be hanging out on the couch and their cigarette would fall out of their hands, you know, where they pass out and it would send homes Up in Flames. And yeah and you know thousands of lives were lost and so rather than find a way to deal with that from the tobacco side from the from the cigarette side, they put pressure on the furniture industry to cover their Furniture in these endocrine disrupting chemicals. And so

mattresses are big one for that. I think that happens

Dries of yeah, you know mattresses that are more natural. Now that have kind of come on in the market and I talked about a lot of these anti-nutrients in my book too and some of them are like really fucking nefariously mind-boggling like so like Velveeta type cheese, like yellow cheese. Well, it combines like yellow number six with sodium benzoate and that's shown in clinical research to cause ADHD like hyperactivity and in kids right like so like you're making kids foods that cause add and you're wondering why that's on the rise. You know what I mean? Like there's this all this stuff when you start to look in those are even approved. They know they're putting that shit in there. Yeah, and then there's the stuff that they don't know that they're putting in there because it's being polluted through the streams in the air and the clothes that are you know, the absorption rates were talking about like we were talking about this before the podcast don't even know why we're talking about it, but talking about scrotums being highly absorbable. Yeah for four different transdermal think so you put on you know, you put on your kids underwear your

Diapers right? Like I don't know what the fuck diapers are made out. I don't have kids. But if I did yeah, I started looking into that shit because there's probably some bad Plastics and some fucking flame retardants in those diapers and you're putting them straight on your kids fucking paint. Yeah, and they're probably absorbing some diaper shit. It's insane. Well, not the shit. That's that's normal but diaper stuff. Yeah, you know what? I mean? Like, there's stuff all over like we gotta just be aware and then take those equal opposing countermeasures to eliminate those things and then also start adding in some really good shit stuff that improves our detoxification Pathways. I mean, I'm sure this has to be one of the cornerstones. I thought you had one of the coolest terms and it was nutritional

Psychiatry. Yeah, right

like that has to be one of the cornerstones. Not only just okay. Let's eliminate some of the bad stuff. Let's start like adding in some of the good stuff. Yeah hundred

percent. I mean, you know eating a diet that's high in produce and provides ample antioxidants and minerals actually elbows out in the digestive tract room.

For the absorption of heavy metals also gives your body the stimulus for its own detox compounds like glutathione and also stimulates the production of those compounds which you know helps your body detox Benzene a Creole in all, you know, all these kinds of environmental pollutants. It's a yeah, so eating a healthy diet, you know getting getting ample antioxidants and especially fat soluble antioxidant. So my passion is brain health and you know fat soluble antioxidants are of particular relevance to the brain because the brain is made of fat and it's not just made of any type of fat. It's made of a fat that is highly prone to form of damage called oxidative stress. So you take the fact that 25% of your metabolism is being harnessed to create energy in a container the size of a grapefruit and that there's all this preponderance of delicate polyunsaturated fats like DHA fat arachidonic acid. These are all, you know, very prone to this this oxidative process.

Yuki compounds like vitamin E carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin and they help your brain basically defend itself. So, you know, these are critical but yeah, it's a it's super interesting, you know, like the fact that there's all these compounds in the environment were being affected from every every possible way. I'm I promote the consumption of organic food not that organic food is perfect in any way, you know organic food is not devoid of pesticides. So I like to be very, you know, I like to tell it how it is, but I still think it's the best chance that we have and often whenever I make posts about like the benefits of organic food I get what I call evidence Nazis like commenting on Instagram that are like, you know, we don't have the evidence that organic food is any safer or healthier? And so those same people would comment when it comes to plastic compounds that you know, we don't have the evidence that these compounds are unsafe, you know, for example, but my argument to people that are that are

Optical is where's the evidence that they're safe? You know, that's why I always take the perspective that we should that the the last time a product or supplement or a compound has been, you know exposed to human beings. The more the burden is the more the burden the higher burden of proof is placed in my opinion on those on those compounds that they need to be proved safe, you know. So for me, it's their guilty until innocent

until proven innocent. Yeah. Now I make sense. All right. So what are some things people listening to this? What are some like real tactical things that people can do, you know, obviously they can get your book read it get the full gamut. But if you had to like hone down to a couple different practices that concern foods and things that they can do with their diet like what would you recommend?

Well, I think the key is to focus on nutrient density and in particular, you know, what's good for the body is going to be good for the brain, especially the cardiovascular system. So, you know, I'm a big fan of dark leafy greens. They're rich in carotenoids again, the protector skin eyes and brain from oxidative stress research out of Russia University found the people who consume a big bowl of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger on cognitive tests. So that's a rule that I lay out for myself to just eat a big salad every single day.

So I've been talking with Max about all of the different foods that we can utilize to help up regulate our performance and health and we've been talking a lot about our immune Health but there's other elements performance that foods can help with and if you've read my book, one of those things is nitric oxide production. That's our blood flow. That's the ability to deliver blood not only to our muscles but to our sex

Get so there's some great foods for that beats pumpkin seeds dark chocolate Swiss chard arugula. Some of these are the great foods that help with nitric oxide production. But if you want to take it even farther, you can go down a supplement path and we've created what is in my mind the very best nitric oxide enhancing supplement. We called it total and oh, it includes the fermented beats and also the amino acids that can help up regulate your nitric oxide production as well. So whether you want to crush it in the gym or crush it in the bedroom or wherever you want that increase circulation and blood flow the total n o is the jam so go to on a.com slash Aubrey save yourself ten percent even though this product is new as shit and get you some it's fucking rad. It's something that you got to have on your shelf because it's dope trust me. It's one of my favorite products. So on a.com slash Aubrey total n. Oh,

So what do you think about the oxalic acid kind of issues that have that have come up from things like kale and swiss chard and

spinach and yeah, I mean, I just don't I think it's again a dose makes the poison right now. I don't I think that if you're eating a large salad every day, you're at no risk, you know, there's always these case studies that emerge like there is one published. I think it was the New England Journal of Medicine where a lady in China was consuming two kilograms of raw bok choy every single day and you know with cruciferous vegetables, you can sort of out-compete the entry of iodine into the thyroid and you can basically grow a greater. You can become hypothyroid for that reason.

And so I think it's you know, you can

consume I mean in my view there's you know, all these people in the carnivore Community now that I'm sure would love to would love to argue with me, but I think you can consume too much meat in saturated fat. You could also consume, you know, too many vegetables. I think it's all about balance with the caveat that you know, I'm not

Big fan of this whole like everything in moderation idea. I think when it comes to foods, like grass-fed beef wild fatty fish, you know salmon and particular pasture-raised eggs and cruciferous vegetables, like broccoli nuts seeds things like that. I think you really want to sort of have them all, you know in your in your diet, you know, because when we barbecue beef for example, grass-fed beef, I would consider a superfood but we also generate potentially harmful compounds when we grill beef, right? So there is Advanced glycation glycation end-products heterocyclic amines that we create other potentially carcinogenic compounds, but those become less of an issue when you have plants in your diet. Yeah, so it's really all about incorporating both in a way that makes

sense. You get a do you get a bunch of vegans that argue with you and your like

I do? Yes, they're very vocal their vocal minority thankfully, but I'm you know, if you choose to be vegan for ethical reasons.

Ends, that's not a debate that I choose to engage in. But I feel very strongly that an omnivorous diet is not only ideal but I think that I think that vegan diets. I don't know. I'm just not not a fan of them and I will say that my mother who had horrendous Health. She was a low she never ate meat. She never ate eggs. The only time I ever saw her eat meat was perhaps some lean chicken breast. My mom was always very afraid of developing heart disease. So she was which ironically she never developed but she was very tuned in to the messaging surrounding, you know, what constituted a heart-healthy diet for the 50 years that she was kind of forming her ideas about mediation. Yeah