 Alzheimer's is a modern health crisis. People just don't realize how big of a deal this is. And you said it's a triple. The number of what people with Alzheimer's are gonna triple by what, 2030? 2030, yeah. It's less than 10 years. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, today, if you may get to the age of 85, you have a 50% chance of being diagnosed. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy, but there are things that you can do. And you know, I've dedicated my life really to helping people separate fact from fiction and help avert these kinds of conditions. We don't have all the answers about Alzheimer's disease, but we know essentially a few salient tenets about how to live in a way that nurtures the health of our brains. And so that's really what my work has been about. Max. What up? Welcome back to the show, man. Thanks for having me. It's been a weird, I don't know, like a couple months in science. Some crazy revelations. One in particular, this is why I invited you back on, has to do with Alzheimer's. And I know this is a subject that's near and dear to you and also one that you're super well versed in your like my go-to person when it comes to brain health. So maybe kind of explain what's happened. What are these revelations around Alzheimer's? Yeah, why are things getting so shaken up? So essentially what happened was it was revealed that a seminal 2006 paper published in the journal Nature was built on fraudulent data. And what this basically, this revelation has done is it's overturned almost a century worth of effort at this point in terms of looking for a cure for a pharmaceutical cure for Alzheimer's disease. Now that's not to say that all of the research performed is worthless, that's definitely not the case. But the prevailing hypothesis that has guided drug discovery with regard to Alzheimer's disease over the past century has been what's called the amyloid hypothesis. And this hypothesis basically stipulates that amyloid beta, which is a protein that we all produce in our brains and as we age tends to form these insoluble plaques is the cause for Alzheimer's disease. And it began basically in 1906 when Alois Alzheimer, for whom the disease is named, saw these plaques in the brain of a cadaver. And his working theory was that these plaques were the cause of the disease. Also in tandem with the plaques, you see widespread neuronal death, there's marked brain shrinkage in late stage Alzheimer's disease and memory deficits, which are obvious, anybody who's ever had a loved one with the disease will be familiar with that. But he wasn't able to name amyloid beta at the time, he just saw these plaques, kind of like the plaque on your teeth surrounding neurons in our brain, in the brain of this cadaver. It wasn't until the 80s where they discovered, where they named rather, amyloid beta, they came up with a name for this protein that they saw, again, that we all produce that is able to in some form these aggregate plaques. And so the plaques really became the focus for drug discovery with the idea that if we can remove these plaques from the brain or prevent the brain from accumulating these plaques that we will then have a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which is a condition that affects 5 million people in the U.S. alone and that number is expected to triple by the year 2030. So it's a condition that's rapidly exploding. But there are a few sort of plot holes that from day one really were dissonant with this notion of amyloid being causative in Alzheimer's disease. And the primary one is that many older people have amyloid beta in their brains, but they don't have the cognitive deficits that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Oh wow, right. Were you privy to this before all this came out before? Were you kind of already? Yes, 100% because though the amyloid hypothesis directs the vast majority of drug discovery funds and research, it's not that there are other neurologists and neuroscientists who are going down other paths. For example, there is the metabolic origin theory of Alzheimer's disease that Alzheimer's disease really is a problem of glucose hypometabolism in the brain. So an underutilization and a deficit in the ability of the brain to create ATP from sugar. The type three diabetes comes from. Exactly, which was coined by a legend of a researcher named Suzanne de la Monte at Brown University, but she's not the only one. And so one of my mentors who was at Cornell for many years and he's now at FAU, Dr. Richard Isaacson. I mean, he was another, one of these neurologists practicing neurologists who just didn't buy that amyloid was the cause for Alzheimer's disease again because people have it in their brains that don't show these cognitive deficits, right? Now Max says everybody who has Alzheimer's have these plaques? Yes. Okay, so if you have Alzheimer's, you have these plaques, but then there are people with these plaques that don't have these symptoms. Right, but the central idea is that the plaques are probably a symptom, not the cause. Similar to the way that cholesterol builds up in our arteries, right? Is cholesterol the cause of atherosclerosis or is cholesterol being deposited in our arteries due to some other factor, some other variable, right? Whether it's inflammation or oxidation of, for example, the fatty acids that are being tugged around our bodies by these various lipoproteins, for example. So it's there certainly at the scene of the crime, but is it suspect number one? That's been the sort of guiding hypothesis, but they were never able to connect these amyloid plaques with memory impairment. They were never able to do that until this seminal paper was published in 2006 in the journal Nature by Sylvain Lesny. So this is the one that said, here's a silver bullet. We proved the hypothesis. We proved that amyloid, when injected into young mice, dramatically impairs their cognition, their memories. So that was the missing link. That was the missing link. And at that time in 2006, when this paper came out, there was waning interest in the amyloid hypothesis. It was still the dominant direction that industry was going. And a lot of these like massive Alzheimer's focused organizations, I won't name any of them, but are deeply, I mean, everybody was so deeply invested financially in this hypothesis. Industries around it, right? Industries, yeah. But nonetheless, by 2006, it was becoming clear that it was, or it was at least starting to become clear that this was the wrong direction because drug trials, Alzheimer's drug trials, as anybody knows who's working in this field, have a dismal success rate. 99.6% of Alzheimer's drug trials fail, right? So you can only fail so many times before people want to look elsewhere for solutions, right? Let's back up for a second. So are these drugs that, because the theory is, oh, it's these plaques, so let's create a drug that effectively reduces these plaques. Oh, here, this does that. Then they put it on trial, like, oh man, no symptom improvement. Is that what was happening? That's exactly what happened. And actually a very controversial drug called Adyuhelmer, Adjacanamab was recently greenlit by the FDA and it was highly controversial. What these drugs essentially do is they're antibodies that mark amyloid plaques for clearing by the body's immune system. So it essentially creates like an inflammatory response in the brain, which then helps to reduce because it trains our own immune systems to attack these plaques unless clear these plaques, right? But what they found in this Adyucanamab trial, which was the last, before this, a drug hasn't been approved for Alzheimer's disease for 13-something years. But Adyucanamab recently got the green light and it was highly controversial. It did succeed in reducing plaques in the plaque burden in the brain, but it didn't improve cognition. It didn't improve anything with any clinical value other than serve as sort of confirmation bias that we can, with a drug, reduce the brain's plaque burden, right? It's like a statin almost, right? It's almost like a statin, right? So this drug, actually when it was being assessed by the FDA, they put together this panel of 11 people, eight of the people on this panel, this internal panel at the FDA, told the FDA that ethically, in terms of the efficacy, this drug should not be approved. Two people withheld comment and only one person said, yeah, let's go ahead and approve it. But the FDA ended up approving it and three people resigned afterwards. And again, this drug reduces plaque in the brain, sure, but it doesn't actually improve any of the meaningful indices that we wanna improve for a patient with Alzheimer's disease, right? And in fact, people who saw this reduction in plaque burden, there was a 35% side effect rate. So 35% of the patients saw brain swelling and about half of those had bleeding associated with the brain swelling. So nothing good, right? Yeah, now did they apply this hypothesis to other neurodegenerative diseases or was this, the main focus is Alzheimer's, where they found the plaque? Well, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, so all the money goes into Alzheimer's disease, but there's overlapping features with other neurodegenerative conditions. Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, for example, they're called proteopathies, so they both involve these misfolded proteins in Alzheimer's, it's primarily amyloid beta along with tau, and then in Parkinson's disease, you get another protein called alpha-synuclein, so they're different, but they're similar. They all have neuroinflammation in common, they all have oxidative stress in common, but the diseases that are more common get the most funds, and so the Alzheimer's disease was squarely in the target. So my question is, how did it get, why would it get approved if the money train already going or what? Yeah, I mean, the way that, I mean, you have in science these fiercely territorial, obstinant personalities that, I mean, have you guys ever heard the saying, science advances one funeral at a time? It's because we expect science to evolve naturally and be driven by curiosity and a desire to augment the human condition, right, and make life better for people, but first of all, science is an industry, and it's a tool that's wielded by people that have, I mean, oftentimes serious personality defects. I mean, if you guys spend any time on nutrition, Twitter, I mean, some of these, you know, like it's clear that some of these personalities are highly toxic, and those exist in academia, and so when you're published in a paper like Nature, which for scientists is like winning the Academy Awards. Yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah, it's a huge deal, and also when you come from a lab, for example, this guy, Sylvain Lesney, he was the young University of Minnesota researcher who was basically found to have created this fraudulent data, which we haven't even gotten into yet, but he was working in the lab of a woman named Karen Ash, who had this incredible pedigree, and so scientists, you know, especially when you have celebrity in the field, they don't want, people, there's group think, just like in every industry, you know? It's always human, they're always human. I'd also be curious too of what drugs were already in the works before this fraudulent study came to. Has anything been released around that? Like, do we know, like all, you said 1986, when was it, the study? 2006, was the one that was fraudulent. So were there like drugs that were ready to go? Like as soon as that study got published and pushed through, do you know? Or like that conveniently came out, like right after? Or drugs that were already out, that were already supposedly, yeah, I believe, I'm not sure the timeline of the two most commonly prescribed drugs that are out now for Alzheimer's disease, but all they are are biochemical band-aids. Like one is the, you know, there's Donna Pezzle and Namenda, and one works by increasing the amount of acetylcholine in the brain, which is a neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory, and the other one is a, it's called Namenda. It basically modulates the NMDA receptor, which is a glutamate receptor. What you see in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease is excitotoxicity, so sort of an imbalance of glutamate and GABA. And so those two drugs are usually prescribed in tandem, but they're just biochemical band-aids. It's like L-dopa for Parkinson's. Exactly, it's like L-dopa for Parkinson's. What's up, everybody? Ooh, you're gonna love this giveaway. Check this out. By the way, this is a great episode with Max Louvier. It's a controversial one. You won't wanna miss this one. Anyway, here's the giveaway. MapSplit and MapSpowerlift, both together, you can win for free. By the way, here's why I put those together. We've put together a whole bunch of different bundles, small bundles, two and three program bundles, and we've put them all on sale. This sale ends on the 14th of this month, and every bundle, every single bundle, is $99.99, that's it. So every bundle you find at mapsaugust.com, 99.99, and you could do, like I said, MapSplit and PowerLift is one of them, which I'm gonna give away, explain how you can win that in just a second. We have Maps Performance and Maps Aesthetic. We have Map Starter and Map Senate Ball. Like a whole bunch of bundles, all of them, really, 99.99. Okay, here's how you can win the bundle that I just told you about, which is PowerLift and Split. Leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode. Subscribe to this channel, turn on notifications. If we like your comment, we'll notify you in the comment section, and then you win that bundle. And once again, for everybody else, if you wanna take advantage of this promotion that's ending on the 14th, go to mapsaugust.com. All right, here comes the show. Okay, so let's talk about this fraudulent study. How did they figure out that it was fraudulent? What happened? So all studies are subject when they're published in major medical journals, especially a journal like Science or Nature, which is where this study was published. They all undergo this process of peer review, right? But scientists aren't looking with a fine-tooth comb at imagery, right? They're not like image sleuths. And the kind of data that was fudged deliberately in this paper was a way of presenting data called the Western Blot, which is basically like these images that depending on how bold this blot appears, there's a stronger presence of a certain protein that's being illustrated, essentially. Now this, the whistleblower who identified this data as being fraudulent, he had already garnered a bit of credibility because he was very critical of the Azucanumab drug that I mentioned earlier. He was very critical of this drug because again, it didn't improve clinical markers, like quality of life, memory, cognition, anything like that, but it was associated with these awful side effects, like brain swelling, right? So he was already hypercritical of that and he was working on another case for this other pharmaceutical company. And over the course of his research, he was spending a lot of time on pub peer or peer pub. It's like this website where it's basically a crowd sources peer review. It's like crowd review, essentially for scientific literature. And a lot of people were talking about this paper, which he saw, but they hadn't really kind of done the deep dive that he was able to do using image software, where he found essentially that some of these blots in this Western blot were literally copy and pasted. Like purposefully fake. Purposely, yeah, purposefully fake. Like identical blots to others that were in the paper, they were like digital artifacts that were clearly, if you like zoom in and like turn up the contrast, like do a little bit of color manipulation. So when like a paper submitted for peer review, they're not doing that to the data. They're looking at the numbers. They're reading the methodology, they're like reading the conclusions and things like that. They're not like looking at the actual imagery and that's how this data was presented in this paper. That showed that this specific sort of subtype of amyloid beta called A beta star 56 was directly responsible for cognitive deficits in the young rats that it was injected into. What turned out to be the case is that other scientists since 2006 weren't really able to find this amyloid beta subtype, but it was just accepted as truth, A, because it was published in nature because it had this like pedigree with this with the scientist and his mentor and that nobody, everybody just accepted what was presented by the Western blot as face value. But it turns out it was completely fraudulent. And nonetheless, this paper went on to really renew interest in this amyloid hypothesis. Do we know why what the motive was? Was it just like, that's why I asked about the gene that's why I asked the drug thing there. I feel like there had to been like some money motivation. Yeah, and then in speculation, so why they made a fraudulent study that way? Well, I think, I mean, I think it very clearly has to do with money. I mean, there's $3 billion that go into into Alzheimer's research every year from the NIH and a huge portion of that goes into like amyloid associated research. Yeah, and again, some of the biggest like Alzheimer's advocacy organization in air quotes, advocacy organizations put money through that sort of pipeline and I have my own experience with that too. Oh, the other thing, the other problem with this, it's not just that it derailed looking elsewhere for a viable cure or treatment for Alzheimer's disease for the past 16 years, but any other voice, scientist, physician, what have you, that would bring up an alternate sort of viewpoint would be ridiculed by the quote unquote amyloid mafia because all of these science were so, they were so deeply invested. You like their hands were deep in the pockets of this hypothesis. Yeah, so okay, so this is really interesting. I know you have a personal experience. I wanna go there in just a second, but just for the listeners, you know, the way research works is you have a hypothesis or an idea. If it gets accepted, it's almost like a branch on a tree and that directs the next coming research and the longer that's allowed to go on, if it's a wrong, if the first initial breakthrough study or whatever is wrong, the further away from the truth we end up going. So it's like you have something that can follow a path that could go this way or this way. And if this is the direction that it's gonna go, it keeps going that way. And why it keeps going that way is because that's where you get the funding. Like if I tried to get funding from the NIH for Alzheimer's research, which they do a lot of funding for Alzheimer's, it's a big problem. But I said, hey, I have this hypothesis that it has nothing to do with amyloid plaques. It has everything to do with, I don't know, I'll say, I'll make up something, right? They're not gonna give me any money. They're gonna be like, why we're not gonna fund that because this is the direction that looks like it's going. So we're gonna give these people money. So everybody who's following along with that particular hypothesis, they're the ones that get the money and that's where all the studies go and that's where the drugs go. That's where the drug companies go because when you're a pharmaceutical company, if you're trying to raise money from investors, investors are gonna look at what you're trying to do and they're gonna say, well, I wanna develop a drug that prevents the buildup of amyloid plaques. Ah, I'm putting money there or I'm gonna develop a drug that is totally novel and different. And that's really risky. I don't think I'm gonna give you any money. So it continued for that long and for that long we've been totally misguided. Now, I wanna talk about your experience. Well, but also, Alzheimer's disease is a condition that begins to brain 30 to 40 years before the presentation of symptoms. So the idea that you're gonna be able to have a drug that comes along and undoes decades worth of damage. And we don't know all of the, and I could talk about some of the potential reasons for the damage, but the idea that we're gonna be able to develop some monotherapy that's gonna come along and undo decades worth of damage, it's a pipe dream. It's arrogant, right? But nonetheless, this idea that amyloid, because in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, it's just plausible enough to get doctors and scientists to buy in, right? And if they can come up with a drug that can potentially reduce the amyloid burden, I mean, drugs have a run where before they're able to be generic, they make tons and tons and tons of money. And all the investors, I mean, whenever there's any good news of an amyloid drug or an Alzheimer's drug, whatever the pharmaceutical industry, if they're a public company, the stocks spike, right? So there's a ton of money in it. And there's no money, as you mentioned, Sal, like in telling people to just, perhaps eat a healthier diet or be more mindful of the air pollution that you're exposed to or exercise more. It just doesn't sell. Like you can't make, have a billion dollar exit or make shareholders happy with that kind of advice, right? Yeah, knowing that it's like 20 to 30 years, like, if you go all the way back there and is there any early detection signs or tests or anything like available to kind of at least start to understand that this is something that is developing. Yeah, great question. I mean, there are every once in a while you'll see a new biomarker pop up. There was one called IRS One that was a blood biomarker that correlated really tightly with brain energy metabolism. I wrote about it in my first book, Genius Foods, but I haven't really heard much on that since then. Essentially, there's been this resistance to acknowledge that we could potentially prevent Alzheimer's disease because it runs counter to the doom and gloom funding pipeline, right? And so when I first got started and I started working on this documentary project, which I'm now very close to finishing, thankfully, I got a taste of that. There was actually a, there was this guy, Evil Dude, associated with one of these Alzheimer's, one of these totally benevolent seeming Alzheimer's advocacy associations that came out against me and attacked my project because it went against this sort of amyloid hypothesis dogma of the time. And he went so far as to, he even wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and the headline is misplaced hopes for curing Alzheimer's disease. Wow, okay, so let's talk about this documentary because that's what peaked him to come after you? Yeah. So I've seen the trailer for this. It's amazingly powerful. Now, you have a personal connection. We had you on the show before talking about this, but your mom suffered from Alzheimer's at a young age and you were with her the whole time and this is what motivated you to really go in this direction and why you do what you do. And this documentary was about that process. So he got wind of this and in the documentary you talk about what? Like, you know, there's dietary stuff you could do, exercise, here's some other- Absolutely. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the idea that you can prevent dementia with, you know, through diet and lifestyle. And by the way, I'm not saying that we know everything that can prevent dementia in each person because once you've seen one case of dementia it's possible that there are different causes for each person who ultimately develops that condition. But essentially any, I guess they felt threatened that any focus that you would take off of the necessity for a sort of cure, quote unquote cure, a pharmaceutical cure is less, you know, is again, like less, it's gonna be less good for the bottom line of that organization. So my documentary was all about prevention. My efforts have always been about the prevention of dementia and cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease through diet and lifestyle. Because again, this is a condition that begins in the brain decades before the presentation of symptoms. That's always been since day one of me setting foot out into the health and wellness world, the prevention of dementia. Yeah, and you mentioned the amyloid mafia. So this guy's part of it. Who else is part of it and did you get, it was anybody else or has anybody else come after you or try to come after you for saying you could prevent this through lifestyle changes. This was probably like the closest I flew to the sun with this one article and this one guy. But no, I mean, I could name certain scientists who I know that that generally do good work. But yeah, their whole careers have been, I mean, the thing is like in science, reputation is everything, right? So if you're, again, science advances one funeral at a time, right? If your reputation is everything and data comes out overturning what was previously a prevailing dominant hypothesis about the etiology of a certain condition and you've spent your whole career working on that, you're gonna fiercely defend it against all odds, right? And a lot of these guys have incredible pedigrees like from Ivy League universities and the like. So you see some kid come in, right? Trying to do a documentary on dementia as a condition that's potentially modulated by our diets and our lifestyles, right? And that's a threat. That's a threat, cause I can speak to the masses, right? These righteous users are ego, man. You built your whole career off of something like that like and then that goes away. Like that's a huge shock to the ego. But here's what I've seen. I've seen the tides turn. I mean, they're turning slowly, but surely, like when I first got started, you couldn't say dementia and prevention within the same sentence. That was like, you'd get like tomatoes thrown at you. It was just that it just flew against, you know, everything that the neurological medical orthodoxy knew about Alzheimer's disease, that it was not a condition that you could prevent, treat or slow. But as of, I mean, it was 2020 published in the Lancet that the Lancet is one of the most prestigious medical journals finally acknowledged that up to 40%, or at least 40% of Alzheimer's cases, dementia cases are potentially preventable. They said literally in the Lancet, and I quote, the potential for prevention is high. And they listed all of the different risk factors. So I mean, when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, you have what's called, you have two types of risk factors. You have your non-modifiable risk factors, right? I'm sure you guys can guess what those are. You have your age, you have your gender, and you have your genes. You can't modify any of those things, right? But then you have this array, 12 non, or rather, modifiable risk factors. So the 12 modifiable risk factors. Diet, sleep, exercise. Yeah, all those things. Are you obese? Do you have hypertension? Are you, do you have, what's your education like, right? Do you, are you socially connected? What is, you know, are you a type two diabetic? And as of 2020, they actually included three new modifiable risk factors, one of which being air pollution, exposure to excessive air pollution, excessive drinking, and then there was one other one, I forgot it. But essentially, the bottom line is that you have, we all have risk factors that are modifiable, and that's the empowering story here, right? And about five of them, if I recall correctly, whether it was like BMI or hypertension, are mediated by diet. So diet plays a huge role in terms of our brain health. Yeah, it's, the diabetes connection is pretty big, right? Or just your inability to process carbohydrates, sugar, or just, you know, being insensitive to insulin. That's a pretty big connection. Huge, yeah. If you have type two diabetes, your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease increases between two and four fold. So it's massive. Now I'm gonna ask you a personal question, because this is really close for you. You went through the process of what it's like to watch someone get treated for Alzheimer's through the medical community and it failed. When that, when this news came out, which is recent that, hey, this was fraudulent. I mean, what was your reaction? How did you feel when you saw that? I mean, it, my, I went straight back to that Wall Street Journal article where my project was attacked. And it was a project that I've been working on for eight years, like I've put so much of my blood, sweat, and tears into this, into this documentary. And the documentary precedes my books. So I got started working on this documentary back in 2014. And since then, because I had to make a living and I wasn't just gonna sit idly on my hands as I waited for all the pieces to come into place to finish my documentary. I've written, you know, I've written three books. I've launched my podcasts, et cetera. But this, this film is really like the, it engenders like why I do what I do. It's about my mom. My mom had a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body Dementia. It's a one in five dementia cases are attributable to Lewy Body Dementia. So, you know, I'm not holding my breath for the kind of research that we have on Alzheimer's disease to come out with regard to Lewy Body Dementia anytime soon. But what I've learned, you know, after years and years of immersing myself in this research is that what's good for the brain is good for the brain. We don't have all the answers about Lewy Body Dementia. We don't have all the answers about Alzheimer's disease. But we know essentially a few salient tenets about how to live in a way that nurtures the health of our brains. And so that's really what my work has been about. Why do you think we, because I find this very interesting that if we talk about the heart, we consider the heart a part of the body. So it's like healthy body, healthy heart. When it comes to the brain, although it's still a part of the body, just like the heart is, because it houses the mind, we sometimes separate the two. Like we don't necessarily say, well, if you have a healthy body, you're more likely to have a healthy brain, therefore have a healthy mind. Why do you think that is? Well, I think part of it has to do with the fact that when you present to a physician with, you know, perhaps risk factors for cardiovascular disease, there are things that a cardiologist can do that will at least on paper make him happy, right? Like if you present to a cardiologist and say your LDL is too high or whatever, they can put you on a reduced saturated fat specifically diet and you can watch your LDL come down, right? If you have joint issues and you're eating an inflammatory diet, a pro-inflammatory diet, you can potentially clean up your diet and see your joint issues improve, right? You can eat in a certain way that obviously affects your body composition. You guys are experts at that. You talk about that all the time, right? But with the brain, it's not as simple, right? Like with the brain, we don't have as many biomarkers. Oh, true. You can't flex your brain in the mirror. And when you present to a neurologist with any kind of brain condition, the tools in the toolbox are very limited. So it's basically IQ tests and cognitive tests and that's our metric, essentially. But we have really good correlates. We know that the metabolic health of the body is crucially important when it comes to the metabolic health of the brain. They're tightly correlated. We know that cardiovascular health is really important with regards to the brain. The brain is fed blood, nutrients, and oxygen by this network of microvessals that if you were to take out of your brain, out of your head and stack end to end, these microvessals would stretch 400 miles long. So we need to nurture that network of microvessals, essentially, and procuring good heart health is one way to do that. We have cognitive tests. Cognitive tests are okay. We have various brain scans, but as I mentioned, I mean, it's futile to look for amyloid in your brain because, I mean, as people age, they tend to accumulate amyloid. And amyloid is actually, it's probably the same way that we produce cholesterol as a vital nutrient for life, right? Amyloid probably serves some kind of protective function, at least in the early, at least early in life, right? They've done studies at Harvard where they've actually devised this technology where they can grow essentially brain cells in a lab dish, and they find that when exposed to the herpes virus, you see this upregulation of amyloid production in the brain. So amyloid is like, it potentially serves an anti-inflammatory purpose, at least until the point where the build-up becomes overwhelming, and then the inflammation kind of like feeds back on itself. Just like the plaques on arteries, some people say they're put there because there's inflammation, and it's kind of bolstering strength in the artery, but then, of course, you get too much, and then it blocks things off. It's been a really weird time in science because while this happened with Alzheimer's, which literally upended just the perfecting thought, we have this paper that comes out that totally flips the serotonin model for depression on its head as well. Like that just came out, and there's decades of medications and treatments completely based on this serotonin deficiency model for depression, and now they're like, no, that's not okay. So are you familiar with what's been happening with that? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this paper that came out, it was an umbrella meta-analysis and review, and basically what it found was that there's no good evidence that there is a chemical imbalance in the brains of people with depression, which I think is really empowering news, because I think it could be tempting, it could be seductive to think that your brain just is not working properly when you're depressed, or that you were born with a brain that just isn't meant to be happy, for example. Now what this reviewed, and I think it's really important to mention this, what the review didn't look at was the efficacy of medication. So these medications do work for some. Yes, I'm glad you said that. So that's super important. Yeah, because if you're on an SSRI and it's helped, don't go off of it because of this. Absolutely. This is just- The mechanism doesn't matter. Yes. The mechanism doesn't matter. The outcome is really what matters, and what research shows is that the efficacy of these medications really depends on or is mediated, rather, by the severity of the depression. And what the medication seems to be most efficacious in people with increasing severity of their depression. Unfortunately, the medications are very widely prescribed and over-prescribed, in fact. And for people with mild to moderate- Which is the most common form of depression. It's the vast majority of people with depression. Right. So for people with mild to moderate depression, not much more effective than placebo. And certainly, likely not much, not more effective at all than exercise, which we know is a powerful antidepressant. But they're certainly effective for some people, for many people even. But what this paper basically showed us was that there really is no difference in terms of the serotonin level in the depressed person versus the quote-unquote not depressed person. They look in- They've compared cerebrospinal fluid serotonin levels, which admittedly is pretty hard to do, so there isn't a ton of research on this. But in post-menopausal women, what they found was that among depressed women and non-depressed women, clinically-depressed women and non-clinically-depressed women, cerebrospinal levels of serotonin in CSF, not significantly different. They've also done a number of studies over the years that are called serotonin depletion studies. They use- There are different mechanisms to do this, but one way to do it is you basically feed somebody branched chain amino acids, which out-compete tryptophan for entry into the brain. And so you can tryptophan as the precursor to serotonin. And so essentially what you're able to do, at least temporarily, is to quote-unquote deplete the brain of serotonin. And that tends not to cause depressive symptoms. If you take a BCAA supplement on an empty stomach, do you walk away depressed? No, you don't. So they looked at basically the breadth of available evidence, measuring serotonin levels in clinically-depressed people and controls. They also found in that that the serotonin receptors, because they said, okay, maybe their receptors are down-regulated. Yeah. They actually found that depressed people have slightly up-regulated serotonin receptors. Yeah. Which is like the opposite, the complete opposite what he would expect. Right. Yeah, so based on this review, they found that there is no- But you know, most, like, any psychiatrist, like, worth their salt, knew that this theory wasn't the sole guiding theory for depression. No, we had a debated in junior college, in psychology class, because we knew way back then that the placebo effect was almost as effective as those drugs. Yeah. So I mean, I feel like we've kind of known of, and the argument that we had a debate was, should we still prescribe it, even though we know that the placebo effect is almost as equal, and the prevailing answer by the class was like, yeah, we still should, because it's still helping a ton of people. Well, the side effects are- Well, the side effects, yeah, the side effects are non-trivial. You know, like they mess with your sex drive. Obesity. They can increase suicidality in some. Like, they're, yeah. They're no walk in the park. And so, and they're also difficult to come off of. And I have experienced personal anecdotal experience with this too. My mom, at the beginning of her disease, a psychiatrist thought that all of her symptoms were attributable to depression. There is a kind of, like, there is a complex of dementia that you can kind of observe in people who are severely depressed. It's called pseudo-dementia. But that's not what my mom had. But nonetheless, the psychiatrist put her on sertraline, which is like one of these SSRIs. And she was on the drug until the end of her life. And it was impossible to come off of, like impossible. You need to, you know, jump through all kinds of hoops to- Oh, because of withdrawal? Yeah, because of withdrawal. Holy cow. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, well, so I'm actually, I was, I'm listening to a book called The Body Keeps a Score right now. It's a really, really good book. I've heard great things. Excellent book. And in the book, he talks about how, like, Prozac hits the market and it created a completely new industry in mental health. Whereas before, it was all talk therapy. And then all of a sudden, it was like prescription therapy was the big thing. And I mean, just, I can't stress this enough, how much it changed the trajectory of investments and of research because so much was built on that theory that lots of money didn't go in other places because it all went to that. Again, you know, getting funding to develop a new SSRI after Prozac hit the market, like way easy to get that money compared to, hey, I have this idea for this other novel treatment. Like you're not going to get any money for that. Yeah. I mean, these drugs, they've been shown to increase levels of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factors, so they can help potentially in air quotes, rewire the brain if you have like old traumas and stuff. There is a potential for that. But no, I mean, in general, yeah, they do tend to be overprescribed. That is a big problem. And there are other causes for depression. I mean, you could have something bad happen in your life and feel it's normal to be depressed. There's the inflammatory cytokine model of depression that inflammation can instigate depression in some. Their depression can potentially be caused by a crappy diet. And we can see this in studies where they actually improve subjects with clinical depression, their diets. They get them off of junk food diets and they start getting them more on whole foods dominant diet. And they see like remission, like stark rates of remission in people just eating like whole foods, right? Yeah, Max, so here's why I think it's so, part of the reason why it's so complex. And by the way, what you're saying, I mean, we were trainers for decades. I never saw a single client not have a mood improvement from exercising with me and changing the diet. Every single person I worked with that was consistent, saw such an improvement that they would comment on it. Okay, that was everybody. That was just exercise and diet, wasn't performing miracles. It was just traditional exercise and diet. But part of the reason why this is so challenging is it's almost like pain. It's almost like dealing with pain, like physical pain, like describe your pain, where does it come from? And then it's your experience of the pain. That can make it for some people, it can make it a rousing for other people, it could be terrifying, right? When you're talking about depression, like both two people could have the same, I guess, objective feeling, but then subjectively, one person could perceive it differently. Maybe they feel more empowered, or maybe there's meaning behind something, and they don't perceive it as something terrible. They just happen to be, oh, that's John. He's just a little flat, but man, that guy's driven. And then you got this person over here who maybe feels physically the same, but the perception and their experience of how they feel is so different that for them, it's depressing and crippling. And so how do you separate the two? That's the challenge. Because we're not just dealing with the brain, we're dealing with the mind and consciousness. Good luck. That's why I find that so damn challenging. How do studies get funded? And why is so hard to get some things funded and other things not so hard? How does that work? Yeah, I mean, I think you just have to follow the money trail. I mean, it's easier to find money for a drug candidate if it's potentially patentable. And we've certainly seen that with, I mean, when Prozac, I'm pretty sure is generic at this point. Most of these SSRIs are generic, right? And I don't know the exact laws and rules, but at the beginning, a drug is able to be patented. And they're crazy expensive. Like, I mean, the Alzheimer's drug that we were talking about before, Adjacanumab, it's insanely expensive. Thousands of dollars a pill or something like that, right? Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, with regard to nutrition studies, I mean, like a lot of the nutrition research that we have actually comes from the industry. I talk about this a lot because, you know, we know, for example, that blueberries are very good for the brain. But blueberries are, I mean, we know this because the studies on blueberries are funded by one of these like blueberry producers. We know that dark chocolate is really good for the brain because most of the studies on dark chocolate cocoa flavonols that we know support cardiovascular health and brain health are funded by Mars, I swear. So, you know, we can't necessarily throw out all industry-funded studies, right? Because if we're going to throw out studies funded by one industry, we should throw out all of them. Yeah, because let's talk about this because this is a very challenging problem, right? It's hard to navigate. I talked to my, okay. So I talked to a friend of ours, Lane Norton, somebody that we love and sometimes disagree with, but he's the guy's always, he's got his opinions and he tries to stay, he's got good integrity in my experience. And I sent him this paper, I sent you the same one. It was in PubMed. And somebody did an analysis of the, what was it? I think it was the Dietary Guide of America. Yeah, Dietary Guide of America. Yeah, Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Yes, and this is an association that essentially dictates our dietary policy, influences regulation, okay? So smart scientists, this association that they're the ones that put forth our policy, okay? So they went through and they looked for conflicts of interest, like strong conflicts of interest. Like, okay, could this person, are they connected to this industry here and how connected are they? And could that sway their decision? So it'd be like, if I'm a Congress person passing legislation on a new bill, that's gonna raise taxes on a product and then I go buy a competing product on the stock market, like that's conflict of interest, right? Okay, 95% of the people in this association had strong conflicts of interest or potential conflict. So almost all of them with the food and pharmaceutical industry. Now here's the challenge with that, but that doesn't sound like a good thing. I don't think it is a good thing, but the challenge is how do we fix that? Because like when I talked to my friend, Lane, I said, hey dude, this is crazy. And he goes, it is, he goes, but I don't know what the solution is. And he goes, look, when I got funded, because he did studies on loosing, his theory was that loosing, if you measure loosing, that'll tell you the quality of protein essentially. I'm paraphrasing. And he's like, where was I gonna go get funding for that? I wasn't gonna get it from plant food companies or because I had to go to the beef industry and the dairy industry because if my theory was correct, it would benefit them. So it's like, do you have any ideas of how we could potentially eliminate these conflicts of interest and make it more? Because I've been wrecking my brain. Well, hope is that there's enough competing that if you can't get it from one industry, you can get it from another industry, right? I don't know. Or maybe fund, maybe fund a scientist, because here's another thing that there's not much funding. Scientists who come out to duplicate or prove wrong studies, there's not much funding in that, right? Which is that's what science is supposed to be doing. Yeah. Yeah. What is that saying? It takes monumentally more effort to debunk something, to debunk a lie than to create that lie from the get-go. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a simple solution, but it really is a house of cards and it's very disheartening. And I'm not like, I think it's, you gotta be tricky. You don't want to sow skepticism when it comes to science because science is really at its heart a method, but the industry of science, I think, has really, you know, it's really bad. Well, I just, I think the, I mean, I don't know the answer to getting the studies funded, but for the consumer, for the average listener, I think this is the message that we've been trying to communicate so long on this show. I know you do the same thing too is just that you have to kind of take everything with a grain of salt. You can. You just because some, just because some studies says this, it doesn't make it the truth and end all be all. And I think as consumers, we need to, okay, this now may point us in this direction or this is interesting. But the, what I've found with, and I think you alluded to it earlier with the nutritionists on social media. I mean, that's, it's like you get this dogma around it. Like one study comes through and says something or proves a point which probably was biased because somebody who funded it wanted that point to be proved. Now everybody latches on to it as it's the end all be all. And it's just not. What wasn't part of the scientific method of being able to replicate it? How often does, do these studies get replicated like? Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, it's, there's what's called the primary literature, the secondary literature. But a lot of this like stuff that, you know, people argue about is like secondary, just like dreamed up, you know, in a boardroom somewhere and then somehow published. Like a good example of this that I talked about recently on social media was the Tufts University food compass. Did you guys see that? Yeah, I retweeted it. I retweeted it. Did you? Yeah, you posted it. Oh, explain it. Oh, so the food, it's a nutrient profiling system that was devised at Tufts University by a researcher who's done, he's a legit nutrition researcher. You know, I've cited some of his previous work, but he was on this team that assembled this nutrient profiling system that was then critiqued by a researcher and others named Ty Biel at all, you know, put together this critique because when using this algorithm that they devised to score foods to make it easier for consumers to identify what's healthy and what's not and also for manufacturers to use to steer consumers towards healthier choices when running a myriad of different food items through this algorithm, what they found was that really healthful nutrient dense foods like beef and eggs and whole milk were on the bottom of the list and then at the top were like frosted miniweeds and lucky charms What the hell? And egg substitute Because they're like fortified with shit and stuff Yeah, it's just No, it's because they used that in vegetable oil Yeah, that freaking thing the food compass score So yeah, so basically this legit nutrition researcher whose work I really quite like published this critique and submitted it and sent it over to Tufts and it went ignored it went ignored and this happens all the time in nutrition Bro, that's why it's all a freaking house of cards and I think we have real problems you know, it's no wonder people are so sick and are so confused and don't know who to trust It makes sense and it comes from within science I mean, I could throughout history there have been other like this like amyloid thing that we were talking about which is so awful, so terrible it's not, I mean, it's like just one of many examples like there was that case of I don't know if you guys remember but this was like an expose that was revealed years ago where the sugar research foundation Yeah basically paid scientists the equivalent in today's money of $50,000 to place to take all the blame off of cardiovascular disease take it off of sugar and put it on fat and put it on to fat, right and that was not disclosed in the pivotal New England Journal of Medicine paper that for decades led to people being afraid of dietary fat, of saturated fat, right? So, right, I mean, it was so corrupt and then there was this other instance of um, and I actually think it's quite funny I'm probably the only person that gets the nuance of this but Ansel Keys and this Sylvain Lesney guy both were both conducted research at the University of Minnesota and so Ansel Keys is this guy who for decades is, you know, he's This is a seven country study Seven country study which was really the 22 country study but he conveniently left off all the countries that happened to eat high fat and had low incidence of heart disease but he was this is what you see over and over again with this Lesney guy with this with Ansel Keys you see the same kind of descriptors used over and over again like obstinant, outsized personality highly charismatic and in a sea of scientists if you've got even like an iota of charisma You stand out You're going places, right? So that's the that was the case for this Ansel Keys guy who you know, many people trace back to being the reason why we've become we've been so scared of dietary fat and saturated fat in particular it became national policy for decades because of his fake study because of his fake study and so one of his the pivotal studies that he set out to prove the diet heart hypothesis, right? That's dietary saturated fat increases risk for cardiovascular disease was called the Minnesota Coronary Experiment where they took these prisoners, right? and they randomized them to either being on the what was the equivalent of the standard American diet at the time I think it was like 18% saturated fat in their diets and then the control that they slashed the saturated fat in half and they gave them all this like corn oil fortified crap food, right? There was like I think what the findings at the time was there was no difference or something so it was like essentially a null result but 30 years later they found the data they found the data in a basement somewhere they reanalyzed it and they found that the corn oil the people in the intervention diet the corn oil diet were having dramatically more incidents of heart disease heart attacks, cancer and things like that You know what's interesting about that is they even said if I'm not mistaken it was that study where they said oh the corn oil vegetable oil people we saw reduction in cholesterol yeah and that's how that's how they advertise it like oh it works Reduction in cholesterol but again like the right like the reduction in amyloid yes right if you're reducing cholesterol but you're not actually reducing rates of heart attacks then what the fuck are you doing? Yeah that's the point the shitty part is how how long it takes to steer this ship too because once you set it in motion on that direction I mean you still I mean you guys still come I still come across people that think that you know butter, saturated fat things like that is like the Is the devil marketing the way to go? Yes I mean that's how long it takes that's been we've known that's a bunch of bullshit for quite some time now but it still takes that long to steer it back The method of science is objective but the people that advertise it talk about it use it human beings are corrupt that use it those are the ones that could be corrupt and science I never thought I'd see the day Max where diets would become politicized I never thought I'd see the day like how can you politicize a diet? How can a political party use a diet in a way to advance their cause and now we're seeing that Well because somebody smart quickly realized how closely related is to religion I mean diet and religion are so closely related because it's a part of who you are Yes and now I'm seeing there was an article see the article in Scientific American how eating too much protein can make your urine bad for the climate Yeah My natural pee is bad for the environment Yeah Get the fuck out of here I gotta be scared of my pee now I mean and you've been on the other end of this like how politicized the diet diets have become I know you've even been attacked because you've said things like meat's actually quite nutritious Yeah It's super nutritious I mean this guy one of the papers that I left aside from from Ty Buell and you know there are other papers he's not the only researcher, nutrition researcher but animal products are the most nutrient dense foods that we have access to there was a paper that came out where it was basically listed all of the foods that are the highest in terms of their concentration of not just any nutrient but like nutrients of concern nutrients that tend to be under consume and it was with the exception of dark leafy greens at the top it was all animal products it was like liver, eggs, milk products and things like that and yet these foods continue to be demonized I'm not a conspiracy theorist but you know it's it's hard not to believe that somebody somewhere isn't like yeah it's keeping them weak you know it's like it's like you're in my real house now I wouldn't I wouldn't have believed you had I not seen articles which people share with me now over the last couple years so I never saw articles like this before but I've had people share me articles literally why lifting weights is contributing to toxic masculinity or why trying to become fit is body shaming and you know and you know why yeah alt-right you know flourishes and fitness communities and I remember I've seen these articles I'm like oh my god are they going to try to politicize weaponizing this fitness well good luck first of all the reason why I say good luck is because it's you can politicize anything but people who are really into fitness and I don't care where you where you start from I'm fat I'm skinny I don't look good I want to look sexy for the beach whatever if you pursue it long enough it's such a personal growth vehicle that once you experience it you do it for five years 10 years you try attacking it and it's like no man it doesn't work that way like I've been in gym for 10 years and they're the most accepting places on earth for obese people where as some of these articles say don't go to gyms it's you know they're going to body shame you you will the the last place we'll get body shamed if you're obese is when you go to the gym and work out that's when people are working out and they see you and they go oh my god it's so awesome you're here let me help you out or do you have any questions or high five you this is really really crazy really crazy to me so okay so people listening to this and so here's my fear my fear is with all this stuff that's coming out that now people are like I don't believe anything cynicism through the roof yeah I don't believe anything I don't know who to believe I'll just you know whatever which I don't think that's good either are there good kind of directing principles that people can look for when they read a study like what do they look at you know things like controls and or what about made analysis like what are things that you look for in studies that make you go okay this I think this is good this is a good direction or ooh I don't really know if I like this study you know it's it's really hard to say because I mean I would say go to the meta analyses but even meta analyses can be poorly done based on what their inclusion exclusion criteria is right so you can you can do a study to to prove any point that you're trying to make that's why I think I mean my mantra has always been evidence based but not evidence bound I think it's super important to still use common sense and to and to be able to think through the lens of evolution like what what ooh I like that yeah like what what would have made sense for my ancestors you know I think that the less time for example a food product or us or medicine or supplement has spent in circulation the greater scrutiny and skepticism we should have when assessing whether or not it's going to be right for us I mean a great example of that are the grain and seed oils you know I get a lot of flak sometimes online for steering people away from grain and seed oils because the nutritional and the medical orthodoxy still loves them and it is hard to find human outcome data that they that they are acutely harmful right but these are novel foods like they didn't exist in the in the human food supply prior to 100 years ago and so suddenly we think that that this is somehow going to be a better alternative for us than something that our ancestors have consumed I mean I know that there's the appeal to nature fallacy and I know that what's natural isn't always better for us like that's that should be a given at this point that's not what I'm saying but but a novel food like this you know especially when we have ample animal research we have mechanistic data that would suggest these are not ideal for us all of the human outcome data is short-term and equivocal it's not it's not like overwhelmingly positive in favor of seed oils and then you could look at parts of the world like in Israel Israel is actually they they have what's called the Israeli paradox they are the top seed oil consumers in the world they consume about almost 10% more of the by calories of these seed oils than we do here in the U.S. and they're not a picture of cardiovascular health they have higher rates of cancer they have all the obesity all the type 2 diabetes and so it's a big problem it's an experiment that you know we don't really know the true outcome of well it's it's co-evolution this is the part this is why what you're saying is so true because for example let's just say we didn't know what the sun was we never were on the sun and scientists went and studied the radiation from the sun the message would be don't go outside this will kill you right but now the reason why that sun doesn't kill us and why we need it is because we evolved with it yeah the sun was here before we were so we evolved with the sun so the foods that we've eaten for thousands and thousands of years we evolved alongside those foods meaning we've become either dependent on them or those of us that didn't process them well those of us that had intolerances to meet probably didn't survive and those that did well with it you know thrived and had offspring this is over the course of thousands and thousands of years so I like the the lens of evolution I also like to use ancient practices or ancient health practices not because I think they're the answer to everything but because they've been around longer and so I'll sometimes look at like Chinese medicine or heredic medicine yeah and see what they use and it's like how long have they been using that oh they've been using that for a thousand years and they say it's good for anxiety there might be something there that's a long time for them to say something is effective right a thousand years like how many millions of millions of people have used it over that pretty time do you ever do that where you look at these different arenas and try and find clues or answers yeah I mean I think I think there is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from these like ancient traditions whether it's heredic medicine or Chinese medicine and you know sometimes you'll see you'll get data about various compounds and other times you won't you know I think it's good to sort of have a foot and be rooted in in science and the available data I think it's you know we I think that the the way to encourage science being performed better is not to opt out of science entirely we need science I'm not anti-science in any way but you know I just think that like it's a shame that we don't get better better data on these kinds of compounds like for example what is that supplement that I told ashwagandha yeah you know it's like an anti-stress I mean it would be great to have the the level of evidence that we have for something like that that we do for something like Prozac but unfortunately it's like you can't patent you know no unless they figure out the active ingredient and then synthesize it and change it a little bit yeah right like proprietary proprietary formula but yeah I think I think the evolutionary lens I think it's I think it's important you know it's like you know I want to eat whole foods primarily and and avoid the foods of modernity in hopes of potentially avoiding the diseases of modernity you know the diseases of civilization I mean rates of Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's disease like all these kinds of conditions they're they're increasing they're accelerating autoimmune issues yeah autoimmune issues yeah and yeah I mean it's it's hard not to point the finger at the modern when you first got into the space and your intentions were oh man I just want to help people and you wrote your first book this one we first had you at the show great book then you wrote the second one and all your books are amazing and you genuinely want to help people you genuinely have these great intentions good intentions were you shocked or blown away that you would actually have people coming after you not to say hey I have you know information that's maybe different but rather trying to attack you like you were like you were running for you know public office or something like they need to throw mud at you was that was that I remember when I'm I'm not I'm not going to get going to details but I remember text messages from you where you'd send them to me like this is the weirdest thing why are these people coming after you yeah where's all this hate coming from yeah did you have any idea that would happen I get you know I get a lot from the vegans just because I take an unapologetic approach to promoting animal products but I also promote whole plants so it's like you know the carnivores come after me too so and then I get attacked by you know sometimes like the quote unquote evidence based people on on social media but actually some of they're like when you look at them the first of all the the the advice that they often pedal is among the worst out there and they tend not to look very healthy either I mean the last person I want to take nutrition advice from is a nutrition expert on social media ironically right like some of these and I'm not talking about anybody in in specific here but like you know a lot of the like nutrition phd's and and you know the the dieticians like it's some of the worst information that you'll see you know like this like all foods fit mantra you know the idea that really calories are all that matter which I know that you guys talk about all the time so I don't want to be dead get a dead horse but it's um it's like this really sort of like reductionist and simplistic approach to nutrition that like I don't really know who it's serving you know like some sometimes you'll see these like food scientists that there it seems like their whole brand is to is to really shoot down what I think is the warranted skepticism that people have around food additives and about chemicals that they're exposed to in their environment you know they'll say things like everything is a chemical you know to the mom who's afraid of exposing their baby to some kind of industrial freaking chemical that's only been sort of in you know human circulation for the past like 20 or so years I think I think there I want to believe their intentions are pure like I don't think they're all malicious right I think what they're trying to do is distill it down to what they think is the the biggest rock and think that like we're not going to be able to convince all these people to look deeper at their foods and like so let's just give them the most the biggest thing which is if you just eat less calories than you than you burn every day you'll be exponentially healthier and so they they try and stay focused on that and then everything else they want to dismiss because it's too overwhelming for the majority and so I think that's the logic that that you'd hope so that message you'd hope so they don't sell it that way they don't they don't sell it that way and then I think they deliver it poorly but I can think of a lot of these people that present that message and I know some of them and I know that they they don't have malicious malicious intent I think quite a few of them get a little bit of God complex because they're educated and they're smart and they know how to read studies and so and they think they know what's best or the best way to communicate but I think the part that they miss big time and that we try we all here try and communicate is the behavioral aspect and I think that that's the piece that's missing in this conversation a lot of times is like you know when you when you tell somebody it's just just calories and if that person because you technically if your body burns 2000 calories you absolutely could eat 1000 calories of ice cream every day and potentially still lose weight but we know what behaviors that leads to later on and and the reality that person's going to stay at 1000 calories eating ice cream is not realistic and so there's a bigger part of the conversation that I think that we're all trying to have all the time with people and I think people are smart enough to be able to understand that it's myopic that's why that people get real myopic and you know like like artificial sweeteners is one right that's a big one that I tend to hammer on and people like well but the studies show it's totally safe or whatever like okay do you taste it do you perceive it it influences your behaviors it is not innocuous so and by the way it doesn't and now it also comes along with no calories do you think that's going to change your behaviors when you're going to get this feeling of the sensation of sweet without calories and sure enough you know someone might drink one coke but now to diet cooks I'll have 15 right so it's uh they don't have the big picture or at least they're communicating just one small thing another example would be a study on an additive and they say well here's a six studies showing that at 10 times a concentration that anybody will consume it at that they'll be you know totally fine well there's two problems with that one is it's six months so who knows what it looks like cue me to live cue me to you know over decades and decades and also there's a lot of these additives that are in combination nobody's studying exactly all of them together like okay fine the chemical my deodorant has been shown to be safe in some studies and the chemical in my my plastic container has been shown to be safe in some studies and then then the shampoo and then in the food and then the but is there a study combining all these things none yeah none of those and over years none of that six weeks yes yes yeah and our worsening chronic our chronic health issues and as they continue to worsen tells me we're doing a lot wrong yeah more wrong than we are right yeah inhabiting the modern world is like swimming a toxic soup it really is there was a an organization called the endocrine disruption with the one of the main spokespeople for it and they identified 1400 compounds that were exposed to on a daily basis that have endocrine disrupting potential it's like disrupting the hundred yeah so we know one of them may do but 1400 combined right combined yeah they don't know they're doing these studies with like you know with with rats in isolation and the other like the the reason why these compounds are so difficult to study in terms of their their toxicological effects is that they don't have the same linear dose response that that other potentially toxic compounds have right yeah there's sometimes there's a tipping point in other words you don't get an effect until you hit this high amount and then you start to see some real negative effects so if they don't hit that right you might not see anything well that's like the dose makes the poison so that's like typically like you could look at water you could look at all you could look at literally any compound and at a given there is a toxic dose right for any compound like for any exposure but the problem and that and that it's linear essentially with increasing dose you get increasing danger for lack of a better term but the problem with these endocrine disrupting compounds we've talked about this in the past but it's that they have a non-monotonic dose response so it's not a straight line it's like a curve it's like a U where you can get one effect at a certain dose and then at a low dose you can get a completely different effect and so that's why it makes these compounds really difficult to study wow wow this is this is crazy okay so so let's talk about this this documentary that you that you worked on and that you've been working on for years you showed me the trailer twice now both times made me want to cry because it's so powerful so talk about this for a second what are we doing with this are we are you putting it out there yeah well it's we don't have a release plan in place yet but the film is called Little Empty Boxes it used to have another name we did a Kickstarter campaign for it and the name was Breadhead actually for the that was the name of the documentary and it was called Breadhead not because I was pointing a finger at bread and saying bread causes Alzheimer's disease but because bread I think is one of it's it's a it's one of these like ultra processed foods that tends to masquerade as like a health food you know it's one of humanity's oldest processed foods but it's a processed food nonetheless and today our diets are dominated by ultra processed foods I mean 60 percent of the calories that we consume actually one of the first studies I'm sure you guys would be interested in this came out looking at the relationship between ultra processed food consumption and dementia risk was published two weeks ago I saw it yeah for every 10 percent increase in ultra processed food consumption 25 percent increased risk of developing dementia over 10 years right what does that have to do with amyloid nothing right it's like what you know it's in the food but anyway so the documentary is called little empty boxes and it's the first ever dementia prevention film and we are finishing it up right now we're submitting it to various film festivals hopefully we can get a premiere at one of them but the footage is is there's footage it's it's your mom yeah is a big part of it because she went through it and there's old footage of you as a child recording are you always like trying to capture stuff and yeah I've always been that's actually the the I think probably major reason why I go into medicine which is you know something I've always been incredibly passionate about but I'm also super creative so I've always been sort of toying around with cameras and yeah so I've been I've been essentially filming my mom who passed away three years ago but I've been filming her since I'm like a little kid since like a baby wow and it's funny because like I you know I mean now I know what it was all for right it was so that I can so that you know the tragedy that was her life I mean her life wasn't entirely tragic but that what what she endured wasn't in vain you know that I can that I can share her story with others and hopefully inspire them to a greater vision of life well God bless you man I hope this thing crushes I'm excited for to come out man I'm very excited again you're by far one of our favorite people I don't want to say my favorite on air because then I don't want hurt anyone's feeling but you know how we feel thanks but no I appreciate you man I really appreciate what you're doing and I mean interesting time right now but great time great timing for you because this has been something you've been preaching for a while now and now finally news is coming out that you've been going in the right direction in that right direction and this this is good for humanity because Alzheimer's is a modern health crisis people just don't realize how big of a deal this is and you said it's a triple the number what people with Alzheimer's are going to triple by what 2030 2030 yeah it's less than 10 years yeah it's it's crazy I mean today if you may get to the age of 85 you have a 50% chance of being diagnosed yeah it's crazy it's crazy but there are things that you can do and you know I've dedicated my life really to helping people you know separate fact from fiction and and help avert these kinds of conditions and cardiovascular disease because you know that's important when it comes to the brain so anybody that wants to do a deeper dive I've written three books but genius foods is my first book and that's really a it's like a nutritional care manual for the brain so anybody wanting to do a really thorough dive into the mechanics of brain health and how to you know optimize the way that their brains work both for mental health as well as risk minimization for these kinds of conditions great place to start and then I talk a lot about this stuff on my podcast The Genius Life and we just let you on yeah yeah I was just on there I've been on there a few times good time always a good time thanks man thanks man thanks Max appreciate it this one's really important and that is to phase your training if somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw on some supersets at the end of that year you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injuries