The Gut-Brain Connection with Max Lugavere

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Coming up next on StarTalk Special Edition, we’ve got Max Lugavere, who’s a health and wellness journalist and an expert on all manner of connectivity between the food we eat, the body we get as a result of it, and what effect it has on our mind.

Right on up through, dementia is ultra processed food of force operating against us.

Check it out.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Special Edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Chuck, how are you doing, man?

Hey, Neil.

What’s happening?

All right, Chuck, professional comedian and actor.

Of course, Gary O’Reilly, Gary, former soccer pro.

Hey.

Always good to have you.

So, what have you and your fellow producers cooked up for this episode?

It all starts tragically, but not too tragically, I hope, but with a family illness.

Our guests put their media life on hold when in search of answers.

So, here we have Curiosity.

Years of investigative research led to the New York Times’ instant bestseller, Genius Foods.

That was followed by Genius Life and third book, Genius Kitchen.

Let’s meet our guest, a podcaster, a filmmaker, author, and wellness journalist, plus a TEDx speaker.

And probably in a minute, we’ll find out much, much more.

Neil, Max Lugavere.

Max, welcome to StarTalk.

Big fan.

Thank you so much for having me.

Good.

So do I trust Gary’s pronunciation of your last name?

Yeah, he did a fantastic job.

And that’s how I’ve been hearing it, actually.

I was in London for a week, just up until two weeks ago, and it was really fun being there for the first time.

And shockingly, I discovered, this is very new research, that Alzheimer’s disease and dementia is now the UK’s number one cause of death.

So I was there talking about the role of nutrition in brain health, and it was my first time getting to explore London.

It was a blast.

You have a good time?

I did have a good time.

You know, as I mentioned first, it’s a great city, great food, which I wasn’t quite expecting.

Not known for that.

Yeah.

Not known for that.

It didn’t used to be.

There’s no restaurants in town that say, British cuisine.

Yeah, that means mashed potatoes, sausages, fish and chips, baked beans, and then you’re done.

You’re kind of done there.

So Max, this portfolio of expertise, did you come to it through your roots as a health journalist, a wellness journalist?

Yeah.

So I always like to be very clear upfront.

I’m not a medical doctor.

I didn’t go through the traditional academic channels.

I started my career as a generalist journalist.

I worked for Al Gore for six years for a TV network called Current TV.

And then my mother got sick at a very young age and I became obsessed with trying to understand everything I possibly could about the role of diet and lifestyle in brain health as well as mental health.

And I’ve published a lot of literature, as you have mentioned, three books on the topic exploring the intersection between our diets and our lifestyles and disease outcomes, brain health, et cetera, et cetera, which obviously are geared towards lay audiences.

But I’ve also had the privilege of getting to co-author academic work.

So I got to co-author a chapter in a textbook geared to clinicians in a handbook on the neuropsychology of aging and dementia, on the clinical practice of dementia prevention.

And then I also have gotten to work for Medscape, which is the largest publication reaching doctors all around the world.

So, yeah, medical health and science journalist is sort of my professional title, but I create content.

I have a podcast.

I go on television, again, to lay audiences and I’m largely an autodidact.

But despite that, I’ve gotten to do really incredible stuff.

I lecture around the world on this topic and it’s fun.

But the reason why I got into it is because, again, at a young age, my mom got sick.

And so that is my why.

And she passed away four years ago, but trying to understand why she developed the rare form of dementia that she had has become really my life’s purpose.

And so you like the word genius because it’s in three of your books.

Genius and your podcast, a genius life.

So no one doesn’t want to be a genius.

So that’s quite the magnetic draw for potential audiences out there.

So let’s start out by asking, I guess you would say there’s some foods that are good for the brain and some foods that are not.

Now, I’m going to take the very naive view.

The foods I like from my brain are the ones that taste good.

Because then I’m happy and my brain and my mind, if I’m happy, I’m happy, right?

So I have French fries or kale.

When I’m done eating the French fries, I’m happier than when I eat the bowl of kale.

But I’m betting that’s not the kind of thing you’re talking about.

Yeah.

Well, first off, I do want to address the genius aspect of the titling nomenclature that I’ve used.

And part of the reason why I chose that is not to say that I’m a genius and that I have some profound secret insights to offer, although I do like to think that at times.

It’s really that I wanted to create the ultimate sort of nutritional care manual for the brain, the ultimate dementia prevention roadmap.

But I realized that young people wouldn’t be interested in such a topic.

And one of the most startling insights that I discovered when I set foot on this journey was that dementia often begins in the brain decades before the first symptom, 30 to 40 years prior to the first symptom.

So in my estimation, this is very much like a millennial topic that we needed to be talking about.

And so I started looking at food.

I’ve always been a big nutrition junkie.

And so with regard to your dilemma, your French fry and kale dilemma, yeah, French fries are generally speaking, well, there’s a continuum.

Like food isn’t necessarily food, right?

Like fat isn’t fat, protein isn’t protein.

And French fries can be made really healthily if you’re using an air fryer or if you’re using, if you’re using a type of fat that is chemically-

Or if you’re using spinach.

Yeah.

If you’re using spinach to what?

To fryer-

To make your French fries.

There you go.

No, I’m talking about authentic, original McDonald’s lard-fried-

Lard-fried French fries.

Yeah.

I mean, unfortunately, McDonald’s today, they’re not frying their French fries in lard.

I’d be somewhat, I think, more amenable to French fries fried in lard because instead what they use are these ultra-processed, refined, bleached and deodorized seed oils, which oftentimes are sitting in the fryers for days.

Now, these oils, if quote unquote fresh, they’re never actually fresh because they’re so highly refined and processed.

But just for all intents and purposes, if they were changing these fryers regularly, we’d have less of an issue.

But unfortunately, when these oils are held at temperature, they generate really nasty compounds like certain aldehydes, which we know are potentially mutagenic and damage the energy producing mitochondria in our cells.

And they create trans fats, which we know there’s no safe level of trans fat consumption.

And so I think that’s combined with the fact that french fries tend to be hyper palatable.

They imbue this characteristic that food scientists refer to as hyper palatability.

They’re almost impossible to moderate our consumption of those foods.

I think that’s really where the problem tends to lie.

But you can make french fries at home using tallow or if you wanted lard.

I mean, my personal favorite and I think probably the healthiest choice would be an unsaturated fat like, you know, avocado oil or extra virgin olive oil.

Extra virgin french fries are amazing.

Yeah.

My 10 year old makes them in the air frying toaster oven that we have.

And by the way, the same way you can make the french fries, you got to do is slice those same potatoes very thinly.

And in the exact same way, you can make your own fresh potato chips, baby.

I will never buy another bag of potato chips again.

Oh, oh.

You’re lying.

Max, what are the Genius Foods?

Because there’s got to be like a police lineup of the good guys and the bad guys.

So let’s hit the good guys.

Yeah, absolutely.

So when I started looking to the literature, I really wanted to rather than like come out of the gate with the foods that people ought to be avoiding, which can be really overwhelming.

And I think kind of it’s a that’s a pretty common trope in the in the diet industry.

You know, diet culture tends to really love to vilify foods.

The genius foods are the foods that you should actually adopt and embrace and consume more of.

And so these are foods like avocados, which, you know, living in California, I’m kind of preaching to the choir.

But generally, avocados are an incredible brain food because of their abundance of fat protecting antioxidants like vitamin E and carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin, which we’ve known for decades can help protect the eyes against age related macular degeneration.

We now know that these same compounds actually accumulate in the brain where they protect the brain from oxidative stress.

They boost something called neural efficiency, meaning suggesting that your brain might actually, if we consume more of these, work less hard to achieve the same tasks.

They also can boost visual processing speed, according to research out of the University of Georgia.

So avocados are tremendous.

I’m also a huge fan of eggs, you know, eggs, no pun intended, have taken a beating over the past couple of decades.

We saw what you did there.

He’s here all week.

I’m here all week.

Yeah, but the egg yolk is literally one of nature’s multivitamins.

It contains a little bit of everything required to grow and sustain a healthy brain.

I mean, it’s no wonder that egg yolks contain cholesterol, which has been the vilified nutrients in question for, you know, since probably the 1970s.

The brain is made of cholesterol.

25% of total body cholesterol is housed in the brain, which accounts only for 2% to 3% of your body’s mass.

Now, I’m not saying you need to consume cholesterol for brain health.

Your brain produces all the cholesterol that it needs in a process called de novo cholesterol synthesis.

But all that is to say, it’s no wonder that egg yolks contain an abundance of cholesterol because it’s there to help grow a brain.

So eggs are amazing.

They contain choline, which we see in older men.

There was a study that found that even if you were genetically at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, the highest level of choline intake was associated with a 30% risk reduction for the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

So eggs are tremendous.

So if you’re rich, will caviar work as a substitute for eggs?

Ooh, yeah.

I like this.

I actually like this question because caviar provides a form of docosahexaenoic acid, aka DHA fat, which is one of the most…

New world alert.

Yeah, new world alert.

There you go.

So that was getting my…

Learning how to pronounce that accurately, that took a…

Sing it again.

He was showing off.

Docosahexa what?

Enoic acid.

Enoic acid.

Enoic, yeah.

You know it.

Yeah, that’s it.

So yeah, DHA fat.

It’s one of the most important structural building blocks of the brain.

We typically don’t consume enough of it in the context of the standard American diet.

And fish eggs, like caviar and salmon roe, ikura, in Japanese restaurants, is actually a wonderful source of DHA fat.

And in particular, it’s a source of DHA fat in what’s called a phospholipid format, which is like plug and play to the brain.

It just gets sucked up by the brain and integrated into cellular membrane.

So it’s a great…

Now I’ve heard of DHA fat in certain kinds of cold water fish too.

Is that the case?

Yeah, exactly.

So wild salmon, sardines, mackerel, great source of DHA fat.

Now, people will look to…

Especially today, there’s this push towards plant-based diets, which I think is…

If you choose to be on a plant-based diet, by all means, do it.

I just aspire so that I hope that people have the full breadth of information before making a choice like that.

A lot of people will look to flaxseed oil or chia seeds for their omega-3s, but men in particular are very poor at converting plant-based forms of omega-3s to their usable form in the body, which is one of those important omega-3 fatty acids, it’s DHA fat.

So, I prefer to get it from fish, Chuck.

I don’t blame you.

Just back up for a sec.

So you make a point, but I don’t want you to just skip by it.

You recognize that just because you eat a molecule doesn’t mean that molecule retains its molecular form and then gets used by the body in that state.

There’s a lot of molecules we eat that we decompose and reassemble according to the body’s needs.

So, just because you know a chemical is used in the brain, why should consuming that chemical automatically mean it lands in your brain to do just what you think it should?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

I mean, we shouldn’t assume that.

I mean, so, DHA fat, you can get it in…

There are multiple forms that DHA fat appears in the diet.

So, typically, we ingest it in its triglyceride form.

That’s how it’s found in fish.

But then, krill oil, salmon roe, for example, have it in the phospholipid form, which is thought to be more bioavailable to the brain.

And a lot of people on plant-based diets will look to alpha-linolenic acid or ALA, which is a plant-based form of omega-3s.

So it is assuming that we all transform this plant-based compound to its usable form in the body.

But that’s actually not correct thinking because we all are different and we all vary in our capacity to transform that compound to its usable form in the body.

There are enzymes like the delta-5 desaturase enzyme and there are minerals that are rate limiting in this process.

So, you know, in the nutrient-deficient standard American diet, I mean, it’s leaving a lot to chance and where our brains are concerned, that’s not something that you want to leave to chance.

You want to make sure that you are, I mean, essentially what I call the set it and forget it method.

You want to make sure that you’re ingesting preformed DHA fat, preformed EPA fat.

People of different genetic backgrounds, people with different genders, for example, like men are worse at this than women.

Women are about ten times more effective at converting ALA to DHA, which is thought to be an adaptation to support child rearing.

And so, yeah, you’re absolutely right, Neil.

We can’t just like, you know, we want to take the guesswork out of this.

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So, what evidence do you have that your mother’s condition, which launched you on this quest to associate food and nutrition with brain health, what evidence do you have that had she eaten differently, for example, that her condition might have been delayed or ameliorated entirely?

Like, is there, because you can’t just load people up and do brain experiments on them, right?

This is unethical.

Not yet, but let’s come on now.

No, well, we are starting to see, first of all, that rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia are increasing across different age groups.

So this is not just the oldest old.

This is not just a function of the fact that we are living longer.

In fact, we’re actually dying longer.

We’re spending more of our years with disabilities saddled by chronic disease.

But then you see that the standard, well, first of all, actually there’s a lot of ways to approach this and I think it’s a fantastic question.

So one of the most well-defined Alzheimer’s risk genes is called the APOE4 allele.

And we carry about one in four of us carry it here in the United States, right?

And in the United States, that carrying whether you carry one or two copies increases your risk anywhere between two and 14 fold.

It was recently revealed that Chris Hemsworth, for example, on a show that he did, carries two copies, right?

So that’s a dramatic, you know, risk increase.

But risk is correlation.

And these studies to ascertain the degree of risk increase are all performed here in the United States.

If you were to look to another part of the world where say Ibadan, Nigeria, where they’ve done this, they see the same gene frequency.

So again, roughly one in four people carry the gene there, but there it has a little to no association with Alzheimer’s disease.

So essentially that gene increases your risk in the context of the standard American diet, right?

But if you were to simply move yourself to another part of the world, a part of the world, say, where the food supply is less industrialized, where there tends to be tighter social connections, where people tend to be more active, less sedentary, less exposed to environmental pollutants, et cetera, you might see that risk abolished.

So genes are not destined.

So what you’re saying is risk doesn’t necessitate outcome.

Exactly.

So the potential for the outcome is to be there, but what we know environmentally is, as we make environmental associations associated with that risk, we see a decline in other areas where they don’t have the hazards of diet that we experience here in the United States.

Yeah, exactly.

This is a concept known as epigenetics.

So you might, you know, we all, you might carry, think of your genes like the keys on a grand piano, and you might have within your genome the keys required to play the song Alzheimer’s disease, right?

But if you live and eat in a certain way, and we don’t have all the details in terms of like how this might, you know, the exact roadmap for guaranteed prevention, so we talk in terms of reducing risk, right?

But you might live in a certain way where those keys never get played.

On the other hand, if you consume largely the, you know, a diet representative of the standard American diet, whereby now 60% of your average American’s calories are coming from ultra-processed foods, those keys are likely getting played.

Then you add in environmental exposures.

You add in an overly sedentary lifestyle.

You add an exposure, for example, to cigarette smoke or chronic alcohol consumption or traumatic, you know, like, or even non-traumatic head injury.

Then you’re-

Well, that’s it, I’m dead.

Yep.

You’re dramatically increasing your risk.

Again, and context is everything.

Now, my mother, I will never know what caused her dementia, unfortunately, but you know, my mom was somebody who adhered to what any dietician of the 70s and 80s would have described as a perfect diet.

It was very low in fat, low in saturated fat, low in dietary cholesterol.

I never saw her eat eggs, red meat, anything like that.

Foods that we know are highly nutrient-dense.

And instead, she consumed mainly ultra-processed foods, but the kinds of foods that you might see the Red Heart Healthy logo on in the supermarket.

In the supermarket, if it had the Red Heart Healthy logo on it, chances are it would have passed through my kitchen at some point or another growing up.

We consumed margarine instead of butter.

We always had the bottle of corn oil by the stove in the plastic tub, which now research is beginning to show us are not healthy alternatives despite their marketing.

She always ate refined grain products, but again, that were low in cholesterol and saturated fat, were purportedly heart healthy.

And unfortunately, that’s the dietary pattern that my mom adhered to.

And I don’t even know, to be honest, if it was her diet.

She was of a generation where physical exercise wasn’t really appreciated the way that it is now.

I mean, you know, for her adolescence, like the gym membership wasn’t a thing the way that it is now.

So I don’t know if they…

There were no gyms.

There were no gyms.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

So not that you need a gym to exercise.

But, you know, her lifestyle was very different.

And she aspired to be healthy.

That’s the grand irony of it all, is that my mom was somebody who, you know, she was born and raised in New York City and had access to healthful food.

She didn’t come from money or anything like that.

But she aspired her whole life to be healthy.

And despite that, developed these awful monstrosities, these awful health monstrosities.

So, yeah.

What is nutritional psychiatry?

Yes.

So great question.

Nutritional psychiatry is this burgeoning field looking at the role of diet in mental health.

So we’re seeing mental health disorders increase.

We’re seeing even non-clinically people struggling around the world with depression and anxiety.

And so we are now, there’s now starting to, we’re starting to develop a growing body of evidence showing us not just associations, right?

Not just correlation where people who consume more junk food tend to be at higher risk of depression, or people who adhere more closely to vegan diets tend to be at higher risk of depression.

But we are now starting, randomized control trials, the kinds of trials required to prove cause and effect are starting to show us that food is medicine with regard to mental health.

So, one of the seminal studies came out of the Deakin University’s Food and Mood Center in Australia called the SMILES Trial, where they took people…

Food and mood.

Food and mood, yeah.

Clever, right?

I love the SMILES Trial.

That’s where they give you Neil’s French fries.

Exactly.

Yeah, those patients were eating lots of French fries.

And they had clinical depression.

And after cleaning up their diets and giving them a dietary pattern similar to the one that I recommend, a Mediterranean whole foods dietary pattern inclusive of animal products and with a reduced focus on ultra-processed, what I call vending machine foods, they saw that three times compared to patients on the standard of care intervention, there was a dramatic rate of remission and just symptom improvement across the board.

So we can actually use food as medicine now with regard to mental health, which is amazing.

So now with that, Max, let me interrupt you because right now I’m sure there are some people who are getting the impression, not that you’re giving it, that perhaps what you’re saying is that this is the preferred method of treatment as opposed to the standard of care that is now given to those who suffer these maladies.

Is that indeed what you were saying or are you just saying this is the best means of preventing ever getting to that place in the first place?

Yeah, it’s both.

And to be clear, my intent is not to place stigma on pharmaceutical intervention.

The drugs do work for a subset of depressed patients, but they tend to be more effective the more severe the depression.

But my argument, and I think the growing argument now, is that food and lifestyle should be a frontline defense.

And if that doesn’t work for you, then by all means see a psychiatrist and have them work out something that’s effective for you.

Did you hear about the doctor who prescribed because people were living in a food desert and he was seeing all of these illnesses that he basically was just like, these are lifestyle illnesses, and he started prescribing like vegetables and things like that.

He was basically saying exactly what you’re saying.

He was a medical doctor.

You know, and that’s not to say that all depressed people, that the etiology of their depression is rooted in their choices.

That’s not what I’m saying.

But for certainly a subset of patients with depression, there is a role for diet and lifestyle, and it could potentially be driven by poor food choices because we’re now, there’s what’s called the inflammatory cytokine model of depression.

This doesn’t apply to all depressed patients, but for some, inflammation in the body can drive symptoms of depression.

A sick animal, for example, an animal under inflammatory assault with an infection, for example, they display what are known as sickness behaviors.

You ask any zookeeper, right, like how their animals behave when they’re sick.

They retract from the herd.

They display symptoms that in a human look a lot like depression.

So today, unfortunately, a lot of people are exposed to inflammatory environmental pollutants.

They eat diets that contribute to inflammation, ultra-processed, highly refined diets.

They have perhaps energy toxicity because they’re just eating too much in general.

And so that can create inflammation in the body.

And the brain sits directly downwind of that inflammatory smoke, if you will.

And so for those patients, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to hypothesize that maybe cleaning up their diets and getting to a state of nutrient repletion and exercising a little bit more, which we know has an anti-inflammatory effect, can help.

And so why not try that first before getting on to one of these drugs which have side effects and are very difficult to come off of?

I think you owe it to yourself.

And again, I’m not…

But Max, so I’m a physics reductionist, all right?

So you could chew on the bark of this magic tree or you can isolate what is the pain reliever in it and you get aspirin.

So you just take a pill rather than bow to a tree and chew on its bark.

So if everything you mentioned that is good for the brain and you’re citing a food in which it’s found, why not just put it in a pill?

And then everybody takes the pill.

And then we can eat what the hell we want.

Or avoid the things that you know are bad, but we don’t always have to chase the things that have been declared good if you can reduce it to something that would fit in a pill.

What’s wrong with that?

Yeah, that’s a great question.

And in the field of nutrition, that’s referred to as nutritionism.

This idea that humans, especially in the field of nutrition, meager tools distill a food down to its constituent nutrients.

Like we look at an orange and we think vitamin C, right?

But an orange is composed of hundreds if not thousands of chemicals, right?

And food has what’s called an entourage effect.

And when we take these isolated nutrients and we give them as supplement form in clinical trials, they don’t always have the expected effect.

Food, we’ve co-evolved with food, not these nutrients in isolation.

That makes sense.

It’s like what you’re saying is that when you eat an orange, you are getting the vitamin C, ascorbic acid, which you can find in the pill.

But you’re also getting collagen.

You’re also getting every other thing that an orange does for you and you can’t get that in the pill.

So maybe the pill is good to undergird a certain part of your nutritional health.

But if you make that the essential focus…

You mean to supplement?

But to make that the focus probably won’t work.

Yeah, and that’s one of my biggest, one of the biggest arguments that I have to make against veganism.

Again, I’m not against somebody…

Uh-oh, wait a minute, I got to go.

I got to go to the bathroom, guys.

He’s talking about vegans.

We’re about to be under attack.

Watch out.

Everybody duck.

Everybody duck.

Watch out.

So, I, you know, I don’t, people can, I don’t care what people eat.

I think that they should adopt whatever diet they want with full informed consent, and the full breadth of information before they make those choices.

But, you know, they’ve distilled an entire massive category of foods, animal-source products, right, that we’ve co-evolved with.

There’s no single vegan hunter-gatherer tribe on the planet, and meat played, you know, the best scientists that I know believe that meat played an integral role in the evolution of the human brain.

But there’s this idea that you can distill the entire category of animal-source foods down to one nutrient, vitamin B12.

And as long as you supplement with that, then you’re good, right?

You can X out animal products and cross them off from your shopping list.

And that’s a big problem because we know that animal-source foods have a ton of really beneficial nutrients that we are now just starting to identify.

For example, it was just recently shown in both primate and mouse models that taurine, which is an amino acid found only in animal products, can actually extend lifespan.

It set the internet ablaze.

Everybody is looking for the next fountain of youth.

And taurine is this compound that in clinical trials in humans has been shown to reduce blood pressure, improve glucose homeostasis, like glucose regulation, and might even actually play a role in extending your lifespan.

Now, the dose in humans for that effect is unclear, but animal-sourced products are loaded with nutrients that seem to improve the way that our biologies function.

Creatine found in meat, carnitine.

And so this whole idea of nutritionism, reducing foods down to its constituent nutrients and trying to identify with all of our hubris what is essential and what’s not, well, that would only leave us with vitamin B12, which is a huge mistake, in my view.

Well, all I know is, as a comedian, touring will kill you.

Exactly.

Thank you for the rim shot, because that deserved it.

Yeah, that’s a tumbleweed sleeping out.

What deserves a rim shot here?

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Max, are you saying the human body is predisposed to need certain animal products, be it egg, be it dairy, be it meat, fish, protein, in a certain format rather than?

Yes.

Omnivory is our biologically appropriate way of eating.

You can try to get around it by playing a cat and mouse game of nutrients.

But pretty much your teeth make that point for you, Max.

Let’s be honest.

There’s a reason why we have canines, okay?

Interesting point.

Right, and it ain’t to eat apples.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So yeah, I’m a huge proponent of omnivory.

I think it’s like, you know, and it’s a very balanced approach, I think, but today nothing is balanced.

Everything has become polarized.

And so there’s the vegan diet tribe and there’s now the growing carnivore diet tribe.

And by sitting in the middle, you get haters on both sides, which can be frustrating at times.

But yeah, I’m unapologetic in my stance.

We know what to eat.

We know how it works.

Is it now about food strategy for how we eat?

Do we binge?

Do we graze?

Do we fast?

Do we just get a jab of OZempic?

What are we doing?

How are we going about this?

O-O-Z.

Yeah.

That’s a great question.

I think it’s, what you eat is still more important than how you eat, when you eat, but these are all variables that are starting to be looked at.

You know, Sachin Panda, for example, at the Salk Institute is a circadian biologist who’s done a lot of great work showing us how early time restricted eating, meaning curtailing your food consumption to about, you know, three to four hours before you go to sleep, actually can lead to improvements in certain markers of cardiometabolic health, such as blood pressure and blood sugar.

We also…

Let me just, we should unpack that for a second, because you said a lot there, Max, and basically, you know, you’re saying that basically everybody has a 24-hour rhythm to their body and their metabolism, and so that if you restrict your intake to a few hours or cut it off a few hours before you go to bed…

And as you said, you can see metabolic benefits to doing so in terms of like your heart and so forth.

Is that right?

Yeah, without even changing what it is that you’re eating, which I think is really empowering for people in food deserts, people who can’t easily change what it is that they’re eating, you know?

And so, yeah, I mean, so what the research is showing is that first of all, your average American is eating, is digesting and metabolizing calories from the moment they wake up until the moment just before they go to sleep, right?

And that seems to be out of sync with our natural circadian yearnings to, for one, be diurnal creatures, which we are, so we’re meant to eat primarily during the day and not too close to bedtime.

And studies show, for example, that eating late at night actually affects your next day hunger rhythms.

So for anybody trying to lose a little bit of weight, eating late at night might be, in a way, causing your efforts to backfire.

They’ve shown that this negatively affects next day energy metabolism.

It increases hunger and decreases your metabolic rate, not by huge margins, but by margins that, you know, if regularly occurring and sustained, might presumably lead to weight gain.

Blood pressure is a, hypertension is a major problem.

About 50%, so one in two people listening to this have hypertension, which literally…

I’m the one.

You’re the one in two people.

There’s four of us.

Yeah, I mean, this is a big problem.

I mean, it’s not just the silent killer, but chronically sustained hypertension literally destroys your brain.

I mean, this was shown in a seminal dementia prevention trial that I often reference, the Sprint Mind Trial, where they showed that people who were aggressively treated for their hypertension saw a significant risk reduction for the development of mild cognitive impairment, which is considered pre-dementia.

So, we know that your brain is fed blood and nutrients and antioxidants, oxygen, glucose by a network of micro vessels, and you might not experience a stroke, but vascular dementia is the second most common form of dementia.

And even in Alzheimer’s disease, there’s early vascular dysfunction.

Mind you, Max, if I think back to my younger days and certain Maxims, all right, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but eat your greens.

Don’t go to bed on a full stomach.

We’ve kind of known these things, you know, and had them absorbed whether we paid attention to them or not.

Good point.

Yeah, but unfortunately today there’s massive pressure from, whether it is the pharmaceutical industry, as you mentioned, or Zempik, there’s somebody who recently on 60 Minutes claimed a highly credentialed physician who claimed that the primary cause of obesity is genetic, which I think is hugely deflating for anybody on a weight loss journey, right?

It foments the victim mindset that, oh, I guess I’m overweight or obese now, like one in two people are because of my genes, right?

But there are some people, and I am not disputing what you just said by any stretch of the imagination, there are some people who are genetically big people.

Like I spent a little time in Hawaii, and I met some people that were just big people.

Like, I mean, big and burly and like everybody was big.

Samoan, Samoan big people.

Yes, they are Samoan.

But they look at me like, oh, I would love to pick you up and carry you around like a little baby, because they’re big people.

Yeah, I mean, there are genetic contributions, certainly, but by and large, whether or not somebody is obese, I mean, this is something that is largely environmental.

I mean, this is an environmental problem.

So you take Samoans in Hawaii, you expose them to the standard American food diet.

And by the way, people do genetically differ in not just where they carry their fat, but their personal fat thresholds, like how fat they can get.

And so some people are able to get a lot fatter than other people, right?

But whether or not you’re fat or lean, you still might be exposing yourself to metabolic dysfunction, right?

Which in certain people will happen at a far lower BMI.

We call this normal weight metabolic obesity, which is quite common.

About 20% of people that are normal weight, seemingly healthy, are actually metabolically obese.

And then obesity is on the rise.

But again, it’s a largely, it’s an interplay between our environment and our genes.

You know, the one thing we haven’t done is talk about where do you start?

I mean, this is a lot of information about what we’re doing to ourselves and our diets and, you know, highly processed foods and all that.

But I got to be honest, right now I’m kind of thinking, all right, what do I do?

Well, Max, this must be now the next step in the strategy.

So if the enemy inside, I’ll call it that, is the ultra processed foods that are so abundant in supermarkets.

Except, except, I’m still, I’m, Max, have you explicitly said why ultra processed foods are bad for you?

Yeah, I can totally go into that.

I mean, they’re, yeah.

I don’t think we’ve heard that yet.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so ultra processed foods are foods that you couldn’t conceivably make in your own kitchen.

They typically lie in the aisles of our supermarket aisles, now making up 73% of the standard American food supply.

The reason why they’re, they’re so pernicious is, well, there’s a few reasons.

One is that they tend to be hyper palatable.

So we tend to, they tend to push our brain to a bliss point beyond which self control is nearly impossible.

And, you know, if I were a food manufacturer, I would want my foods to be hyper palatable, right?

It’s just another way of saying super, super bussin, you know, like super, super…

The other aspect of them is that they’re highly calorie dense and minimally satiating.

So this is for a few reasons.

One, they tend to be low in fiber.

Two, they tend to be depleted of protein.

Protein is the most satiating macronutrient.

And your typical junk food is low in protein.

It’s high in carbs and fat, right?

And the third factor that makes an ultra processed food minimally satiating is that they tend to be dehydrated.

So they provide no hydration benefit, which is atypical when looking at whole foods.

And the reason for this is that moisture in a food impedes its shelf stability.

So food manufacturers, they deplete their foods of water, protein and fiber, making them minimally satiating.

They’re highly refined.

They’re highly calorie dense.

Okay, so I get all that.

I get all that.

What does it have to do with the brain?

Well, the brain, it just like, it sends off like the equivalent of the Fourth of July fireworks when we consume them.

And so we tend to over consume them.

There was really elegant research and seminal research published, funded by the NIH, led by Kevin Hall, who’s a highly credentialed obesity researcher who found that by the time we’ve eaten these foods to satiety, we’ve already over consumed them.

This is not the case with minimally processed foods.

So minimally processed foods, the kinds of foods that you would cook conceivably in your own kitchen, right?

Single ingredient foods that you even, you know, that you cook yourself and make delicious.

When consumed to the same degree of satiety, meaning fullness, meaning the point that you’re ready to get up from the table, you’re happy, you’re good, you come in actually effortlessly at a calorie deficit, whereas these ultra processed foods, we over consume them.

So we get fat.

They turn you into pirates of the Caribbean.

You can eat all you want, drink all you want, but you never get satiated.

There you go.

So we get fat.

They’re also nutrient depleted.

But we get what they get fat.

What does it have to do with my brain health?

So, well, I mean, being…

Smart fat people.

Yeah.

So being overweight and obese drives inflammation.

As I mentioned, inflammation, the brain sits directly downwind of that fire, which is essentially like a forest fire in the body.

So that damages the brain.

Being overweight also puts you at higher risk of type 2 diabetes, which increases your risk of Alzheimer’s disease between 2 and 4 fold.

Having chronically elevated blood sugar literally damages the blood vessels that supply blood nutrients, oxygen to your brain.

So I mean if these foods are uniquely obesogenic, then right there, that in and of itself means that it is a threat to the brain.

Obesogenic, good word.

Obesogenic, yes, another new word for us.

Food labeling, nutrients, this, this, this, this, this.

Most things that you’re going to buy in a supermarket have to have some kind of nutrient labeling.

Are we getting everything we need to know on there?

And how do we know what part of the product is what we think we’re going to get?

So, for instance, if it’s an orange, we get everything that’s in the orange because it’s nice, it’s fresh.

But if it’s this synthesized process, ultra processed form, how much of it is left?

How can we work that out?

Yeah, well, I like to remind people that real foods don’t have extensive ingredients lists.

They are the foods.

They are the ingredients.

And so, I think people do need to…

One of the best things that people could do, second after reducing their intake of these types of foods, is to know how to read food nutrition labels.

And so, now you can identify easily the added sugar content, which is essentially just empty calories.

When I grew up, that wasn’t clearly seen on the label.

They would have four different kinds of sugar, and then you’d see sucrose, the regular sugar, listed last, and you’d think that was all the sugar, but sugar was masquerading as four other ingredients.

I was a big triumph.

I remember when nutrition labels decided to localize all the sugar content in one column.

Yeah, that was hugely helpful.

I think people just generally should read ingredients lists and become familiar with that.

And all, you know, many of the more common names by which sugar goes under.

I also think that it’s important to, you know, opt for foods that are higher in protein.

I mean, today it’s rare to find people in the western world who are deficient in protein, but just because we’re not walking around deficient doesn’t mean that we’re consuming optimal amounts.

Protein, again, is a very powerful anti-obesogen, if you will, because it’s so satiating.

And so by prioritizing protein, you’re not only supporting your musculature, which is incredibly important, like our skeletal muscle is now being thought of as a new vital sign, if you will.

We’re starting to see that frailty really plays a huge role in our predisposition to developing age-related chronic disease.

And so protein is a really great magic, almost macronutrient to prioritize in your diet.

There’s this idea that we’re eating that you can eat too much protein.

This is actually pretty difficult to do because it is self-limiting.

It is so difficult to over-consume.

And so that’s one of the, I think, more practical things.

You don’t even just put teeth in that.

You don’t have the urge to binge on it.

You’re not going to sit there with a platter of protein of any kind and go through an entire bag of it and then open another bag, like we do with carbohydrate foods, right?

Yeah, carbohydrate and fat, Latin foods.

Yeah, it’s highly satiating.

It also tends to come with it important micronutrients.

So these are the nutrients that are arming your body with the compounds required to fight off aging, right?

Fight off DNA damage, which we all accrue over the course of our lives, to give your cells the cofactors required to generate energy, right?

So a lot of people, this is one of the most, in wellness, one of the most common searched things is like, how can I gain more energy?

People are walking around feeling zonked, fatigued all the time like zombies.

Well, it’s because we’re all nutrient deficient.

90% of us are walking around deficient in at least one essential nutrient, and our bodies require cofactors to generate ATP energy in our cells.

And so, yeah, so…

And that is why I just use meth.

Works for Chuck every time.

I’m telling you, man, I could walk to Kansas City from here if I wanted.

So, Max, is it a myth that the only way we can supply enough quantity of affordable foods is through the ultra-processed route, or is that a fact?

It’s a good point.

The food processing industry, there is a benefit to it, of course.

It’s made food abundant, widely available, safe.

And cheaper than ever.

If you look at the percentage of the average income’s expenditures on food, it is a fraction of what it was when I was growing up.

So, it’s a lower hit to your total budget than ever, as low as it’s ever been.

I think there are people out there right now at this moment, Neil, feeling the pinch on the food prices.

Yeah, making a relative statement here.

Yes.

That’s right.

Yeah, but there are trade-offs, right?

These foods might make it easy to…

And we also need to separate the notion of calories from nutrition.

Like, yeah, they provide cheap calories, but are those calories coming from…

Are those calories nutritious?

Are they providing adequate nutrition for us?

About 50% are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

So, yeah, I mean, we’re providing cheap calories to our population, but at what cost?

Leaving us saddled with chronic illness.

And it’s also playing a role in soaring healthcare costs.

So, yeah, again, it is a double-edged sword.

So, what is biochemical liposuction?

Biochemical liposuction is a term that I heard a migraine researcher give to the ketogenic diet, which I thought was a very compelling way to think about ketosis.

But I will add that it’s not just ketosis that creates this phenomena of biochemical liposuction.

Anytime you are in a calorie deficit, you are essentially sucking fat out of your own adipocytes and using them for fuel.

As long as you are burning more energy on a daily basis than you are consuming, you are in a type of biochemical liposuction.

What you’re saying is the energy is being drawn from your fat rather than from carbohydrates flowing through your system.

Because you go into a carbohydrate deficit and now, oh my gosh, I’ve got to get energy from somewhere, your body gets it from your stored fat.

Exactly, your stored fat.

I like that reference.

It’s a very graphic reference.

Do you remember our survival expert, Dr.

Timijin Tan?

Yes.

They dropped him in the middle of a Labrador and said, you know, fend for yourself.

And his ketosis state.

Are we looking here, Max, at keeping all the 21st century medical benefits and lifestyles to a certain extent, but go back to a more ancestral way of consuming foodstuffs?

Yeah, that’s my view.

And some of the more orthodox in the medical and nutrition space might think that even that suggests quackery.

But I think that we’re very limited with our tools in the field of nutrition.

And nutrition is a very polarized field.

And nutrition data is incredibly weak.

I mean, our dietary guidelines are based on population level evidence.

We have very few long-term randomized controlled trials with testing one dietary pattern over another.

And yet, if you spend any time on nutrition Twitter or nutrition Instagram for that matter, you’d think that each of the many different dietary tribes do have their answers, right?

And we’re just not privy to them.

And so, I think you do need to apply…

Well, Max, this was my sense when I spent time binging on every single nutrition documentary on Netflix, only to find, every single, a dozen or so, only to find that there was very little consistency from one to the next.

Each one had their own sort of dietary preference.

And it left me wondering whether the person who made the video, it worked for them, and they’re assuming it’s going to work for everybody else, but maybe not, because of genetics, because of epigenetics, because of whatever else.

Now, you’re making a documentary, right?

Is it in this space?

Am I going to line it up with the others?

What am I going to say after I’ve seen 12 others and then come to yours?

Yeah, so I’m working on a documentary.

It’s called Little Empty Boxes.

People can check it out at littleemptyboxes.com.

It’s not out yet to see, but we have a trailer up.

Cool, we’ll look for it.

Yeah, but it’s not…

I mean, there is science and research in it, but it’s not going to be one of these pedantic, highly prescriptive nutrition docs like what you see on Netflix.

Because the reality is that many dietary patterns work.

There’s no such thing as a one size fits all diet.

This was my sense when I was seeing this.

It just worked for all these different people.

And so I said, okay, fine.

I’ll pick what works for me.

Not turn one person’s documentary into a cult.

Because that’s what it kind of felt like.

They were saying, if you’re not with me, you’re against me.

And join us.

We are the…

So is that, Neil, then, going forward, the next generation will want to get ahead of what is the food, stuff, nutrients.

So they’re going to go and get the genomes analyzed.

They’re going to find out what they’re predisposed to metabolize better, what is better for them.

Is this, do you think, Max, the way that we’re going to address this, get ahead of our own diet?

Bespoke nutrition.

I love that.

That’s going to be true no matter what Max says.

That’s going to be…

We know that’s true.

Max, that’s got to be the solution to this.

Personalized nutrition, yeah.

But I think it’s in the distance.

I don’t think that this is something that’s around the corner.

This is again, it’s socioeconomic.

You’re going to take out the people who can’t afford to go and buy super hyper fresh local.

All their dollar will buy them is ultra processed.

I know one thing that we can do when you talk about how returning to our ancestral way of eating.

So what we do is we take all the junk food in the supermarket, right?

And we make it so that you have to hunt it.

Because the reason why we were skinny back in the day is because we had to chase our food.

And that’s why you had to expend a great deal of energy in order to eat.

I’m not chasing down my potato chips.

You gotta hunt those potato chips, man.

So you’re going to put them in a…

So what we’re going to do is electric carts, right?

Full of food that we have to chase around the aisles in the supermarket.

So you say, there they go.

There go the potato chips.

And then you just gotta start running to get your chips.

Exactly.

We need sub-shooters for the potato chips.

We start forming teams to work together.

That is one solution.

It’s time to end the show right now before that gets further out of hand.

So Max, it’s been a delight to have you on.

It’s great to know that folks like you are running around trying to make this world a healthier place because without those forces operating, I don’t know why we’re even alive at all.

We’re not for the reminders of what we should or should be doing with our body and our minds.

So thank you for being a force of good in this world.

Thank you, Neil.

It means a lot coming from you.

Yeah.

And so, Chuck, good to have you.

Gary?

Oh, as always.

All right.

We’ve just concluded another StarTalk special edition.

This one on your food and your brain and your brain on food.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep working out.