Max Lugavere: Genius foods for a healthier you

The Love a Fair event is on at Whole Foods Market. With deals on delicious desires through February 14th, the floral department's in full bloom. So look for savings on double dozen bunches of roses. In the meat and seafood departments, save on Animal Welfare certified New York strip steaks and sustainable wild-caught lobster tails to make the night sizzle. Gifts from the wellness and beauty department are always a nice touch. And you have to grab those chocolate-dipped strawberries.

Make Whole Foods Market your Valentine's Day destination. Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist, New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Genius Life Podcast. And that's just some of the stuff he's doing. And Max in studio. Max, great to see you. Brian, great to meet.

How's it going? I mean, the passion that you have and the reason you got in I think is important. And then what you've done since. You're helping so many people. But sadly, you got involved in nutrition because you found out about your mom's diagnosis.

Yeah, exactly. I began as a generalist journalist and I became more specialized as a health and science journalist by way of necessity, actually. My mother at a very young age was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia called Lewy body dementia. People may be familiar with that condition. It was the condition that Robin Williams was diagnosed with just prior to his death by suicide. And it's akin to having both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time. And I knew nothing about either condition. But when my mom was diagnosed, it was gut wrenching to me and my family was incredibly traumatic. And I did everything I could to understand to the best of my ability why this may have happened to her. And in tandem with that, what could be done to prevent it from happening to myself?

What did you find out? Well, I found out that like many chronic conditions of modernity, dementia often begins in the brain years, if not decades, prior to the onset of symptoms. And to me, that was an incredibly powerful call to action to do what I could to use my skills to advocate for healthier lifestyles, brain healthy lifestyles. And I learned that it's not a genetic that, you know, there are many different types of dementia. But when talking specifically about Alzheimer's disease, for example, which is the most common form of dementia, pretty much everybody today has been touched by Alzheimer's disease. That's a condition that is by and large determined by an exposure or set of exposures to our environment. It's not a genetic condition for the vast majority of people who suffer from it. And lo and behold, my mom is the first person in my lineage to have suffered from dementia.

And so for me, that posed this incredible question, right? Like, what was it about my mom's environment that was so toxic that she developed this awful condition? And where would she live? Does she live in the city?

Yeah, yeah. So I'm born and raised in New York City. My mom was an affluent woman for the latter portion of her life. She was able to afford healthful food, but nonetheless, she was struck by this condition, which now affects so many. And I think it probably had something to do with the food environment, which is now 73% ultra-processed. And this is something that began, you know, probably around the 70s, where the influx of ultra-processed food-like products really began to reign on the market.

And now our diets are saturated with it to the degree that 60% of your average adult's food intake is comprised of these ultra-processed foods, which are calorie-dense, nutrient-poor, high-margin. And so that was actually the first place that I started to look, the food environment. And so what did you discover? And were you able to help her in her time? I know she passed away in 2018.

She passed away in 2018, yeah. You know, I can't—I'll never be able to—I'll never know what it was specifically that triggered my mom's illness. But what I did learn is that, by and large, you know, we're seeing skyrocketing rates of obesity. By the year 2030, one in two adults are going to be not just overweight but obese. We live in a time where at least half of the population is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. Most incidences of pre-diabetes are actually undiagnosed. And if you have type 2 diabetes, for example, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases between two and fourfold. So all of these conditions are intricately related. And we're now starting to realize that to the degree that Alzheimer's disease is being considered a form of diabetes of the brain.

Type 3 diabetes is how some are describing it. So when did this go from, hey, I want to make—I want to lengthen my mom's life and maybe solve what she's dealing with, to I'm going to help other people, too, and launch the podcast and this passion? Yeah, so, I mean, I love to be incredibly transparent and truthful about my background. So I didn't go through academia. I'm not a medical doctor, but I was a journalist. And I had honed skills as a journalist, like storytelling, being able to create content, and specifically being able to create content and good content for a young adult audience. I used to work for a TV network called Current TV, where I specialized in creating short form, short documentaries, essentially, that would capture the waning attention spans of young adults, millennials. And I also had a knack for understanding and communicating science. I actually started college on a pre-med track. I've always been passionate about nutrition and fitness. And so when I set out to evangelize, in a way, what I was learning, very much for the benefit of my family, right? Not so much for commercial gain or anything like that. Like, I never would have anticipated having written a book at this point and being the host of a very popular health podcast.

But it was really, how can I use my skills to make an impact on this condition? So the movie, a little roll clip of your trailer from your movie. Yeah. Could you give us, set it up? Yeah, so the movie, the documentary is called Little Empty Boxes.

It comes out this year. And it is essentially a portrait and time capsule of my mom's journey, what it's like to have dementia from both a patient standpoint and caregiver standpoint, and also a tribute to the science, this growing field known as dementia prevention, which I feel very lucky and humbled and honored to have helped, in a way, usher in into this sort of public awareness. And you've worked it into your diet, too? I've worked it into, yeah, yeah. So I've changed my diet as a result of the production on the film and all the subsequent research that I've done.

Here's a little clip. I've tested many diets over the years looking for the healthiest ones. A major challenge in nutrition studies is everyone is unique and responds differently to the same food. So what if we got people who are genetically the same?

Twins share the same DNA, so we get to see if it's about your greens, not your genes. For the next eight weeks, we'll be investigating the pros and cons of a healthy diet that contains meat and dairy versus a plant-based diet. Where as sure processed meat causes cancer, we are that cigarette smoke causes cancer and plutonium causes cancer.

Every time you eat a steak, a little puff of smoke goes up in the Amazon. Many of the same things that promote human health are also good for the environment. If you ask any human being, do you want to save the planet or destroy the planet?

I mean, come on, it's a no-brainer, right? We can solve a lot of the issues that are hurting us by just rethinking what's at the end of our fork. Max Lugavere, your approach is to try to blow up, if of course necessary, some of the, I guess, fallacies that are out there that we take as fact. Yeah, well, I just want to clarify the clip that was just played. So that's not from my documentary, that's from a new Netflix TV series called You Are What You Eat, which I had nothing to do with. My documentary is called Little Empty Boxes and it's about dementia. This clip that you just played a clip from has been making the rounds now on social media and it's a trending documentary TV series on Netflix. And it's actually, it's a nutrition film, but with a much different, from a much different vantage point. And this film that is now, I guess, making the rounds on social media and a lot of people were talking about is actually a form of pro-vegan propaganda that I've called out on social media. And it comes, it's basically... Save the world, eat vegetables.

Go vegan, not just eat vegetables, but ditch animal products completely and go fully plant-based. And it is produced by a vegan association called OPS, the Oceanic Preservation Society. It's directed by a vegan and it focuses on a study run by a vegan out of Stanford University who also sits on the board of a vegan advocacy group called the Plant-Based Diet Initiative. And so the conclusion at the end of this documentary series, they put two twins, they take sets of twins and put one twin on a quote unquote healthy omnivorous diet and they put the other twin on a quote unquote healthy vegan diet.

And miraculously at the end of the TV series, they come to the conclusion that we should all be on vegan diets, which makes perfect sense when you consider the bias of everybody involved. Right. So you're saying that they skewed the results, that person wasn't actually healthier?

Correct, yes. So there are a lot of what are called confounding variables here, which basically render this comparison that they're trying to make impossible, right? They're trying to compare two diets, but they're not controlled the way that diets need to be controlled to make a direct comparison. So the vegan dieters ended up consuming fewer calories by about 200 fewer calories, which is significant. They ended up losing weight and notably they ended up losing more muscle mass in this TV series because they were eating significantly less protein. Protein is incredibly important to maintain muscle as we age. And muscle is now being considered a sort of currency of longevity because it helps us stay mobile and move about the world. And it's important for metabolic health, which we know that 90 percent of American adults today actually are in a state of metabolic dis-ease. On top of that, they also, the vegan dieters consumed less saturated fat. They also ate a lot more dietary fiber, which we know independently can reduce LDL. And as vegan diet evangelists tend to do, they make LDL cholesterol. LDL is a lipoprotein that actually carries cholesterol around in the body and is thought to be associated or is associated. Is good cholesterol bad cholesterol, right? Well, now people are starting to take a more nuanced view of these lipoproteins and LDL is, our bodies make both, right?

So to demonize one or the other doesn't make any sense. We're now starting to get a more granular picture of what actually leads to elevated risk for cardiovascular disease. And cardiovascular disease is multifactorial.

Diet plays one role, but we're just barely scratching the surface in terms of understanding the kind of diet that is optimal from a heart health standpoint. All right. Well, I promise you we'll get your clips when you provide them.

Do you actually have clips that are out there? Yeah, we do. We have a trailer at LittleEmptyBoxes.com so people can take a peek at that. All right, good. So we'll look that up. We'll use that.

More with Max next on The Brian Kilmeade Show. The Love a Fair event is on at Whole Foods Market with deals on delicious desires through February 14th. The floral department's in full bloom. So look for savings on double dozen bunches of roses in the meat and seafood departments. Save on animal welfare certified New York strip steaks and sustainable wild caught lobster tails to make the night sizzle. Gifts from the wellness and beauty department are always a nice touch. And you have to grab those chocolate dipped strawberries.

Make Whole Foods Market your Valentine's Day destination. If you're interested in it, Brian's talking about it. You're with Brian Kilmeade. Welcome back to The Brian Kilmeade Show.

Max Lugavere, host of the Genius Life podcast, is here with me. And we're talking about the foods you can eat for a healthy brain. What could you tell us, for example, what have you concluded, if you ever can make a conclusion, what could help your brain health? What are some of the things you can eat to help your brain?

Such a great and important question. So from a dietary standpoint, nutrition really is our brains are made up of what we consume. And I think that grass fed, grass finished red meat is a health food.

I've gone to bat for it many times, even though this is controversial. I will say that this is controversial, even among, you know, medical experts and nutrition experts. But it's one of the most nutrient dense foods that we have access to.

You'll see red meat make the list of any chart of nutrient density. It's highly satiating, so it helps us ward off excess adiposity or excess weight, excess fat around the midsection, for example. It's loaded with micronutrients like creatine, which we know is important to metabolic health, as well as brain health. It's loaded with, you know, vitamin B12, which plays an important role.

So, you know, I'm a big advocate for that. You can't really have a conversation about brain food without talking about the value of fatty fish. So salmon is, you know, a great example, but also sardines, herring, mackerel, wonderful source of omega-3 fatty acids. The brain is comprised of omega-3 fats. Could you get there through supplements?

You can, yeah. So fish oil is a great option. You want to look for a high quality fish oil. When I'm buying a fish oil, I look for IFOS certification, and I have no affiliation with that organization. But what they do is they do third-party independent testing of fish oils to make sure that there's no rancidity, oxidation, or impurities. And so, you know, with a fish oil specifically, you actually want to buy the best that you can afford.

All right, good. So that'll be important for your health. What about the aging process? Yeah, I mean, you know, age-related decline seems to be fairly typical these days, but that doesn't mean that it's normal. You know, we've kind of normalized disease in this country because so many of us suffer from age-related conditions, whether it's, you know, depression, frailty, sarcopenia, sarcopenic obesity, which we know is highly detrimental to the brain. And so I think one of the best ways to ward off aging is by maintaining a vigorous exercise routine. So there were actually studies. There was a really great study actually published in 2023 by Loon et al. that found that when 85-year-olds took on a resistance training routine, they saw the same degree of strength increase, about 40 percent of a strength increase in their one-rep max for leg extensions, which is a measure of your quadricep strength, that 65-year-olds saw.

Wow. Yeah, so I mean, people tend to, you know, think of aging as this sort of passive process by which we are all pulled inevitably towards decrepitude. But resistance training is the best way to fight back against aging.

Yeah, find a way. Bill, I don't want to build big, bulky muscles. There's nothing to do with it, right? There are different exercises you can do. That's nothing to do with it.

No. Instead of a fitness program. You don't get that through your doctor. And you point out, too, that by the time you go to your doctor, you're not healthy. Yeah. So you need things to prevent you because it's not a healthy situation.

You need things that are going to keep you out of the doctor's office. Exactly. So have you made up your program? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, here's the deal. And I saw this firsthand with my mom. I mean, I've been in myriad doctor's offices.

I've been to the best, you know, cathedrals to academic medicine in the country. Because, again, my mom had resources, but we were desperate like anybody would be. And what I've found is that by the time you show up to your doctor's office, what you're looking for ultimately is sick care. Health care is what begins at home. It begins when you are negotiating with yourself to pull yourself up off of the couch and get to the gym or, you know, even without a gym membership, do the push-ups and the pull-ups and the wall sits. And, you know, all of these different exercises that we have at our disposal to foster whole body strength, which we know is so important from the standpoint of metabolic health, bone health, like resistance training. A lot of people, you know, when they go and get that diagnosis of osteopenia or osteoporosis, they'll start taking a calcium supplement thinking that that helps. It doesn't hold a candle to resistance training.

And I think for older generations, this is something that is highly underappreciated. I know that exercise, as far as my mom was concerned, was aerobic exercise. And we know, you know, cardiovascular exercise is certainly important.

But what the past few decades or decade really of exercise science has shown us, it's that resistance training really is sort of a holy grail of aging healthily. So what about these studies? I mean, I see some of your tweets back and forth where you took on Tufts College because you said Tufts told us lucky charms are healthier than an egg.

Harvard warned that steak may cause type 2 diabetes. Stanford got its own You Must Go Vegan guilt trip TV show. So this is when you decide to take on these huge organizations, dare I say, schools.

Yeah, well, my, you know, what I've decided to do with my career is punch up and speak truth to power. I think part of that is my duty as a journalist, but also because I'm so deeply immersed in the world of nutrition science and because I have a vested interest. I had a loved one who was incredibly sick and who was victim of a lot of this messaging, right, that comes from whether it's mainstream media or these academic institutions. And, you know, sadly, a lot of nutrition science today is not quite evidence based. It's evidence biased. And so, you know, I like to to really go head to head against these institutions when I feel that the time is right and do it in a way that's responsible because at the end of the day, I love nutrition science.

I love it. But, you know, we see a lot of corporate interest these days. We see a lot of, you know, inappropriate overlap between the food industry and nutrition science and also what I like to call covert bias. So, you know, when you're getting nutrition advice from somebody you want that advice should be solely limited to the domain of nutrition science.

But today, often it's modeled by covert activism. Right. It's people who are giving their advice, but through the lens of climate activism or through the lens of animal welfare, which is not what you found with this. There was a reason they came up with these studies. Yeah. So the Tufts University Food Compass, which, you know, went super viral on social media.

And and I still get pushback whenever I talk about it. Tufts tried to release a what they call, well, what is called a nutrient profiling system of their own called a food compass. And what they did was they took tens of thousands of food items found in the supermarket and they up and they and they basically like applied an algorithm that they devised to all of these different food items to come up with a score. Right. A healthfulness score that they gave to all of these many different foods.

And a separate group led by Beal et al. found that when you take these foods out of context. Right. And stack them one on top of one another and create sort of a food hierarchy, that there are some very odd juxtapositions that you see. You saw things in this chart that went viral, this chart that went viral subsequent to the release of the of the food compass data, that Lucky Charms, according to Tufts, was healthier than a poached egg.

Right. That egg substitute fried in vegetable oil was somehow healthier than a real egg, which, you know, a four year old would look at that and be like, that is just B.S. And critics to the pushback that the Tufts food compass received said, well, you know, these food items weren't meant to be taken out of their respective categories. And that, you know, the scores weren't necessarily meant to say that one food is healthier than another.

But if you actually go to the Tufts Web site, Tufts did exactly that. Right. The score of food with a higher score was meant to be consumed more frequently.

A food with a food item with a lower score was meant to be consumed less frequently. And that's what a scoring system is meant to do. Right. Like we don't we don't give sports teams scores. Right.

For for no reason. Right. We give them scores.

They achieve scores. And when you examine it, they got defensive and they started seeing you reading it wrong. Exactly. They got they got defensive. They got defensive. But I think calling it calling it out was so important because the whole point of this food compass, nutrient profiling system was meant to provide information for consumers on front of package labeling.

So give us an idea how to get to the bottom of all your research. You did the hard part. Yeah. So we could just follow you.

So you got the movie out. How do we get it? So little empty boxes dot com is a great way to keep tabs on the documentary, which is about dementia prevention. I host a podcast called The Genius Life and I've written three books. So where do we get The Genius Life?

All podcast platforms and on YouTube. Yeah. All right. And then in the book. And so my first book is called Genius Foods. It's a nutritional care manual to the brain.

I highly recommend checking that out. That was the first book I ever wrote. And it's a New York Times bestseller.

It's published now around the world. It really is a sort of nutritional care manual to the brain. How to get better brain health and mental health through food. And then my most recent book is called Genius Kitchen, which is both a both a cookbook and a wellness guide.

Lots of delicious recipes, photos, things like that. Sounds like a great book. Coming up, though, Max tells me the truth on Impossible Burgers and Joe Rogan. You are listening to The Brian Kilmeade Show. Remember to check out Brian's show One Nation Saturdays at 9 p.m. Eastern on Fox News Channel. If you already have plans, set up that DVR and watch when you get home.

That's One Nation Saturdays at 9 p.m. Eastern on Fox News Channel. Be there. TIAA is on a mission. Why?

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Find out how he defines processed foods and what he thinks about Joe Rogan. So I mean, the one thing is, you love this. I love it.

And you feel like there's still a lot more to learn. I do. Yeah. Well, yes. I mean, on the one hand, I think that, you know, we don't we don't need more science to know that a whole foods diet is more optimal than an ultra processed food diet. Right.

But obviously there are forces out there that want to convince us otherwise. Right. Right. I mean, there was a study that came out that they tried to push past, you know, the public showing us that a healthy diet could be comprised primarily of ultra processed foods, which is, of course, B.S.. How would you define a processed food?

So that's a fantastic question. And processing is a continuum. When you have an apple, you know, in front of you, that's an unprocessed food. When you slice that apple, you're processing it to some degree.

Right. And of course, apple juice is the most processed form of that of that apple. So even if I squeeze the juice like I would in orange, you're processing it. What you want to do is base your diet around minimally processed foods.

When you cook food, you're processing it to some degree. But what we want to be really wary of are the ultra processed foods. So these are foods that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried. Right. They have innumerable ingredients.

Right. Ingredients that you can't pronounce. And people, you know, skeptics might listen to me say that and say, oh, appeal to nature fallacy. But it actually is a pretty good litmus test.

You know, like if a food item has, you know, dozens of ingredients and you can't pronounce half of them. Well, that that pretty that correlates pretty strongly, you might assume, to a food that is ultra processed that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen. Pretty good.

That's pretty good barometer. Yeah. But I am surprised by that. For example, if I just get a like an old fashioned nineteen fifties orange juice squeezer, I just get an orange right from a tree.

Yeah. And I put it in that that steel crusher. And I with the juice, I am processing it. I'm not adding sugar.

I'm not doing anything. I'm not even taking out the pulp. Well, you're you you are 100 percent processing it in the way that your body responds to those different food products. Right. The whole orange versus the orange juice that you've just made in your own kitchen. Right. Your body is going to is going to handle both of those very differently. The orange juice, you've extracted all of the fiber and all you're left with essentially is the sugar and vitamin C from that orange juice.

Right. So vitamin C is great. And, you know, there's some studies that suggest that orange juice can still play a helpful role in the diet. Of course, if you're consuming it in moderation, no problem.

I wouldn't worry about it. But the whole orange is self-limiting, whereas in a glass of orange juice, you could easily consume the sugar from three whole oranges. Right.

Because it's not associating as the whole orange, which has that whole food matrix, which we're now starting to learn is so important. It's got the fiber. Right.

It's got the minerals. So the my sense is my gut always told me that if it's coming from nature and there's sugar in it, that sugars are bad for you. Exactly. Exactly. So I love to separate fact from fiction on social media.

And I also love to myth bust. And, yeah, you're 100 percent right in that sugar from in its whole food form is totally fine. Sugar is not inherently toxic. There's nothing wrong with all plant foods, which are incredibly healthy.

We know that fruits and vegetables are very good for you. Have sugar to some degree. Right. And even a little bit of added sugar here and there is not a big problem if you're active.

Right. If you're if you're exercising regularly, like sugar is not the devil that I think some people make it out to be. But, you know, it's meant to be consumed in moderation.

On the other hand, I think your average adult today consumes something like 70 pounds of added sugar every single year, which is nuts. The only thing is impossible burgers are? Is junk.

Filled with? Crap. Can I say that? It's terrible. Yeah, it's just ultra processed.

Yeah, I would. I felt good about it until people started telling me you realize how bad they are for you. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, here and there in moderation, it's it's not a problem. I mean, look like, you know, people on paleo diets, they eat. There's, you know, all kinds of paleo breads on the market now.

So paleo diet advocates are, you know, they have their own form of imitation food. Right. But I think at the end of the day, this this false comparison that people make these plant based meat alternatives don't hold a candle to the real thing when looking at their nutritional value. And also, again, they're they're minimally processed and we've co-evolved with food. Right. We've co-evolved with animal products and animal products like a piece of beef.

Right. Like we could even say lean beef. It doesn't it's not just a great source of protein.

It's a great source of all of these different myriad nutrients that we know play a role in our physiology. Do you care what the cows were eating before you slaughtered it and ate it? You know, I do care. I think that does that matter? It does matter. But to a what I would call probably a trivial degree in the grand scheme of things, you know, if all your grass fed and.

Yeah. If you have the resources to buy grass fed, I say by all means do it. It's better for the cow. It's better for the environment and it's better for you. Right. But also even a piece and I and I hate to promote the factory farm system because it's important to the animals and support into the environment. So that has to be said. But I also think that, you know, for your average person now who's serving, you know, boxed mac and cheese for dinner to make the swap over to factory farm meat.

I think that's a that's a helpful decision to make. Understood. I just always to take the word for like salmon, you know, is not what is it?

What do they call it? There's fresh and what do you call farm? Right. There's farm raising as well. We're also going on their word.

Who are these people telling us how where we caught the salmon? Yeah. We can't let perfect be the enemy of the good. Yeah. You know, like we don't all have access to the kinds of supermarkets that that I have living in Los Angeles that you have living in New York.

You know, I mean, like we we can't let perfect be the enemy of the good. And context matters. We live in a world again where 73 percent of the food products in your average supermarket are ultra processed. Right. Did you find that Joe Rogan, did he know everything about the nutrition when you were on with him? Right. Yeah. He's a he's a big fan of nutrition. Yeah.

Did you feel like you could keep up with you? Oh, for sure. I mean, that guy's sharp as hell. And he's yeah, he's amazing. I was so grateful for the opportunity that he gave me. You know, and I was on episode 1870.

It was a masterclass in dementia prevention. Yeah. Yeah. He's super into it. He's a big he's a big advocate of you know, he consumes plants. He consumes, you know, fruits and vegetables. He also consumes meat that he hunts himself. And, you know, wild game tends to be leaner than factory farmed raised meat anyway. So it's I mean, it's a helpful it's a more helpful choice.

How he has time to shoot his own dinner is beyond me with everything he's got going on. You're right. Max Lugavere. Great seeing you. Great to meet you.

Congratulations on everything. And I'm glad we didn't throw you by rolling in the wrong clip. If you were able to roll with it, you knew exactly where we got it. Yeah, brother. Thank you so much, Brian. I won't throw you off the next time. You're the man. Thank you. Thanks, Max.