The Terrifying Link Between Diet & Mental Health - Max Lugavere (4K)

Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist, filmmaker, podcaster and New York Times bestselling author. To maintain peak health, nurturing a healthy mind and body is key. Simple daily habits and foods can make a massive difference to limiting and even reversing cognitive decline as you age. Expect to learn why California is banning Skittles, how worried you should be about artificial sweeteners, tactics for how to kill your sweet tooth, why raising your baby vegan might be child abuse, the biggest issue with the demonisation of red meat, the specific ways you can prevent dementia from happening and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on your Mud/Wtr subscription & freebies at https://mudwtr.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my own productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom #diet #health #fitness - 00:00 California Has Banned Skittles 04:40 Should We Worry About Artificial Sweeteners? 11:52 The Problem with Ultra-Processed Foods 19:24 Why Do Humans Binge for Comfort? 25:53 Placebo Effect of Gluten Intolerance 32:05 The Sorcery of Low Net-Carb Products 35:36 Is it Good That Young Girls Are Avoiding Meat? 44:53 How Exercise Reduces Cancer Risk 50:43 Why Raising Kids as Vegans is Child Abuse 1:03:38 The Motivation Behind Max’s New Film 1:10:20 Daily Things We Do That Ruin Our Brains 1:18:27 Does Brain Training Actually Work? 1:22:39 What Max’s Mum Would Think of His Work 1:28:33 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Gavin Newsom signed Bill 418, which will prohibit any food containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye 3. California becomes the first US state to ban Skittles and 12,000 additional products for cancer-causing additives. What's going on?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  It's hard to take a firm stance on this because on the one hand, I do think it's largely virtue signaling and perhaps a bit of fear mongering. You know, California is kind of known for doing that. A lot of products that are sold in California, for example, like coffee, and a product as innocuous as instant coffee has to come with the warning label that it contains acrylamide, a compound that in vitro at least is a is a known carcinogen, right? You can like find this on instant coffee sold in California. It's not uncommon to be in a parking garage, for example, and see a sign in, you know, by the elevator or staircase that the by being in the parking garage, you're going to be exposed to chemicals

• 1:02Speaker 01

  known to cause cancer and that are, you know, teratogenic, birth defect causing. So California is known for being a bit of a hypochondriac state. And and so that's where I think a lot of this comes from. On the other hand, I am, I'm not a fan of big government. I'm a fan of small government and less regulation as opposed to more. But I do kind of think that where regulation is perhaps warranted is in with regard to the food supply, the food system, because if you let the market decide, you end up with things like Mountain Dew flavored hot dogs, which we've seen go viral on social media.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Or, yeah, I mean, these are, it's unclear whether or not these were real or computer-generated. But I mean, you see all the time, you know, there's like all kinds of crazy products in the supermarket that are just, you know, their sole intent seemingly is to hook consumers onto this addictive, hyper palatable, hyper calorie dense product. You see it in fast food all the time. I mean, I'm not sure what country I was in, but I was walking around and there was like a glazed donut hamburger that some mega chain was offering somewhere. So like, if you let the market decide, the market is ultimately going to cater to what the people want. And people don't have like, Stopgaps.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  Old roads lead back to Haribo tank fastics or something.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yes, there you go. Exactly. Those, those kinds of products. So I do think that a little bit of regulation is important. And I think, you know, this, this perhaps is a step in the right direction because we know that the food supply is essentially toxic. We live in a world now where 73% of items in your average supermarket are ultra-processed. This is according to a new study that came out that used a machine learning algorithm that looked at all the products available to your average consumer in your average supermarket. And the vast majority of them are ultra-processed, which we know has been linked to every poor health outcome imaginable these days. So, you know, when, when banning, or at least regulating these kinds of products, which at the end of the day, ultimately are proxies for ultra-processed

• 3:03Speaker 01

  foods, like you're not going to find red dye 40, right, in something that mom cooks. I think that's a positive thing. But again, California is known for fear mongering. I don't necessarily know how evidence-based the, the, the, the fear that a lot of the, a lot of people have towards these products are, you know, the, the reason, the reason aspartame controversy was a good sort of example of that. I don't have a dog in the fight with regard to aspartame. You know, there's, you can find equivocal evidence that diet sodas are, you know, actually very helpful with regard to weight loss. You can find observational evidence that people who consume more diet sodas have higher risk of obesity, higher risk of, you know, other negative health outcomes. But, you know,

• 3:47Speaker 01

  the World Health Organization came out and said that it was a possible human carcinogen, which the data on that isn't really so black and white.

• 3:55Chris Williamson?

  Give me the, yeah, I've had so many conversations about aspartame over the last six months since that World Health Organization thing came out. Some people have said, most people have said, the risks are overblown.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:11Chris Williamson?

  Concern doesn't matter unless you're taking 8,000 cokes a day or something that the risk is so small. Then a lot of people say, well, a small chance of cancer risk increase isn't a good thing. Then other people have said, well, the reduction in weight from switching from sugar calorific drinks to non-calorie aspartame drinks, think about the difference that you get now in terms of weight loss and the downstream benefits. Like, what's your read overall? How worried should people be about artificial Sweeteners?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that people should be that worried. I, this is where I think the limitations of data come in and you have to, you have to arrive at a set of values about these sorts of products. And for me personally, I avoid artificial sweeteners because I abide by what is sometimes referred to as the precautionary principle, you know? And you might say, oh, it's sort of like borderline appeal to nature fallacy. But I think that the less time a food or product has been in the marketplace, the more skepticism, the more caution we should reserve for that product. And yes, aspartame is one of the most studied compounds in existence, really, well, particularly with regard to a consumable

• 5:24Speaker 01

  product, right? But there's also publication bias. It's a heavily commercialized product. And so for me, I choose to avoid like artificial sweeteners. I don't think that consuming them, particularly in reasonable doses, is, is going to be a health concern. And certainly for people who are on weight loss diets and it is the sort of the one singular vice that allows them to better adhere to that diet. I think that's a positive thing. And ultimately, we're exposed to carcinogens, innumerable carcinogens on a daily basis. I think ultimately, how to prevent cancer is to, you know, to stack the odds in your favor by building your own resilience, your own robustness with exercise, with an antioxidant-rich diet

• 6:06Speaker 01

  and the like. So if a little bit of aspartame sneaks in here and there, which I personally avoid, but again, if, if, if this is something that happens to be your vice and you're consuming it in reasonable doses, I think it's probably fine.

• 6:17Chris Williamson?

  What is your advice to somebody like me who has quite a strong sweet tooth and has managed to condition myself into eating a savory meal and then looking for something just that's like a little finisher? At the end, right? And a lot of the time I can make this work with blueberries or raspberries. Sometimes they're not in the fridge. Sometimes it's a more blueberries and raspberries. What, what are your go to? I have a sweet tooth craving and I need to satiate that, but I don't want to kill myself.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  Where do you, where do you go? And where do you advise people to go?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  You and Stephen Bartlett, he asked me the same question.

• 6:54Chris Williamson?

  Did he?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was like,

• 6:56Chris Williamson?

  So it's a, it's the British thing in us, or maybe it's the fact that we're both from like super working class backgrounds. And we're like, we've been given this sort of zero, some scarcity mentality around sweet things that it's a treat. I don't know.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's great. I, look, I have a sweet tooth too. I think we're programmed for that, right? I mean, sweet is for one of our hunter gather ancestors, the only time they would encounter the sensation of sweet, sweet taste, right? Would be when fruit was finally ripe during the summer season and it would signal to your body to store fat, right? It causes an elevation of insulin, it floods your muscles with stored energy for later use, right? So we're hardwired to enjoy sweet. And particularly today, when sweet is combined with salty, when it's combined with fatty, you get this hyper palatable combination, sometimes referred to as the Dorito effect, right? It takes a food that was previously an ingredient and it turns it into this, this concoction that pushes your brain to a bliss point beyond which self-control is seemingly impossible, right?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I've gone through it. I've, you know, I've gone to my freezer, taken out the pint of ice cream, only aspiring to have a spoonful or two before, you know, I knew it, I was looking at the bottom of the pint. So I mean, that's kind of the problem with modern foods. Um, but ultimately I think, you know, with sweet, there are a number of non-caloric sweeteners on the market that I think are relatively safe. I mean, allulose is a naturally derived sweetener that I've no, and I have no commercial affiliation with any allulose producer or anything like that. But there seems to be some evidence that it might even be, might even actually have health benefits associated with it. I think erythritol is great. Erythritol is a sugar alcohol, but among the sugar alcohols, it's the more well tolerated one.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Some of them can draw water into the gut. And have like a laxative effect, which you don't want. It's like, here's a chocolate bar sweetened with maltitol and sorbitol. Oops, you're gonna get diarrhea if you eat more than half the bar. But, um, but erythritol is generally very well tolerated.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  Like, no one's gonna go and buy erythritol and like throw it at a thing. Like, what's the food? Give me some foods that are gonna satiate me.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, fruit, I think, is great.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Look, ice cream, you know, there, there's observational evidence. It's like mind blowing, but the people who consume ice cream, for whatever reason, they seem to have better health. You know, I think this is.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, that's gotta be a type of ice cream. It's good, it's not gonna be, you know, your ultra processed.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  Get it from an ice cream truck thing.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, if you think about it, humans have been making ice cream for quite some time. And the ingredients, and I'm not saying that ice cream is a health food, by the way, just to make that perfectly clear. And this is a perfect example of where correlation doesn't equal causation necessarily. But, um, but yeah, ice cream, I mean, if you can buy like, uh, you know, uh, ice cream made in the traditional way. I mean, it's egg yolks, right? It's, it's heavy cream, which is actually, heavy cream is a great source of vitamin K2. Like, there's nutrients in, in ice cream. So if you could find a low sugar version of it, you know.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  Let's just take that. There are nutrients in ice cream. That's all I needed to hear.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  There are, yeah.

• 9:58Chris Williamson?

  Actually, that was, that was all I wanted. But yeah, I think, um, it makes me think, reflecting on my own sort of dietary habits, that, uh, sweet craving that I've created in myself, sometimes after I have a big meal. And, uh, unless I'm very disciplined, that can lead me down a very dangerous path. You mentioned about kind of this, uh, unique blend of particular types of ingredients, particular types of flavors.

• 10:25Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever seen hunter gatherer tribes trying cheesecake for the first time?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  No, is that a thing?

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  There's videos of it on the internet.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 10:32Chris Williamson?

  So they give people who've never had processed foods before. And you think about cheesecake from a taste design, uh, orification, you familiar with that?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  So orification is the way that food textures are designed to make them more palatable. We don't really think about this, right?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:49Chris Williamson?

  The obsession is with what's in the food, but the way that it feels in your mouth is a big determinant of your enjoyment of it. Ancestrally, it would have been very, very rare to have found something that had both crunchy and fluffy. And if you think about some of the most palatable foods, Oreos, you know, you've got this sort of crunch and then fluff, french fries, same thing again. Cheesecake, you've got that, but really dialed up with this perfect ratio of carbs and fat and sugar.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  There's tart across the top. If you've got like a little fruit compote type thing and you just get this like blast of this orchestra, right, in your mouth. They give it to these under gatherer tribes and their faces are just, you know, someone that's just chewed leaves, right, for the last decade and eaten meat that's been cooked in variable like qualities. And yeah, you realize how hyper normal the stimuli of the foods that we're eating are. And this is the biggest lesson that I took from you and it's been really, really useful for me that one of the main problems with ultra processed foods

• 11:55Chris Williamson?

  is not just what's in them, but it is the fact that eating to satiety is so tough to do because it is built to push you past satiety.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. Super well said. That's, you know, I used to be more, admittedly, and this is an area where I've evolved. I used to be more interested in what is the, what is the more optimal mix of carbs and fat for, for example, a weight loss diet or even for longevity. And I think now where the science is sort of, has sort of evolved and also where my thinking has evolved as well, is that it's really, it's about food quality at the end of the day. And ultimately ultra processed, this term ultra processed, which was devised, coined by, in the Nova Nutrient Profiling System, which was devised in Latin America. So people can go look it up. It's, there's actually a definition around

• 12:47Speaker 01

  what it takes to be classed as an ultra processed food. It's a good screening tool. It's not even necessarily the best diagnostic tool because certainly there are some ultra processed foods which are quite healthy. You know, you could take like a legume based pasta, which is, you know, certainly a processed food, might not necessarily be an ultra processed food, but processing is a continuum. And certainly there are some ultra processed foods that are healthy, you know, like a dark chocolate bar is, is, you know. Fairly processed at this point and it's a and it can be quite healthy. We know that cacao cocoa flavanols are really quite beneficial to you, but by and large, the vast majority of foods that Americans today are consuming are ultra-processed and we know that these

• 13:31Speaker 01

  foods typically are very nutrient poor. So they're depleted of any real nutritional quality other than perhaps energy and and they are incredibly calorie dense and they're hyper palatable, which makes them really difficult to to moderate. So this seminal study published a couple of years ago now, two or three years ago, funded by the NIH, found that when people eat to eat ultra-processed foods to satiety, they end up consuming a calorie surplus of about 500 additional calories. And today in the United States-

• 14:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a pound of weight per week, right? 3,500 calories a week is a pound of weight gain per week.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Precisely. Yeah. So and you know, your average American today, that is largely what your average American is doing. Every day they're consuming 60% of their calories from these ultra-processed foods. In the UK, it's a little bit lower. It's about 50%. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys are doing a little bit better than we are over here, but American children are consuming 70% ultra-processed foods and it's only trending up. It's like it's not getting better. It's getting worse. And we're now seeing connections between ultra-processed food, like dose responses between ultra-processed food consumption and all-cause mortality and risk for cancer and risk for, I mean, dementia, even depression.

• 14:41Chris Williamson?

  Depression is linked with ultra-processed foods?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we're at the very tip of the iceberg with this in in this field, which is being called nutritional psychiatry, looking at the role that diet plays in mental health. But there have been a number of associational studies at this point linking poor diet to worse mental health outcomes like clinical depression and the like. The question has always been the direction of causality, right? So depressed people, obviously, like when I'm depressed, I'm reaching for comfort foods, right? Which tend to be ultra-processed. Can eating more ultra-processed foods actually create symptoms of depression? That's been the sort of looming question. Well, we now have- Randomized clinical evidence, like empirical clinical data suggesting that

• 15:26Speaker 01

  when people on junk food diets clean up their diets and adopt a more Mediterranean style approach, which the Mediterranean diet is lauded in the Western literature as being the ideal human diet. I think it's it's one of probably many ideal diets. It's just a less processed diet at the end of the day and a diet that's more palatable that is palatable to Western palates, that when people adopt a more Mediterranean style diet, they see some they see remission from depression three times the at three times the rates as compared to standard of care, which was shown in the smiles trial, which is sort of one of these like, it was the first and still highly regarded, highly cited trials in this field of nutritional psychiatry run at the food and mood center

• 16:08Speaker 01

  at Deakin University in Australia. So, yeah, so food, I mean, food is medicine and depression has been linked to inflammation. We know that inflammation is we can modulate it, you know, via our diets and our lifestyles. Not for every, this isn't the case for every person, but there's certainly a subset of the depressed population for whom inflammation is likely playing a role.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  And there's a feedback loop going on here, right? Like, the fact that you don't know which direction the arrow of causality is going in means that it could actually be cyclical, right? That we get depressed, so we eat food which worsens the way we feel, which worsens the depression, which, dude, I remember, so I've spoken about this on the show before, throughout a good bit of my twenties, I thought I had like ambient depression that would creep up and then it would break through the activation energy surface and then it would go away again. And how depression would manifest for me is I would stay in bed for maybe, you know, two days at a time and I would refuse to get out of bed, but I would eat. And one of the things that I would do is I would comfort,

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  I guess binge, and it would be very sugary, very sort of just like comfort eating foods. And there's a sensation that you get if you really pump your like, you know, like a couple of muffins for breakfast and a few slices of pizza or whatever it is that you want to order from Uber Eats or something. And there is a sensation you get, especially if you haven't moved, you haven't got out of bed, you haven't seen any sunlight. And it presumably is the inflammation response where it almost feels like your body's sort of throbbing, like in a satisfactory way and your joints feel a little bit tight and your brain feels very foggy. And then presumably off the other side of this absolutely huge glucose spike, I was able to then like fall back asleep. So I would do that, you know, I'd wake up,

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  get food, eat, feel like shit, like put Netflix on or whatever, curtains would be closed, wouldn't want to see anybody, you know, like meet the guy at the door. The, it sounds like I'm getting my fucking MDMA dealer to come around here. Like he also came around, but he came around at different times. And that would be, that would be part of my cycle of, of low mood. And it absolutely facilitated it. And I, I used food, ultra-processed, highly palatable foods that spiked my blood sugar as a comfort tool. And it absolutely made me, and here was the other thing. It's not just about what you eat and the way that it makes you feel. It is the story that you tell yourself about the sort of person that

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  you are for having eaten that kind of food.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:37Chris Williamson?

  Right. And that is, that's really the sort of ruminative narrative based, I am a kind of person that does the X, Y, Z. That's what I think really sort of drove at home for me and made me feel like particularly like unsatisfied with myself. I'm like, look, I shouldn't be doing this. Like, I understand how important health and fitness is. I go to the gym. I'm in good shape. I was a fucking commercial model for 15 years in the UK. Like, you shouldn't be lying in bed, eating duffins, which is a, a combination donut muffin that was created in the UK.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Don't let the market decide.

• 19:13Chris Williamson?

  All roads descend into the hell that is duffins. But yeah, and you know, I think that comfort eating, but in fact, that's something I'd love to know about from you. Like, what is it? Have you got any idea why people comfort binge eat? Like what's going on there? Are they reaching for something that's like a psychological piece of tape to?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Like a psychological Band-Aid of sorts?

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, when you, when you eat high sugar foods, there's a, I mean, it can, it can depress levels of cortisol, which is like the stress hormone. We know that people that are like, for example, fasting, you can, I mean, fasting is a stress response, right? So sometimes when we're stressed out, we crave food because it's a way of signaling to our biology that everything's okay, because ultimately food is a really important, we've solved for the food scarcity issue. But for a long time, I mean, food was the primary

• 20:12Speaker 01

  variable, right? That would indicate and like one of our ancestors' successes or, or ultimate demises, right? Whether or not they could, they were able to procure food. And we've done that. And now that's sort of become the double edged sword of modernity is that like food is available constantly with a swipe of, you know, your finger on your app. You can have whatever it is your heart desires to arrive at your doorstep within 15 minutes. So I think that's, that's certainly part of it. Also, the associations that we have with these kinds of foods that maybe they evoke, you know, our childhoods in a way, like we reach for foods that remind us of a more peaceful time in our lives, when the stakes were perhaps a bit lower. So I think, I think there's a lot of different variables potentially at play.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  But I think it's also really important to not, to not stigmatize, I mean, and pathologize ultimately being depressed. Because depression and stress are par for the course of being human, particularly today. I mean, we're living in tumultuous times and inevitably all of us is going to encounter something in life that, that serves as a depressive stimulus. I mean, I've been depressed in my life and it wasn't attributable to my diet. I've been really depressed because of what was going on, for example, in my family life, with everything that, that my mom went through and, and you know, the, the journey that took me, that has gotten me to this place.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And so it's important to not pathologize these kinds of normal human emotions, which I think is really common, especially in our world where everything has become lately all about optimization and the 1,500 steps that you have to do every morning before your morning coffee to optimize your day and to.

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we'll get back to talking to Max in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative which tastes like cacao and chai had a beautiful baby together. It is nearly winter time, which means you might want to hold on to your hot drink, but not have the caffeine crash and jitters that comes along with coffee. And Mudwater is the alternative. It's got four functional mushrooms, each of which was chosen for a specific purpose. It's got cacao and chai for a hint of caffeine and chocolate-like taste, lion's mane for focus, cordyceps to promote natural energy, and both chaga and reishi to help support a healthy immune system. Plus, it's Whole30 approved, 100% USDA organic, kosher, vegan, and gluten-free. So if you are looking for a delicious alternative to your morning coffee, this is where to start. Right now,

• 22:36Chris Williamson?

  you can save $20 plus get a free sample of creamer and a free frother by going to the link in the description below or heading to mudwtr.com/modernd wisdom. That's mudwtr.com/modernd wisdom. I brought this up with Huberman yesterday. I called it the peril of over-optimization. I have a friend who is a world-class DJ who messaged and said, dude, loving the show, blah, blah, blah. I have to say I'm starting to fall out of love with DJing because I watch a lot of good health communication podcasts on the internet. And every time that I DJ and stay up till four in the morning, I feel guilt about not hitting my morning

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  waking circadian rhythm. So his love, his main passion in life, he is feeling that become tarnished because he has guilt around the gap between his potential optimized version and his realized optimized version. Do you see this as a trend among people?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, certainly. And I'm not an expert in disordered eating or eating disorders, but that is one of the, what I've been able to glean from experts that I've interacted with and ultimately people who've suffered from disordered eating is that it's important to remove the morality from food.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I think if you have a healthy relationship with food, it's important to have empirical definitions around food like, obviously, you know, a four year old might be able to look at, you know, a, a, a certain food item, a bluffing.

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  Duffin.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  A duffin.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And, um, and identify that that's maybe not as beneficial as, uh, you know, a stalk of broccoli or an egg or a piece of, you know, grass fed, grass finished beef or something like that. So, you know, I think it's important to have, to, to, to maintain definitions around food. We live in a time where seemingly it's impossible to define anything. Um, and, uh, and I think that's not helpful. But on the other hand, it is really important to remove the shame that we feel around food because at the end of the day, one single food, one single meal isn't in any way going to sway your biology in the, towards the direction of health or disease. It's about the dietary pattern as a whole.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  It's about, we don't live in the on average though, right?

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  We don't have the perspective. What we have is what is the lead measure of the thing that I'm doing? What is the story that I tell myself about that? Oh my God, I'm such a piece of shit. This is exactly why such and such a person left you. This is exactly why you're not realizing your, this is going to be the beginning of the end. You know, it's very much a scarcity fear mentality.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  I think it plays into it.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a big problem. I've actually heard this referred to as holistic derangement syndrome, which is.

• 25:19Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Let that settle in.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  That is so good. Holistic derangement syndrome. Yeah. This sort of obsession with over optimization with understanding that where was the, is this grass finished or is this grain finished? Can we check with the, was that actually butter that the chef cooked it in? Because that if there's a seed oil in this, uh, did I tell you about that study, uh, that I learned in the expectation effect, David Robson's thing about glucose?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  Dude, uh, gluten, sorry. So, David Robson, the expectation effect, everyone should go and read his book. Everyone should go and read your book, Genius Foods, but everyone should also go and read, uh, the expectation effect by David Robson, really great science writer from the UK. And, um, they bring people into the lab to try and work out what's going on with gluten intolerance. That gluten intolerance is nearly 10x over the last 30 years, I think.

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  Human biology hasn't changed that much. Maybe the diet landscape has changed a lot, but like gluten's gluten, right? And the intolerance shouldn't have changed that much. They wanted to work out whether it was due to, in some part, this expectation effect.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Chris Williamson?

  That people were hearing a lot of demonization about gluten. So they bring people into the lab, set them down. People that are in there do and do not have biological intolerances to gluten. They've done the tests. They set everybody down. They give everybody the same meal. They tell everyone that it's got gluten in. It's got no gluten in. Within minutes, people are running to the toilet with diarrhea. They're breaking out in hives. They've got inflammation. They've got tension headaches. No one ate gluten. No one in the entire room ate gluten. And you had all of the symptoms.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  Of gluten intolerance manifesting.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  It's wild. It's like a nocebo effect.

• 27:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I admit, I'm very much immersed in the wellness world and I, I love the wellness industry, but I will concede that, you know, it's, I think it has done some damage in the sense that there's a lot of misinformation now about what foods are beneficial, what foods are less so. And, and I've, I've been, I've drank the Kool-Aid at certain points in my life where there was a time when I thought dairy was sort of like an unclean food and that it wasn't ideal from a health standpoint. And now, I mean, I'm, I'm the biggest advocate of consuming dairy. I think dairy is a great food if you, if you tolerate it. For example, you know, there's like this idea that clean eating is

• 27:47Speaker 01

  somehow dairy free, it's gluten free, it's free of all the things, right? And, and I think it's, it's again, really important to educate with nuance around these topics because the, the people, the proportion of our population that is celiac is non-trivial. It's one to 2% and a lot of people with celiac. Or I'm sorry, celiac. So, you know, one to two percent is celiac. And then there's this spectrum of symptoms that people will get that is a true that is thought to be attributed to gluten called non-celiac gluten sensitivity. And that's thought to be, I mean, that's a real thing. And that's widely under diagnosed. So a lot of people are, do experience symptoms

• 28:29Speaker 01

  when they ingest gluten. And gluten is something that, you know, the, the dose, if you want to consider it that and speak in terms of gluten as something that that is ultimately dosed is higher than it's ever been. I mean, we now we breed wheat to contain higher levels of gluten because it provides a mouth feel that we enjoy. It's that gooey texture. And also, we're eating wheat. I mean, wheat is one of these like foundational ingredients to the ultra, the, the deluge of ultra processed foods that your average person is now consuming en masse. It's wheat with breakfast, lunch and dinner and wheat snacks all in between. So the dose of gluten that your average person is ingesting is massive. And I'm not saying that people need

• 29:10Speaker 01

  to avoid gluten if they're not explicitly sensitive to it. But it is a protein that humans don't properly break down. It does stimulate a protein in the gut called zonulin, which basically leads to increased permeability in a sort of increased in passage of ingredients from the compounds from the lumen of the gut in through circulation through what are typically tight junctions that are closed.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, this is like leaky gut.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, I've learned. So I had, I went to Fountain Life in Dallas and had a full body MRI, brain angiogram, heart angiogram, gut microbiome analysis, DEXA scan, balance, everything, full, full, full, full, full works. And they came back and they said, you need to take AMRA colostrum.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Colostrum.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. They said, we need to just, it's not bad, but you, you could, your gut could be less leaky. And that was the first time I thought I didn't even know what the fuck leaky gut was. I didn't know if it was due to gluten or anything else. But yeah, I think this like colostrum products generally are going to be more widely discussed. Yeah. So it seems like overall.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  Gluten just something to probably keep in the back of your mind regardless of how well you think that you tolerate it?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also, um, the, it's also the context in which, in which the gluten is being consumed, I think, which also plays a role and is not something that's being discussed enough. So we live in a time of widespread gut dysbiosis, right? Again, and not to keep harping on this because I don't want to sound like a broken record, but your average Americans, adult, your average American adult's diet is by and large ultra-processed. One of the consequences of this is that most people aren't consuming adequate fiber. Now, fiber is not an essential nutrient, but your average American today, I believe, consumes somewhere between five and 15 grams of fiber a day, right? So fiber is one of these non-essential nutrients, but it seems to be associated with positive health outcomes. It seems to be associated with lower levels of inflammation, greater

• 31:10Speaker 01

  longevity and the like. And so there is a degree of resilience that we should all be able to cultivate with regard to our gut health that we're simply not because, again, we're just, we're eating predominantly junk foods in the background, with the background of a low-fiber diet. And so whereas, you know, we might, we should have the, the resilience that it takes to be able to ingest a protein like gluten and, and be all right with it. Well, we're eating more gluten than ever before in human history. We're eating less fiber than our ancestors likely ever consumed. It's estimated that our fiber, that our hunter-gather ancestors were consuming upwards of 150 grams of fiber a day, which is like, you know,

• 31:51Speaker 01

  orders of magnitude more than we're consuming today. So it's like, it's all, it's the, it's the, it's the dose, it's the compound, it's the context. Everything matters. And so.

• 32:03Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you explain to me what's going on with these new products that are low net carb? Like some cereals have this, some bars have this. What fuckery is happening on the backend? What are net carbs? And is there any, is there any sort of wizardry going on which is hiding something in a, in the deep dark annals of the ingredient profile?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, very likely. So a lot of these, you know, net carbs really are mainly a concern for people who are on a ketogenic diet. And I think it's really important to lay out upfront, a lot of people are on the ketogenic diet because they think it's the ultimate diet for weight loss. And if you prefer, if a ketogenic diet is a diet that you are most easily able to adhere to, then by all means have at it. And I also think, I have to add all these sort of nuances and disclaimers because hashtag science. Yes. And I think it's important. The ketogenic diet, I think, is a really important diet, particularly in the context of neurological conditions, epilepsy primarily, but also I think now we're starting to see neurodegenerative age-related conditions like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. It's a very low carbohydrate diet. And so net carbohydrates

• 33:12Speaker 01

  come into play because people want to be able to consume processed foods while still allowing ketogenic, right? Still allowing for ketone generation by eating low carbs. But I think one of the problems with this is that a lot of these low carb foods are so high in calories that it's like you might as well eat the original food. Like unless you really have a medical reason for being in ketosis. And so a lot of the food manufacturers that produce these keto foods, they achieve having low net carbs despite having a ton of calories by using either fibers, which are inaccessible to us. We were unable to, humans unable to

• 33:53Speaker 01

  break down fiber into its, into glucose. So it's, it passes through the small intestine, basically unadulterated, and then it becomes food essentially, like a food substrate for the bacteria that live in our large intestines. And this is true for fibers found in whole foods. What remains to be seen is whether or not these extracts that are now being used as sweeteners in these ketogenic products function the same way. I think the jury is still out. The FDA, last I recall, is investigating ingredients like tapioca fiber syrup and all those kinds of chicory root fiber to see if they actually do pass through the small intestine unassimilated, undigested, which would

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Allow them to maintain that they are in fact fibers. But I've seen people, because now there is this sort of trend of people wearing, non-diabetics wearing continuous glucose monitors. And I've heard reports from people that follow me that they'll eat a lot of these keto products that allegedly have very few net carbs. And regardless, they still see a pretty significant spike in their blood sugar, which would suggest that they, these fibers are not acting like true fibers.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  Something's going on.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at the end of the day, I think, you know, and this is again, another area where I've evolved. I used to by default opt for these fake foods with the fake fibers that have low net carbs. But now I think, you know, ultimately like a cookie is a cookie, right? Like ice cream is ice cream. So if you're going to reach for one of these foods and you don't have a medical necessity for being in therapeutic ketosis, you might as well offer the real thing, you know, and be cognizant of the overall calorie count of these products because at the end of the day, I mean, they're junk foods.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of this trend of young girls avoiding eating meat and protein and instead replacing it with salads and smoothies and just roughage for days?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Horrible, yeah. So I'm a huge advocate, an unapologetic advocate for omnivory. I think it's, you know, there's this push at the public health scale to, towards plant based diets. And also online, you see, obviously, you know, a lot of women in particular have embraced these diets, I think in part, and I'm not, obviously, I'm not a woman. I don't know what their lived experience is like, but what I've been able to glean from my friends and other experts in this, in this area is that a lot of women avoid meat and protein and they opt instead for salads because they think that it's going to make them smaller to eat that way, to eat like a rabbit. And this is a big problem. You know, a lot of women today have body image issues, I think perpetuated at least in part by social media.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  The fact that you see people, men and women, that have phenomenal bodies that are, you know, usually augmented.

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  Dude, male, I, I, just to interject there, male body dysmorphia will overtake women's within the next two decades.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  It's on track to overtake it.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, the pressure to look a certain way now on social media. I mean, they're augmented, they're augmented like behind the camera, right?

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  And then post.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  And then post, yeah, and then post being posted, yeah.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Um, so it's, yeah, it's, it's really problematic. And so, you know, the pressures, I mean, women have always faced body pressure, right? I think this is fair, a fairly new arena for the fellas. But, um, yeah, women, I think, have always wanted to, particularly since the nineties, like appear smaller. Um, there's this idea that eating meat, I think, is masculine, that it's gonna make, that it's gonna make you bigger, that it's harder to digest. I mean, steak should actually be, steak is incredibly, should be very easy to digest. The problem is a lot of people that are on low meat diets, they're depriving their bodies of the raw materials required to create stomach acid. So, you know, if you're on a low meat diet, then you decide, you know, once in a blue moon to have a piece

• 37:38Speaker 01

  of red meat, well, you might be low in the minerals required to generate adequate stomach acid to allow you to properly digest that food.

• 37:46Chris Williamson?

  And you will mistake the discomfort after eating that meat as, oh, this is what meat, eating meat is like for all people, right? You've conditioned your stomach to not be able to do the thing. So what is the result for girls in the way that they look and feel by being roughage-pelled?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, roughage is, like, I'm the biggest advocate of eating dark leafy greens. I think dark leafy greens are an incredible food, but if that's all you're eating, you know, they are hard to digest. I mean, for example, when, you know, anybody's who's ever had, like, A like a procedure on the large bowel. They're told, you're told prior to the procedure to go on a low residue diet. A low residue diet is a low fiber diet. Red meat is is low residue. Basically, like the residue are the is the indigestible material that makes its way down to the large intestine that gets then fermented and create can can potentially create particularly if you're unadapted to it, symptoms like gas and bloating and things like that. Steak should be one of the one of the easiest foods to digest.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  And and so on the other hand, you have women and people in general, not just not to not to single out women, but people that, you know, they base their whole diets around cellulose, you know, like greens and indigestible plant material. And they wonder why they're walking around bloated all the time. And they're also, you know, studies show that people who are on vegetarian and vegan diets, they tend to eat less protein. We know that protein is really important for a number of reasons. It's satiating at the very least, but it also helps to preserve and grow, you know, your muscle tissue. It's important for providing, you know, amino acids, which are the backbones to your neurotransmitters. So, yeah, there is, I think, a consequence to, yeah, to basing your diet around just like rabbit food.

• 39:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, this it seems to go hand in hand with a trend that, at least as far as I can tell, is kind of falling away now, which is like the thigh gap obsession.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  Very willowy kind of the, you know, the London look model kind of super sort of stringy thing. But even within that, there's a softness to the body type, right, of people, both guys and girls, that do that because it, again, thankfully, is falling away and the pivot from thin spoh to fit spoh, I think, has actually largely been really good in that encouraging resistance training, encouraging high calorie meals, prioritization of protein, more focus on training, even like a bit of G flux theories thing coming in, like, let's try and create a calorie deficit through both calorie restriction, but also through training increase. So, you know, both sides of the the Kiko equation.

• 40:30Chris Williamson?

  But you see, and I see it as well, man. Like, I see a lot of the girls that we used to work with at our events company. You're eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old and you're dancing for our events company. And you want to look good in your dancer's outfit on stage or whatever. And the girls that would push a little bit harder on calories and train would have a different kind of physique. In the way that it presented, like the skin seemed a little bit sort of like thinner and tighter and more translucent. And you could see the shape of their bodies underneath it, as opposed to someone that's just dieting themselves into the ground. Thirteen hundred, eleven hundred calories a day in a desperate attempt to try and get down. And there's like a

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Softness.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  There's like, yeah, there's a softness despite there not being much there. What is there still feels like that.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is a recipe when you zoom out and you extrapolate out ten, twenty, thirty, forty years down the road. I mean, that's a recipe for sarcopenia at the very least.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  It's accelerated muscle wasting and just a lack of strength as one ages, which is fairly common these days. The worst is sarcopenic obesity. So it's like excess adiposity along with being under muscled.

• 41:45Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon was on the show this week talking about her muscle-scented medicine.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Great.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, this is a big, a big movement. I think this is again, so much sort of convergent trends.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  Happening here. We've got maybe the science side coming in. We've got that. But yeah, dude, I mean.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  It's super, yeah. And not, not even to mention the, the important minerals and micronutrients that women are, you know, potentially missing out on that are particularly important to the premenopausal woman. So, you know, for example, heme iron, which is found primarily in red meat. You know, red meat is the ultimate iron supplement. And women who are premenstrual, I mean, there's like.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Anemia is super common. Iron deficiency anemia is super common today and

• 42:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, women lose quite a bit of iron once every 28 days.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we're gonna get, it's, we're gonna get red flag for mansplaining, I'm sure.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  Don't tell me how my periods work. I don't even like them.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  No, but, no, you're 100% right, though. I think like, you know, there are women, and the Fitzbo thing I think is great, you know, in the sense that it's gotten more women sort of aware to the benefits of resistance training. The, and, and, you know, a lot of us have worked really hard to dispel the myth that resistance training is going to lead to a bigger, bulkier body. It doesn't, you know, women have testosterone, but one tenth the testosterone of men, and it's really important for, you know, for libido, it's important for well-being, body composition, but it's not gonna make you, it's not gonna lead to you ending up looking like Chris Bumstead.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  Bro, I said this yesterday to Huberman. Do you realize how desperately hard I've tried for a decade and a half to become bulky? Like, I work most moments of every day to put things into my body and do stuff to my body to become bulky. Like, you're not accidentally going to do a couple of supinated bicep curls and then look like Sebum. You know, it's not gonna creep up on you. And if it does, please tell me the protocol that you were doing.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Same.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

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• 44:32Chris Williamson?

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• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  You posted a study talking about two minutes of exercise a day reduces cancer risk by up to 20%.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this kind of research comes out all the time and it's super interesting. And it's not to say that all you need to do is two minutes a day of exercise. Right. That's not the point of the study, but what it, I think the, the drive home message is that we're not impotent to, to these kinds of conditions, which now seem to be so rampant today, right? Like cancer. I've had a number of cancer experts on my podcast. As of late, actually, Thomas Seyfried, you know, is a wonderful expert in this field. Also, Joe Zundel is a good friend of mine, who is another cancer expert. And the, the resounding advice that you get from both of these experts is that exercise really is medicine. I mean,

• 45:42Speaker 01

  it's super, super important in terms of reducing inflammation, in terms of building your robustness, your resilience. Yeah, it's crucial. And so I don't know if two minutes a day is necessarily going to suffice, but, but yeah, I mean, again, like today, the milieu of the Western, not just diet, but lifestyle, we're largely sedentary, like leisure time, physical activity is at an all time low. And we're starting to see increased rates of cancer now among younger people. There was another study that made major headlines recently that found that rates of cancer, and particularly malignant cancer, among cohorts that typically you wouldn't see much of this type of cancer in, is now increasing,

• 46:26Speaker 01

  right? Rates of breast cancer have, I think, like doubled since just 50 years ago. So, I mean, there's something in the modern world, you know, one, one variable, myriad variables that have become essentially toxic. And I think one of the variables that has, that is essentially toxogenic is the fact that we are now, that so many of us are sedentary. It's a big problem and it doesn't take a ton of exercise like you don't have to be like a gym bro like you or I to reap the benefits of exercise. But I think it is super important to have an exercise routine and particularly one that prioritizes resistance training. I mean, this idea that you can just be active, like a lot of older adults, I think, are told to just be active, right?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Which I think is typically taken as just walk, you know, just like walk as much as you can. And walking is great. Walking is great, no matter where on the age spectrum you are. But I think resistance training has long been sort of thought to be this pastime of bros. And, uh, and I think that's a big problem.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Proudly, proudly, yeah, pastime of bros.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  Dude, the, uh, 10 minute to 15 minute walk after eating.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  For me is about as close of a, like, superpower as I've been able to find. And I first got taught this from Stu McGill, like four years ago, back pain expert, flew up to Canada to see him. And he was doing it primarily for, uh, the relieving of lower back pain. And what he was doing was you need to walk, um, small doses frequently. And a good cue for that is when you have something to eat, you're going to eat at least multiple times per day, go for the walk afterward. And he mentioned at the time, there's some benefits to downstream, maybe mentioned a couple of bits. And just the last five years, Mark Bell and Stan Effeding, right?

• 48:20Chris Williamson?

  With the, I think he calls it the 10 minute walk, but 15 seems better. And if you're eating, you know, if you get one in on a morning to get some sunlight in the eyes because you're Huberman pilled, and then you have three meals a day and you do, if you can get a nice 10 to 15 minute loop from wherever you are, that's also your 10,000 steps sorted. That's also going to improve your insulin sensitivity. That's also going to help you to blow off a little bit of that spike that you get post eating. It's going to the, uh, muscles, like the contralateral muscles that run across the stomach. It actually helps to move food, or at least it does for me. If I have a big meal, I actually feel like the food is able to move through my digestion more easily if I go for a walk afterward. The two nights that we've been here, we've had big dinners both times, Cheesecake Factory

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  and Buffalo Wild Wings, because, because I, I am a child. Um, and both times we've been for a walk for 15 minutes afterward. And I can go to sleep more easily on an evening time. It's just, it's a, a real phenomenal hack. And I think that. Struggling to get your walks in, maybe you're concerned about what's happening with insulin. Maybe you want to get a little bit more time outside in nature and be away from your phone. It's, I love these habits where you can stack a bunch of different things on top of that. Get some more time outside. I'm going to get some more sunlight. I'm going to get some more fresh air. I'm not going to be on my phone, blah, blah, blah. It's a real 10 minute walk, 15 minute walk after eating, I'm all in.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, walking moves, there are so many benefits to walking, but I mean, you have fluids in your body that don't have their own heart. And so, for example, lymphatic flow, right? Like, walking helps to promote that, which is involved in, which plays a role in digestion. We know that just a short walk post meal reduces that postprandial blood sugar spike, which is thought to be beneficial, particularly if you have glucose tolerance issues, right? We know that walking helps to remove fat in the blood. Super important. We see that there's an association, particularly in younger people, between around 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day and lower risk of all cause mortality. And then about 10,000, I think, to 12,000 steps among older people. The whole 10,000 steps a day thing is a little bit BS,

• 50:23Speaker 01

  but there actually was a meta-analysis that came out fairly recently, I think over the past year, that found that it, there is actually a zone that's not too far off from that 10,000 step mark that seems to be associated with.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  You need to pick a number.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:37Chris Williamson?

  You know what I mean?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it depends on how quickly you walk, I suppose. There was a New York Post article titled, "I'm Raising My Child Vegan. It's Not As Simple As You Think," and you replied and said, "child abuse."

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:53Chris Williamson?

  What's going on?

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we are biologically adapted to be omnivores. And we know that the neonate relies on the mother deriving adequate nutrition from her food. And there are, if you look at the most nutrient-dense foods available to your average person today, there's literally a paper, people can look it up, published by Beal et al. Two to three years ago, that ranked all the most nutrient-dense foods, particularly by nutrients of concern. So nutrients that people tend to under-consume today, zinc, vitamin B12, and things like that. And animal products were took all the top spots with the exception being dark leafy greens,

• 51:39Speaker 01

  which are thought to be very, very nutrient dense because they're so calorie sparse and they can, they're a good source of vitamin C and folate and calcium and the like. But animal products are our most nutrient dense foods. And when you're a pregnant woman, you are eating for two. So, you know, we already see that pregnant women tend to under consume protein, you know, consumption of choline, which is a really important nutrient for, I mean, you put choline, right? City choline in your, in your neurotropic beverage right here, like super important for brain development, for cognitive function, vitamin B12, crucially important. There's so many DHA fat, right? Like preformed DHA fat, which is found exclusively

• 52:20Speaker 01

  in animal products. You can consume omega threes from plants, but humans are very inefficient at converting it to its usable forms in the body. And so, I mean, that's from the standpoint of pregnancy. Like if I were in, at the stage in my life where I were looking to procreate, I would want to procreate with an omnivorous woman. And it's like saying something like that is controversial today, but it shouldn't be.

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  Max Lugavere wants to procreate with an omnivorous woman. Ladies, you have, this is the sign that you have been looking for.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  It's the bad signal.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's super important. I think like you, with regard to plant-based diets, you can cobble together a diet that leads to better biomarkers. And ultimately, look, a plant-based diet compared to the standard American diet is going to be a healthier choice, right? You can cobble together a diet that, you know, with the use of protein supplements perhaps, can, can, can afford you a fantastic body composition. But I think from the standpoint of pregnancy and ultimately development and childhood development, I think it's really important to, yeah, to allow your child, who's inevitably going to be a picky eater as it is, because that's inevitably

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  They're a child.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Because they're a child. Yeah. I think it's really important to not cross off the list because of some silly ideology. One of the most nutrient dense, the most nutrient dense category of foods available to your average human.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  Do you, do you have any idea what will happen to a child who is lacking in many of the sort of things that a vegan diet would cause there to be a bereft?

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, stunted development, failure to thrive. I mean, you know, I just think it's, I think you're, it's essentially sometimes referred to as nutritionism, this idea that humans with all of our hubris can distill food into its constituent nutrients and then replicate food in a way with, with processed alternatives. I mean, if you take something like the product soy lent, it's a perfect example of that, right? It's like, what happens when Silicon Valley people try to create food? They break down a food into its constituent nutrients, right? The data that makes a food food according to them.

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  This is the code of food.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the code of food and, and we have this ultra processed, ultimately crap product, but here it is, right? Like you're not going to develop a deficiency disease if this is all you consume every day. And so that's like nutritionism. And I think it fails time and time again, because we didn't evolve with these nutrients in isolation. We've evolved with food and we have a handful of nutrients that we know are essential. But that list of what's essential, what's conditionally essential and what's non-essential is changing all the time as it should. And foods don't just contain these single nutrients in isolation, right? Like an orange isn't just, doesn't just provide vitamin C, right? There are countless other innumerable, like nutrients that we have

• 55:15Speaker 01

  yet to even name likely compounds in, you know, in an orange that might have an entourage effect that might increase the absorption, the bioavailability of the vitamin C, for example. And the RDA for vitamin C is set to avoid scurvy at the population level, right? But that doesn't mean that we're all consuming adequate levels of vitamin C to promote optimal collagen synthesis, for example, which we know vitamin C is involved in. So, you know, foods have all of these different nutrients and you take a food like red meat, right? Like red meat has, it contains vitamin B12, which somebody on a plant-based diet might say, well, that's the one essential nutrient you can't get on a plant-based diet. I can just take a vitamin B12 supplement. But what about the constellation of nutrients

• 55:57Speaker 01

  that that vitamin B12 comes with, right? Like the heme iron, the carnitine, the carnecine, the creatine, which we know is really important from a standpoint of muscular health, right? And so you're just depriving a baby of, you know, of all of those different nutrients. And look, the standard American diet isn't, isn't great either. Like you have a lot of children these days that have early onset hypertension, early onset type two diabetes. So I'm not saying that the alternative is the standard, is the standard American diet. But I think that you can, that, yeah, that like you can, the ultimate optimal diet for,

• 56:32Speaker 01

  certainly for a developing human, but also for an adult is a diet that incorporates both animal products and, and plant products.

• 56:39Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting to think that the child abuse thing is like a really interesting frame of it. Because you are locking in to this neonatal human, a kind of development that they didn't choose.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  That they had no volition in saying yes or no to. And I guess, you know, largely until the age of probably 14 or 15, when they can use the stove themselves and actually fully understand what's going into them. You know, even throughout preschool, so on and so forth, you're still largely doing that. But when it's, you have to, what you eat is what your child eats.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  In some regard, it's wild. I have a friend, Alex, who was a vegan philosopher for a good while. He was ethically convinced by Peter Singer's work, Animal Liberation, which I still think from an ethical perspective, I, I think that we're going to look back on what we do now with much of animal farming and think of it as abhorrent. I think you're going to look back and see it as not quite sort of Holocaust-y, but in that sort of realm. Oh my God, we had sentient animals and we did this to them. Right? He became completely vegan pilled. He became an advocate. He is an unbelievably effective debater at everything, but particularly for veganism.

• 58:03Chris Williamson?

  And he found after going vegan, that making a commitment, making a sacrifice to the philosophy that he, the ethics that he'd been convinced by, he found that he was suffering. His body and his mental health had both taken a, a pretty big, like an increasingly big hit from this. And he, he posted the day that he became unconvinced that he could meet an adequately balanced vegan diet. He immediately felt like it was his. He was compelled to tell his audience because again, he came here, he got here from being ethical and being truthful and high integrity with his ethics.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  And then as soon as those had changed, he decided to put a post out and I said, don't do this, you are opening yourself up to a ton of criticism. Wait until you can do the video. And he said, well, yeah, but what if someone sees me eating salmon on a train or something in the UK like I'm not going to feel in line. So again, he was like hoisted by his own ethics. Again, he got absolutely pilloried by the internet for doing it. We, you know, you were supposed to, you said that you understood and a blah, blah, blah. And then he did a video talking through how he was struggling to be able to eat a completely balanced, sufficiently robust, plant-based diet. And again, people had massive problems. And now I think he's probably one year hence ish. Wow. Mental health is way better.

• 59:29Chris Williamson?

  His pursuit that he goes after in life is flourishing. His energy levels have improved, all of this stuff. Again, this isn't for me to say, look, vegans, you're condemning yourself to a life of low energy misery. But there are people out there for whom the limitations that you place on yourself by going on a vegan diet make getting a balanced diet so much more difficult again. And if you're a 24-year-old YouTuber and writer, who maybe still needs to do a bit of growing up.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  You, life's hard enough, like you're just trying to get up before midday. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like you're trying not to go out and party with your friends too much. You're trying to like, learn what productivity is and how do I do my taxes? And like, I've got a relationship or I'm not in whatever. You know, these are additional levels of complexity and difficulty that I don't think you need to add into your life. Uh, and yeah, you know, this is very, very much kind of fallen by the wayside now. And Alex is, is out on the other side. But I really respected him for what, for what he decided to do with that. That he said, look, I've given this a crack. I'm still ethically convinced by veganism. But physiologically, I don't think that I can do. I don't think I can commit to this. And yeah, out the other side of that, he's now just

• 1:00:45Chris Williamson?

  he's crushing it. He's absolutely crushing it.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Also, I mean, as you referenced, when you're younger, you have more resilience, like a younger body is a more resilient body. I mean, think about all the late nights, all the, I mean, for me, like when I was in college, I used to drink a lot. I don't have a problem with alcohol, but like, I would, I would consume alcohol, I would do other things, like, and your body rebounds really fast when you're young, right?

• 1:01:09Chris Williamson?

  They have rubber and magic.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're high, we're a highly adaptable species. That's one of the amazing things about being a human being, right? But as you get older, I mean, I'm telling you, I have a lot of friends that are in middle age and that are still clinging on to this idea of a, of a plant-based diet being optimal. And again, they, they look sarcopenic, you know? I mean, you can find vegan bodybuilders, like those outliers exist, you know? Some of them are augmented, don't necessarily cop to it, all good, not judging, or maybe judging a little bit because they attribute, they tend to attribute their gains to being vegan.

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Not to the exogenous testosterone.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  There you go. Again, you can cobble, like, we know that plant protein at this point, and animal protein, when you consume enough protein, the muscle gains are comparable. So that, you know, there's no issue there. But for most, again, for most people, for most people that are not obsessive fitness junkies, it's a big problem. They tend to underconsume protein. And, and as you get older, you become anabolic resistant. I'm sure Gabrielle Lyon talked about this, you become resistant to leucine. So the little leucine that you're getting on a plant-based diet is becoming even less effective, you know, as you get older. And whether it's andropause or menopause, you're fighting a losing battle with regard to your hormones ultimately, unless you're on, you know, HRT. And so it's a, it's a huge problem. But younger people, you know, maybe they adopt

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  a vegan diet for a few months or years and they feel good, right? The body has stores of certain vitamins, they're again, more resilient, they're more adaptable. And so it's fine, but yeah, it's not uncommon these days to see whether there are influencers on YouTube or on Instagram that are that were previously vegan, either covertly eating animal products, which I've heard happens, like they're doing it covertly, or they they make the switch, right?

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  I mean, eating steak wrapped in spinach and no one, no one can see what's inside of this.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Dude, it happens, it happens. And with regard to mental health specifically, there are so many nutrients in animal products that are just required by the human brain. I mean, we attribute the development of the human brain to access to the nutrients found in animal products. Right? So this idea, again, it's just hubris, right? It's hubris and I hate the P word, but I'll use it privilege.

• 1:03:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  That we think that we can cobble together a diet that mimics our the diet, the kind of diet that we evolved.

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  We know better than nature.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  We don't need to use, no, no, no, no, we don't need to grow it and you pull it out of the ground. No, no, we can do it from code.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  From first, we'll matrix our way into creating a diet. Yeah, it's, it's, it's wild, man. Talk to me about this new film that you just finished. You very kindly sent me a link so that I could get first access to it last night.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's called Little Empty Boxes and people can watch a trailer at littleemptyboxes.com and it's the first ever dementia prevention film and it's about 75% narrative, 25% science, but the narrative follows my mom. And why I do anything that it is that I do is because my mom got very sick at a very young age. She developed a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia. And I mean, this was 10 years ago that I began working on the project and back then I didn't know anything about Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease or anything like that. I was just a scared son looking to do whatever was possible to help his mom in a time of immense trauma and tragedy.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  And so the film kind of is like a time capsule. It documents everything that my mom went through, the descent into dementia. It's really, really difficult and it's been a labor of love. And ultimately, the film is a tribute to my mom, but it's also a tribute to the science. So, you know, as much as I think, you know, we get into debates on the interpretations of science, particularly in the field of nutrition, which is, you know, where my passion happens to lie. I'm a huge fan of science and I think it's incredible. And so the film I created to be a tribute to this, this growing field of acceptance known as dementia prevention.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Whereas 10 years prior, you couldn't mention dementia and prevention within the same sentence. You'd get like produce thrown at you because dementia for a long time was thought to be an unpreventable condition. Like even the Alzheimer's Association was one of the largest nonprofit organizations, you know, for years and years and years, you know, would drive home this fear-based talking point, I think primarily to raise funding, that dementia is the only, Alzheimer's disease is the only condition that can't be prevented, treated or slowed. And we know now, I mean, thanks to incredible research, that, that the potential for prevention is high. And, um, and so, yeah, so the documentary is like a testament to that. And it offers some, I think, really actionable tips.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  And it's in very, it's in many ways, the prequel to my work, you know? Cause since, since embarking on this production process, I've written my books, I've launched my podcast and, you know, I'm grateful that many people, and mind blown actually, that many people consider me an expert in this field. Because I'm ultimately a layperson, like I'm somebody who really began just to be able to, you know, with the intent of gleaning answers for their mom. But I've learned a ton, uh, you know? Over the course of my journey, but the documentary really is to is to document what it's like being a caregiver for somebody with dementia and to show people what it what it really is like and how valuable and important prevention is because dementia begins in the

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  brain decades before the first symptom. And this is something that is when you look at the science coming out about dementia, Alzheimer's based therapeutics, Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate. They're just dismally effective, if at all. And this is because this is a condition that manifests in the brain over a span of years, if not decades. So it's really important, I think, for people like younger people, millennials, you know, you're you're the oldest millennial is now in their 40s. And so the time is like, there's no better time than right now to start thinking about your brain with your choices, because, I mean, once it goes, it goes.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  What are the big myths and realizations about neurodegeneration, dementia, Parkinson's, stuff like that? Like, what were the the big unpredicted insights that you got on this journey?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Well, I think for one, people think that it's genetic. You have genetic risk factors. So the APOE 4 allele is the most well-defined of the Alzheimer's and ultimately neurodegenerative risk factors.

• 1:07:53Chris Williamson?

  Is that the one that Chris Hemsworth?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  Realized that he had?

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he realized that he was a homozygous carrier. He was an APOE 4.4, which increases your risk around 12 to 14 fold.

• 1:08:05Chris Williamson?

  12 to 14 fold?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  So how low is this? Because it could be 12 to 14 fold from 0.1 to 0.12 or whatever.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an interesting question.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  We're always going to consider the base rate, right?

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the absolute risk. Today, about 5 million people in the US have Alzheimer's disease. So 5 million out of 300 million. It's a fairly, you know, low proportion, but but that number is set to explode in the coming years.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  The rates of Alzheimer's are increasing and I think it's clear that we have what are called modifiable risk factors and the rates of those modifiable risk factors are also increasing. So for example, if you have obesity, your risk for Alzheimer's disease increases. If you have type 2 diabetes, your risk for Alzheimer's disease increases between two and four fold. If you have hypertension, today, one in two adults have hypertension. That increases your risk.

• 1:08:56Chris Williamson?

  Stacked on top of each other.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So we're seeing increasing rates of all of those, um, those, uh, conditions. And so that's, what is that doing? It's not, it's not doing our brain health, our collective brain health any favors. And so that's one of them, that it's genetic, you know, the vast majority of dementia cases are attributable to an interaction between the genetic risk factors that you may carry and the environment. But also with regard to genes, which are a non-modifiable risk factor, of course, there's what the concept of polygenic risk. So you might have genes that we have yet to elucidate that are canceling out the risk of, of said risk genes. Two to 3% of Alzheimer's cases are attributable to a deterministic

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  gene called early onset familial. Again, tiny minority. But as recently as 2020, the Lancet Commission on Dementia pointed out that at least 40% of Alzheimer's cases are preventable. And I think that's a gross underestimate because in that paper, it didn't even talk about all the, it didn't even talk about exposure to environmental toxicants or drugs. Um, we know that people who routinely take anticholinergic drugs are at higher risk of developing dementia and that wasn't even elucidated in the paper. So, um, I think the vast majority of, of, uh, Alzheimer's cases are potentially preventable and I don't claim to have all the answers. We, we don't, um, certainly, but, uh, but yeah, there is a lot that people can do.

• 1:10:18Chris Williamson?

  If you were to, I always like inverting stuff like this. If you were to try and design a lifestyle for someone that would onset their predisposition or lack of neurodegeneration as quickly as possible, what would you prescribe that person? If you were like you had some demon from hell and you want to try and make this person's brain, uh, degenerate toward some dementia Parkinsonian style thing, what would, what would you get that person to do?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would deprive them of sleep. We know sleep is crucially important. Sleep is when your brain is actually cleaning itself of proteins that are associated with the condition. So amyloid beta, tau protein, we see increases in cerebrospinal fluid on just one night of shortened sleep. So I would deprive them of sleep. Sleep is really important with regard to brain health. It's important with regard to mental health, but it's very important with regard to how your brain actually functions. So there's that. Chronic stress is a killer. We know that chronically elevated cortisol leads to shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the most vulnerable structure of the brain, the first, one of the first structures of the brain to be affected by Alzheimer's disease. It's where, you know, it's the memory processing center of the brain. We know that chronically elevated cortisol, which is wrought

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  by chronically elevated levels of stress, is not good from a brain health standpoint. It also creates an inflammatory effect in the body. I would, from a dietary standpoint, I would give a person exclusively ultra-processed foods to consume. We know that these kinds of foods not only create inflammation in the body, but they drive adiposity or obesity. We know that they create the phenomena of insulin resistance, and we know that insulin resistance is not good from a brain health standpoint. Actually, in Alzheimer's disease, you see a reduction in the brain's ability to generate energy from glucose. And in the

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Alzheimer's affected brain, that ability is diminished by about 50%. And the brain is a ravenous energy consumer. And so, I mean, that's just like lights out for the brain, right? You can imagine how detrimental that might be. Well, we see that the level of glucose metabolism in the Alzheimer's affected brain is actually very strongly correlated with the degree of insulin resistance in the body. So you want to make sure that you're as insulin sensitive as possible. And so, one way to do that is by, you know, optimizing for protein in your diet. We're starting to see all this research now come out about the value of dietary protein, minimizing your consumption of ultra-processed foods. Make sure that you're at a healthy weight. And then finally, this kind of funnels into the lifestyle recommendation,

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  which would be if you want to develop dementia as soon as possible, make sure that you are highly sedentary and that you never exercise. The brain thrives atop a body that's, you know, moving and that's exercising. And there's tons of evidence now on this, both as a preventative strategy and also as a way to slow down the progression of neurodegeneration. So making sure that you're that you're resistance training. And I mean, I can't underscore that enough. Resistance training is super, super important. We're seeing a correlation now. Andy Galpin is, you know, he's one of these guys who's who's become fairly prominent in our space. Just published a paper looking at whole body strength and cognitive function. And this is just, this is one of many papers, right? That has come out showing us the link between robustness, strength.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  And it's not even necessarily muscle mass, right? So it's like not, we don't all have to look like Seabum, right? After all, or you to procure better brains. It's just about being strong in body and resistance training is the best way to do that. And optimizing for protein again. And so, yeah, I mean,

• 1:13:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so if that if that's the the demon's prescription of what you would do if you wanted to unset it. When it comes to strategies and tactics that people can lean on, a food type, any supplementation, any other sort of lifestyle interventions? What is there on the on the sort of positive side?

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the it's it's very, the diet dementia recommendations are, all the evidence is,

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  I don't want to say weak, but we have the best sort of idea for what a brain healthful diet might look like is referred to as the mind diet, which is the sort of diet that's been cobbled together by an epidemiologist of observational research that combines the some of the attributes of the Mediterranean diet with some of the attributes of the dash diet, which is the dietary approach to stop hypertension. Because again, hypertension is one of these important modifiable risk factors. Hypertension is high blood pressure. So it's the Mediterranean diet combined with the dash diet with a sprinkling of, you know, foods that we've found specifically play a brain beneficial role. For example, blueberries, right?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  The mind diet only recommends, in terms of fruit, the only fruit that the mind diet recommends, makes a recommendation for are blueberries, right?

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  Pretty dialed as a fruit. I know that we want more, but it's blueberries are

• 1:15:33Chris Williamson?

  blueberries, pineapples, bananas, AAA rated fruits for me.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  No, blueberries are great. But I think that's where the limitations of that kind of like dietary recommendation comes in because avocados are a fruit. And if I had to, if I had to pick a fruit that I thought was potentially most beneficial to the brain, I think avocados are actually probably the most beneficial fruit to the brain. Because they have the highest proportion of fat protecting, specifically fat protecting antioxidants of any fruit or vegetable. Which is of particular relevance to the brain because the brain is made of fat. And not just any type of fat, but the brain is comprised primarily of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are especially damage prone. They're the most chemically unstable of fatty acids. You have your polyunsaturated fatty acids, your monounsaturated fatty acids.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  And your saturated fatty acids, saturated fatty acids being the most chemically stable. But your brain is comprised primarily of polyunsaturated fats. DHA fat, docosahexaenoic acid and arachidonic acid. And so we need to protect these fats, right? The brain is a crucible for oxidative stress. Because it's metabolizing 25% of every breath you take in a container the size of a grapefruit. So it makes up two to 3% of your body's mass. Yet it counts for 25% of your body's oxygen metabolism. So again, crucible for oxidative stress. What can help protect the brain under those circumstances? Antioxidants. And so fat protecting antioxidants, really important. I think avocados are again, one of the best brain foods that you can consume. They're also rich in

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  compounds like lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know are really supportive of cognitive function. Wonderful source of potassium, which we know is really important for cardiovascular health. So, you know, the mind diet is a great starting place. But there was just a randomized control trial that put the mind diet, compared the, the, the mind diet in a at-risk population, I believe. And found no benefit over just a calorie deficit in an older adult population. So.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  You see what I'm saying? So nutrition science is incredibly weak and that's where you have to, you can't be, you can't be prone to scientism, which is like this, you know, adherence to scientific data as if it is religious doctrine. That's just not, not how it works, right? Like nutrition science is harder to study than drug, than drugs, and yet it's much less well-funded. So a whole foods diet is my prescription. It's a diet that incorporates both animal products. I think grass-fed, grass-finished red meat is a brain health superfood, along with avocados and dark leafy greens and shellfish, I think are incredible. Legumes, I think are incredible, but yeah, I think omnivory 100% and avoiding the ultra-processed foods, processed foods as best, as best you can.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Foods with refined grains, foods with added sugar, foods with refined bleach and deodorized seed oils. I think that's the, the way to go.

• 1:18:24Chris Williamson?

  I noticed that at no point in this preventable neurodegeneration conversation, have you mentioned doing Sudoku?

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Chris Williamson?

  Or, or brain training?

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Chris Williamson?

  Or crossword puzzles or, or anything like that? Is there a, is this just so low down on the, the sprinkling on the cake and everything else is the foundation? Or is there something in the brain training wise?

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  No, it's a, that's a good question. I think keeping, keeping active and staying socially engaged and doing things that require that draw on a complex array of cognitive processes. I think that's very helpful and there is evidence that that can help build what's called the cognitive reserve, which is super important. So the cognitive reserve basically stipulates that the more you have to lose, the better off you're going to be. It's a form of cognitive resilience that you're building. Sudoku, things that are like really kind of more like on the simplistic side, like crossword puzzles and Sudoku?

• 1:19:18Chris Williamson?

  Speak for yourself, man. I can't do Sudoku.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Same. Yeah. I mean, I don't remember the last time I've even attempted, but.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  It's essentially like they're better than nothing, right? Better than nothing, but but they're too simplistic to really have what's sometimes referred to as a spillover effect where they can actually improve other cognitive domains. Whereas engaging more in real life is actually the best way to to to build that cognitive reserve. Like engaging in real life, learning a new instrument, perhaps learning a language, learning a new skill. Those are all super important because they're more complex than just sitting down and, you know, playing a numbers game.

• 1:19:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I had Roy Baumeister and Robin Dunbar on the show within the last year. And Dunbar was talking about how the most computationally difficult thing that humans have to do is tracking the social intricacies of all of their friend groups, right? I know Max and I know John and I know that Max and John used to be friends, but they're not anymore. And the reason because of that is because of Fred and Fred is friends with Dan. But Dan and Max, they don't get on because of this thing from before. Like, his argument is that although we look at the brain and we use the brain largely for this sort of beautiful cerebral, consider the nature of the universe, man, am I really enacting my logos forward, like all of that stuff?

• 1:20:39Chris Williamson?

  But what it was there for was to track between 50 and 150 intersecting hierarchy based relationships.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, from a computational perspective, I think, again, that's one of the reasons why relationships are, it's like the 10 minute walk, right? It's not just the walk, it's not just the insulin, it's the outside. Being a single biggest determinant of how long you're going to live is the quality of your your relationships. It's more than smoking, it's more than diet, it's more than your weight, you know? And if you can manage to use, hopefully not a drama ridden set of friendships, but if you can use all of the different friendships that you have as a push, as a That is part of your cognitive horsepower backup. I think that that's a really good way to do it.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Yeah. Loneliness is a toxin on par with with alcohol alcoholism these days is what this what we're starting to see. And that, I think you referenced the Harvard, the Harvard study is like the longest running study on human happiness.

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  Eighty years, longitudinal. Yeah.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah. I think it's crucially important. This is something that I struggle with. I live in Los Angeles, which is a city that can at times feel very alienating and isolating. But I'm very grateful that I have a.

• 1:21:59Chris Williamson?

  Come to Austin, baby.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I'm thinking about it. But I do have a, I have a friend, a great friend group, which you're obviously, of course, a part of. But I also have like my family close and I feel super lucky and my heart goes out to people who don't have that. But yeah, loneliness is and loneliness is not being alone. That's, I think it's important to make that decision. It's, it's good to make friends with your mind to the point that you can actually be comfortably alone. But um, but if you're not happy about it, you know, if you, if you feel like your social life is lacking, it's definitely somewhere.

• 1:22:29Chris Williamson?

  Story that you tell yourself again.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:22:31Chris Williamson?

  Like we said about about the food, it's not just the food that you eat. It's not just the relationships you have. It's the story that you tell yourself. What does it mean that this is the case? What do you think that your mom would think about what you've done to your life now? About your work, about the way that you're influencing people about this film? What do you think she would, which she would think about it?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Well, my mom was my, my biggest fan and.

• 1:22:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, mine is mine is too. She'll be listening.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it. I mean, yeah, moms are the best and I'm very lucky that I had a great mom and a very kind mom and a mom who raised me with like, I think the best values that you could raise a child with. And I think that's why the people that follow me, follow me because they know that honesty, integrity is super important to me. And those are 100% values that I got from my mom, you know, like growing up in my household, to be called a liar was like the worst thing, the worst thing.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, she like, she was an incredible, incredible mom. Not perfect. No mom is, uh, no person is, but, um, but yeah, she was, she was wonderful and she supported me from day one. She was, you know, I mean, I come from a very small Jewish family and my parents grew up very poor. And, uh, and they made it for themselves. They, they teamed up and they created a business and it led to a really great childhood for me and my brothers, but she never pushed me into any one career direction. Like she wasn't like, I, I definitely expressed interest early on in wanting to go the medical school route to be a doctor, but when I pivoted out of that, she, she didn't give me any, any crap for it, um, which I'm super grateful for. She just allowed me to pursue my passions and, um,

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  so yeah, I think that she would be, and she was, she saw my first book come out. She was very, very proud of me and, and, you know, it's funny, like you can never be a prophet in your own land is a term I've heard recently and, well, I, I would try to tell my mom, like, you know, I would, as I was learning, I was like trying to like, come to my mom with all these like new learnings and insights, and she adopted a lot of them, like, you know, she started exercising more and, you know, which I think was helpful and we, you know, I, I got rid of some of the more processed things in her, in her, in her kitchen cupboards, but, um,

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  but she wouldn't, she would never listen to me ironically, when it was like me just kind of talking to her from across the kitchen, the dining room table. It was only when I got to go on shows like the Dr. Oz show, you know, that she would then start to actually pay attention to what it was.

• 1:25:01Chris Williamson?

  My son has Dr. Oz's steal of approval. I'd better listen to him now.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:25:07Chris Williamson?

  You're like messaging Dr. Oz being like, yo, uh, I've just found something new out and I know that my mom won't listen to me. Would you mind if I come back on? Cause I need to tell her through the television. The only way that this works.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or even when it like, even if it's something that like, I had been telling her for months, somebody else would say it on the Dr. Oz show. She'd be like, Max, I heard this guy talking about the benefits of, of kombucha.

• 1:25:30Chris Williamson?

  Mom, that was me.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. And you know, it's really interesting to me to see this, this arc for you, you know, as somebody that's now stepping in, that's giving people evidence-based, very, apart from the child abuse thing, which I actually think is accurate, but largely un sort of volatile. It's not tribal. It's just like, here's some, here's some evidence to do with it as you wish. I know it seems like a, it's like alchemy, right? You take a situation that wasn't very good. And then you turn it into something which is like, I know it's like the, the progeny of this situation.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  You know, the, the epitaph that's been written is the nudging that you have done. And, you know, think about how many centuries, millennia of human life has been added because of the information that you and the millions of people that have listened to your podcast have learned about. Like, that's, that's like fucking insane. That's crazy. And what a great tribute to give to someone.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  No, it is, it is insane. And it's, and it's a, I know that I have a responsibility that I don't take lightly. And I, I continually remind my audience that I'm not perfect. Um, I don't, I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do the best that I can. And my life circumstance has, has, and you know, my, whether you want to call them innate or whatever, my, my skillset and my passion and the circumstance that I, you know, endured with my mom has led to, you know, I guess a certain, uh, knowledge base. And I feel like you have to do in life the things that you can't not do. And as somebody who's really empathetic and compassionate at the end of the day,

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  what I was learning as I was going through this with my mom, I couldn't keep to myself. I had to share. And I realized, of course, along the way, that I had an aptitude for what I was doing. I realized that I enjoyed it and it started to build a following. And look, I know that there are some people out there that no matter what I say will never listen to me, you know, because I'm, I don't have credentials after my name and I'm fine with that. I'm not here for you, you know? I'm here for the people who, you know, have, have seen my work, who can feel my integrity. And those are the people that I try to reach, you know? And like, you can't please everybody in life, right? Like, you're not pizza.

• 1:27:54Chris Williamson?

  Ah.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so again, I, I try to do the best that I can and I'm always learning and I'm always challenging my biases and my assumptions. And I try to align myself with people that I think are, are, you know, who are in the space, who are also doing it from a place of benevolence. There are experts in the space who I believe are not doing, who are not. Operating from a place of benevolence, you know. But um, but I I am. I love what I do and I I aspire to lead my audience ultimately to a greater vision of life. And um, and just super grateful that honestly, anybody's paying attention.

• 1:28:28Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Max Lugavere, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go? When's the film out? What date?

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  So we're looking for a, knock on wood, we're looking for a Q1 or Q2 2024 release. So at some point in 2024, we're hoping for a global theatrical release. That's as much as I can say at this juncture, but um, people can check out littleemptyboxes.com. We have a trailer and people can join the newsletter there. I don't send out like regular updates, but anything specifically related to the film. People can sign up, you know, for local screenings and what have you to learn how to become an advocate for the film. They can sign up for that at littleemptyboxes.com. And then I have my own podcast, which hoping to get you on soon enough.

• 1:29:11Chris Williamson?

  We're gonna do it.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna do it. It's called The Genius Life on all podcast apps. And then I'm super active on Instagram and Twitter and all the places.

• 1:29:18Chris Williamson?

  Hell yeah. Max, I appreciate you. Thank you, man.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Thanks, Chris.