141. Max Lugavere: Seed Oils, LDL Cholesterol & Inflammation

What if everything you thought you knew about “heart-healthy” cooking oils was based on outdated science and clever marketing? In this episode, I’ve sat down once again with Max Lugavere, and we’ve had an amazing conversation about the metabolic chaos that modern seed oils are silently creating in our bodies, and why the food industry’s favourite oils might be driving the global rise in chronic disease. We also uncovered some actionable steps that we hope to see prioritised with the new government, and especially with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Ready to transform your understanding of nutrition and take control of your overall health? Hit subscribe and share this video with someone who needs to hear this message. Join Gary Brecka’s FREE 3-Day Morning Routine Challenge! 🗓️ LIVE February 19-21 👉 Sign up now Gain exclusive access to Gary Brecka’s proven wellness protocols: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Connect with Max Lugavere: Get Max Lugavere book, “Genius Foods” Listen to "The Genius Life" on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: https://bit.ly/3X5fVQO Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4gJiBL8 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4gOCmAS Connect with Max Lugavere: Website: https://bit.ly/3XLOGdN YouTube: https://bit.ly/4eJc6r7 Instagram: https://bit.ly/3BsEf7y TikTok: https://bit.ly/3Y8ov2w Facebook: https://bit.ly/3Y4QkZr X.com: https://bit.ly/3ZMQgPk Thank you to our partners: BODYHEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV BAJA GOLD - USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY”: https://bit.ly/3WkLd6E STRENGTH TRAINING EQUIPMENT - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN: https://bit.ly/3zYwtSl COLD LIFE - THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST $50+ ORDER: https://bit.ly/40LVY4y VANDY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/49Qr7WE PARKER PASTURES - PREMIUM GRASS-FED MEATS: https://bit.ly/4hHcbhc AION - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD HAPBEE - FEEL BETTER & PERFORM AT YOUR BEST: https://bit.ly/4a6glfo CARAWAY - USE CODE “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3Q1VmkC Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka: Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X.com: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 04:11 What is Seed Oil? And Why Is It Bad For You? 10:21 Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids in Seed Oils 14:25 Awareness on Food Labeling 20:28 High Volumes of Oxidised Oils in Blood Stream Risks 25:55 Animal-Source Foods Play an Important Role in an Optimised Diet 36:00 Randomised Clinical Trials on Red Meat 38:48 Top 5 Sports Supplements 42:25 Supplementation for Vegans and Vegetarians 45:02 Actionable Steps the Government Can and Should Do 54:54 Nutrition for Brain Health 59:22 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?’ Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Least healthy foods in the supermarket make the loudest claims. It should be banned that ultra-processed foods are allowed to make health claims.

• 0:07Gary Brecka?

  It's such a large percentage of our public policy nutritional research is funded by pharma. I think this has got to be partially responsible for an upside down food pyramid. You know, Lucky Charms, Nutritious, and Grassroots Steak.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  I'm happy with products marketing how they've been produced. If it wants to say organic, great, but it's the health claim. Just be a level playing field to inspire consumers to learn for themselves.

• 0:28Gary Brecka?

  We're both connected to this Make America Healthy Again movement.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm optimistic that we can raise more awareness around this topic and call for better science.

• 0:35Gary Brecka?

  We've privatized profits and we've socialized the expense. Medicare is picking up the cost of this burgeoning explosive era of chronic disease and morbid obesity.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Obesity has tripled over the past 50 years. Our genes have not changed all that much. Our lifestyle, our food environment has dramatically changed.

• 0:52Gary Brecka?

  In a perfect world, what are some real actionable things that the government could do to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time?

• 0:59Speaker 00

  The motivation is there to uncouple some of the many conflicts of interest. I remain totally optimistic, but what can they do? You know, I think for one.

• 1:19Gary Brecka?

  Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And a trip to LA would not be complete without having Max Lugavere back on the podcast. It was one of the best podcasts that we've launched. I mean, the, the, the story that you told about your journey with your mother and Alzheimer's and how you really became an advocate. And I say this all the time. I feel like I start every podcast the same way, but I've truly found that people that are the most impactful, the most passionate, the most driven and purposeful are people that solve the problem in their life. And, and you really solved the problem when, you know, your mother was probably the closest,

• 2:04Gary Brecka?

  I'm going to assume relative to you, you know, went through that time and you just said, I. I need answers. And so if you guys have not watched the podcast that I do with Max on the journey with his mother and how he became an advocate for for mental health. It's a really, it's a phenomenal podcast. I linked all of the research in the in the show notes and even gave a link to the documentary that he did with his mother. I was, you know, before every podcast, and I know you so well, and we just had a great time at the Maha Ball, which was awesome. We had a great time at the Turning Point Ball, which was, which was a great time, other than the weather. It was like freaking nine degrees and all the women were walking a mile in open toed heels.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  I know. It was like being in a cryotherapy chamber, like

• 2:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I didn't think about it that way. I should have turned that into a positive and then like, I'm getting all this vasoconstriction and brown fat activation and dopamine, but but I was actually pissed off. So maybe the dopamine didn't work.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  I know. We were constricted. You're wearing a tux. It's like, oh.

• 3:04Gary Brecka?

  But I ran into a great clip that you did, and I think it was either during a congressional hearing or when you were on Capitol Hill not too long ago, and you made a comment and you said, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the grocery store? And, you know, as obvious as that is, it just made me go, you know, it's, it is so true. And it's so interesting how, you know, we're both connected to this Make America Healthy Again movement, and we're both committing time and resources and our platforms to it. And it's astounding to me how bad it's really gotten. And, you know, just how far away from the basics, you know, eating whole foods and nutritious soil and and getting back to the basics, the war on saturated fat, the, you know, the promotion

• 3:49Gary Brecka?

  of of seed oil, the allowance through grass that's generally regarded as safe guideline that the FDA has that we can actually take microtoxins on a regular basis. And so I want to kind of roam around that that with you because I consider you an authority on that. And, and maybe we should start with one of the most controversial topics, which is seed oils. And I think that a basic explanation of what is a seed oil? Why is it bad for you? And so pro-inflammatory? We had an awesome discussion before the podcast started about, you know, its impact on LDL cholesterol. And I thought that your viewpoint on that was really good because you you talked about the house of cards collapsing on LDL cholesterol. So I wonder if you might expand on that.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so seed oils are a obviously very controversial today. Everybody's talking about them. I actually, I think, was very prescient in my, you know, diving into this topic in my book Genius Foods, which came out in 2018, which the manuscript I wrote around 2016. And there have been other people sort of broaching this issue. I mean, Weston A. Price, I think, was one of the earliest.

• 4:58Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, Paul Saldino has been big on it.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Talk about it. Yeah, Dr. Kate Shanahan. You know, the evidence is kind of all over the place, and I think it's a little bit. We have to talk about seed oils, not as a monolith, but with nuance. And, you know, when discussing these kinds of oils, there are the culinary oils like sesame seed oil, which have been used in various traditional cuisines for millennia, which I think can be perfectly healthy and add, you know, great qualities to certain recipes. And, you know, I think those are fine. But the oils that are in question, particularly today, are the, what are sometimes referred to as RBD oils, which stands for refined, bleached, and deodorized oils.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  These are the highly marketed cooking oils that have only really had a presence in the human food supply for the past couple of decades. And the issue with these, and even within the refined, bleached, and deodorized seed oil category.

• 6:00Gary Brecka?

  First of all, when you say refined, bleached, and deodorized, I mean, you should come to a full stop right there. Because there's no mechanism in nature for something to be refined, bleached, or deodorized.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Correct. Yes. So, I mean, we've now, I think, many of us in the nutrition community are placing an emphasis on awareness around ultra-processed foods, right? We generally want to, you know, minimize our consumption of ultra-processed foods, which now make up 60% of the calories of your average adult. But what about ultra-processed food ingredients? And these refined, bleached, and deodorized seed oils are ultra-processed. By definition, a food that is ultra-processed is something that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried. Now, you could make sesame seed oil in your kitchen, right? To make sesame seed oil, you press sesame seeds. You could conceivably make extra virgin olive oil in your own kitchen. I mean, humans have been making and consuming extra virgin olive oil for centuries at this point.

• 6:54Gary Brecka?

  I'm a huge fan.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Me as well.

• 6:56Gary Brecka?

  I actually start the morning with a shot of it.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  But you couldn't realistically create one of these RBD oils like soybean oil or corn oil in your kitchen. They often require industrial machinery, chemical solvents like hexane. So right off the bat, these oils are ultra-processed. We know that. The ultra-processing designation comes from the NOVA paradigm out of Latin America. And so it's a little bit unclear. I think the technical definition might not necessarily place, you know, corn oil and soybean oil under that in that category, but they are. There's no question you couldn't make them in your own kitchen. I mean, you would, you would need some serious chemistry to do so.

• 7:37Gary Brecka?

  Right. Plus, most of us don't have hexane and sodium hydroxide just lying around.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. There's actually a, there was a viral video on Instagram by a really wonderful content creator, and I forget his name, but I'll send it over to you and you can perhaps include it in the show notes. It's actually a guy who seems to, who appears to have a chemistry background, attempts to make a refined bleach and deodorized seed oil in his, in his home kitchen. And it's pretty terrifying.

• 8:03Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Actually, yeah, yeah. The, all the myriad production steps, but it's, it's, you know, nobody's doing that at home for the most part.

• 8:10Gary Brecka?

  I'm gonna try to dig that one up.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:13Gary Brecka?

  Cali just did, Cali Means is another good friend of mine and someone I deeply, deeply respect just did a post on the, this, the sequence in the manufacturing of seed oils. I thought was really good.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're often exposed to high heat. So, but you know, it should be said that processing doesn't necessarily make a food unhealthy, right? Even, even within the bucket of ultra-processed foods, ultra-processed foods are not a monolith. Some are better for you than others. So what is it specifically about refined bleach and deodorized seed oils that make them, that, that should ought to inspire caution when over-consuming them? Well, For one, they are novel fats. So, you know, again, we, these didn't exist in the human food supply prior to 50 to 70 years ago. So, right off the bat, I think we should, you know, embrace by default, what's called the precautionary principle. So, the less

• 9:07Speaker 00

  time a food or an ingredient or a product is, you know, humans have been exposed to it, the more skepticism, the more caution, the higher the burden of proof should be on that food to prove itself as safe, you know, as opposed to the burden of proof being on the consumer or the researcher to prove it guilty, right? It should be guilty until proven innocent. And that's what's referred to as the precautionary principle. It's something that actually in the EU, that's, that seems to be the norm for food additives and the like. Here, the burden of proof is usually on the consumer to prove something, to prove that something is unhealthy. And usually that occurs years, if not decades, after many, many people have been exposed to it. And we've seen that with Red Dyed III, which was just banned.

• 9:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that was a good move.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  After decades.

• 9:53Gary Brecka?

  Just to start, we need to go through the other 40 and some of the other ones.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  There you go. So, I think the precautionary principle is super smart. It's something that we don't generally abide by here in the United States, and I think that's unfortunate. So, these ultra-processed, you know, oils are, they're novel, right? Now, again, that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right? So, we have to peel back the layers of the onion even further, right? The problem with, I think, one of the major problems with these oils is that they're predominantly comprised of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are the most chemically unstable. So, among the fatty acids that predominate our diets, you've got mona, you've got unsaturated fatty acids and you've got saturated fatty acids, right? Those are the two major categories. Saturated fats are the most chemically stable. They tend to be solid at room temperature. And under the bucket of unsaturated fats,

• 10:40Speaker 00

  you've got your polyunsaturated fatty acids and your monounsaturated fatty acids. Polyunsaturated fatty acids are very prone to a chemical process known as oxidation, where essentially the oils go bad. They go rancid.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  And that process is catalyzed by exposure to light, heat and oxygen. And so these refined bleached and deodorized seed oils are, they tend to be predominantly polyunsaturated in nature. And that's not the case for all of them because there are seed oils like high oleic sunflower oil, which I actually think is fine because it's mostly monounsaturated fat, which has a degree of of chemical protection. It's less prone to this oxidative process, but polyunsaturated fats are essentially naked because they're the most prone to oxidation. And they're extracted from the food matrix, which often coincides with antioxidants that protect those fats.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  In fact, in nature, where you see higher levels of polyunsaturated fats, you also see higher levels of certain antioxidants like vitamin E, which whose role in nature is is is mainly to guard these polyunsaturated fatty acids against oxidation. So in foods where you have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats, you see higher levels of vitamin E, which is why nuts are one of the primary sources of both polyunsaturated fats in the in the diet as well as vitamin E.

• 12:07Gary Brecka?

  Okay, I didn't know that.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Polyunsaturated fats are not inherently unhealthy. And vitamin E is super important from a brain health standpoint. The problem is when we extract these fats from the whole food matrix and we expose them to these, you know, caustic chemical solvents like hexane or others. And then we expose them to heat, which often occurs during the deodorization process. And then we further use them to cook them, to cook, to cook with, which ironically is what they're marketed as being ideal for.

• 12:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Then you're further catalyzing this oxidative process to these polyunsaturated fats, which are very vulnerable. And, you know, oxidation occurs when we ingest these fats in us.

• 12:49Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  But it can also occur in the external environment, when they're used in the fryer setting, when they're used to, you know, create ultra-processed foods. And so that's potentially really harmful.

• 13:01Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  The other problem is that there are byproducts of oxidation. So it's not just that the fatty acids themselves become oxidized, but they there are all of these other nasty compounds are generated. When a high polyunsaturated fatty acid dominant seed oil is exposed to high heat and reheated in particular, you know, you're not just damaging the fatty acids, but you're generating all of these noxious compounds like acrylene and four hydroxy nannanol, which have been shown to

• 13:35Speaker 00

  be cancer causing and be associated with conditions like Alzheimer's disease, four hydroxy nannanol in particular. So you're in

• 13:46Gary Brecka?

  And this doesn't exist in the seed oil initially. This exists when the seed oil becomes oxidized. And I think the, the, the oxidation process, which is also a pro inflammatory process in the human body, when you, when you have oxidative free radicals in the human body, you create inflammation and you see, again, it's not causal, but it's correlated. You see significant increase, dramatic increase in the consumption of things like refined sugar, but also the consumption of seed oils. I mean, you, you really can't get away from them. I mean, even, even if you go to, you know, and my favorite thing is that most of them had a, have a heart healthy label on it. American Heart Association, so there's beautiful picture of a heart with a smiley face and, and

• 14:31Gary Brecka?

  they're, and, and the bright eyes that's on the, on the bottle of seed oils. But the amount of their consumption too is, well, people go, well, I don't grab Wesson oil off the, off the shelf. But, you know, you start spinning around the labels of your, you know, your salad dressings and, and most, you know, a lot of your seasonings and, and even some extra virgin olive oils, you know, and until Paul Saladino brought this to my attention, it was a few years ago, I actually Extra virgin olive oil is extra virgin olive oil. And then when you spin the label around, it's like extra virgin olive oil, palm oil, cottonseed oil, canola oil. And it's right in the bottle that, and all it says on the label is extra virgin olive oil.

• 15:15Gary Brecka?

  And it's, and you know, part of, I think, the issue and what, you know, hopefully we're, we're going to help solve with this Maha movement is that, you know, the average consumer doesn't stand a chance. I mean, I can consider us to be pretty woke and educated in this arena. And, you know, just getting to the grocery store and just getting through that is it's a task, right? And so you think about the middle American mother and fathers trying to do the right thing by the family and trying to raise their kids and trying to eat healthy. And, you know, as I'm cruising down the aisle, I think, see things like fortified, enriched, um, heart healthy. Okay, those are the things that I'm going to grab and throw in my, you know, in, in my basket.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:54Gary Brecka?

  Right?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  It's a bit, it's a, it's a huge problem. And, um, yeah, you know, I'm, uh, I'm optimistic that we can raise more awareness around this topic and call for better science because again, the science is a little bit all over the place. And this is a controversial topic, not everybody. I mean, it's, it's actually very, uh, this is a very unorthodox perspective that we should be avoiding seed oils. I mean, I'll say with all, you know, transparency that like, if you were to ask your average dietitian, for example, what they think about seed oils, they'll say that they're not only, they're not only benign, they're, and not harmful, but they're actually good for you. And so I think, um, you know, this is something that we're going to need a lot more research to say with certainty, but, um, based on this line of thinking that I've, you know,

• 16:38Speaker 00

  at least begun to lay out, I think that we should all have a little bit more skepticism around them. And, um, you know, like linoleic acid, which is the form of polyunsaturated fat that dominates these seed oils is also found in extremely healthy foods. Like again, nuts and seeds and things like that. And you find linoleic acid in animal source foods, egg yolks and things like that. And so, um, a lot of the observational data on this, like when they'll, when they'll correlate blood levels of linoleic acid, for example, to certain health outcomes.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  You know, it's, it's actually seems positive from, from that perspective, but there are a lot of confounding aspects to that observation. For one, nuts and seeds and other foods, as I've, as I've mentioned, that are high in this fat are healthful. And then also there is what's called healthy user bias where. You know, these oils are adorned with the heart healthy logo on them. So a health conscious person might be more inclined to consume canola oil and corn oil and soybean oil. Now is their health good because of these oils or perhaps in spite of these oils? Cause I mean, that's a health conscious consumer, right? Maybe they're more inclined to take a multivitamin, or maybe they're less likely to smoke or drink alcohol excessively. So.

• 17:47Gary Brecka?

  When it comes to snacking, masa is flipping the script on what real food should look like. Masa chips are crafted with grass fed beef tallow, one of the healthiest fats on the planet. These chips are packed with essential vitamins like vitamin A, D, E, and vitamin K2, all of which play a role in keeping your skin vibrant, your immune system strong, and your bones solid. But here's the real magic about masa. Masa's corn goes through an ancient process called nixtimalization, which makes it way easier to digest and it amps up its nutrient profile. Plus, these chips are low in PUFA, so you won't find any of the inflammatory seed oils that you find in most snacks. And instead masa uses pure Redmond sea salt, giving you a natural hit of minerals that keep your cells hydrated and your energy steady. So

• 18:31Gary Brecka?

  don't just snack. Reach for masa. It's real food, real health, without any of the junk. Grab a bag and I promise you'll feel the difference. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Well, you know, I think you see such a parabolic rise in nearly all forms of chronic disease, autism, ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, and then also the more physical characteristics, obesity, multiple chronic disease in a single biome, all of which the United States is leading the world in. As we drop to 66th and like 66th in life expectancy, you know, we are leading in these areas where that we don't, don't want to lead, especially after spending four and a half trillion dollars a year on healthcare. If

• 19:15Gary Brecka?

  we spend four and a half trillion dollars, Ben, we should, we should all be flying around with a cape.

• 19:22Gary Brecka?

  For four and a half trillion dollars, we should be the healthiest, you know, nation in the world. But, um, and, and, you know, I'm always cautious to say the pandemic of obesity or chronic disease is directly related to seed oil consumption. I think it is multifactorial. This is certainly a factor. You know, I don't think that the jury is out on. You know, oils becoming rancid at high temperatures and therefore, you know, at least, you know, to be prudent, if you were to wipe seed oils out and add things back in, let's say room temperature oils, like extra virgin olive oil, or cooking in high smoke point oils, like, you know, coconut oil, or grass fed butter, ghee butter, tallow,

• 20:07Gary Brecka?

  some of these oils that actually can withstand those temperatures. Quite frankly, I think things taste better, personally, when you cook in those oils. And they're the only things you really need to have around your kitchen. But this process of oxidation in seed oils, what are some of the outcomes of having these oxidized oils in high volumes in the bloodstream?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Well, one effect which they've, so people can look up, there are two, there's a lot of, there are many different researchers, you know, working on this. But there have been some really interesting papers, clinical trials by a researcher with the last name of Ramsden, and then Taha. And there was one paper in particular that I often cite, it's actually a review, so it's pretty easy to read, by Taha, single author paper, published in 2020, looking at linoleic acid and its impact on the brain, which is obviously a topic that I'm incredibly passionate about because my mom had dementia from a young age. And I'll never know what caused her dementia. I don't know if it had anything to do with, you know, her exposure to these, her lifelong exposure to these kinds of

• 21:20Speaker 00

  fats. But, but yeah, it doesn't seem that consuming excessive amounts of linoleic acid, which again predominates these oils in question, linoleic acid has easy access to the brain. And it's a fat that's incredibly prone to oxidation because of its, you know, its polyunsaturated nature. And the human diet is now, I mean, saturated with this, with this type of fat. I was reading a study that came out in 2023. And it painted the picture very plainly that, you know, in 1910, more than 90% of the fats in the human diet were of animal origin, 90%.

• 22:04Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And now that figure is like, it's less than 15%. I mean, it's way lower and the bulk of that, of those fats have been replaced by these grain and seed oils. Like most of the, the majority of fats in the human diet today come from soybean oil.

• 22:21Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  And corn oil.

• 22:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and canola.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's like, it's, uh, it's shocking. So the fact that these, you know, the idea that these fats are benign and not having some kind of physiologic effect.

• 22:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  It's just that, that doesn't even pass like logical muster, you know?

• 22:38Gary Brecka?

  Right, right.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Like, of course they're doing something. We just have to figure out what that something is. One thing that they do do, and this was actually shown in a paper by Ramsden, I forget which year, but people can look this up, is that they increase in the blood something called oxalams, oxidized linoleic acid metabolites. And these have been associated with Alzheimer's disease. I mean, these, these compounds.

• 22:58Gary Brecka?

  Atherosclerosis.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, narrowing of the arteries. You find a lot of these oxidative species, you know, at the site of inflammation and also, you know, at the site of, you know, where cholesterol coalesces into, you know, these plaques. And I think often we, we blame cholesterol for crimes it's not committing. Uh, you know, I often refer to cholesterol as a fireman. Uh, you know, your, if your house catches fire, the fireman shows up to put the fire out. Um, but he didn't just show up randomly, right? I mean, if, if this Airbnb never caught fire, a fireman would never show up in the driveway, right? But if it did, they would show up to extinguish the fire. Cholesterol is usually called to the site of inflammation. And I think it's something that goes lost on a lot of folks. They just think because

• 23:45Gary Brecka?

  of the presence of LDL cholesterol, especially, especially if LDL cholesterol is in higher amounts, then I have a higher risk for narrowing of the arteries or atherosclerosis. But that's, that's like making the argument that if there were more firemen, we would have more fires. But you know, that line of thinking is not, not true. And I think it is about to be majorly disproven. But one of the things that I liked that you were saying before the podcast started was, we have to understand that, you know, these, these polyunsaturated fatty acids are built on the backs of this entire house of cards built around LDL cholesterol. And if, if, if one of those cards, like polyunsaturated fatty acids falls apart,

• 24:30Gary Brecka?

  the house of cards starts to come down because you're like, well, if, if the fact that these, because the, the, the pro seed oil discussion is, well, they lower LDL cholesterol. And isn't LDL cholesterol terrible? Isn't LDL cholesterol bad for you? Isn't LDL cholesterol the genesis of all heart disease? I mean, shouldn't you, if you have high LDL cholesterol, lower it as low as you possibly can? And if seed oils lower LDL cholesterol, then the argument's over. They're, they're not bad for you.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I've said that LDL cholesterol isn't, isn't just a biomarker. It's an industry. And, and it's not just one industry.

• 25:13Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I love your one liners, man. It's like, I like the health food line. I'm going to borrow that. You can see it start creeping up in podcasts.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free, use it, use it, credit me, but, or don't, I don't know.

• 25:27Gary Brecka?

  So it's an industry. This LDL cholesterol is an industry.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so like this notion that seed oils are good for you. You know, refined bleach and deodorized seed oils are good for you. It's true that seed oils reduce LDL cholesterol relative to certain saturated fatty acids. And so you have to accept that as being a benefit. Because if that's not a benefit, then suddenly animal source foods are not the dietary villain that they're often made out to be. And suddenly statins, their LDL lowering, you know, effect might not necessarily be, you know, of benefit. Statins have pleiotropic effects. They're also anti-inflammatory, but.

• 26:08Gary Brecka?

  Exactly. Yeah, very interesting podcast with Dr. Gundry on that. Talking about the, the research on the minimal impact that, you know, that statins had on life extension, which was very, very minimal. And the impact that it had on cardiovascular disease coming from the anti-inflammatory effect, not actually from the LDL lowering effect.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's, um, the, the house of cards that you referenced is something that I think it's, it's really important. Like the, that seed oils are heart healthy is a card in that house of cards. And for us to challenge that assumption, well, then that might lead to a reassessment of all of these other assumptions that we make about what causes heart disease. Maybe saturated fat isn't the dietary villain that it's, you know, often for decades made out to have been. So, um, so yeah, that's why I think it's, uh, it's been a real challenge to, to actually address this stuff because there's

• 27:15Speaker 00

  so much commerce tied to it. And I'm not saying that LDL cholesterol is unimportant, that ABOB is unimportant, but the, um, but you know, heart disease is multifactorial.

• 27:25Gary Brecka?

  Right. Yeah. I don't think it's directly causal for LDL cholesterol or directly causal for seed oils either. But I think the more of these things, you know, it's interesting as I sort of travel the world and talk to experts like yourself and other experts and PhDs and MDs and researchers and are leading minds in the field. Yeah. So we're, we seem to be coming full circle, you know, and just getting back to the basics, you know, a lot about what you talked about, how, um, a lot of these polyunsaturated fatty acids weren't even in the diet in the, in the 1900s. And you also saw very significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in younger ages, not, you know, when in older ages, it was certainly a phenomenon,

• 28:07Gary Brecka?

  but in young, it's becoming younger and younger. And so is metabolic syndrome. You know, I read a really interesting article and had a discussion with Dr. Gundry about this, about, you know, the metabolic syndrome, which we were discussing before the podcast, you know, abdominal adiposity, hyperinsulinemia, hypertriglyceridemia, um, you know, elevated,

• 28:29Gary Brecka?

  or suppressed HDL cholesterol and high blood pressure.

• 28:33Gary Brecka?

  We really tend to think of these things as these are older age problems, right? Like, like, we think Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline. I'll start worrying about that in my late 60s, my early 70s.

• 28:47Gary Brecka?

  But all of these things have a genesis that's decades earlier than than they manifest themselves. And obviously, diet plays a huge role in that. Now, I know you're a meat eater like I am. And I've often heard you dispel a lot of the vegan vegetarian.

• 29:07Gary Brecka?

  I'm not saying attacking vegans and vegetarians, but just just dispelling the myth that you can't be healthy unless you're eating an entirely plant-based diet.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely worth pushing back against because there's so much money that goes into the promotion of plant-based diets. Right? But, but yeah, no, I'm a I'm an unapologetic omnivore. I think that people are best suited eating both plants and animals. And, you know, there's like the ethical question that always arises. And I think that's a good, you know, these are important questions. Animal treatment in this country, particularly in the CAFO system is like really aberrant and it's not great for the environment either. But from a nutritional value, I think it's, you know, should not be controversial that animal source foods are can play a really important role in in the optimized diet. They're they comprise some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Red meat in particular, I think it's a it's a repository for not just really high-quality protein, the highest-quality protein, but creatine, carnecine, vitamin E, you got a tiny amount of omega-3s in grass-fed, grass-finished red meat. Taurine even, there's there are carnit nutrients, nutrients that are found exclusively in animal source foods that I think we we shouldn't be neglecting. And so, yeah, I take a really unapologetic, unapologetic stance. And, you know, the the epidemiology surrounding red meat is really terrible. It's, you know, I most of the time I find can't be trusted, you know, barely.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  Scientific uses called food frequency questionnaires where you know, within the category of red meat, you'll see hamburgers.

• 30:50Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  You know, at the population level, people who are eating more hamburgers are eating more fast food. And it's like, is it the bun? Is it the high fructose corn syrup ketchup on the burger? Is it the french fries that?

• 30:59Gary Brecka?

  Right, that came with it.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 31:01Gary Brecka?

  The shake that came with it.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. So, you know, observational research tends to paint red meat as a dietary boogeyman. You know, those observations, those associations are easy to find. Red meat associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer, you know, all this stuff. But the question, the issue is really diet quality. Randomized control trials do not bear out those observations. And those observations also, those increase in risks that you tend to see tend to be very small. They're increased. The risks are relative risk.

• 31:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  Increases in relative risk.

• 31:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Hey guys, let's talk about meat for a minute. Did you know that 96% of the beef sold in stores is not grass fed? That's right. Most beef comes from cows fed a grain based diet in feedlots, which isn't even healthy for you or the cow. And even if a label says grass fed, that doesn't always mean what you think. It means a cow spent at least 50% of its life on grass. So if you're ready to eat a real nutrient dense meat that was raised on a pasture, then let me introduce you to Parker Pastures. I love this place. The story of Parker Pastures is as inspiring as it is heartwarming. Chloe Parker, just 19 years old, took over the family business when her mom was diagnosed with cancer. Instead of backing away, Chloe stepped up to lead and turned an overwhelming challenge into

• 32:19Gary Brecka?

  a calling. Chloe says it best. In honor of my mom and for the health of all, I guarantee Parker Pastures meat will always be flavorful, nutrient dense, and healing for both you and the land. You can order grass fed and grass finished beef, lamb, bison, as well as pasture raised pork and chicken to be delivered straight to your door next week. She delivers to all 50 states. So why settle for mystery meat from the store when you can eat meat that nourishes your body and restores the earth? Visit ParkerPastures.com today and you'll get 25 bucks off your order. That's ParkerPastures.com and get $25 off your first order. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Interestingly, we, I didn't mean to cut you off, but we talked about this yesterday on a podcast

• 33:03Gary Brecka?

  that a pediatrician on and we were talking about statistical data. I have a background in probability and statistics and mortality modeling. And by asking a different question, you can get a completely different answer from the same data. And one of the things that we were discussing was if you have, you know, 100 people in a population, for example, and one person is helped by, let's say, a pharmaceutical intervention, and you tweak that pharmaceutical intervention and now 1.5 people out of 100 are helped. Well, that's a 50% increase in the efficacy. And so now, you

• 33:42Gary Brecka?

  know, consumer sees, well, there's a 50% improvement. And you would think, well, it went from 1 to 50 out of 100, but it didn't. It went from 1 and 2, 1 and 1/2 out of 100. The stat claims a 50% improvement, which I guess, hyper technically is true, but you know, when you're, when you're looking at the data, it's misleading. And that's a lot of what happens with epidemiological studies.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%. It's like if you are, if they take a group of, I mean, we'll just say like 100 people and, you know, they see four, four of those people getting a, you know, a negative health outcome related to a certain variable, like red meat consumption, you know, four of those people out of 100. And then, you know, another cohort that, you know, maybe is meat avoidant, you'll see three people, you know, have the same health outcome. The headline will be 25%

• 34:39Gary Brecka?

  25% reduction.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  Risk reduction, right? But it's just going from four to three. And it's like red meat, you know, maybe was assessed via these food frequency questionnaires, which are notoriously inaccurate. Yeah. And there's all of these other variables. There's, you know, healthy user bias. There's multi-colinearity. There's like all of these other

• 34:57Gary Brecka?

  Multi-what?

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Colinearity, which I was, I got into a

• 34:59Gary Brecka?

  Multi-colinearity, damn. I've been in the industry a long time and I've never heard of that.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  I got into a debate on

• 35:05Gary Brecka?

  Multi-colinearity?

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I got into a debate with a, with one of these like vegan science communicators. Their whole shtick is like promoting, you know, their, their activism around that diet, that lifestyle. And, and, you know, there was a

• 35:20Speaker 00

  They can be so pedantic, you know, and we got into this debate about semantics and healthy user bias versus multi-coloniality, they're related concepts. But yeah, so that's why those, those kinds of studies I think are really not trustworthy. They're, they're useful for generating hypotheses.

• 35:37Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But, um, but the randomized controlled trials don't really tend to show any negative health effect from the consumption of red meat. In fact, one meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials was just published that found that of all the cardiovascular biomarkers that were assessed over, across myriad randomized controlled trials using red meat as an intervention, the only potentially negative effect to come from red meat consumption, up to about six ounces of, or on average, six ounces of red meat consumed per day, was a tiny, tiny, tiny bump in LDL cholesterol.

• 36:13Gary Brecka?

  Hmm.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  And it's like, is that bad?

• 36:15Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 36:16Gary Brecka?

  No, it's not. I, I, I had, I did a whole podcast on this with Dr. Arshin Maholtra, who's a cardiologist out of the UK. He's, he's, he's up for a cabinet position in, um, in the new administration. It's not the American Heart Association, but it's another cardiovascular society and, uh, and, and running the Health and Human Services. And he said, the very first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to de-correlate LDL's direct risk for, for cardiovascular disease. And we saw this in, in our mortality tables where we used large data, because when we were determining mortality, we used voluminous pools of data because we were putting people

• 37:01Gary Brecka?

  into a cohort of a thousand lives. And we didn't use randomized clinical trials. We used actual data, day, date, time, location, and cause of death, and triangulated that back into the record. And if elevated LDL cholesterol was correlated to decreased mortality, we would have had it as a risk factor, what we could call morbidity factor or comorbidity factor, but it wasn't. In fact, it was, it was oppositely correlated in older ages that the higher the LDL cholesterol, the more it was correlated to longevity. We, we didn't. At the time that I was there, processed death claims on centenarians, which we would see from time to time. Sometimes in life insurance, the policy does what they call endows. So if you actually make it to age 100,

• 37:46Gary Brecka?

  the death claim pays. So it's kind of fun to like screw your children and make it to 101 years old. Hey, dad just got his life insurance. Fucking 101, I'm going on a binder. I just got 10 million tax free. But, um, but what was interesting about these death claims is many of them died in, you know, hospital or scared living facilities or, you know, other kind of areas where we had blood work and universally across the board, they had what we would consider to be, you know, elevated levels of LDL cholesterol. And yet these are the centenarians.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  And great longevity.

• 38:25Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And like, and great longevity. So he and I went deep down the rabbit hole with this. If you want to check that podcast out, it's Dr. Asim Alhotra. But I saw a tweet of yours that I want to dig into because I happen to agree with it. Agree with most of your tweets. Aside from being funny, you've got some great one liners. But you tweeted about the five best sports supplements, creatine, beta alanine, nitrates, caffeine and protein. And I wonder if we might discuss that. I mean, obviously, I think protein is pretty, pretty well vetted and discussed. I don't think anybody considers protein to not be excellent for sports nutrition.

• 39:06Gary Brecka?

  But what about beta alanine, creatine, nitrates, caffeine? Why did those make your top five list?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, actually, that was a review that just came out and it sought to elucidate the five top sports supplements. So the five top sports supplements, according to this new review, was creatine, which was sort of the king.

• 39:27Gary Brecka?

  I would, by the way, agree with that.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:29Gary Brecka?

  I think it is the most underserved nutrient in 40 plus year old females. Especially perimenopausal.

• 39:39Gary Brecka?

  Pre-menopausal, post-menopausal women. Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the bomb. I mean, it has a really long historical track record for safety and efficacy. And they're now starting to, research is starting to mount showing that it has a cognitive benefit, supplemental creatine. It can improve cognition when people are underslept, which is a great thing.

• 40:03Gary Brecka?

  Pretty much everybody.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, right. It might have a cardiovascular health benefit. So I think creatine is amazing. I take about five grams a day and it seems to be, I mean, save for people with, you know, kidney disease, you know, and other medical conditions. It seems to be very safe.

• 40:20Gary Brecka?

  And what form of creatine?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Monohydrate by far.

• 40:23Gary Brecka?

  The monohydrate or the HCl?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Most of the research is on creatine monohydrate.

• 40:27Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So creatine HCl might be as efficacious and safe, but I don't think we know. And monohydrate is super cheap and it's very easy to find.

• 40:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Most of the research, you know.

• 40:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And so.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Centers on that.

• 40:41Gary Brecka?

  And how does beta alanine play in into that?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I mean, beta alanine is not something that I'm all that familiar with, actually, which is part of the reason why I was like reading that, that research review, because it's not something that I currently use. But it did seem to make the list and there is this interesting thing. It does give you tingles when you take it.

• 41:02Gary Brecka?

  Like a niacin flush or something?

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that. It does feel very similar to that. But yeah, but that, but the fact that it made the top five, I mean, that, that.

• 41:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And then nitrates, because you know, we classically would look for nitrate free meats and consider nitrates to be things that are embedded in highly processed meats.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:20Gary Brecka?

  And is, are these the same nitrates?

• 41:23Speaker 00

  Same.

• 41:23Gary Brecka?

  And wow.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:25Gary Brecka?

  So maybe we're coming full circle on the.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Well, nitrates basically support your body's nitric oxide pathway, which, which normalizes blood pressure, can reduce blood pressure and also increase blood flow. So, I mean, everybody's familiar with the certain pharmaceutical that works to increase blood flow in a region of the body. That's, you know, facilitative of sex.

• 41:47Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  But interestingly, there have been some reports and actually some research on people taking that same drug, Viagra, if you, if you haven't guessed.

• 41:56Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  In the pre-workout setting, and it seems to actually improve muscle protein synthesis on par with 1 to 200 milligrams of testosterone in this small study. So nitrates, yeah, might have a really powerful effect. I mean, not least of which, you're going to probably see a better pump from it, but it might have enduring, you know, an enduring impact on muscle protein synthesis.

• 42:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And just so we don't leave the vegans and vegetarians totally out of the conversation, like, what are some important things for vegans and vegetarians to pay attention to? You know, I often just highlight the fact that, you know, there's a widespread assumption that if it's not meat, it's healthy. But, you know, if you look at Beyond Burgers and Non-Burgers, and you read the list of ingredients in there, the number that I can't even pronounce and don't even recognize, you know, polysorbate 80, and there's just all kinds of binders, fillers, gelatins, thickening agents, you know, things that are put in there for consistency that you do not find anywhere naturally in nature.

• 43:05Gary Brecka?

  But for vegans and vegetarians, what are they particularly depleted in, and what do they need to replace that a meat, you know, diet is getting them?

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. I mean, you know, vitamin B12, we all know, is, is most easily obtained from eating animal source foods. But if I were going to go vegan, which I won't be anytime soon, but, but I would say, you know, a nice omega-3 supplement, like an, like an algal-based omega-3 for DHA fat, very useful. I don't think we can rely on plant-based forms of omega-3s to, to adequately support our needs from an omega-3 standpoint. So, you know, I would definitely be supplementing with preformed omega-3 fatty acids. Algae's a great option there. I would also supplement with creatine. You know, at this point, the evidence is pretty strong, strongly in favor of creatine.

• 43:58Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  So I would definitely take that. Creatine's found exclusively in animal source foods.

• 44:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  And it's synthesized, so it's vegan, you know, you could, you could take that.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Those would be my two supplemental, I guess, like the high leverage nutrients that I would look into. There are a lot of other nutrients, though, that I think are valuable that vegans likely underconsume. I would put choline in there, which is really important for brain health. You can find choline in animal or in plant-based foods. I mean, choline does exist, I believe, in soybeans and cruciferous vegetables, but in much lower concentration than animal source foods.

• 44:41Gary Brecka?

  So you can supplement it from a vegan source or from a vegetarian source?

• 44:44Speaker 00

  I think so. Yeah, there's like-

• 44:46Gary Brecka?

  Well, you definitely could get a choline supplement.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, you're right. Yeah, like city choline and stuff.

• 44:51Gary Brecka?

  Because I think what, you know, you and I are both involved in really, as we discussed at the beginning, putting our platforms behind this Make America Healthy Again movement, which I'm super excited about, and hoping that it can coalesce into, you know, more of a well-organized movement. A lot of us are trying to do that. In a perfect world, what do you see as, you know, what are the biggest threats right now to society because of our, you know, the corruption in our nutritional research and the corruption in our, you know, food supply, chemicals in our food supply? Like, there's so much, you know, like banning

• 45:34Gary Brecka?

  Red Di 3 was amazing. And then everybody, of course, everybody crawled all the way to the woods and said, what about a Red Di number 40? And what about, you know, yellow 90? And I agree with that. But in a perfect world, where do we start? And what are some real actionable things that the government could do public policy-wise, or, you know, to restrict certain corrupted practices to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time?

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Great question. Yeah, I mean, I'll preface by saying I'm not formally involved in any way in the, you know, the administration or-

• 46:11Gary Brecka?

  Right, I'm not formally involved in-

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Same, yeah. We're kind of like tangentially, you know, at this point, supporting, you know, it's a fantastic initiative. I remain totally optimistic. I know you are as well. But what can they do? You know, I think for one, RFK Jr.'s-

• 46:30Speaker 00

  You know, the motivation is there to uncouple some of the many conflicts of interest with our regulatory agencies. Whether that's the FDA, you know, almost 50% of the FDA's budget comes from what are called user fees, which are predominantly from the pharmaceutical industry. So getting

• 46:49Gary Brecka?

  The Food and Drug Administration's budget comes from user fees. What is a user fee?

• 46:54Speaker 00

  So user fees are basically the application fees that these,

• 46:59Speaker 00

  you know, and other forms of fees that the pharmaceutical agencies pay into the FDA.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  To, you know, I believe, look at data with regards to drug trials and things like that.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  So sort of like administrative fees that the pharmaceutical companies pay into the FDA.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  A proportion of that comes from the food industry, but most of it comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah.

• 47:23Gary Brecka?

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• 48:08Gary Brecka?

  That's 8sleep.com/gary and use the code GARY, G A R Y, for your discount. Transform your nights and elevate your sleep. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. And what other areas could this movement really make? Big pendulum swings with, you know, small amounts of action. I've heard Kelly Means talk about ending the direct, you know, advertising to the consumer because that allows The control of the narrative stops anybody from speaking out.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:41Gary Brecka?

  But what are some other areas where this Make America Healthy Again movement can make big strides in short, short periods of time? What are the muskows in the food supply?

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think that getting pharmaceutical ads off of TV, that's easier said than done, to be fair. You know, a lot of these networks, I mean, if you watch the nightly news in America, I mean, most of the ads are for pharmaceutical drugs.

• 49:05Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  You know?

• 49:06Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  So, you know, I don't know the, I don't, I don't know the proportion to which those, the revenue of those companies, those conglomerates come from their advertising.

• 49:18Gary Brecka?

  It's as high as 74% than I've read.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, you know, and but the crazy thing is that those ads are not even necessarily there to influence consumer spending, which is what we would, which is what even I assumed, you know, prior to Cali coming on to my show and pointing out that, no, they're actually spending their money to influence the platforms.

• 49:38Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  You know, if you look at every TV show.

• 49:40Gary Brecka?

  Control the narrative and control the leader.

• 49:41Speaker 00

  Exactly, as you've said. Yeah. So I think, I think, you know, uncoupling that would be amazing. I think getting the conflicts of interest out of the USDA, which, you know, I don't know how that's gonna unfold. I mean, it was just announced that, you know, Trump nominated a former C, I believe she was the CEO of one of the largest C2O lobbying groups to be the chief of staff for the USDA. So I don't know, it's all gonna shake out. At the point at which we record this, RFK has not been confirmed either. So I feel like there are a lot of moving parts. And once he, you know, if he gets officially confirmed, you know, we might see major sweeping changes. But, you know, I personally would really love

• 50:23Speaker 00

  to see, something I would, I would love to see. I think it should be banned that ultra processed foods are allowed to make health claims. I think it's really screwed up that you can, you know, that the least healthy foods in the supermarket make the loudest claims, whereas the healthiest foods in the supermarket. Don't make any claims, you know, most of the healthy, the healthiest foods in the supermarket, the grass fed, grass finished red meat, eggs, you know, extra virgin olive oil, like very, very seldom will you see any, even avocados, like you don't see health claims on those foods, berries, you don't see health claims. Where do you find the health claims? On all the ultra processed garbage foods, the seed oils, the commercial cereals marketed towards children,

• 51:08Speaker 00

  of course.

• 51:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Wow. That's, I actually never thought about that. That's a really good angle. I mean, that is such a large percentage of our public policy nutritional research is funded by pharma. And I think this has got to be partially responsible for an upside down food pyramid, you know, Lucky Charms more nutritious than grass fed steak. And if there's any mechanism to flip that pyramid, or to be a little more truthful, I'm of the same mindset that you are. We shouldn't restrict free choice, right? Like, people buy cigarettes, they, obviously, I don't think anybody buys a carton of cigarettes and doesn't know what the risks are, but they're an adult, and they know what the risks are, they can grab that off the shelf. I think what you're pointing

• 51:53Gary Brecka?

  out is intentionally misleading, you know, heart healthy, fortified, enriched, and, you know, a high fiber, and then on the back it says, high fiber diets are related to, or improvement in cardiovascular, you know, reduction of cardiovascular disease, and improvement in, a reduction in colon cancer, and things like that, and, you know, leading you to believe that that box of cereal reduces, you know, colon cancer.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  I'm happy with products, marketing how they've been produced. Like, I think if it wants to say organic, great, you know, but it's the health claims. And I'm happy to say, you know, across the board, no health claims on even foods that I would consider healthy. You know, I think it should just be a level, level playing field to inspire consumers to learn for themselves, to seek out their own sort of education around this topic. But it's like, once we start allowing foods to make health claims, that's actually, it sounds like on the surface, that would be a good thing, you know, like a ranking system for foods and Like that, but there's just too much money involved. And it's like, who's to say what's healthy and what's not?

• 52:57Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  You know, so I think just, just across the board banning health claims, I think that would be great.

• 53:02Gary Brecka?

  And then leaving it up to consumer choice.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I would agree with that, too. I mean, I have high hopes for this movement to just create less leverage and more transparency, because I think one of the major things that's gone wrong is we've privatized profits and we've socialized the expense. And when I say socialize the expense, Medicaid, Medicare is picking up the cost of this burgeoning, you know, explosive era of chronic disease and type 2 diabetes and morbid obesity. I know you've been outspoken about classifying obesity as a disease and certainly about it being genetic.

• 53:45Gary Brecka?

  So talk a little bit about that. I mean, you think that obesity should be considered a disease?

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's highly responsive to our diets and our lifestyle. So it's not something that we can, that we, that we're, that we're unable to address with our own agency in the world, but I push back, what I push back primarily against is the notion that it's genetic, you know, there are certainly genetic influences, but this idea that it's primarily genetic, that's BS, you know? I mean, obesity has tripled over the past 50 years. Our genes have not changed all that much.

• 54:26Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  But our, our lifestyle, our, our food environment has dramatically changed.

• 54:31Gary Brecka?

  Absolutely.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  And so.

• 54:33Gary Brecka?

  And from a mental health perspective, what do you think is most, because you're a huge mental health advocate, but what, what has most dramatically impacted our mental health? And for those folks that are listening, we just gave five of the top, you know, supplements for, for fitness and for sport. What about for? Good mental health or cognitive health. We've actually started the discussion on nicotine.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:59Gary Brecka?

  I'm not quite there yet. You know, we had this discussion in Baja, but I'm on the precipice of it because I've heard Huberman talk about it. Ben Greenfield's big on it. Dave Asprey and I spoke about it on his podcast. You and I have spoken about it. I'd love to, because I think as soon as you say nicotine, people think cigarettes, vaping.

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:17Gary Brecka?

  We're obviously not, you know, talking about those things, but.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Nicotine, yeah. Nicotine is a, I mean, I, um, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And I think nicotine has some benefits and it has some definite downsides. The benefits are that it improves cognitive function. It's a, it's a well-studied neurotropic. It might benefit mental health. Also with fear extinction and things like that, there are a few studies that.

• 55:47Gary Brecka?

  I'm actually seeing some of the cancer binding site research, which seems to be very promising with, you know, even some oncologists recommending pure nicotine patches for, you know, patients that are going through oncology treatment. I don't purport to know the science behind that, but if we just stick into cognitive function, you know, as a cognitive enhancer, I would say the majority of people over 40 would say, I have some level of brain fog, some level of short-term recall issues or some level of focus and concentration issues. So if we're just isolating, you know, cognitive function and the neurotropics, where do you fall on what you feel are the best long-term for our brain health?

• 56:31Gary Brecka?

  Aside from maybe the short-term impact of nicotine.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Generally speaking, like aside from nicotine, I would say, you know, choline is definitely important. I try to, you know, prioritize choline in my diet from eggs, red meat, fish, things like that.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  I think collagen plays an important role in longevity and systemic health. I think brain health probably too.

• 56:57Gary Brecka?

  The problem with collagen is people think that we can target direct collagen, right? If you eat collagen, it shows up as collagen in your skin, but you know, I always use the analogy that we don't eat our nails to grow our nails or eat our hair to grow our hair. And collagen is going to provide, you know, it's an incomplete protein and won't really build muscle, but I think it can. Become amino acids, which can then become collagen, elastin, fibrin in the skin.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Do you take it?

• 57:20Gary Brecka?

  I don't take collagen. I take these. I take these perfect aminos because that's all eight of the essential amino acids. And these actually have nucleotides in them, too. And I take it because it has such a low caloric impact, less than two calories. And but it provides the equivalent of 29 grams of whey protein. So especially, you know, working out in a fasted state, you know, I find that the essential amino acids, they're essential for a reason. And if you look at metabolic processing conversion, as soon as you're deficient in even a single one of the essential amino acids, the balance of those are going to become fat or sugar. So the eight essential amino acids in the right ratio is critical.

• 58:05Gary Brecka?

  And obviously, you can get them from high protein sources, but I think that.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Way better than BCAAs alone.

• 58:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  You want the full complex, yeah.

• 58:13Gary Brecka?

  Because the branched-chain amino acids are, you know, just leucine, isoleucine, valine. And usually, they're in the right ratios, that two to 111 ratio. But the branched-chain amino acids are only three of the necessary amino acids. And I think the old adage used to be, well, BCAAs are either metabolized at the muscle level, or they're the most commonly used at the muscle level. So we should take branched-chain amino acids, you know, prior to workout or during a workout. But I think you should take full spectrum of the essential amino acids prior to workout or during a workout, so that you can build anything from that complete protein. You build natural killer cells, you build collagen, you can build muscle, you can build anything from those essential amino acids.

• 58:57Gary Brecka?

  Well, this is amazing, man. I'm super excited about, you know, anything that we can do and our peers can do to have a positive impact on this Make America Healthy Again movement. I'm also not directly involved with the administration, but tangentially, you know, and significantly supporting that movement. So as you know, I ask all my podcast guests, and you can't give me the same answer that you gave last time.

• 59:25Gary Brecka?

  Should we look up his last answer?

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Ooh, I wonder what it was.

• 59:28Gary Brecka?

  I ask them all the same question at the end of the podcast before we go into my VIP community and after you answer this, we're going to go into a private room. If you're interested in becoming an Ultimate Human VIP, you can go to theultimatehuman.com and just to sign up to be one of my VIP Ultimate Humans. We do private podcasts. I do a lot of one-on-one and group settings, answering questions. We do challenges. We're just building an incredible community of like-minded folks and I give discounts on all of the products that I endorse. But before we go into the private podcast for my VIP community, I ask

• 1:00:10Gary Brecka?

  all the guests the same question. What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human?

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:00:17Gary Brecka?

  That was the shortest answer we've ever had. Great. Thank you, Max.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  I forget. I completely forgot how I answered it the first time. I don't know. For some reason, my brain is going to like James Bond.

• 1:00:31Gary Brecka?

  To be really good at karate and shooting with a gun.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Like, strong in body and in intention and to, you know, and in values and to be a high integrity person, to be a self-sufficient person. I think that's, you know, and, and obviously, health, I think, is a crucial one to embody. Making sure that you're, that you're strong, that you're, you know, taking care of your body, that you're prioritizing self-care. And then I also think it's important to like, show up in the world, presentable, you know, and to have respect for not just your body and your mind, spiritually, your

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  relationships and all that stuff, but also, you know, how you're, how you're perceived. Some people scoff at like, appearance and things like that. Like, it doesn't matter. It's shallow. But, you know, I think like,

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Because my mind went to James Bond, I'm also thinking about, well, he's the person who dressed really well and he showed up really well and he was, you know, always presentable and, um, and, uh, and I think that's why he's, he's such an iconic character. I happen to be a big, you know, James Bond fan.

• 1:01:44Gary Brecka?

  I think everybody growing up was a big James Bond fan.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  Favorite Bond? Who's your favorite Bond?

• 1:01:50Gary Brecka?

  Who was the English Bond, the heavy accent, English actor, actor? I'm having a brain.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Was it?

• 1:01:58Gary Brecka?

  Sean Connery. Well, no, it was actually Sean Connery. He just faked the British accent.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Did he? Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, he did. He faked a really thick British accent, but I, I, I loved Sean.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  Mine is Daniel Craig.

• 1:02:11Gary Brecka?

  Sean Connery was like, he was a badass at 75.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was an ultimate human.

• 1:02:17Gary Brecka?

  Clint Eastwood, you know, I'm like, kind of like tougher and, and more chiseled at 75 than at 45.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  He was, yeah. My, Daniel Craig for me is the, uh, is the GOAT.

• 1:02:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Roger Moore?

• 1:02:30Gary Brecka?

  Roger Moore is your favorite Bond?

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  Cool. I'm so.

• 1:02:33Gary Brecka?

  Hasn't been a good Bond series in a while.

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  To know who the next Bond is. Maybe it'll be you, Gary.

• 1:02:38Gary Brecka?

  Hey, I'm in, uh, Universal Studios. I'm, I'm here if you guys want to send me a contract. Well, guys, uh, as, as always, um, I'll put the links to any of the topics that we talked about below to the extent that they're research. Um, I'll also try to dig up the studies that you referred to if you can help my team get those. So I can link those in the podcast below. Um, where can people find you? I mean, my, my audience for the most part is familiar with you, but where can people find you?

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, my, my podcast, The Genius Life is my pride and joy. So, uh, come over and listen to that if you're into podcasts, as I'm sure you are, if you listen to this. And I'm also very active on, uh, X and Instagram, which I know you are as well.

• 1:03:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, very. Okay. Well, VIPs, we'll see you in the private room and the rest of you guys. Until next time, that's just science.