What to Eat to Improve Your Memory | Max Lugavere on Health Theory

on this episode with New York Times bestselling author max of the veer we talked about his mom's dementia diagnosis how he became a citizen scientist why Alzheimer's is now being called type 3 diabetes the importance of distressing and what exactly you should be eating to optimize your brain everybody welcome to another episode of health theory I am here today with a very special guest max Lugo vir he is a citizen scientist whose new book genius food is literally a user's manual for the brain and he has an amazing ability to take really complex ideas about diet and lifestyle and make them accessible so that everyone can upgrade themselves live higher-quality lives and avoid humanity's most dreaded diseases max what I want to know and the thing that I found so interesting and the reason that I'm wearing this shirt today how did this all start for you how does one become a citizen scientist and maybe more importantly why yeah it's a great question um you know I I had this amazing dream job when I graduated college I began as a TV host and producer and journalist for a TV network that Al Gore founded back in 2005 and so anyway when I left Current TV to try to try to figure out where I was gonna go with my career I started spending more and more time in New York City and I was you know I for the past five years I was sort of beholden to the rigorous TV production schedule of having a nightly show on on national TV so I took this opportunity to spend more and more time with my mom and my two younger brothers and it was at that time that me and my brother started to notice that you know my mom had always been a very spirited person fast walking fast talking New Yorker but it had seemed almost as if her her cognitive power her brainpower had downshifted and you know we started to notice this when for example I would be in the kitchen cooking with my mom which was always one of my favorite things to do with her I would ask her to pass the salt or a spice that you know was perhaps closer to her than it was to me and would take her an extra beat to register it would almost be quicker for me to to traverse the kitchen and grab it for myself then to wait for her to process the command and then act on it I think we all intuitively when we're talking to a much older person we know that they're not gonna respond as quickly as a younger person but my mom was still young she was blonde she was 58 at the time it suddenly had seemed as though my mom had the brain of an elderly elderly person and I had no prior family history of dementia or any kind of neurodegenerative disease so I was completely at a loss I was totally ignorant and it culminated for me you know we my family had taken a trip to Miami and it was one of the few times where my my mom and my dad were together under the same roof because they'd been divorced since I was 18 and my mom was standing behind the the breakfast counter and she announced to the whole family that she'd been having memory problems and that she had also recently sought the help of a neurologist and it was something that you know was we were I mean mystified to say the least but my dad actually chimed in and he said you know come on Kathy which is her name if you're having memory problems what year is it and my mom couldn't immediately respond and me and my brothers to break the silence chimed in I mean we were completely in the dark and we almost you know mocking the difficulty that she seemed to be having we're like come on mom how can you not know the year and she started to cry and in that moment for me I mean that's when everything changed that's when this became something that I was sort of curious about on the periphery - something that I realized I needed to step in and try to figure out what was going on with her and I started to go with her to doctors appointments and in every single instance I experienced what I've come to call diagnosed and audio's a physician would spend about 15 minutes if we were lucky with my mom were on a battery of strange tests not once taking the time to explain to me what was going on because I was my mom's patient wing person it was there at the Cleveland Clinic for the first time that my mom was with a neurodegenerative disease who's prescribed drugs for both Parkinson's disease and alzheimerís disease and I didn't know it at the time because actually the doctor didn't explain to me what the drugs were for but later on in the hospital or in the in the in the hotel room in Ohio where we were staying I started googling the drugs and I learned that they're essentially band-aids I mean they have no disease modifying ability and they're barely effective and it was there that for the first time I had a panic attack I mean I thought you know I was I didn't know I was scared that my mom would die I was scared that she would ultimately become decrepid and you know I mean I just didn't I didn't know what to expect my own helplessness and ignorance really seemed to it was sort of like the walls of a room that we're just starting to like close in on me and I'm a pretty chill guy I'd never had a panic attack but you know that was one of I think one of the darkest moments in my life and as soon as that cleared I basically became obsessed I mean from one from it was sort of like a line being drawn in the sand I mean I just became unable to focus on my career and I just all I wanted to do is learn everything I possibly could about how diet and lifestyle affect affect brain function and ultimately brain health and mediate one's predilection for these diseases one of the most shocking things that I learned was that oftentimes like many chronic diseases now burdening burdening society they begin far earlier than the presentation of symptoms and it became this major call to action for me not only to try to see if there was anything that I could do to help my mom but also to prevent it from ever happening to myself and yeah that's what really began this journey and you know just to go back to go back to your first question how does one become a citizen scientist you know we live in such an incredible time where all of the world's knowledge is at your fingertips 24 hours a day I mean if you have a if you have a smartphone right I mean we have PubMed you know the primary literature that that is that is what science it's our it's our method as a species of asking questions and seeking truth and finding answers R is at our fingertips so it didn't it didn't seem a barrier to entry for me that I wasn't a medical doctor you know I felt entitled to answers as a human being and I just set out to learn everything I could literally of it now that that response to what happened to your mom is so powerful and so unlike what other people do and I really want to dive into that so how did you the walls feel like they're closing in how do you reget your wits about you what I assumed at that point then you start thinking like a journalist but how does a journalist think my mom had symptoms that were more akin to a movement disorder the most well-known of which is Parkinson's disease which you know Michael J Fox has Parkinson's disease many people many people know about it but they weren't typical symptoms and my mom also had these memory problems that she had developed and she was prescribed a drug for Alzheimer's disease so I think the fact that regardless of the type of dementia a person develops they they give you these these biochemical band-aids the fact that it seems so nonspecific to me made me just intuitively think you know I had this I had a theory that there that there had to be a better way and having a lifelong passion for nutrition and health just in you know general in the sense of general fitness my hunch was that diet and lifestyle may have had something to do with this did you start pushing back on the doctors and saying that to them when they're prescribing the drugs not not at first certainly because you know in that in those moments of fear you want to do anything that you can do to help your mom and I think that we all tend to really put a lot of faith in the medical establishment I don't know a single doctor that would give me their email address so I could follow up with them you know when something like your health is on the line where of a loved one is on the line I didn't want to wait three months to get another appointment to ask my follow-up questions I just think that it's so important to become an expert in your own health and you know my mom's generation previous generations only the doctor can know about health only the nutritionist could know about nutrition we're of a generation Millennials you know that we want answers you know where we feel empowered we feel entitled to them so if somebody right now just walked into that either they're being diagnosed with something that they find terrifying or someone they love is how like what give me like just a couple steps so is going to PubMed calm it's just up number one like what are a few things that people can do to really begin that process that's a good question so yes I do think that going I think using PubMed as a resource is very powerful I think you know you can most a lot of studies are available for free in open access journals but I've actually written a a what I call a citizen scientist handbook because I think it's really important to know how to interpret research I think that I think knowing how to interpret research is you know science literacy is as important as financial literacy we there's a lack of both I think among younger people today and that's problematic all right so as you start diving into figuring this out you're going after this stuff you're building the science literacy if you didn't already have it you're reading the studies what do you begin to learn that you think is like revolutionary knowledge well I used to think that dementia was an old person's disease right i I like many people didn't didn't care about it alzheimerís disease was something that I thought was decades into the future something only old people get a natural part of aging you know age-related senility was something that was considered in par for the course of just getting older but what I learned is that Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain 30 to 40 years if not longer before the first symptom yeah there are biomarkers evident on brain scans now with you know the hyper advanced scanning technology that we now have access to that have shown signs related to Alzheimer's disease in the brains of 20 year-olds so whoa yeah so I mean this is something that might be a lifelong cascade by the time you there's something I could get checked for right now well there are genetic risk factors for developing Alzheimer's disease so the most well defined of them is the apoe4 allele which is a variant of the apoE gene that you inherit one copy from your mom one copy for me but your thesis if I have it right is basically okay you may have the allele the gene but that doesn't mean that it's inevitable 100% what could I do to my brain to see if I have any of the precursors of Alzheimer's well one of the top things that you can do is make sure that you are insulin sensitive because peripheral insulin resistance which is insulin resistance is the hallmark of type-2 diabetes pre-diabetes it can proceed actually the the appearance of chronically elevated blood sugar and so it's been shown that that is actually very closely related to your brain's ability to create energy so this is actually one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease and it might be the one of the earliest things to go awry in the brain metabolic dysfunction in the brain and it seems to be very closely tied to the body's metabolism so I would go to the doctor and have them run what test your fasting blood sugar and your fasting glucose very important and with those two biomarkers that any physician can check they can determine your level of insulin sensitivity okay one thing you've talked a lot about in the book and in your talks and I love this is so I hear Alzheimer's I think I know all about this amyloid plaques image that's the problem I just recently had my cholesterol taken I like to think I am healthy and my doctor literally wanted to put me on a statin yeah and I was like whoa whoa whoa I know enough to be dangerous when it comes to cholesterol walk us through the the relationship that you've talked about that exists between potentially what amyloid plaques are and potentially what cholesterol really is yeah really interesting Alzheimer's disease was first named in 1906 by a German physician in alois alzheimer but 90% of what we know about the disease has been discovered only in the past 15 years the only way up until very recently that it could be diagnosed with black and white certainty was on death they would open up the brain of a cadaver and they would examine the brain they would notice a dramatic brain shrinkage and they would notice hallmark plaques and tangles in the brains of these patients the plaques were an aggregation of misfolded proteins the protein is called amyloid beta and so the amyloid hypothesis that these plaques build up in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease has been the guiding path what it now turns out thanks to you know advanced scanning technology that amyloid might actually be there at the scene of the crime but in fact at least initially an innocent bystander because you know we now have scanning technology that allows us to see things that are happening in the brain well before the presentation of symptoms that might actually be more initial factors in the Cascade that will ultimately create Alzheimer's disease it's led researchers and scientists to take a step back and ask what is causing our brains to become landfills for this amyloid plaque and so as I mentioned earlier one of the burgeoning theories that now seems to be displacing at least from my perspective this amyloid hypothesis because you know drug trials that have sought to cure the disease have a 99% 99.6% fail rate yeah so the question is what starts first you know is there's is there something that we can measure in the body or brain that begins before this build-up of amyloid plaque that we can intervene and say you know by taking these steps you might prevent this disease from happening well one of the if not the earliest measurable thing to happen in the brain is a reduced ability by the brain to create ATP out of glucose so the brain has a few fuels substrates that it can use to create ATP which is the energy etic currency of the cell and energy for the brain is really important in fact 25% your metabolic rate is used to satiate the energy requirements of the brain so 20 you know every one out of every four breaths that you take a fourth of all the calories you eat is going for your is being used by your brain to create energy so any sort of outage in the brain in terms of its its ability to create energy is gonna create problems just as a as an anecdote you know a newborn human their brains require 90% of their base metabolic rate oh yeah so that a newborn human baby 90% of its oxygen all the calories that it's that it's using is going to help its brain develop because actually human babies are born half-baked we continue our develop actually in the real world this is one of the reasons why humans are so smart and we've been able to build what we've been able to build because we complete our cognitive development in the presence of of you know other other people it's called the fourth trimester right that's one of the reasons why a baby a newborn human baby is so fat because the fat that a newborn baby comes packaged with is actually an energy reservoir for the developing brain I've heard you call it a Mophie it's a mower your brand I love that it's a Mophie for the brain it's been shown that the brain's ability to use glucose is diminished by about 50% in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease so there's this this really stark metabolic problem that's occurring in the brain and thanks to functional MRI scans and PET scans we've been able to see that there's a deficit and energetic deficit in the brain that's evident from very early in life and it's related to the this gene that seems to put people at higher risk for the disease in the Western sort of environment food environment so you see that deficit in people that have that allele yeah not necessarily across the board there's about a 10% reduction in the brain's ability to generate ATP out of glucose from very early on and you've interviewed the woman that coined the phrase diabetes type 3 yes what Alzheimer's is often referred to as a want to walk through this process because oftentimes people talk about it at a really high level and I want to drill down so why is it called we'll start with why is it called diabetes type three well if you have type 2 diabetes which 50% of the u.s. population is now either diabetic or pre-diabetic your cells have an inability to respond to insulin which is the hormone that allows glucose entry into those cells where the cells loses fuel to be used as fuel yeah so basically you have despite an abundance of fuel in circulation because blood sugar you know is chronically high in a person with type 2 diabetes your cells essentially starve because they have an inability to respond to insulin and therefore glucose has a much more difficult time getting into the cell where it can be used to create ATP which again is the energetic currency of cells so in the brain a researcher out of Brown University who have interviewed Suzanne de la montagne has coined the term type 3 diabetes to describe Alzheimer's disease because there's a similar inability of the brain to create energy even though and oftentimes this is the case there's an abundance of fuel in the body and you know and people that are overweight you know people that are carrying fat around their midsections your average pound of fat has about 3,000 backup calories of the brain will happily use for fuel but the brain is unable to because most people on the western you know diet plan are eating about 300 grams of carbohydrates per day carbohydrates cause insulin to become chronically elevated and insulin acts like a one-way valve on your fat cells so fat is we you know we're really good at storing fat but in an overweight person in the modern food environment that the ability of fat to be burned is basically blocked sugar is one of those things that like oxygen you know oxygen oxidizes things it ages you slice an apple leave it you know they're on the counter you'll notice it starts to turn brown the same way that we need oxygen it also is what's killing us and the same thing goes for sugar we need a certain amount of sugar I mean the brain still has about a forty percent energy requirement for glucose but sugar is also very damaging it's glyco toxic you know I'm in a diet damage your proteins this is one of the reasons why type 2 diabetes is so damaging because at that point your blood sugar has become chronically elevated glycated all of the proteins that make you you and we tend to think about protein as a nutrient in terms of its ability to help us grow bigger muscles but we are made of protein actually the protein that that aggregates and forms the plaques that characterize Alzheimer's disease that's another protein that can become glycated and when this happens when it when it gets bound to sugar in the molecular sense it becomes less easily able to be flushed away which is something that our brains actually do when we sleep our brains actually clean themselves of these of these proteins that can aggregate over the course of the day so one of our best performing episodes of hell theory ever was on sleep which I was totally surprised by I did not think people really cared that much about sleep nor did I honestly know how detailed an important sleep is why is it that you think sleep is important it's so important I mean there's a newly discovered system in our brains called the glymphatic system which when we're sleeping actually swooshes cerebrospinal fluid all throughout essentially cleansing it of these proteins that aggregate over the course of the day they've shown that on one night of bad sleep there's an increased level of amyloid measurable in CSF cerebrospinal fluid but then also you know I think dietary change for most people is one of the most difficult things to do and it's particularly difficult when we have our hormones working against us so sleep I think is so profoundly important because it acts like a master regulator of our hormones it helps to you know make sure that we don't need to use our willpower very often because you know willpower sort of like this muscle that we need to use in order to fight off cravings and things like that but with good sleep our cravings diminish I mean they've shown that even on one night of poor sleep you consume an excess of calories the following day anywhere between three and five hundred calories I've actually noticed it's a little off topic but I once one of the major breakups I had in my life I that I would feel way more sensitive to it when I was underslept you know you become less able to contextualize emotions when when your underslept on just one night of bad sleep a metabolically healthy person will be essentially pre-diabetic the next day temporarily well yeah you become more insulin resistant so yeah sleep sleep I think is one of those things that today we romanticize being busy but it's sort of like the one thing that lifts all the boats in your Harbor you know and yet we tend to undervalue it you talked on your Instagram about you want to live for a really long time or since your life forget exactly how you worded it which got my attention and then you said prioritize distressing yeah is that tied to sleep like what what do you mean by that well stress is an indiscriminate killer and today you know so many of us are losing sleep due to stress it's one of the reasons why one in six adults and I was on some kind of psychiatric drug one in six yeah yeah is on or has used well we're definitely self-medicating and and it's not good I mean chronic stress is a major major problem yeah give me some tactics how does one de-stress you know I think meditation is really important you know I'm one of those people that I was trained to meditate I think this is really important I think you know being being taught how to meditate is as important as being taught how to do yoga you know we don't come out of the womb knowing how to do a downward dog and to hit you know any of the number of yoga poses that were taught to do with a good yoga teacher having a good meditation teacher is very I think is critical to knowing how to de-stress I also think you know knowing knowing what chronic stress is and knowing what it isn't is really important you know so in my book I'd differentiate between chronic stress and acute stress which acute stress is very beneficial you know what we do in the we stress our bodies chronic psychological stress is really toxic it's working under a boss that you hate it's being stuck in a relationship that's gone sour by distressing and by you know doing physical exercise and things like that you actually increase your resilience to stress cortisol sort of gets a bad rap because it's related to stress but it's actually a really important hormone it's the body's chief waking hormone so for about 45 minutes after you wake up cortisol is the highest that it's really meant to be throughout the day it's part of the body's natural circadian a hormonal Evan flow and in that in that window for about 45 minutes after you wake up that's a great fat-burning window you've got that cortisol spike which is really working to liberate stored fat stored sugars for use by your body as fuel it cement as a way of you know allowing fuels to become accessible so that you can use them and carpe diem right seize the day within that window it's particularly dangerous to consume breakfast in its most standard American form which is usually rapidly digesting carbohydrates from oatmeal granola bars things like that because that causes a spike in insulin but going back to stress this is why consuming carbs in the context of chronic stress is so bad because you've got cortisol chronically elevated due to chronic stress and then we're continuing to keep our insulin elevated with the carbohydrates that we're consuming so this not only helps to redistribute our weight from muscle to fat but also our visceral fat which is the most inflammatory kind of fat that wraps around our internal organs actually has about four times the cortisol receptors on it so this is actually why when you look at people that are chronically stressed out they their bodies take on a very particular shape it's totally different from run-of-the-mill obesity where people are just eating lots and lots of calories and not necessarily chronically stressed out somebody who's chronically stressed and eating lots of carbs in particular they usually have skinny arms and skinny legs but a bulging midsection because their visceral fat is just soaking up all the excess carbs that they're eating because of the presence of chronically elevated cortisol that's so weird it's no idea I always thought that was just like Oh some people that's how they put on fat I like to think of stresses and it's sort of invisible and it doesn't really have any lingering effects but when you see that it can play out into an actual body type yeah that's when it gets really crazy yeah now one type of stress you've talked about that is really useful when I go a little bit deeper thermal stress I'd never heard of that before what is it exactly and how do we leverage it so you know we our bodies were you know we're the ultimate performance machines right we all evolved chasing our food and and really being honed to perform physical bouts of exercise but thermal exercise is another form of exercise that we also had for the vast majority of our evolution and I think chronic climate control you know something that we've developed you know with air conditioning and heat and things like that really has been to the detriment in many ways of our of our health so we can look at research that was performed recently out of Finland that I think is very compelling they found that people who used saunas four to seven times per week had a dramatic risk reduction for Alzheimer's disease about 65 percent risk reduction for people that you saw enough four to seven times per week really I mean there's no drug on the market that will cut your risk of developing Alzheimer's disease by 65 percent Finland is the sauna capital of the world so in Finland there's on average one sauna per household in Finland it's like taking a shower in Finland it's so embedded into the culture in fact there's a great documentary called steam of life which documents all of the weird ways in which people in Finland will you know create like phone booths abandoned phone booths into saunas things like that it's very strange yeah so they found that in this population that saunas really seem to play a protective role in terms of vascular function it also was related to a dramatic risk reduction for high blood pressure but then also for for dementia seems to really help promote what's called vascular compliance and reduce high blood pressure so what coincides with Alzheimer's disease is all a vascular dysfunction of all of the micro capillaries that provide you know blood fuel nutrients to the brain and so anything that's good for the heart is gonna be good for the brain and so on I seem to really be good for the heart as well what about like cold showers and stuff yeah those are all great you know they are really good in terms of really dialing mental acuity I mean you can feel it instantly take a cold shower there was a really great study performed where people with type 2 diabetes were told to basically turn the air conditioning down on low to about I believe it was 60 or 66 degrees Fahrenheit for six hours a day so I mean that's not freezing it's cold but it's not freezing and there was about a 25% increase in their insulin sensitivity not changing their diet at all or doing any additional physical exercise just exposing themselves to colder temperatures they showed a dramatic increase in their metabolic health again insulin resistance is the hallmark of type 2 diabetes I'm so surprised yeah cold stress heat stress all very beneficial so I try to compel people to get out of their comfort zones in in the thermal sense you know it's really good for creativity getting out of your comfort zone but it seems to be the case as well in terms of temperature that is really interesting and I hate you for it because I hate being cold so much so why I begin to tell you yeah so do I actually but but you know I think it's one of those things that seems to be really beneficial you know I I go to my mom's house occasionally and the heat is always blasting it's like always like super warm in that apartment not like sauna level temperature but just always you know my mom doesn't like to be cold she doesn't like to be hot she likes to live only within that narrow range of her comfort glad you brought your mom back up I wanted to talk a little bit more about something you said that I thought was so beautiful so I grew up in a morbidly obese family and it really struggled with well I know what they need to do but that's very stressful for them emotionally and I don't want to stress that relationship out and you said something similar about your mom and you said I don't ever want her food choice to damage the relationship that I have with her yeah how do you deal with that what advice you have for caregivers loved ones of somebody that's going through dementia it sounds cliche to say you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink so I think at a certain point you've you should teach you know I think that's one of our missions here on earth as empathetic and compassionate beings is to lead you know lead your neighbor lead your loved one to a greater vision of life you know that's what you're doing with the show I think you can't do it with force you can do it with aggression you've got a you've got to be I think a bit more gentle and when it comes to loved ones and especially people that are suffering with chronic diseases and that you know you don't know what they're going through psychologically I think it's really important to to provide the information but then to to step back and detach at a certain point at a certain point with my mom I would get very emotionally wound up in what my mom was eating and I would become upset if I went to her house and I saw that she had an open bag of chips or you know she cookies or what you know whatever and I didn't want that to interfere with the time that I was spending with my mom you know I would never want to do that and I value so much the time that I spend with my mom and I know that I'm really neurotic when it comes to nutrition and health but I don't you know I don't judge other people in your book you do a great job of not spending a lot of time demonizing anything but instead really being quite prescriptive about okay if you want to upgrade yourself which is like the big tag and your website which I absolutely love so if somebody wants to upgrade themselves knowing that every word that's about to come out of your mouth comes with compassion and knowing that there's a lot of individual variability you know you get all of that but like in a nutshell for somebody that wants to upgrade themselves what should they eat and not eat yeah so you know opt for foods that are nutrient dense one of the easiest things that I recommend that people can do every single day is to come what I call a large fatty salad I think it's one of the best ways to really check off so many of your nutritional boxes to get an abundance of dietary fiber that the microbes that live in your large intestine love to consume and when I say fatty I don't mean you know throwing on tortilla strips and cheese and ranch dressing I mean you know taking a bowl of dark leafy greens kale spinach which are you know top sources of magnesium which 50% of people do not consume adequate amounts of folate arugula arugula is a top source of nitrates dietary nitrate really important in terms of increasing blood flow to the brain one single high nitrate meal might actually improve cognitive function it's that powerful dousing those dark leafy greens with extra-virgin olive oil which research has shown out of Barcelona Spain a pretty med study you can consume about a liter a week to better our cognitive function cognitive health cardiovascular health and it might even help you lose weight because it's so anti-inflammatory actually there's a compound in extra-virgin olive oil that is as anti-inflammatory as low-dose advil but without any of the potential for negative side effects and importantly you need to have fat in that salad because fat allows many of the most important nutrients in the cell to become bioavailable so I talked a lot about in this book which I think is bringing you know especially you know there's a lot I think actually that there's a lot of new information that I bring to the conversation but I talk particularly about carotenoids and how research has shown out of University of Georgia that by eating lutein and zeaxanthin by by supplementing with these carotenoids you can actually boost visual processing speed by 20% even if you're you're young and healthy so I mean these are young and healthy people that are already considered to be at the peak of their cognitive prowess visual processing speed is so important I mean think about in terms of responding to visual stimuli you know driving athletic performance sports performance things like video games video games yeah yeah absolutely so dark leafy greens are abundant in these two carotenoids and they're only absorbed through the digestive tract when in the presence of fat you don't absorb any of them unless you're consuming them with fatso like that fat-free dressing throw that in the trash extra-virgin olive oil you know is super key eating a large fatty salad I think it's just really key people tend to think about salads in terms of like weight loss I want to lose weight I'm going to eat more salad but really in terms of the brain it's powerful you also get the benefit of I mentioned dietary fiber we now know that you have microbes that live in your large intestine that when you consume fermentable soluble prebiotic fiber which is found in abundance in that in that bowl of greens the microbes turn out a compound called butyrate which is profoundly anti-inflammatory it is really you know beneficial in terms of the gut ecosystem it's been shown to boost levels of growth factors in the brain which promote neuroplasticity which is your brain's ability to change over time very important stuff in terms of lifestyle you know I advise as I mentioned not eating for an hour or two after you wake up people today are really obsessed with intermittent fasting which i think is you know really great at the very least it it I think has awakened people to the necessity to bring back balance in terms of being fed and being fasted but I don't get hung up over the hours I think it's just really important to honor the body's natural circadian inclinations you really want to like after that 1 2 or 3 hour window eat your food and then stop eating for 2 or 3 hours before bed again you know we talked about the glymphatic system it's a newly-discovered system but you know it's been theorized that eating soon before bed might interfere with that that that clean up process and then you know I try to eat a low-carb diet I try to avoid dense sources of carbohydrate with the exception of occasionally eating them in the post-workout window if you're gonna eat carbs throughout the day you really want to concentrate them into one meal it seems that when you consume your carbs concentrated into one meal less insulin is required to clear those carbs from circulation that glucose from circulation as opposed to if you were to spread them out over the course of the day which makes that that old to eat six small meals throughout the day particularly bad because insulin seems to be able to compound on itself so rather than eating you know 30 grams of carbs at launch 30 grams of carbs at dinner 30 grams of carbs at breakfast concentrate them into one meal and there's less of an you know insulin AUC so less less insulin being stimulated to clear that glucose which is important because as we talked about earlier glucose is very damaging when it's in the blood it glides those proteins is really interesting everything you've said is really interesting I mean yeah I'm a major nerd for this kind of stuff whether or not you're concerned about your risk for disease in the long term you know the all these things actually help you feel great in the here and now you know we talked about visual processing speed just in terms of your overall energy levels feeling less beholden to your hormones into your you know food cravings I think is really important and these are all ways of really kind of I think helping stack the odds in our favor you know because when it comes to nutrition what I've found is that the mainstream medical system has very little to offer and nutrition really is so important when it comes to preventing you know all of the diseases that I think we're seeing skyrocket today I mean 60 according to the World Health Organization chronic diseases now account for 60% of deaths worldwide all right before I asked my last question what's the best place for people to find you online definitely Instagram I'm pretty active on Instagram people can go to my website and join my newsletter which you know I put a lot of time into and yeah I mean genius foods really is I think I've been able to synthesize you know much of if not all of what I've learned into the book amazing so my final question if people are only going to make one single change in their life to have the biggest impact what change do they make that's a good question you know we've already talked about nutrition so I'm gonna throw you a curveball and I'm gonna say I think that people really should be kind to one another you know I think that's so important teach one another to help you know be a shoulder for for others especially that are less fortunate to to give back whether it's charity whether it's just to be more diligent and and deliberate about your social media use by posting things that are less inflammatory more helpful when I see suffering I'm profoundly affected by it and there's a lot of suffering going on in the world both in terms of health food scarcity things like that so just you know to your to your part what an unexpected and beautiful answer thank you so much for coming on the show man that was absolutely incredible thanks for having me my pleasure guys this is somebody I'm telling you right now the deeper into their world you go the more you're gonna get surprises like that not just nutritionally but somebody that's looking at the world in a new way I am fascinated by this notion of being a citizen scientist that he had this moment in his real life and instead of being a victim instead of letting the walls close in on him he really did something about it and went out and learned and leveraged his ability to think like a journalist to question things to go out to research to figure things out to find that intuitive through a line where things actually made sense and instead of saying oh it's confusing because I don't understand it he said maybe what's being proposed doesn't make sense and so that to me that is this new wave this new world that we all live in where we have access to things where we can go read the studies we can look at the press releases and do the fairly straightforward simple things that he laid out that he did that utterly change the course of his life and I hope will change the course of some of your lives as you dive in and see that and then you're gonna see that layer of humanity to what he does where his - what the one thing people should change is is the be kind which he posted in his Instagram feed by the way another place I recommend that you guys go check out max thank you so much for coming on man true honor to be here thank you guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe since I know it's over here and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're gonna get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 249,130

Rating: 4.8709855 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, TomBilyeu, health theory, health, max lugavere, genius foods, nutrition, genius life, brain health, what to eat to improve your memory, improve memory and concentration, improve memory while sleeping, brain foods for memory and concentration, what to eat to improve memory power, max lugavere diet, brain healthy foods, improve health naturally, improve health tips, healthy foods for your brain, nutrition tips for memory

Id: qplhqCKj_wE

Length: 42min 45sec (2565 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018