The Gut-Brain Connection with Max Lugavere

How does food impact your brain health? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly break down the gut-brain connection with Genius Foods author and science journalist, Max Lugavere.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 a force operating against us? Check it out.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Hey, Neil, what's happening?

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, professional comedian and actor, and of course, Gary O'Reilly, Gary, former soccer pro.

• 0:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And always good to have you. So what have you, what have you and your producers, fellow producers cooked up for this episode?

• 1:07Gary O'Reilly?

  It all starts tragically, but not too tragically, I hope, but with a family illness. And our guest put their media life on hold and went 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.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Max, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Hi, Neil, big fan. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. So do I, do I trust Gary's pronunciation of your last name?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did it. He did a fantastic job. And that's how I've been hearing it, actually. I was in London for a week, a week, just.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  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, brain health, and it was, I mean, it was my first time getting to explore London, it was a blast.

• 2:17Chuck Nice?

  You have a good time?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I did have a good time, you know, as I mentioned first.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  It's a great city.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Fantastic city, great food, which I wasn't quite expecting.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Not known for that.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not known for that. It didn't used to be. There's no restaurants in town, they say, "British cuisine." Those two words, you never see together. Yeah, that means mashed potatoes, sausages, fish and chips, baked beans, and then you're done. 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?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  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, but which obviously are geared towards lay audiences.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  But the reason why I got into it is because, again, at a young age, my mom got sick. And so that is my, my why. And she passed away four years ago, but trying to understand why she developed this rare, the rare form of dementia that she had, um, has become really my life's purpose.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm. And, and you, so you have, so you like the word genius, cause it's in three of your books, uh, gen- genius.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And the podcast.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, so let's start out by asking, I, I guess you would say there's some foods that are good for the brain and some foods that are not. I'm going to take the very naive view. The foods I like from my brain are the ones that taste good. Cause then I'm happy and my brain and my mind, if I'm happy, I'm happy. Right? So, so I have a, I have french fries or kale. When I'm done eating the french fries, I am happier than when I eat the bowl of kale. So, but I'm betting that's not the kind of thing you're talking about.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first off, I do want to address the, the, the genius aspect of the, you know, titling nomenclature that I've used. And, 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. Um, 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 ult- 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, 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

• 6:16Speaker 01

  at food. I'm, I've always been a big nutrition junkie. And so with regard to your, uh, your dilemma, your french fry and, and kale dilemma.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  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-

• 6:41Chuck Nice?

  Or if you're using spinach.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you're using spinach to what, to fryer-

• 6:46Chuck Nice?

  To make your french fries.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 6:54Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lard fried french fries.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Come on, man. 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, you know, changing these oil, 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, can damage the energy-producing mitochondria in our

• 7:40Speaker 01

  cells, and they create trans fats, which we know there's no safe level of trans fat consumption.

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  And so I think that's, you know, 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, you know, tallow, or, you know, 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.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Extra virgin french fries are amazing.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  My 10-year-old makes them in the air frying toaster oven that we have, and I'd- and, by the way, the same way you can make the french fries, all you gotta do is slice those same potatoes very thinly, and in the exact same way, you can make your own-

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Potato chips.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  Fresh potato chips, baby.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Potato chips.

• 8:36Chuck Nice?

  I will never buy another bag of potato chips again.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, ooh.

• 8:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Lot, 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.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So when I started looking into 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.

• 9:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't eat this.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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, um, 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.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:04Gary O'Reilly?

  We saw what you did there.

• 10:09Gary O'Reilly?

  He's here all week.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  I'm here all week. Yeah, but, but the egg yolk is literally, uh, 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 the, 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, um, men.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 11:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Ooh, yeah. I like this. I actually like this question because caviar provides a form of docosa hexaenoic acid, aka DHA fat, which is one of the most-

• 11:23Chuck Nice?

  New word alert.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, new word alert. There you go. That was a getting my, learning how to pronounce that accurately. That took-

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was showing off there.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  He was showing off. Docosa hexa what?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Enoic acid.

• 11:37Chuck Nice?

  Enoic acid.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Enoic, yeah. You know it.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's it.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  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 membranes. So it's a-

• 12:13Chuck Nice?

  Now, I've heard of DHA fat in certain kinds of cold water fish, too. Is that the case?

• 12:19Speaker 01

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

• 12:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Now, you know, people will look to, especially today, there's this like this push towards plant-based diets, which I think is, you know, if you choose to be on a plant-based diet, by all means, do it. I just, you know, aspire so that I, I hope that people have the full breadth of information before making a choice like that. A lot of people will look to like 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, you know, one of those important omega-3 fatty acids. It's DHA fat. So I prefer to get it from fish, Chuck.

• 12:58Chuck Nice?

  I don't blame you.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, just back up for a sec. So- You make a point, but I don't want to, 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?

• 13:38Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 14:23Speaker 01

  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 10 times more effective at converting ALA to DHA, which is thought to be an adaptation to support child rearing.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, you're absolutely right, Neil. We can't just like, you know, we don't want, we want to take the guesswork out of this. Nutrition is far too important.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  Not yet, but let's come on now.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  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, so 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,

• 16:44Speaker 01

  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, Ebedon, 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 little to no association with Alzheimer's disease. So essentially, that gene...

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Increases your risk in the context of the standard American diet, right?

• 17:29Chuck Nice?

  Got it.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 17:47Chuck Nice?

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

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:52Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. This is a concept known as epigenetics. So you might, you know, we all, you might carry, uh, 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, 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 Americans'

• 18:54Speaker 01

  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, uh, you know, like, or even non-traumatic head injury, um, then you're...

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's it. I'm dead.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yep. You're, 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, who, who adhered to what any dietitian of the seventies and eighties 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

• 19:59Speaker 01

  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, for her adolescence, like the gym membership wasn't a thing the way that it is now. So I don't know if they...

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There were no gyms.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  There were no gyms.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  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...

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is nutritional psychiatry?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  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

• 22:00Speaker 01

  show us that food is medicine with regard to mental health. So, one of the... One of the seminal studies came out of the Deakin, 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. Alright. Right?

• 22:17Chuck Nice?

  I love the, the Smiles Trial, that's where they give you Neil's French Fries.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, those patients were eating lots of French fries and- There you go. And they had clinical depression and after cleaning up their diets and giving them, you know, a dietary pattern similar to the one that I recommend, you know, a Mediterranean whole foods dietary pattern inclusive of animal products and, and with a reduced focus on ultra-processed, what I call vending machine foods, they saw that three times the, compared to standard of 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. And that-

• 23:00Chuck Nice?

  So now with, 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?

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's both and all, and to be clear, I'm not, you know, my intent is not to place stigma on pharmaceutical intervention. The drugs do work for a subset of depressed patients, but you know, they tend to be more effective the more severe the depression. But my argument, and I think the, the, the growing argument now is that food and lifestyle should be a frontline defense. And if, if that doesn't work for you, then you know, by all means, see a psychiatrist and, and, and you know, and have them work out something that's effective for you.

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  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. It was a medical doctor.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  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?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  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 top pollutants. They eat diets that contribute to inflammation, ultra-processed, highly refined diets. They're, you know, they experience, 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

• 25:52Speaker 01

  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, you know, why not try that first before, you know, getting onto one of these drugs which have side effects and are very difficult to come off of, right? I think you owe it to yourself. And again, I'm not-

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Max, but Max, so I'm a, I'm a physics reductionist, alright? So, 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 and 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, 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?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's a great question. And in the field of nutrition, that's referred to as nutritionism. This idea that, you know, humans that we, you know, with our, especially in the field of nutrition, meager tools just 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.

• 27:33Chuck Nice?

  That, that makes sense. It's like, what, what you're saying is that when you, 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, 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-

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean to supplement, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes, but, but, but, but, but to make that the, the focus- Probably won't work.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, I gotta go. I gotta go to bathroom, guys. I gotta go to bathroom. He's talking about veganism. We're about to be under attack. Watch out. Everybody duck.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Duck, okay.

• 28:25Chuck Nice?

  Everybody duck, watch out.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, so I, you know, I don't, people, people can, I don't care what people eat. I think that they should be, adopt whatever diet they want with full informed consent, the full breadth of information before they make those choices. But, you know, they've, 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-gather 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, but there's this idea that you can distill the entire category of animal source foods down to one nutrient, vitamin B12. And if, as long as you supplement with that, then you're good, right? You can, you can X out

• 29:08Speaker 01

  animal products and, and cross them off from your, 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, in both primate and mouse models, that taurine, which is an amino acid found only in animal products, right, can actually extend lifespan. It set the internet ablaze. You know, everybody's looking for the new, 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.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  But, you know, animal source products are loaded with nutrients that seem to improve the way that our biology's function, right? Creatine, found in, in meat, carnitine. And so this, this whole idea of like 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.

• 30:16Chuck Nice?

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

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Thank you for the, thank you for the rimshot, because that's deserved.

• 30:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be the judge of what deserves a rimshot here.

• 30:46Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Um, yes. But omnivory is our biologically appropriate way of eating. Um, you can, you can try to get around it with a, by playing a cat and mouse game of nutrients.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  But pretty much your teeth, your teeth make that point for you, Max. Let's be honest. There's a reason why we have canines, okay?

• 31:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting point.

• 31:24Chuck Nice?

  Right. And it ain't to eat apples.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I'm a, I'm a huge proponent of, 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, you know, 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, um, but yeah, I'm unapologetic in my, in my, in my stance.

• 31:52Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 32:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 32:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, Ozempic.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. Um, that's a great question. I think it's what, 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. Um, you know, Satchin Panda, for example, at the Salt Institute is a circadian biologist who's done a lot of great work showing us how early time restricted eating, um, meaning tailing 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

• 32:48Chuck Nice?

  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, your intake to a few hours or cut it off a few hours before you go to bed, you can see metabolic benefits to doing so in terms of like your heart and so forth. Is that right?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, without even, 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?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  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, for one, be diurnal creatures, which we are. So we're meant to eat primarily during the day and not too close to, 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.

• 34:13Speaker 01

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

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  I'm the one.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  You're the one in two people.

• 34:39Gary O'Reilly?

  There's four of us.

• 34:40Chuck Nice?

  I'm the one in two.

• 34:41Gary O'Reilly?

  There's four of us.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, 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 are aggressively treated for their hypertension saw a significant risk reduction for the development of mild cognitive impairment, which is considered predementia. So we know that, you know, your brain is fed blood and nutrients and antioxidants, oxygen, glucose by a network of microvessels. And, you know, 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, so.

• 35:24Gary O'Reilly?

  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've paid attention to them or not.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  Good point.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, but unfortunately today, there's massive pressure from, whether it is the pharmaceutical industry, as you mentioned Ozempic, you know, there was a, 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?

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  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, you know, and they look at me like...

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Samoan, Samoan big people.

• 36:41Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and 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.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  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 largely, it's an interplay between our environment and our genes.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  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 gotta be honest, right now, I'm kind of thinking, all right, what do I do?

• 38:08Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can totally go into that. I mean, yeah.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think we've heard that yet.

• 38:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  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 of the standard American food supply. The reason why 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.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bussin', you know, like super

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Sprinkle some crack on that.

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  The other, 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 a, 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.

• 39:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I get all that. I get all that. What does it have to do with the brain?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Well, the brain, it just like, it sends off like the, the equivalent of the Fourth of July fireworks when we consume them. And so we tend to overconsume them. There was really elegant research and seminal research published, funded by the NIH, led by Kevin Hall, who's a, a highly credentialed obesity researcher, who found that by the time we've eaten these foods to satiety, we've already overconsumed 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,

• 40:34Speaker 01

  you're happy, you're good, you're, you come in actually effortlessly at a, at a calorie deficit. Whereas these ultra-processed foods, we overconsume them.

• 40:44Chuck Nice?

  So we get fat. They turn you into Pirates of the Caribbean. You, you can eat all you want, drink all you want, but there's, you never get satisfied.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  There you go. So we get fat. They're also nutrient depleted.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We get, what, they get fat. What's it have to do with my brain health?

• 41:00Speaker 01

  So, well, I mean, being

• 41:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're smart fat people.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so

• 41:04Speaker 01

  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 two and four fold. It, you know, having chronically elevated blood sugar literally damages the blood vessels that supply blood nutrients, oxygen to your, to your brain.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the brain.

• 41:31Speaker 01

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

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. Obesogenic, good word.

• 41:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Obesogenic, yes, another new word for us. Um, food labeling, nutrients, this, this, this, this, this. The 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?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I like to remind people that real foods don't have extensive ingredients lists. They are the foods. Um, they are the ingredients. And so I think people do need to, one of the best things that people could do, uh, second after reducing their, 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.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, when I grew up, that wasn't, that wasn't clearly seen on the label.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like hidden. They would have four different kinds of sugar. And then you'd see like sucrose, the regular sugar listed last, and you'd think that was all the sugar, but sugar was masquerading as four other ingredients. So I was a big triumph. I remember when nutrition labels decided to localize all the sugar content in one column.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  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-obesagen, 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

• 43:49Speaker 01

  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 overconsume. And so that's one of the, I think, more practical takeaways.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you don't even, just to put teeth in that, you don't have the urge to binge on it, right? 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?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, carbohydrate and fat laden 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 Co-factors 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 not, we're all nutrient deficient. Ninety percent of us are walking around deficient in at least one essential nutrient. And our bodies require cofactors to generate ATP, energy in our cells.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, so.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  And that is why I just use meth.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Works for Chuck every time.

• 45:32Chuck Nice?

  Telling you, man, I could, I could walk to Kansas City from here if I wanted.

• 45:38Gary O'Reilly?

  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?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  It's a good point. There, the, the food processing industry, there is a, there is a benefit to it, of course. It's made food abundant, widely available, safe.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And cheaper than ever. If you look at the percentage of the average incomes expenditures on food, it is a fraction of what it was when I was growing up. So it's, it's a lower hit to your total budget than ever, as low as it's ever been.

• 46:21Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, making a relative statement here.

• 46:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, but there are, but there are trade-offs, right? Like, I mean, these, these foods might make it easy to, and, and we, and we also need to separate, you know, 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 prediabetic. So, yeah, I mean, we're providing cheap calories to our population, but at what cost? Leaving us saddled with, with chronic illness. And it's also playing a role in soaring healthcare costs. So, yeah, again, it is a, it is a double-edged sword.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what is biochemical liposuction?

• 47:15Speaker 01

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

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is the energy is being drawn from your fat rather than from carbohydrates flowing through your system. Because you're going into a carbohydrate deficit. And now, oh my gosh, I gotta get energy from somewhere. Your body gets it from your stored fat.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Your stored fat.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that reference. It's a very graphic.

• 48:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you remember our survival expert, Dr. Timujin Tan?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:23Gary O'Reilly?

  They dropped him in the middle of a Labrador and said, 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?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  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 I think we need to... And nutrition data is incredibly weak. I mean, our dietary guidelines are based on population level evidence. And 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 these different... Each of the many different dietary tribes do have their answers, right? And we're just not privy to them.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  And so I think you do need to apply...

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Max, this was my sense when I spent time binging on every single...

• 49:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nutrition documentary on Netflix only to find that I every single I don't 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 um uh preference.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it left me wondering whether the person who made the video, it worked for them and they're assuming it's gonna work for everybody else, but maybe not. Because of genetics, because of epigenetics, because of whatever else. Now, you're making a documentary, right? I it's in this space and am I I'm gonna line it up with the others? And what am I gonna say after I've seen 12 others and I come to yours?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  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 and people can.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool, we'll look for it.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, and it but it's not, um, I mean, there there is science and research in it, but it's not gonna be one of these pedantic, uh, you know, highly prescriptive nutrition docs like like what you see on Netflix. Because the reality is that, you know, many diets dietary patterns work. There's no such thing as a one size fits all diet. You've got to.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was my sense when I seen this. It just worked for all these different people. And so I said, okay, fine, I'll, you know, pick what works for me. Not not turn a turn one person's documentary into a cult.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 51:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, because that's what it kind of felt like. They were saying, if you're not with me, you're against me. And join a join us, you know, we are the.

• 51:09Gary O'Reilly?

  So is that is that Neil then? Going forward, the next generation will want to get ahead of what what is the food stuff nutrients? So they're gonna go and get the genomes analyzed. They're gonna 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?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Dispoke nutrition.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's gonna be true no matter what Max says. That's gonna be.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 51:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know that's true. Max, that's gotta be the solution to this.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Personalized nutrition, yeah, but it's, I think it's, it's, it's in the distance. I don't think that it's, that this is something that's around the corner. I mean, there's certainly.

• 51:48Gary O'Reilly?

  This is again, it's socio-economic. You know, you're gonna take out the people who can't afford to go and buy super hyper-fresh, local, and all they, all their dollar will buy them is ultra-processed.

• 51:59Chuck Nice?

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

• 52:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 52:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not chasing down my potato chips. I'm sorry.

• 52:28Chuck Nice?

  You gotta chase your potato chips. You gotta hunt those potato chips, man!

• 52:33Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're gonna put them in a, so what we're gonna do is electric carts, right? Full of food that we have to chase around the aisles in the supermarket.

• 52:40Chuck Nice?

  So you just say, there they go! There go the potato chips! And then you just gotta start running to get your chips.

• 52:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Potato chips just came in aisle eight.

• 52:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Blue light chips especially in aisle four.

• 52:50Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need staff shooters for the potato chips.

• 52:53Chuck Nice?

  We, we start forming teams to work together.

• 52:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, dear.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  That is one solution.

• 53:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, make this world a healthier place. Because without those forces operating, uh, you know, I, I, I don't, I don't know why we're even alive at all, you know? We're not for the reminders of what we should or shouldn't be doing with our body and our minds. So thank you for being a force of good in this world.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Thank you, Neil, it means a lot, coming from you.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, 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 looking out.