How To Optimise Human Nutrition - Max Lugavere

Max Lugavere is a health and wellness expert, author and a diet advocate. Working out what to eat is hard. Which is odd because everybody does it. You'd think that the science of nutrition, a thing the entire human race relies on multiple times per day, would have some definitive answers. Thankfully Max can explain why it's such a mess and give some solid principles we can all use. Expect to learn whether carnivore is an optimal diet for us all to follow, whether organic and non-GMO actually makes that much of a difference, what to look for in a magnesium supplement, the actual science of seed oils, whether sunscreen is a danger, why nutrition science is so contested, why calories matter but they aren't all that matter and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a free bag of Colima Sea Salt at http://modernwisdomsalt.com/ (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Max's website - https://www.maxlugavere.com/ Buy Max's book - https://amzn.to/3gQJ1l6 Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #nutrition #diet #health - 00:00 Intro 00:38 Is Shredded Wheat a Superfood? 05:15 Why the Science of Nutrition is So Confusing 12:49 How Important is Organic Produce? 22:17 What’s the Problem with Seed Oils? 31:57 Why Max Isn’t a Carnivore 44:08 Worst Diet for Cognitive Ability 48:58 How to Choose the Right Magnesium Supplement 55:59 Max’s Issue with Mouthwash 1:01:39 How to Know if a Lotion is Really Safe 1:10:23 Supplements You Should Be Aware Of 1:17:15 What the Fitness Community Are Getting Wrong 1:35:30 Where to Find Max - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There is no long-lived population on Earth for whom which seed oils make up a significant calorie contributor. You might not believe that these oils are harmful to you. And you know, I'm always willing to adjust my stance when new data presents itself, but there's no reason to consume them.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  Max Lugavere, welcome to the show.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Chris, honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  Look at you, fresh from the dentist, so smiley.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Dude, I chipped a back tooth on a cacao nib. The irony. It's a superfood and it was super effective at chipping a tooth in the back of my mouth.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  What was that thing that you shared a little while ago that had like frosted shredded wheat as the greatest superfood on the planet? Take me through that.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that was something that was published by Tufts University, the Friedman School of Nutrition over there. There's great interest in developing what's called nutrient profiling system among scientists and ultimately to be used for the public good. And so the food compass, which was Tufts, is Tufts' sort of best take on what an idealized nutrient profiling system would look like, came out and it had all of these various different food items ranked. The supplementary material that came with the paper was, I don't know, it was like a couple, it was like 100 pages long or something like that. And it ranked every possible food in

• 1:32Speaker 00

  the supermarket. And basically, the reason why it's in the, why ultimately it's in the public's interest to create a food profiling system like this is because the public is confused, right, about nutrition. The public doesn't know what to eat, right? For decades, we were told via the USDA food pyramid to load up on something like 7 to 11, 6 to 11 servings of grains per day, right? And that's been replaced by the MyPlate paradigm with, which still implores us at every meal to include grains, to utilize vegetable oils and things like that. So the public is confused, right? And so Tufts University thought that it was in the public's interest to create

• 2:16Speaker 00

  this this food profiling system called the Food Compass. And it had a lot, a lot of flaws that were illustrated by a separate group headed up by a researcher named Tybeal, who teased out various food items and put them on a hierarchy. So this was not an extrapolation. This was data taken from the supplementary material provided with the Food Compass paper. And it showed these completely asinine relationships between various foods that even a four-year-old would say, this is absurd, right? It ranked frosted mini-weeds above a poached egg, for example. It put ground beef at the bottom of the of the chart, for the most part. And it was just completely absurd, right?

• 3:01Speaker 00

  It ranked egg substitute fried in vegetable oil above actual egg, which, you know, eggs, ground beef, dairy, these are some of our most nutrient-dense foods. And so this chart went viral, which was basically a chart that was created by this separate group that published a reaction critique to the Food Compass paper, which, by the way, went completely ignored by the journal that it was submitted to and also ignored by Tufts, just to show the ridiculousness of of this Food Compass. And really, you know, again, I don't think that it was like created out of malicious intent, but it completely underweighted foods for their the nature of their processing.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  So it basically didn't penalize foods appropriately for being ultra-processed, which we know are a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic and the obese the epidemic of chronic disease. Foods that are ultra-processed now make up 60% of the calories that your average American consumes every single day. So this is a major problem. We know that that Only 10% of Americans have good metabolic health. The rest are struggling with some type of metabolic illness manifest as either dysregulated lipids or an oversized waistline or what have you. And so you fail to penalize ultra-processed foods, which Americans are already over-consuming. You don't properly credit foods for containing protein, which is a very important macronutrient, or dietary fiber.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  I think actually protein and fiber were given the same weight and they were both underweighted relative to other features. So, yeah, so it was a mess. It was just a complete mess. And they've since, I've actually had a conversation with Darry, who's the lead researcher behind it, and you know, we just, we have different views on, I think, the value of protein. But you know, at this point, I've communicated and I've done, you know, I've written three books and I've had many protein experts on the podcast, and I think protein is incredibly important. And so, you know, I think it's kind of odd that we have such divergent viewpoints on that. And, you know, again, I think, I think there is value in creating a nutrient profiling system, but that ain't it. The food compass ain't it.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned that diet science is kind of like built upon a foundation of a house of cards, that it's, you can manipulate data to wield any particular outcome that you want, which can fit a preconceived ideology. Explain to me, someone who doesn't understand nutrition science, how it is that so many different interpretations can come from something with the word "science" in the name. I don't see people in the physics community debating over the speed of light. I don't see people in the chemistry community debating about what happens if you add magnesium to water. You know, like those seem to be closed systems, the same as our body.

• 5:57Chris Williamson?

  How is it that there are so many degrees of freedom that permit researchers to be able to do this fuckery?

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think it's because nutrition is a much more difficult science to study than, say, drug research.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  I thought you were gonna say physics there. The physicists were about to be up in arms saying, "It's not rocket science. Actually, it's nutrition science."

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I mean, I feel like, yeah, rocket science is actually much easier to study than nutrition science. Nutrition science is very difficult because people don't eat single foods in isolation, right? They consume dietary patterns and people don't consume the same dietary pattern one decade that they do the next. And people have different needs, of course, over the course of their lifespan. So, and different preferences, dietary preferences, taste, cultural paradigms that, you know, nutrition sort of has to apply itself to. And making matters worse, nutrition is much less well-funded, right? So, a lot of the studies that you'll see, for example, showing us the benefits of a food item like blueberries are actually funded by the berry board,

• 7:01Speaker 00

  which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? That doesn't invalidate the science, but it's like, there's always gonna be, there's always a vested interest. So, you oftentimes will see, especially with more contested food categories like meat, right? Like, "Oh, well, that study, I'm sure, was funded by the beef industry." Well, you know, where else are you gonna find that, that kind of money to do these studies, right? Like, you can't patent broccoli. You can't patent an egg. And so, there just isn't the kind of commercial interest in it the way that there is for, for drugs. And then on top of that, you apply the fact that people tend to make nutrition their identity. And so, there's a lot of ideology within the world of nutrition, right? There's a lot of virtue signaling. There's a lot of morality brownie points that

• 7:45Speaker 00

  are thrown about, depending on what dietary tribe you choose to adopt, right? And so, and so, yeah, so there's what's called the diet wars online. And I'm just like, I find myself in the middle of it, actually, because my, the recommendations that I make tend to be among the more balanced of the recommendations out there. So, I'm a, I'm a bigger threat to all of the groups, right? Because I actually present, I think, what I think is to be a very balanced message. And, and yeah, so it's just, it's, it's just a big, a big problem. And, and the reason why I think it's so easy for you to spin your message and to wield science in a way that can basically...

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Prove any point that you're trying to make ultimately is that, like I said earlier, it's sort of like built on a house of cards like nutrition science for decades has been built primarily on epidemiology because to get human beings to adhere to long-term, multi-center randomized control trials is just impractical, actually impossible for the most part. I mean, we have a few seminal studies like the PRETIMED study, which I often evoke. There's the FINGER study, which is particularly for my sort of interest vertical. It's the first ever large population randomized control trial to look at a dietary intervention as it applies to cognitive health and risk for dementia and things like that. But there's

• 9:10Speaker 00

  just not many of those. So, you know, you rely for the most part on observational types of studies to make inferences about nutrition. And it's just all so incredibly weak. I mean, that's what you find out once you really get into it. And, you know, researchers do their best to control things for, to control, for example, for confounding aspects of epidemiology like healthy user bias, which basically is the phenomenon whereby somebody who's doing one thing healthy tends to do other things in their lifestyle healthy, right? Like, like somebody who is healthy tends to do healthy things. And so you can see that with people

• 9:55Speaker 00

  who eat lots of vegetables, fruits and vegetables, for example. But it's the question that always arises, is the, are the, is the health of the, of the population that you're studying due to the item that's being studied? Or is it due to all of these sort of external variables, right? And so researchers try their best to account for all of those things. But, but there's just healthy user bias always creeps in. And a good example that I like to give is quinoa, right? If you were to do like a population level study of all of the people in the United States who regularly consume quinoa, chances are their health is going to be much better over the long term than the average person, right? That doesn't eat quinoa. Chances are if a person knows how to pronounce quinoa, right? Like, we live

• 10:37Speaker 00

  in a country where the average reading level is, I don't know, what, third grade or something ridiculous like that? I don't know. Don't quote me on that.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Quinoa.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. Like, your average person doesn't, wouldn't know how to pronounce quinoa, right? Like, I think that's a pretty fair assumption. So if you know how to pronounce it, you're already probably reading health blogs or shopping in a supermarket that carries quinoa, right? Or that lives in a city where quinoa is available, or town where quinoa is available, right? So that's healthy user bias in a nutshell. If you're eating quinoa, you're probably also eating more whole grains in general, which means you're also probably consuming more fresh fruits and vegetables. You're probably also more likely to work out. You're less likely to smoke. You're less likely to be sedentary. So is the health of that population due to the quinoa? Or is it in spite of the quinoa? Or is it maybe it has nothing at all to do with the quinoa? Maybe it's all those other external variables, right?

• 11:29Speaker 00

  That constellation of other variables that that play a role, right? In somebody's ultimate health. And so when you take fruits and vegetables, for example, you see healthy user bias. When you see, when you look at conversely meat consumption in this country, it's well known that people who who consume more meat tend to smoke more, they tend to be more likely to smoke, they tend to be more likely to be sedentary and the like. So meat, always at the population level, it's very easy to find studies that associate meat with with poor health, right? But is it because of the meat itself? Like if you found somebody that was eating a paleo diet, for example, like a pristine diet with very high quality food, grass fed, grass finished meat, you know, you likely

• 12:13Speaker 00

  wouldn't see a negative health effect from the meat. In fact, you'd probably see a health benefit. And ultimately, there are no long term randomized control trials to show that red meat has any negative effect. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Red meat is a is a wonderful repository of high quality protein, of carnit nutrients like creatine, like taurine, like carnitine, like vitamin E. And so, and so, yeah, I think that we need to get back to like regain us a bit of common sense when it comes to nutrition. And unfortunately, common sense isn't all that common these days, particularly, you know, when you look at all these different diet tribes.

• 12:48Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned there about grass fed, grass finished, and I imagine that non GMO and organic and such like would be thrown into the mix with that. How big of a deal is it to be someone that is optimizing for non GMO, organic, grass fed, grass finished food? How big of an influence does that make on the on the food profile that you're eating?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  That's a good question, and this is actually, I think, probably going to be a surprising answer. It doesn't make that big of a difference. You know, there's a lot of debate about organic versus conventional. And I think when it comes to produce, the big, like, bang for your buck when it comes to organic produce is that you're reducing your exposure to synthetic petroleum-based pesticides, which you're not necessarily getting with conventionally-produced. Like, with organic, you're seeing a reduction in exposure. With conventional, you're seeing increased exposure, right? Now, the system isn't perfect. The organic, the way that organic labeled stuff is produced isn't perfect. Like, there was a study that came out recently that found that even organic wine

• 13:54Speaker 00

  had detectable levels of glyphosate in it, right? But I do think that that's, if you are, if you are wanting to hedge your bets and adhere to the, abide by the precautionary principle, which I think is smart, then organic would be the smart choice. But it's not necessarily more nutritious than conventionally-grown produce. You might see higher levels of various phytochemicals in organic because these plants essentially develop defense compounds, right? And when they are doused with these herbicides, pesticides, and the like, the responsibility, the onus, is sort of offloaded

• 14:37Speaker 00

  from the plants themselves onto these external, you know, endogenous chemicals, exogenous chemicals that are sprayed onto them. And so you see a reduction in, for example, polyphenols, which could include compounds like flavonols and flavonoids and things like that. But we don't really know, we haven't yet quantified the health benefit, the, you know, the sum-total health effect of that. When it comes to vitamins and minerals, there's really not much of a difference. And also, when it comes to animal products... The differences are also really small.

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  Between a grass-fed, grass-finished, and whatever it is, corn, corn-raised, corn-finished?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they're there. There are differences. So, grass-fed is going to be a better option for you. It is healthier. Part of that has to do with the fact that grass-fed, grass-finished beef is going to be leaner than conventionally-produced beef. So, it's going to be more similar to the kinds of, for example, wild game that we probably evolved consuming. Because cows are actually not wild creatures. We created cows. And the modern cow is a very fatty animal. So, I do think that there's probably some benefit to going grass-fed, grass-finished, if for the fact that it's a... You get a higher proportion of protein and less overall fat. And in fact, you get a higher proportion of a particular type of fatty acid called stearic acid in grass-fed, grass-finished beef,

• 15:58Speaker 00

  which is actually beneficial to health. So, it's a saturated fat, but it's a beneficial saturated fat in that it's neutral from a cardiovascular standpoint, and actually has been shown to boost mitochondrial function. You get about five times the omega-3s in grass-finished beef as compared to grain-finished beef. But those are... That's just a relative increase. The absolute concentration of omega-3s in beef is really not that much, right? Like, it's like, it actually is quite insignificant compared to, for example, wild salmon. You get about three times the vitamin E in grass-finished beef. So, it's definitely... It's got a healthier profile, for sure.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  But that doesn't make conventionally-produced beef unhealthy, right? It's still a great source of protein. It's still a great source of creatine. So, you know, I like to... And because of, over the past decade, I've been honed by getting to reach a wide sort of audience, right? Like, people from across the socioeconomic spectrum. I don't like to let perfect be the enemy of the good, right? So, if you're... If you live in a part of the country or the world where all you have access to is conventionally-produced beef, I don't want people to shun that, right? Because it's still going to be a better option for dinner for most people than the ultra-processed option, right? Like, the box mac and cheese.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  There's something, there's definitely something going on here. I can imagine people who are avidly non-GMO enthusiasts saying, but what about the damages to the chemicals in my body, to the DNA, to the breakdown of the telomere length, to, there is something, I think, like sacred about the way that people feel about putting stuff into their bodies. And when you have a particular bias, or you've read something or seen something online, and you then start to attach your sense of identity to that, it's very difficult to then drag people back from it. The same person that wouldn't think twice about eating something that's been packaged in plastic and left on the shelf for six months, would

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  have a problem with going GMO because of sort of some natural, I think we saw this as well with the vaccine, right, that somehow the exposure to COVID as an infection risk was more natural than taking the vaccine. And maybe there's an argument to be made that that could be the case. My point being that as soon as it comes to putting it in or on your body, there's a sacredness that comes to it, I think.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I applaud people who feel that, right? And I personally, like, I buy organic when I'm eating the skin or the peel of whatever produce it is that we're talking about. And I buy grass-fed, grass-finished beef. That's the only type of beef that I bring into my house. I buy only wild salmon. But I also have to acknowledge that, you know, I can afford those things. I live in Los Angeles, where I have access to the best supermarkets in the world, right, living in Los Angeles, California. And so, um, and so, yeah, that's all like, if you have the ability to do that, then I think that you absolutely should. But again, like, I think that, you know, we can't let perfect be the enemy to good when people are, especially these days, like strapped for cash, right? And people live in all different parts, like the people live in parts of the country that I can't even

• 19:09Speaker 00

  imagine, right? That I'll probably never get to visit, where, you know, they buy, literally, people buy groceries at gas stations. And so, um, and so, yeah, that that's all absolutely true. That's why I'm a big believer in what's called a precautionary principle. And I think that like, you know, that that's where the data sort of ends and where your own

• 19:28Chris Williamson?

  What's the precautionary principle? You mentioned it twice now, and I have no idea what it is.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  So the precautionary principle is basically like when we don't have enough data to to act on something or to make a fully informed decision, then we take the more cautious approach, right? As opposed to just gung ho, running into the fire, so to speak, right? I think a lot of the times, you know, some of these new fangled products that we see on the market, whether it's like a food item or a supplement or a medicine, we take the approach of it being innocent until proven guilty, right? That's great for a a justice system, but it's not so great for when we're deciding what to put into our bodies, right? So for me, the approach should instead be guilty until proven innocent, and that's sort of what the precautionary principle sort of implies.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  Because we can see many times throughout history where the food industry has let us down, right? Has essentially foisted a product or an ingredient or whatever onto the human public, only later to have then been recalled, only after serious and immeasurable damage has been wrought, right? A perfect example of that would be the ubiquity up until only about 10 or so years ago of partially hydrogenated fats, right? Which are trans fatty acids, manmade trans fats, fats that were engineered from vegetable oil to behave more like saturated fat at room temperature, so they could be used in

• 20:55Speaker 00

  ultra-processed foods to replace traditional fats like, you know, butter, ghee, lard, and things like that. And so those were on the market for decades, right? As the heart-healthy alternative to those more traditional ancestral fats. We later found out that those were poisonous to the brain, to the cardiovascular system, and they were ultimately outlawed by the FDA, but only after decades of humans being exposed to them on a regular, near-regular basis, right? Other examples: lead in our paint, right? Or lead in our gasoline, for that matter. There are compounds that are, that we are unwittingly exposed to, right? Because they are

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Because other industrial products have them in them. For example, it was recently shown that benzene is, you could find it in sunscreen sprays, right? So we spray our children with these carcinogens, right? Every summer when they, you know, head out to the beach or the pool. There was asbestos has been been been found in talc powder. So it's just like, the industry has violated our trust enough times where I think it's completely reasonable for your average person or parent to just be a little bit more skeptical than the media or, you know, the evidence-based voices on social media are are telling them to be.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned their oils. I went to a bachelor party a couple of months ago, and there there was a bunch of guys that are pretty deep down the rabbit hole of no seed oils, optimized diet, all the rest of it. And we walked through Whole Foods together. And I figured, I mean, Whole Foods, you know, this is the pinnacle of rich white people could shopping for food, which is good for them. So I'm like pointing at different things. I'm like, can I have that? And they're like, no. Can I have that? No. Can I have that? No. Everything has estrogen, seed oils, canola oil, some of the bullshit in it. First off, what's the problem with seed oils? Why are you so anti-seed oil?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So seed, the the debate on seed oils, actually, seed oils are having a moment right now where if you so much as mention seed oils, there tends to be a gaggle of quote unquote, evidence-based diet warriors that come after you, the dieticians and the like. And that's because they're, I mean, they're controversial because they do, they're seen as being a heart-healthy alternative, again, to these traditional ancestral fats. But they're a novel food. So they haven't been in the food supply prior to, I don't know, 60, 70 years ago. And humans are now consuming more of these types of fats than ever before in human history. And just to sort of define what seed oils are, because I think sometimes

• 23:39Speaker 00

  there's confusion about that. The seed oils that that people are currently talking about are the refined, bleached and deodorized cooking oils, right? The industrially processed seed oils. We're not talking about sesame seed oil, which is created just by pressing sesame seeds. The seed oils in question are the ones that come from, for example, soybeans or corn or grape seeds, which we weren't able to produce prior to 100 years ago because we didn't have the the chemistry, the the chemistry labs and the machinery able to extract these from their their constituent food items and then run them through these various processes to make them palatable. Because if you were to extract, for example,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  oil from grape seeds, grape seeds used to be thrown away. Grape seed oil is now a byproduct of wine making, and it has to go through all these steps because it would otherwise contain noxious aromas and flavors. And so these are ultra-processed oils. And we know that ultra-processed oils, ultra-processed foods are a defining characteristic of the modern, chronic, noncommunicable health crisis, right? So for some reason, these seed oils, these industrially refined seed oils get a pass by the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy, because relative to saturated fats, they will lead to lower levels of LDL cholesterol, and now I think more specifically ApoB, which is a sort of indicator of cardiovascular

• 25:09Speaker 00

  risk, right? And so these oils being very unsaturated, right? You have your saturated fats, you have your unsaturated fats. And among your unsaturated fats, you have your monounsaturated fats, and then you have your polyunsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats are going to be more unsaturated than monounsaturated fats, which are a little bit closer to being saturated. And then you have your saturated fats. So it's a little bit of a chemistry lesson. But these polyunsaturated fats are still loved by the medical and the nutritional orthodoxy because relative to saturated fats, they lower LDL, which is thought to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The problem with them

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Is that they are very prone to a form of chemical degradation called oxidation. So they go bad. They rot essentially. You can't see it. It's not, this is not a process that's visible to the naked eye, the same way that when you slice an apple and you leave it on the counter and it goes brown, it turns brown. That's like rust. That's aging. That's decay playing out right in front of you in a way that the naked eye can see. You can't see this happening to grain and seed oils, but it happens because they're stripped from the antioxidant, right? The chemicals that would otherwise protect them in their whole food form. They're stripped of those, of those compounds when they're removed from their whole food form and then they're run through all these myriad processes, right?

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Some argue that they are processed using hexane, but I wouldn't necessarily worry about that. Hexane is a neurotoxin, but they're, you know, you can't really find any detectable levels of hexane in the end product. But they're exposed to very high heat in the production process. One of the steps that they all undergo is a, is a process called deodorization where they're exposed to very high heat. Heat is one of these catalysts of this oxidative process. And that damages the oils, right? It accelerates this aging process and it also creates trans fats, which we've already established, there's no safe level of trans fat consumption. So you're eating these very easily oxidized fats that are generally already oxidized by the time you consume them, right?

• 27:13Speaker 00

  I mean, even if you were to get fresh oil straight from the jug at your local supermarket, there's a good chance that a significant amount of it is already, has already undergone this process, right? But then you ingest them in restaurants, right? Like when you eat fried food, where the oil has been sitting in that fryer for potentially days, right? That, that process just, it continues and it continues and it continues. And by the, by the end, you're eating this like this mutated fat, which contains trace levels of trans fats, right? About 5% trans fats and these, these oxidation byproducts. And what happens is that those essentially damage you because, you know, it's not like sugar. Sugar is one of these like sort of compounds where, you know, you ingest it, your blood

• 27:58Speaker 00

  sugar goes up, the sugar gets stored or you use it, you know, if you're doing high intensity exercise. The fats that you consume integrate themselves into essentially who you are. They integrate themselves into your cells. And so this can create, over the long term, potentially, an inflammatory process. It's not that the oils are acutely inflammatory, but they do provide the chemicals that are the precursors to your body's inflammatory pathways. And so you have all of these sort of like, you have all of this like kindling laying around in your body, right? So it's not that you're like, setting a fire by eating these oils, right? Like, they've actually done studies, you don't see an acute inflammatory effect when you feed, we'll say, fresh oil to a, to a human study participant.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  But you are providing somebody's body essentially with the kindling necessary for this inflammatory process. And so the thinking is that, and we don't really have the long-term studies to say this with certainty, so, you know, there's a bit of speculation here, but again, this is a novel food, and I think that, you know, we do need to do these kinds of longer-term studies, and there's a lack of longer-term research that's been done. That you're basically, you've got the kindling around for your body's inflammatory pathways, so that when you ultimately do encounter an inflammatory stimulus, that you're going to see essentially an over-response, right? We also don't know what these highly oxidized products do in the brain over the long term.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  We have very damning animal research, we don't quite have the human data. Although there was a very interesting randomized control trial in humans that showed that when people that were prone to migraines, which is a neuroinflammatory phenomena, right? Migraines, you know, neuroinflammation is involved in the migraine process. And as somebody who suffers from migraines occasionally, this was particularly relevant to me, but this was a really, really important study that found that when people either increase their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids, which are, have the effect of resolving inflammation, or increase their consumption of omega-3 fatty acids and reduce their consumption

• 30:03Speaker 00

  of these vegetable oils, these grain and seed oils, they saw an improvement in migraine symptoms, but only when they reduced their consumption of vegetable oils. So they saw like, a little bit of an effect when they just ate more omega-3s, but they saw the biggest, the greatest magnitude of effect when they increased their omega-3 intake, but also dramatically reduced their consumption of vegetable oils.

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  In short, seed oils not good, no bueno.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, now, I don't think that they're good. I don't think that they're good. And I think that we have, we need to do more research. But, you know, for even the most, whoever's listening to this, who, you know, is who, you know, thinks, okay, well, this person that I follow said, said that they're great. You know, whether or not that data ultimately reveals itself to us, there's no reason to consume them. Because the Mediterranean dietary pattern, which is the dietary pattern that we know is associated with robust risk reduction for cardiovascular disease, for neurogenerative disease. They don't consume these vegetable oils. They consume extra virgin olive oil as the primary oil, right? There is no long-lived population on earth for whom which seed oils make up a significant calorie contributor, right?

• 31:14Speaker 00

  So you might not believe that these oils are harmful to you. And, you know, I'm always willing to to adjust my stance when new data presents itself. But there's no reason to consume them. When you have a fat like extra virgin olive oil available to you, which has all these health benefits, right? You can't say the same for these, you know, these grain and seed oils. And humans have been consuming extra virgin olive oil for millennia. Because to make extra virgin olive oil, all you do is you press olives, right? Same with sesame seed oil in Asian populations. Sesame seed oil has been consumed for millennia, right? It's got all these benefits. It's loaded with vitamin E and compounds called lignans, which might play an anti-cancer role. These grain and seed oils, they're new foods, right? So again, guilty until proven innocent. They haven't been proven innocent.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned a couple of times about how sort of novel foods that we're not necessarily used to eating is something that we should be skeptical of, at least. And it seems like the paleo community is sort of really trying to take this and run with it. What is the closest that we can find to what would have been a ancestral diet regime? And I'll do that. And I'll spend more time in nature and I'll do CrossFit and whatever. I was with Michaela Peterson this weekend in Miami and then I was with Safe Dean, who is a Bitcoin guy and also a big carnivore. So I've spent sort of four days, basically, being force fed a rhetoric about the carnivore diet. Now, Michaela is kind

• 32:41Chris Williamson?

  of like a, I think, a bit of a unique case because her autoimmune disorders are so chronic and kind of highly attuned that a lot of the stuff that she has as takeaways for her, I'm not convinced are as applicable to everybody else because she's talking to a very unique cohort that has all of these different, like, whatever, maladaptive properties of their physiology. Safe Dean, on the other side, on the other hand, was just somebody that was doing it because he wanted better cognition, he wanted to feel healthier, he was overweight, he was blah, blah, blah. And yet, you're saying that we're not carnivores. You're saying that an omnivore approach, I noticed that you had a couple of cups of leafy greens are in your you must have

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  every single day approach. Why are you not a carnivore?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I think a lot of the, just like Michaela, and Michaela's great, we're friends, and I'm completely sympathetic to her, her learnings, you know, and ultimately her teachings. I think that like, you know, a lot of the people in the so-called evidence-based community that you'll see online tend to be, they tend to be down on what they're not up on. I'm not down on what I'm not up on. I'm just like, you know, I think that there should be room at the table for all perspectives. But I think the problem with the carnivores is that they tend to, it tends to be a cohort for whom, you know, many of them suffer from autoimmune conditions, they suffer from digestive issues. And so that's a cohort for whom I think removing a lot of these, whether it's FODMAPs or cellulose, or some of these just not, difficult

• 34:12Speaker 00

  to digest plant material, which we're not, you know, we don't, we don't easily digest. I think that's where you'll see a reprieve in symptoms, right, for somebody who's maladapted to that diet. And alas, we live in a time where people have gut issues, right? There's widespread gut dysbiosis. Many of us are born via C-section when there's no medical necessity to do so. Sometimes there is, right? But oftentimes-

• 34:36Chris Williamson?

  What's bad about that?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  Well, you get a bit of what's what's sometimes referred to as a bacterial baptism when you're born vaginally, right? And there's there's lactic acid bacteria, bifidobacterium, there's all kinds of vaginal flora and fecal bacteria that get, you know, all over the baby. And that sort of provides the neonatal immune system with sort of like the seeds of what will ultimately train its immune system, right, to better recognize the difference between self and other, right? And so a lot of the time-

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  Is there an issue with water births, if that's the case?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Uh, not, I think it's probably a little bit better in water birth, although I don't, I don't know for sure. But yeah, in a water birth, everything is just like in the water, right? Like in the wash. And so you're just like, it's a, it's, it's a back, it's, it's, it's actually, you know, it's a baptism in the more colloquial way that we-

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  Get a nice big bucket, let's collect it all.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, they're now starting to swab babies. I don't know if they're doing this by default, but you know, if you're expecting, like, I think, I think you can ask the physician to do this, because we're now starting to see the importance of this sort of bacterial, you know, induction into, you know, exposure into these various different kinds of microbes. But it all comes back to the microbiome. Like, we're recognizing the role that the gut microbiome, and we have a microbiome, by the way, everywhere. Like, there are parts of our bodies that were once thought to be sterile, like mammary tissue, for example, or the pancreas, that we're now seeing are teeming with, with bacteria, right? But when most people refer to the gut microbiome, they're talking about the

• 36:16Speaker 00

  community of about 30 trillion microorganisms that live in the, primarily in the large intestine, the colonic microflora. And that, that ecosystem is thought to really train the immune system. The majority of your, of the immune system in your body is, is primed to focus on what's happening in and around the gut. Because the gut is actually your largest interface with the outside world. You might be inclined to think that it was your skin, right? Your skin is a pretty tight barrier between the inner contents of your body, right, and the outside world. But your lumen, your digestive lumen, which is basically the tube that begins at

• 37:00Speaker 00

  your mouth and ends at your anus, right? Like, that's actually, that's actually your largest interface with the environment. If you were to take out the elementary canal and like, spread it out, it would take up the area of a studio apartment. If not larger than that, right? So that's actually a much larger interface with the external environment. And you can eat, you know, I mean, we were, we've evolved eating like dirty produce, right? Like, our, the, our ancient world was a lot less sterile than it has become. And in fact, you know, you can look to the hygiene hypothesis, which provides a sort of framework for understanding why we're seeing such soaring rates, especially relative

• 37:43Speaker 00

  to, to historically rates of allergies and autoimmune conditions and the like. And Michaela suffers from an autoimmune condition, or multiple, right? And a lot of people that are, that are seeing a reprieve of, of their symptomology on the carnivore diet have like these autoimmune conditions, right? And so it's, the microbiome really is there to train the immune system. But when we're born, whether it's via C-section, or we're not breastfed, breastfed, which provides another sort of way of strengthening the neonatal immune system, or we overconsume antibiotics when we're young, which is a time when our, our microbiomes are particularly plastic, right?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  We've heard of this concept of neuroplasticity, but we have like, almost like microbiome plasticity. Our microbiomes are more plastic early in life, right? When they're first forming. And so there's all these like different aspects, right? Like our obsession with sterility, with hygiene. This all, I think, has become problematic from the standpoint of the immune system. And so that's where, for, for people, and so, by the way, that's like widespread, right? So for, so for somebody who has those kinds of issues, I think it makes sense that a carnivore diet would at least provide temporary relief, right? Because you're removing some of these plant compounds. Many plant compounds exhibit what's called molecular mimicry, where they look so closely like compounds in us.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  It's also, it's actually in a way like a plant defense phenomenon, but to the...

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Underdeveloped immune system, it can actually trigger like an autoimmune reaction, right? Like you can see that with gliadin, which is the proteins in gluten, where somebody who is predisposed to, for example, celiac disease, you'll see this like aggressive, violent almost autoimmune effect in the small intestine. People with autoimmune thyroid condition, right? There's like this like enzyme in the thyroid, transglutaminase, which actually looks a lot like, you know, various plant compounds. So, yeah, so I think that like for some people, the carnivore diet makes sense, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that it's because plants are a problem. You know, it's not that fiber is the problem. It's

• 40:03Speaker 00

  that like we have all these other factors due to modern life that are leading to so many of us having gut dysbiosis and the like. But for the general population, I still think vegetables are great because if you have already a degree of robustness, right, in the system, and then you add this sort of like hormetic stress, like this like sort of external stress into the system, then you have like a strengthening effect. But you have to have a baseline level of strength, right, to benefit from those hormetic phytochemicals that so many people like Michaela seem to do better without, right? So that's sort of like my, my long-winded answer. But yeah, I think that, I think that fruits and vegetables, and granted, the carnivores tend to be more against vegetables as opposed to fruits,

• 40:48Speaker 00

  especially these days. But I do think that vegetables are beneficial. But, you know, it's not a one size fits all recommendation. Like you, even person to person, people who are tolerant and will ultimately benefit from vegetables have to find which are going to be the most well tolerated for them.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes. I, the fruit and meat diet is something that I'm hearing more about at the moment, which is basically just a middle finger to vegetables and carbs, it seems to me. Like, so what about oxalates? I've been warned off oxalates if you have too many green vegetables. Apparently that's a bad thing.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's another thing that I think for most people is a non-issue. I mean, first of all, spinach is like the highest, right, in oxalates. So if you are sensitive, and people who are sensitive are gonna know that they're sensitive, whether they've, you know, suffered from gout, or whether they're prone to developing kidney stones.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Gout, dude, what a fucking medieval disease. Jesus Christ.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  It's me and Henry VIII dealing with our gout.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  I know, I know. It's not super common, but I mean, generally, you know, you know, like, I think people with kidney stones, because there's like this accumulation of calcium oxalate in the kidney, like, there's a, there are contributing, I think, genes to this, but for, I think for most people, especially if you're not over-consuming raw spinach, I just think it's like a non-issue. People will often point to kale and other dark leafy greens as being a source of oxalates, but there's really, it's very low, like, you're not really getting a lot in kale, for example.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  You know, so it's, I, I just think it's a, it's a non-issue, right? I think that the recommendation that I make for people is one to two cups of dark leafy greens a day, which if you actually think about that, that's not a lot of greens, right? But researchers out of Rush University found that people who eat between one and two cups of dark leafy greens every day have brains that perform up to 11 years younger. So that study could be attributable to healthy user bias, just to be perfectly transparent and clear, right? Somebody who's eating a salad a day, like, most people aren't eating any salad, right? So if you're eating a salad every single day, I mean, generally, you're probably a health-conscious person, but we know that dark leafy greens, yes, they have, you know,

• 43:12Speaker 00

  they might have some concentration of oxalates, but they've got a lot of good going for them as well. They're one of our most nutrient-dense foods. You're not gonna find a better source of folate than dark leafy greens. You get vitamin C in dark leafy greens. You also get really important phytochemicals, like lutein and zeaxanthin in dark leafy greens. There was a study that found that- Plant flavonoids, right? So these are plant defense compounds that high that plants that were high in flavonoids actually led to a boost in BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor, right, which supports cognitive health and an improvement in cognitive function, right? They compared it to fruits and vegetables that were low in flavonoids. They didn't see so they didn't see an effect, right? They compared it with the baseline diet, didn't

• 43:57Speaker 00

  see an effect. It was only the the high contained the high flavonoid containing fruits and vegetables that led to this cognitive boost and dark leafy greens were among them.

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  If I was trying to design a diet to make myself think as poorly as possible, to slow my thinking, I want to be muddy. I don't want to be able to have good recall. I want my verbal agility to fall through the floor. What what should I eat?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I would say I think you just got to consume the standard American diet, like just toe the line for the status quo. 60% of your calories coming from ultra processed foods, just over consuming grain and seed oils, lots of fried foods, refined grain products. I mean, that's like really the worst of the worst. Minimal fruits and vegetables. And then you throw in all the lifestyle factors on top of it. I mean, exercise we're now seeing is medicine for the brain. So if you really want to deprive the brain and lead and make your brain suffer, it'll be sedentary, right? A brain suffers atop a sedentary body, but it thrives above a body that is in motion, right? A body that

• 45:07Speaker 00

  that is that is doing what bodies are supposed to do, right? Moving and and

• 45:13Chris Williamson?

  Did I start nerding out to you at Aubrey's place about my new bike desk that I got? Did I tell you about this? No. Let me tell you, let me fucking red pill you about the bike desk. So imagine a static bike, kind of like the one that you'll get in like Lifetime Fitness or whatever. And it's one of the ones where you're a little bit more sat back and the pedals are out in front of you and there's a backrest. So you can imagine there's usually handles down by the sides like this. Yeah. Then place a lifted up desk on the top of it with a thick armrest that you can put on. It's purpose built for this. It's called a exoputic exawork desk. And what you can do is the seat goes up and down, slides forward and back, and then the backrest has got angle on it.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  Then the desk goes up and down, forward and back, and also has tilt on it too. So you can lock yourself into a really nice posturally, a great position. It's Stu McGill, I sent my photo to Stu McGill, the number one back mechanic on the planet. I was like, is this gonna fuck me up? He didn't reply, so I'm gonna guess it's okay. But anyway, point being, 180 accumulated minutes ish of zone two cardio per week is pretty hard to do. Like, it's really, really difficult to do because zone two sucks. For me, it's quicker than a walk and slower than a run. So what am I, what am I gonna do out and about? The nature thing, trying to double it up with nature is kinda hard. Also, 180 minutes just generally to add on top of maybe a strength and training routine. There's not a ton of time left for that.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  However, if you have a bike desk, what you can do is you can do up to and no higher than moderate difficulty emails or a little bit of admin. Like, if you start pushing yourself into the creative realm, it's not happening. Or at least for me, I can't think very well. And then I get frustrated that I'm not doing my work, but I also get frustrated that I've gotta slow my legs down. And I can sit, I can sit and happily just churn out emails for 60 minutes and I'll have burned 600 to 700 calories and I'll sit at whatever, like 120, 130 BPM. And I'll just sit and move away and I feel great once I get off it. Like, posturally, I feel fine, the seat's super comfortable.

• 47:21Chris Williamson?

  And it's 310 bucks or 350 bucks for this thing. It's fucking great. I can't believe that more people aren't on it. And I got myself one as a little treat this summer, treated myself to an exercise desk. This summer, because the choices between that or do a Ben Greenfield approach and get a treadmill to stand and walk on. But with that, I figured that it's going to be harder for me as I'm moving to actually be able to type stuff, especially if I was doing admin heavy work. So yeah, I got that. And that's my current solution for getting some extra zone to it.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Genius. I was gonna ask if you podcast while using it, but I would, I guess the noise, the noise would be.

• 48:03Chris Williamson?

  Silent. It's a magnetic.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Oh, it's sound.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. You can tell that I really went down the rabbit hole of the different features. But no, it's, it is silent. However, you could take calls on it. There's something about, I've taken a few calls and I get the impression that the person I'm on the call with feels like I'm a bit of a dick. I think what the subtext of seeing somebody sat on an exercise desk whilst talking to you is this conversation isn't sufficiently important for me to hold off my exercise until it's finished. And

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  I, I'm sure that if you were to actually quiz somebody about it, that's a no, no, of course, it's fine. But the emotional response that we have isn't always necessarily rationally thought through. So I figure like, if it's audio only, sweet, you can get away with it. If it's on video, I wouldn't do it. Emails, edits and show notes and back and forth, the admin bits and shit. Perfect. So yeah, highly, highly recommended. Something else that I've been thinking about a good bit recently, especially since I had human on earlier this year is magnesium. You are big magnesium guy, big magnesium guy. What should people look for when it comes to choosing a magnesium supplement and also a diet that will contribute

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  to better levels of magnesium?

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, magnesium is super important. It's a cofactor in hundreds, something like three, anywhere between three and 600 enzymatic processes using the body rely on magnesium, which means that magnesium is essentially the rate limiting element here, right? In hundreds of processes in the body that range in their importance from ATP synthesis, so the energetic currency of cells ATP, all the way up to DNA repair. So DNA damage is at the root of aging, but also

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Tumorogenesis, right? So cancer, essentially, you can chalk up to DNA damage, among other things. And so magnesium is one of these things that is so important, and about 50% of the population underconsumes magnesium. And yeah, it's fairly easy to find. So actually, if you go to the produce section of the supermarket, anything green, anything that contains chlorophyll, which is a plant pigment, is going to contain magnesium. If you actually go to Google Images and search for chlorophyll and hemoglobin, you'll see that they actually look almost identical, except for at the center of the hemoglobin molecule, you'll find iron, but at the center of the chlorophyll molecule, you see magnesium. So anything green generally is going to be

• 50:35Speaker 00

  a good source of magnesium. Also, almonds are a fantastic source of magnesium. Just one handful, you get about 25% of your daily value for it. Dark chocolate is another great source of it. Generally, you need about 400 to 500 milligrams of it every single day. That makes magnesium what's called a macro mineral. So unlike zinc and copper, which are trace minerals, you only need about, you know, anywhere between 2 and 15 milligrams of those. Magnesium is something that you need more of, almost like sodium. You know, sodium is another example of a macro mineral. Potassium is another example of a macro mineral. And the problem with

• 51:18Speaker 00

  underconsuming magnesium, this was actually an idea proposed by aging scientist Bruce Ames, who coined what's called the triage theory of aging. So I already mentioned that DNA damage is the root cause of aging, right? So when minerals or other, you know, vitamins, for example, are scarce in the body, they get triaged essentially to the processes that are more important with regard to survival, right? So if ATP, the generation of energy, that's a lot more important to survival than DNA repair, which is more of like a long-term project in the body, right? So if you are...

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Shorting your body on magnesium, you're probably going to have enough to create energy, right? But you're not going to have enough to create the DNA damage that's happening on a day-to-day basis in your brain, just due to, right, like, like, time passing. So magnesium is one of these, like, essential supplements that I generally will take every single day. And the kind that I reach for is magnesium glycinate. There are other forms of magnesium. Magnesium is generally pretty bioavailable. You find, you'll find citrate, you'll find magnesium carbonate. There's also magnesium threonate, which is thought to support more directly cognitive health.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  But magnesium glycinate I like because it doesn't have the effect of acting like a laxative, which magnesium citrate. Magnesium citrate, you take enough of that, you're going to find yourself in the bathroom soon after. It draws water into the, into the gut. But magnesium glycinate, it's just magnesium bound to a glycine molecule. And also glycine is something that we tend to underconsume today as well. It's an amino acid, which is involved in metabolic health. And, and, you know, we, I think we, we pretty dramatically underconsume magnesium, especially your average omnivore. And so when you get magnesium glycinate, or bisglycinate, which is two glycinate, two, two glycinate molecules, you're basically getting like a double whammy. And, and it's a great source of magnesium.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  You don't have to take it with food or anything like that. And so that's generally, that's generally like my go-to. It's also a great, it's important for like migraine prevention. You know, this is like one of these like nutrients that actually there's like good data on it. It's also, most people aren't aware of this, but it can actually help prevent noise-induced hearing loss. There have been a number of studies over the past couple of decades where they'll use people that are like in the army, right? Like servicemen and women who are exposed to really loud noise on a daily basis. You couldn't expose civilians to this degree of noise because it would be unethical, right? Like no, no IRB, no institutional review board would, would let this pass.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  But you take people that are already, due to their occupations, right? Exposed to really loud noise. So those are the kinds of people that you can actually like easily enroll in a clinical trial like this. And they've shown that magnesium At a dose around the level that I've already described, about 400 and 500 mg, if I recall correctly, is a really effective prophylactic for, meaning it can help prevent noise-induced hearing loss for people that are exposed to loud noise on a regular basis. So I value my hearing immensely. Like, I love, music is like one of my favorite things in life, right? So when I, after like exposure to loud music or whatever, or loud noise, like if I, if I go to a concert, that night, I'm taking, you know, pretty high dose magnesium just to like offset any of the potential damage.

• 54:53Chris Williamson?

  The real frontline of hearing loss, club promoters. Mate, this is who we really should, you want, you want me to give you some nice test subjects for people that have spent way too much time in overly loud DJ booths? Club promoters, that's me. Going up and telling the DJ that he needs to stop playing drum and bass because there's a fight over the far side of the club, or standing at the back trying to work out why the lights aren't moving and I've got my head next to some huge bass bin or whatever it is. My business partner has lost 16 dB off the top end, and I think 14 or 10 dB or something off the bottom end of his hearing. Thankfully, mine's not that bad, but he's got tinnitus, he's got a bunch of other things. So I'm going to guess that it's, acts as a prophylactic,

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  it's protective, but not regenerative. Is that right?

• 55:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:42Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. So it's, it's, it's gone, it's gone. Good, sorry, Dave. It's, you've, you can't, you can't hear what I'm saying in any case. I don't know why I'm apologizing.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we don't have any data on, on it, you know, any regenerative potential, but, but yeah, no, I would take it more as a prophylactic and be just careful going forward.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  What's your issue with mouthwash?

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Oh, man, mouthwash. So, mouthwash, we talked a little bit about the, the fact that we have like bacteria everywhere, right? And we are just at the very, very, very tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the role that, you know, all of, you know, whether it's like bacteria or viruses or fungi even, play in our health, right? Like, we are, we are essentially superorganisms. And the gut microbiome plays a role, so too does our oral microbiome. And about 40% of people in this country regularly use antiseptic mouthwash, which basically indiscriminately nukes the bacteria in the mouth, right? What could be the harm of this, you might say to yourself? Well, maybe you're mitigating bad breath, maybe you're preventing cavities. The reality is, which we're now starting

• 56:47Speaker 00

  to see... Is that there is a whole host of potential downstream consequences that occur when we routinely nuke the bacteria in our mouth. So it turns out that they're not just doing bad things occasionally for certain people, right? They're actually also doing good things. And so by regularly using antiseptic mouthwash, what you're doing is you're killing off bacteria that, among other things, are involved in the nitric oxide pathway in your body. So when we consume fruits and vegetables that contain compounds called nitrates, right? So beets, for example, beetroot powder is a very popular fitness supplement, dark leafy greens, like arugula, particularly rich in compounds called nitrates, right? When we consume nitrates, the bacteria in our mouths,

• 57:31Speaker 00

  as we chew them, right? The bacteria on our tongue specifically, um, reduce nitrate to nitrite, rather, to nitrate, which is then what enters this nitric oxide pathway. And nitric oxide is a gas that we create in our blood vessels that increases blood flow, reduces blood pressure, and acts as a signaling molecule. So it's also involved in insulin signaling. It's involved in insulin sensitivity, which we know is a really crucial characteristic of metabolic health, right? And so when you nuke that bacteria, you're basically disallowing the bacteria, or you're basically negating your ability to derive a cardioprotective

• 58:16Speaker 00

  effect of healthy foods, fruits and vegetables that you're eating, like beets or dark leafy greens, because you're, you're basically handicapping your ability to generate nitrite. And so they've done studies that have found, and these are not perfect studies, the baseline health of the study participants, not that great, obese participants, but what they found was that obese participants that regularly used, frequently, rather, used antiseptic mouthwash, so this is two times or more per day, were at double the odds of developing hypertension, and they saw a 50% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, right?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  So the hypertension thing makes perfect sense because as we established this, these nitric oxide supporting bacteria play a role in helping to reduce blood pressure. And those studies are correlational, so they don't establish causation. But there was another study that came out that was a little bit more telling. So this was a randomized control trial that found that when people in the post-exercise window, so one of the many benefits of exercise is that it has an antihypertensive effect, meaning it helps to normalize your blood pressure, right? It helps to bring your blood, keep your blood pressure in a nice and healthy range, which we know, like, having healthy blood pressure is crucial for having a healthy brain.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's healthy for, it's, it's important for many reasons, but we know that the brain relies on, on healthy blood pressure, right? And exercise is one of the best ways to keep your blood pressure nice and healthy. So what this randomized control trial found was that when people swished with antiseptic mouthwash in the post-workout window, they basically negated the antihypertensive effects, the antihypertensive effect of that workout, right? So typically after a workout, you see this drop in blood pressure over time. And the people, the, the participants who swished with antiseptic mouthwash, they didn't see the benefit. They didn't see that benefit.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  And in this study, a type of mouthwash that's typically prescription was used, it was called chlorhexidine, so it's not necessarily reflective of what you might see with, you know, one of these like commercially available.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  Like Listerine or something like that.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I mean, you look on the bottle of like that brand, for example, and it says kills 99% of bacteria. That's not a good thing, you know? And it's well-known that people with type 2 diabetes are at increased risk of periodontal disease.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  Right, but it's also that, you know, people, people with periodontal disease with, with dysregulated oral microbiomes are likely, you know, that is, you know, that it's, it's likely a bidirectional relationship, right? And so I think advertising this is something that's like somehow good for, for diabetics. It's a, it's a, it's a big problem, I think, probably pretty harmful. So we do need to do more research on this, but yeah, I mean, mouthwash is something that like, unless you're using it for medical reasons, I would say stay away from it. You know, if you, if you use it now and then, that's totally fine. But if you're one of these like frequent users, two or more times a day, that's definitely a habit worth changing.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  You also mentioned earlier on the dangers associated with certain types of sun cream, maybe all types of sun cream. What do I do if I want to be out in the sun and I don't want to get burnt?

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  So I think it just comes back to developing a healthy relationship with the sun. And, you know, going back to the, to the mouthwash thing, you know, there are a lot of practices that are, have been, or like paradigms that have been sort of put into place by our public health officials that I guess made sense when they were instituted at the time, right? Like, I can see how fluoride in the drinking water serves a public health good because of the fact that so many people today are over consuming ultra-processed foods, refined grain products that easily gets retained by oral bacteria.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  And so that's why you see widespread dental decay, right? And so like, but like, it's, we're not seeing widespread dental decay because of like a lack of fluoride, right? If you actually eat a biologically appropriate diet, you're not going to need the mouthwash. You're not going to need the fluoride in your toothpaste, right? And obviously, people have different genetic tendencies to develop cavities and the like. Not everybody's the same, but the same goes with the sun. Like, we've been told that there's no safe level of sun exposure. But the sun is crucially important. The sun is medicine in many ways. I mean, the sun actually directly on our skin helps to create nitric oxide. It's the UVA rays that actually acts like a hormetic stressor on our skin.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  And just under the surface creates nitric oxide, which is important for lowering blood pressure. Right? It's also well established that exposure to the UVB rays from the sun help us to synthesize vitamin D, which is a steroid hormone responsible for regulating about 5% of the human genome. Right? It's important for cognitive function. It's important for healthy immune function and down regulating an overactive immune system. So there's actually really compelling data on the role of vitamin D in quieting autoimmunity in the body. MS in particular, there's a, you know, vitamin D is like one of the only vitamins that has a relevant clinical impact on multiple sclerosis. Right? And we get vitamin D for the most part from the sun.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  It's also crucially important to anchor our body's circadian rhythm. We know that every organ system is responsive to cues about what time of day it is. And the sun is the chief light, bright light in particular, is the primary time setter for the human brain. So, yeah, if you're going to spend time in the sun, I think the way to do it is to gradually ramp up your sun exposure and to not burn. Right? But like, I think by eating a healthful diet, you're going to have some degree of protection against this. You know, probably more so than somebody who's on like the standard American diet. But you have to be, you have to like develop a responsible relationship with the sun. Right?

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Like, you don't want to just sit out all day. And burn, there's actually no reason to. We generate more vitamin D. It's more effective to have like smaller increment doses of sun as opposed to, for example, the phenomenon whereby like you spend no time in the sun and then you go on vacation and you just, you know, from one day to the next, you're spending zero time in the sun to spending four hours, five hours in direct sunlight. That is not good for your skin. It's not good for your health and it's not an effective way of producing vitamin D. The more effective way of producing vitamin D is to actually spend small, like lesser amounts of time in the sun, but on a daily basis. So this whole notion that like the sun is bad for you, there's no safe

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  level of sun exposure. Yeah, it's pseudoscience.

• 1:05:29Chris Williamson?

  Is there any safe way to put something on your skin as a lotion or a topical solution of some kind that can help to mitigate exposure to the sun? I'm going to watch a baseball match, which I've learned can sometimes take like four hours in this country and it's going to be in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer and I'm going to get exposed to the sun and I can wear a long sleeve top and I can do all the rest of it. My face is going to be in the sun or whatever else. There are certain situations in which people can't avoid sun exposure and haven't had time to build up a month's worth of 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening of sun exposure to get them a base tan. What should they do then?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I am a fan of sunblock, sunblock in the appropriate context and the sunblock that I think is the best to use are the mineral based sunscreens like, because they're actually sunscreens. They provide a physical barrier between your skin and the sun. So zinc oxide, titanium oxide, I believe. Those are the two primary ones. You generally want to steer clear from the chemical based sunscreens, the industrial, the synthetic industrially produced sunscreens like the oxybenzones and the avobenzones.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Now, if I'm desperate, it's better to use those, I think, than burn. You know, on an infrequent basis than to burn, just to be super clear. But, you know, we're now seeing that those actually are easily able to enter circulation, so that they do, we do absorb them. And new data is starting to show us that we absorb them at alarming rates and at a concentration that we actually don't really have a sort of full picture on the data of with regard to how they affect our biologies. There was an alarming paper that came out that showed that, you know, if you use sunscreen

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  in a level that is typical, right? You slather your body with it, it actually absorbs into circulation and reaches a level that surpasses the FDA's threshold of toxological concern. So this is something that we don't know, like the long term, and I'm not gonna, I'm, you know, it's probably not good, right? Like what these compounds are doing in us when used chronically and over the long term, particularly if you are a child, right? If you're still developing, because many of these compounds have exhibited endocrine-disrupting abilities, right? So the ability to scramble your hormones. Avobenzone, oxybenzone, these are well-established endocrine disruptors. And if all they did was stay on the surface of your skin, you know, I think the concern

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  would be a little bit sort of less. But now we see that they easily enter circulation. So I would definitely opt for the more mineral-based ones, which I don't think there's that level of concern. Another thing that you could do, and this isn't going to be as effective as using sunscreen if you're, you know, exposed to the sun in broad daylight in one of these high UV areas of the world. But astaxanthin is actually a compound that's found in wild salmon, and you can supplement with it, and it's sort of like an internal sunblock. They've done studies where they've shown that

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  that there is a degree of photo protection provided by astaxanthin, which is this compound that is created. So wild salmon, it's what gives wild salmon its characteristic red hue. But the salmon aren't born with that color. They actually get it when they consume algae. And algae sit at the top of the water surface, right? Exposed to the harmful, you know, radiating rays of the sun all day long, right? Algae can't like swim away. They can't put like a T-shirt on. They can't move into the shade, I will. So what they do, they generate this super powerful antioxidant called astaxanthin, which is like specifically designed to protect them from the sun's rays.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  And that's why they've done these clinical studies to see, well, what are they? What can this compound potentially do in us? Right? And they found that aside from protecting eye health and from improving skin appearance, right? It actually can also provide some degree of of skin protection. So I'm a huge fan of astaxanthin. It's another one of like these staple supplements that I've been taking. I've been taking astaxanthin for about 15 years at this point. Really, really good data on it.

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  I learned, I was in Zambia filming a mini documentary a couple of weeks ago, and I learned how easily hippos burn, which you might not be familiar with. Apparently really susceptible to the sun. And they get, they get all pink on the top of the, on their heads and on their little snouts. They get all pink and they get burned if they get caught out in the sun, which is bad for them. All right. So you've mentioned there astaxanthin. Are there any other supplements that you take that you consider a staple of your routine that would not be common? Or that you think that people should be more aware of or should have a look at?

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think like fish oil is fairly common, but I'm pretty religious about my fish oil supplementation regimen. I take about a gram.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  I've heard that there are certain types of fish oils that you do want and certain that you don't. Do you want the ones that smell fishy or the ones that don't smell fishy after you've had them?

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  You want the ones that don't smell fishy. And actually, one thing that I do is I actually chew occasionally the fish oil, especially if I'm buying like a new bottle, like a fresh bottle, I'll chew it. Which a lot of people, you know, listening probably gonna be like, that's gross, Max. But fresh fish oil, if it hasn't gone bad, actually shouldn't have any overt fishy flavor. And so, because you know, like, fresh fish doesn't stink. It's only like, if you walk through a fish market, it's all the dried oxidized fish oils that, you know, residues that are still lingering. That's what stinks, right? But fresh oil, fresh fish oil shouldn't have any discernible, maybe like very slight, but it shouldn't have any discernible.

• 1:11:42Chris Williamson?

  Is there a particular brand that you use of fish oil?

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  I mean, I've been using Nordic Naturals for years. I have no, no affiliation with them, so I don't work with them, you know. I, I think in the past I did, like, do a little bit of like, you know, because I have my own podcast, it's called The Genius Life. I, I think I have worked with them in the past, but I'm not currently. I just generally, like, I go to Whole Foods and I buy it with my own money. Because they, they just taste the freshest to me, you know. You could also smell the bottle, like, that's another good thing to do, smell the bottle. It shouldn't smell overtly fishy. You're gonna get like a slight, I think, probably odor, but, and that's not the only good brand. You can, one good thing to look for on fish oil bottles is IFOS, I F O S. It's the International Fish Oil Standards.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  It's this third-party independent organization that routinely tests fish oil for oxidation and oxidation byproducts. So it's, it's sort of a way of,

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  You know, it's just like one more sort of notch on the belt of knowing that the fish oil that you're getting is of sufficient quality that they've been able to sort of afford to submit, you know, for testing and that the IFOS got behind it. So again, it's like not associated with any of these like fish oil brands, but you'll see it on some, on some brands. I think the Whole Foods brand itself actually is IFOS certified.

• 1:13:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so astaxanthin, fish oils, make sure that they're of a good quality and don't smell too fishy. What else?

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I take creatine. I take creatine not, I'm an omnivore, so I wouldn't expect to get a cognitive benefit from it, although people who are not omnivores, people who are vegan and vegetarian, there's some data that suggests that creatine supplementation can actually lead to a cognitive boost. Creatine is a compound that's naturally found in muscle meat and organ meats to some degree, but you primarily get it in muscle meat. And so you ingest enough of it as an omnivore to provide the brain with all of this sort of exogenous creatine that it needs. But, but they've done, there's one or two studies that have, that have, that the signal was that creatine supplementation can actually boost cognitive function in people who don't regularly consume meat.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  But I take it, I take about five grams a day. It's a, it's a, there's a robust safety record and efficacy record for creatine as a ergogenic compound, meaning it helps to support physical performance. And I think, I think it's a great supplement for both men and women. It might lead to a very slight weight gain, but it draws muscle, it draws water in intramuscularly. So it's not like, you're not going to see puffiness. It's like water that's like literally like in your muscles. And it helps to boost energy essentially in the gym, which can then lead to, you know, long-term strength gains and the like. So I think it's a great supplement. Don't take it without checking with your doctor first if you have a medical condition. You always want to check with your, with your physician

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  before, you know, adopting any new supplement. But generally, I think creatine's a good one. I also, I think protein powder is great. I'm a big fan of whey protein. Whey protein is very high biological value. It's a great source of leucine and other essential amino acids. Leutein in particular is, leucine rather is, is very important for stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but it, you know, of course comes with the whole complex of essential aminos. It's also

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  A rich source of cysteine which can help support glutathione synthesis. So there's actually a role for whey protein for supporting immune function, which is really important. It helps to promote the synthesis of glutathione, which is your body's master antioxidant. So I'm a huge fan of whey protein. I think, I mean, I think protein is one of these macronutrients that's like, almost magical in the, for what it does to the human body, right? Like it's, it supports your musculature and muscle and strength is really in many ways, the currency of longevity. So you want to support your musculature and whey protein. Protein in general is a great way to do that. A great way to do that, no pun intended.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  It's a, you know, it's, it's the most satiating macronutrient, much more so than carbs and fat. You can look to the protein leverage hypothesis. Like we, we definitely like, you know, in many ways it seems our hunger, our drive to eat is driven by our necessity for amino acids and, and, and, you know, protein more generally. And actually protein also drives up levels of GLP-1. A lot of people these days are talking about semaglutide, which is a GLP-1 agonist. It's a, it's been hailed as a revolutionary weight loss drug. It's prescribed for helping better manage blood sugar. And one of the reasons why it's so effective for weight loss is that it's very, it reduces appetite.

• 1:16:25Speaker 00

  It slows transit, it slows what's called gastric emptying. So the transit of, of the contents of the stomach into the small intestine. It also boosts insulin sensitivity, or rather it boosts, it releases, it causes a release of insulin. And so you've got this like revolutionary, right? Like weight loss drug, semaglutide. But actually you can boost GLP-1 yourself by just prioritizing protein in your diet. And so that's one of the, one of the many reasons why I think people who even incrementally increase their protein consumption will see a A degree of body recomposition, right? Less fat mass, greater lean mass. So protein is, yeah, protein is where it's at.

• 1:17:05Chris Williamson?

  On top of those, one thing that I've found that's interesting at the moment, I think you and Ben Greenfield both seem to agree on this, is that the healthy community, the fitness community, that are kind of considering what 20 years ago would have been revolutionary, you know, making sure that they're getting sufficient protein in, making sure that they're doing some sort of strength and weight training protocol, even if you're a woman who's not looking to get much more muscular, focusing on sleep, ensuring that they've got proper sleep hygiene. Both of you seem to be kind of taking recommendations for fitness not into a more complex realm, but certainly beyond just that. If you were looking at what you consider to be sort of the typical fitness crowd at the moment,

• 1:17:49Chris Williamson?

  what are the habits that you think that they are missing mostly that they're probably not thinking about at the moment?

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Well, I think the typical fitness crowd is, tends to be obsessed. Well, there tends to be a lot of obsession within the fitness community, a lot of like body image issues, a lot of fractured relationships with food. That's just my observation. And I don't actually consider myself part of the fitness community, maybe because I didn't come from a personal training background or I'm not a bodybuilder, I'm not an athlete, I'm not a powerlifter. I like, I've been, I've always been interested in bodybuilding, but, but you know, I think that like, I am versed in, I'm versed enough in fitness and nutrition science,

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  but with sort of one foot also in the world of longevity, where I can sort of like, filter the, what the data says about how to best, for example, lose fat or gain muscle through the lens of like, okay, well, what's also going to be best for like my long-term health, like the long game, right? There's this concept that I've become kind of interested in, that is, it's a fascinating concept. And it's like, it's a very unfortunate phrase. It's antagonistic pleiotropy. It's just, it's a, it's a mouthful and it's like, not something, it's not sexy. It's like not what's something that your average person is going to remember. But it's a very powerful concept and it basically is like,

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  The things that are good for us, you know, as we're developing and as we are approaching peak reproductive shape, right, like to be in like our strongest and most, you know, robust physical form, aren't necessarily also going to be what's going to get us to the age of 100 or the age of, you know, 120 for that matter, right? And so I think it's a really interesting thought experiment to try to reconcile like, okay, well, what if we did want to do both? What if we did want to get into like Ben Greenfield shape, for example, right? But also like have our bodies in fighting form when we're also like 80 and 90 and 100.

• 1:20:07Speaker 00

  And I feel like sometimes like you've got like the world of longevity and you've got the world of fitness and they don't, they don't, they're kind of like siloed off, right? But I'm, I'm actually very interested in like bridging that divide and reconciling those two sort of like seemingly divergent ideas. And so, you know, one thing that I think is really important that people in the fitness industry don't really talk about very much is like the value of food quality, right? Like, I mean, I see so many people in the world of fitness boiling it all down to calories in, calories out. And calories, yeah, they matter, right? But like, they're not all that matter. Like, food quality, I think, plays a major role. And especially for somebody who's scratching their head, wondering why diet after diet seems to fail for them, I think it's really important that people know that food quality

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  in many ways dictates the quantity of food that one is inclined to consume, right? There was this really great seminal study that was performed in 2018, funded by the NIH, Kevin Hall led it, who's a well-known obesity researcher, who found that when people were given access only to ultra-processed foods, they tended to overconsume their energy requirements for the day by about 500 calories. So that's a 500 calorie, essentially, in other words, energy surplus that they consumed when just eating to satiety, right? Like eating to a point where they felt like, okay, I could walk away from the table now. This was a crossover trial. So then what the researchers did was they gave them access to a diet that was less processed, right? Like a minimally processed diet, like

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  the kinds of foods that you might find around the perimeter of the supermarket as opposed to in the aisles of the supermarket. What they found was that when eating to the same degree of satiety, right? Like I've had enough, I'm good. The subjects ended up eating at a 300 calorie deficit. So that right there, that's an 800 calorie swing determined not by somebody counting calories and they're in an Excel spreadsheet or with an app, right? That was determined purely by the quality of the food that they're consuming. So oftentimes a lot of people, when their diets fail, they tend to feel a sense of moral failure. Like, why couldn't I just count my calories, you know, more rigorously? Or, you know, why did I overconsume the pint of ice cream? I intended only to have one scoop and, you know, before

• 1:22:18Speaker 00

  I knew it, I was looking at the bottom of the pint. Well, it's because that food quality in many ways dictates the quantity of the food that you feel compelled to consume, right? When you're basing your diet on higher protein foods, on foods that are more minimally processed, maybe it's like because you eat them more slowly than something that's more refined, right? That you have this release of hormones, right? Like GLP-1, for example, that makes you less inclined to overeat. And I think that that's like something that you don't often get in the fitness community that tends to make things all about calories,

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  right? It's just like calories in, calories out is a mathematical maxim. Like it's a platitude that, yeah, it's true calories in, calories out. The key to fat loss is being in a calorie deficit. But where it fails is that it's really shitty advice. It's just not good advice. And that's what your average person is also, it's also that advice.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  Is exactly the advice that the food industry wants people to be giving out as well. Because you know, with that advice, there's no such thing as a good or bad food, right? Like you can have, it's like you can have the, the soda, you can have the like the ice cream. It's not our fault that you didn't moderate your consumption of the ice cream, you fat pig, right? It's your fault. But that's because people are not aware, they're not being told that these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation, right? But I didn't mean to fat shame right there. That's not the intent. The intent was to say that that's, that's how the food industry thinks of you, right? That if you weren't able to lose weight because on, on this sort of like calorie centric approach,

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  you know, to weight loss, you weren't able to just eat less and move more, it's your fault, you know? That was a moral failure on your part, but that's not, that's not the case. The case is that we live in a toxic food environment, a food environment that, you know, ultra-processed foods are omnipresent, they're always at arm's reach. And, um, and they're designed to be hyper-palatable, they're designed to push your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-control is essentially impossible, right? And granted, there is variation here. Some people will be better able to moderate their consumption of ice cream and some people can't. People have their different trigger foods, right? Like, but, um, but I think like talking about the, the behavioral aspects of food and the

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  relationship that we have with food, I think that's crucially important, way more important for the long-term sustainability of one's sort of fitness lifestyle than the more calorie centric approach, which tends to be parroted by people in the fitness community over and over and over and over again.

• 1:25:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I'm good friends with James Smith and Darren Cartal, and both of them are, they're Mr. Calories, both of them, like the calorie couple. Uh, and they're right, like the, the fundamentals of weight loss, when it comes down to the thermodynamic, uh, sort of underpinnings of it are calories in and calories out, but the means by which you get there. It seems to be what you're saying matter an awful lot. It's like, do you want to swim upstream or do you want to swim downstream? When you're trying to control the calories that you eat. And then on top of that, you know, the if it fits your macros, bro. Lifestyle that me and all of my lifting friends were a part of 15 years ago. Like when that first came on the scene, it was phenomenal because you could cut and eat Haribo.

• 1:25:48Chris Williamson?

  They couldn't eat many Haribo. You couldn't have much cheesecake, but you could. It it basically told you that as long as you hit these three numbers by the end of the day, nothing else matters. It's like all that you're bothered about your macronutrients by the end of it. And it's any calories, bro, is what is the solution. But that definitely led to a bunch of disordered eating from me because I never, I never learned the value of padding out a meal with a shit ton of vegetables. Like, okay, like I could have my carbs come from these four or five pieces of Haribo. Or I could have like two sweet potatoes. And it would be the same. It's the same in terms of the very narrow view that I'm having of how many carbs are in it.

• 1:26:33Chris Williamson?

  Probably going to end up being the same, something similar.

• 1:26:36Chris Williamson?

  And yet the experience of eating it and my subsequent sense of hunger is wildly different. And then that's before even talking about micronutrients, minerals, fiber, all the rest of this stuff. So yeah, I think that short and snappy taglines are always going to be sexy because they help to minimize down something that's by its nature kind of complex into something which is really, really simple and easy to understand. But a lot gets lost in translation, I think.

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and again, I think that there's a seat at the table for all of the different perspectives. And I've, I've seen some of James's content. I think he's, he's phenomenal, you know, but like, I think you also have to understand context and where these people are coming from like, and you, and you know, I think like many of them who in the past have come after me need to understand where I'm coming from. Right? Like, these are people who are like fitness professionals and. And you know, they have a certain kind of experience, right? A lot of people that gravitate towards that content. These are people that are already very obsessed with their bodies, right? And they're they're amenable to to constantly tracking things like that, right? I'm I'm more thinking of it from like a public health standpoint.

• 1:27:50Speaker 00

  And also, I've been honed by my experience of getting to reach like people. Yeah, I reach a lot of fitness bros on social media, right? But I also, you know, I've been able to do a lot of like television in the United States, where I reach people that are not on Instagram, you know, that are that are not obsessed with fitness. They're just like obese, overweight, and they have no idea why, you know? So like, for me, I think you've got to, yeah, you have to talk about calories. Like calories definitely play a role, but you can't. I don't think that you can really lead with that. I think we have to talk about the behavioral aspects of food. And and because like, once you plant the seed of knowledge, I think that that generally for the motivated person, right?

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  Is going to then be be able to like adopt behavioral change and create healthy new habits for themselves, right? Like, you know, eating while distracted, right? Like watching, watching TV, like if you're if you're eating while you're watching TV or, you know, reading a magazine, for example, or scrolling through your phone, you're going to be inclined to consume about 15% more calories than if you're just like present with your food. And so over the long term, that is going to add up quite fast, in fact, right? So, you know, like be more present with your food. Don't just eat mindlessly on the go. Like, that's another thing that I think can really help people, right?

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  There was a study recently that looked at people who ate late at night, like late night eating compared to early time restricted feeding. This is a super controversial area, right? People are like, you know, it's sort of intermittent fasting and, you know, you see the calories in, calories out. People saying like intermittent fasting doesn't do anything. It's all about sicko. Well, yeah, at the end of the day, it is about calories in, calories out. But this study, what was so interesting about it was that it found that people who eat who ate late dinner, dinner late at night, about 9:00 PM, compared to people who, it actually might have been a crossover trial. So where, you know, subject participants were sort of like their own controls.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  What they found was that late night eating led to increased hunger the next day. Increased hunger the next day. People were more inclined to, they consumed about 60% more calories and they saw a reduction in their resting metabolic rate by, I believe, about 5%.

• 1:30:15Chris Williamson?

  Why would that be the case?

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  Well, it's just that like hunger is driven by hormones and hormones are influenced by our circadian biology. Like this is now what we're starting to see, right? So this doesn't-

• 1:30:27Chris Williamson?

  Typically, though, when it comes to an intermittent fast, most people that do it, David Sinclair and Alex Friedman's of the world, will fast through the morning and eat later in the day. I see very few people proposing an intermittent fasting regime which involves eating upon waking and then fasting for the, from the 4pm slot until 8 in the morning.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  So the data is actually coming out suggesting that that sort of late start and followed by a late dinner is actually the wrong approach. We're diurnal creatures, so we're meant to eat during the day. I'm not saying that we need to eat as soon as we wake up, right? But we're meant to eat sometimes shortly after we, after we arise. I think like when intermittent fasting first came on the scene, scene, so to speak, people didn't think it really mattered so much, like where you placed that feeding window, whether it was 12 to 8 or 2 to 10. But what we're now starting to see is that our metabolic furnace is primed to digest and metabolize food, you know, when it's light out. Because when the sun

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  goes down, that's really when our ancestors would have kind of winded down and gotten themselves ready for bed, right? You also don't need as much energy late at night. You're just not doing as much stuff late at night. But now, due to the, you know, the ubiquity of artificial lighting and the like, we, you know, we're sort of constantly in this like sort of Vegas environment where, you know, our brains don't really have a good sense of what time of day it is. But ancestrally- We would have probably been foraging and eating generally when the sun was up and for maybe, you know, some short time after the sun went down. But this whole notion that like eating late at night is somehow like biologically appropriate, that's a very modern phenomenon.

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  I mean, today, we're eating 16 hours a day. Your average adult is consuming and metabolizing food 16 hours a day, you know, which is like the entire time that they're waking up. Actually, they're digesting food probably even longer than that, right? Because if you eat right before you go to bed, then you're actually digesting while your body should be like priming itself for the restorative and reparative processes that occur during sleep, not digesting and metabolizing your food, right? So what the studies are now starting to show is that early time restricted feeding. So people can actually go to PubMed and look this up. It's sometimes abbreviated in the medical literature as ETRF, an acronym that stands for early time restricted feeding. What we're seeing is that early time restricted feeding compared to late time restricted feeding

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  actually coincides with a number of cardiometabolic benefits. So it's not that, you know, something that you eat at 10:00 PM has more calories than if you were to eat it at 6:00 PM. That's not the case. Again, it doesn't refute calories in, calories out. But it seems to be the case that eating late at night can lead to, well, next day hunger, as I already mentioned, a reduction in resting metabolic rate, small, but they were able to see this in a trial. Hormone dysregulation, so various hormones that are involved in satiety and hunger and metabolism, like leptin and ghrelin, were dysregulated.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  But then also, blood sugar regulation and blood pressure are affected by late night eating, it seems. What you eat still trumps when you eat, but I mean, say you can't or don't want to change what it is that you're eating, right? This is a modification that you might potentially make that could, over the long term, have a, you know, have a positive effect on your health. So, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't push the eating, uh, cause I used to do this. I used to like not eat my first calorie until I, you know, like 2:00 PM or something ridiculous like that. Now generally I wake up at around seven or eight AM and I'll eat at around, you know, 10 or 11 AM.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  And I try to on my best days not eat too late after 7:00 PM. That doesn't always happen. You know, dinner today is our most social meal, so I think it's important that people don't get dogmatic about this.

• 1:34:43Speaker 00

  You know, you don't wanna go, you don't wanna forego social opportunities in the name of early time restricted feeding, but, uh, but there is a signal there, like in the medical literature that I think is like worth, worth listening to for sure.

• 1:34:56Chris Williamson?

  Dude, a lot of things I think to throw out of the window at the moment, maybe my, again, club promotion career that I was doing where I'd finish, finish at three in the morning and come home and eat the food that I'd prepared earlier on at 4:00 AM, uh, might contribute to a little bit of the hunger that I was having. Uh, and also the, the mouthwash thing for me is, is huge. I've been an avid mouthwash user, thinking that I was doing something good for my dental hygiene, that turns out might not be quite so good for my body overall. And look dude, let's bring this one home. Uh, I appreciate the fuck out of you. I really love your work. Where should people go if they wanna check out the things that you do and the books that you've got and all the rest of it?

• 1:35:31Speaker 00

  You're the man. Thanks, Chris. Well, I have my own YouTube channel, youtube.com/maxlugavere, uh, where, um, you know, I put up a lot of my content. I have a podcast called The Genius Life. I've written three books now. Genius Foods is my first book, which is a New York Times bestseller. It's like a deep dive. It's like a nutritional care manual for the human brain. So I highly recommend people check that out. Or, you know, if you like to cook, I put out a cookbook called Genius Kitchen. And then I'm super active on Instagram. So, but I'm easy to find. So, you know, come and find me. All right, man. Cheers. Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

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  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:36:27Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9.0 without