 we see that people who drink more coffee have a have a have a degree of protection against Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's disease multiple sclerosis and also cardiovascular disease so this new study gives us a potential mechanism right which i think is which i think is so powerful max welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast great to see you again my friend great to see you this is becoming a regular occurrence i'm very very excited about it so speaking of regular occurrence this is your third book and tell us how to eat like a genius what the heck are genius foods that's a great that's a great starting point so genius foods are foods that are going to give your brain the biggest the most bang for the buck in terms of shielding it against cognitive decline helping it work better in the here and now with regard to your executive function with regard to your brain's processing speed and also with regard to your mental health which is a function of good brain health and i got into this when a couple of years ago my mother showed initial signs of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a rare form of dementia called lewy body dementia which is akin to having both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time i didn't have a medical background but i was a journalist and at that point i became solely focused on investigating why this would have happened to a woman at the age it did my mom was 58 she was very young once you first started to show these symptoms and what i've learned is that dementia often like many chronic non communicable conditions begins decades before the presentation of of said symptoms by the time you show up to your neurologist for example with Parkinson's disease which is a very common movement disorder half of the neurons in the substantia nigra the dopamine producing neurons involved in movement in the region of the brain affected by Parkinson's disease have already perished Alzheimer's disease is another example research shows that by the third decade of life people who are genetically at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease already have begun to show signs in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's disease so for me i became very passionate about the notion of prevention dementia prevention um and i i just went down the rabbit hole to learn everything that i possibly could about the condition and as i would the more i would read certain foods started to stand out to me foods that were that are for example staples in the Mediterranean dietary pattern like extra virgin olive oil like dark leafy greens like grass-fed beef um like wild fatty fish and i started to see that um people who eat these foods more regularly on a on a consistent basis whether or not you have a genetic predisposition to developing Alzheimer's disease you can actually protect yourself by eating these foods on a regular basis i was also really inspired when writing genius foods which was my first book by a study from tufts university that found that people who adhere to the advice that you often hear echoed by the nutritional orthodoxy to just eat all things in moderation that people who do that actually tend to have worse diets and poorer health outcomes they tend to eat more they tend to drink more sugar sweetened beverages they tend to eat more confectionary products more candies and things like that the healthiest people buy a narrower range of more helpful foods and they just they just buy those foods on a loop so with genius foods i tried to come up with the ultimate brain health shopping list if you will and in my new book genius kitchen where really it's where the new the new book is really where the rubber meets the road it's taking those foods and it's turning them into delicious dishes that are easy to prepare using ingredients that are easy to find low cost and eating these kinds of foods these dishes on a regular basis according to the best available evidence really are poised to give your brain the best shot the best possible shot um with regard to your diet um in terms of helping minimize your risk for cognitive decline uh dementia and other age related um neurologic conditions yeah you make several really good points uh i was lecturing at at harvard medical school a few years ago when the when the plant paradox came out and it was to a bunch of neurologists and now i made my pitch that there are certain foods that we should be eating and certain foods we shouldn't be eating and and one guy said stood up and he says well you know don't you think that the advice to eat in moderation is the best advice and i said yeah that's great advice if you want moderate dementia and moderate heart disease and moderate arthritis and i think you're echoing the same thing uh this this idea that eating in moderation is somehow uh an escape clause to eat you know junk every now and then is is just not true all things in moderation right i i even think that um i mean there's we could look at uh something like red wine right which is consistently associated with with better health right like like moderate drinking is associated with better better health but you can't really drive around the fact that ethanol which is the the component of alcohol that gives you the buzz is a neurotoxin right right it's a neurotoxin it's carcinogenic so i think that the reason why moderate drinkers are you know typically have better health is not necessarily because of the alcohol it's in spite of the alcohol but what it does shows that that that that people who are able to drink moderately are able to be moderate and that's something that that i think is is probably a good quality it's it's somebody who's a moderate person is not perhaps a a big risk taker and so that's why you know it's called the healthy user bias but um but with regard to brain health and food 90 percent of what we know about alzheimer's disease which is just the most common form of dementia but it's not the only form of dementia has been discovered in the past 15 years alone so this is a rapidly evolving field of science and the brain for a long time was thought to sit in isolation from the rest of the body and medical doctors dr gundry as you know are are not trained when it comes to nutrition in general so you take a neurologist who who focuses on the brain and um it was it wasn't until very recently that we could even have a conversation about brain health and diet and and now we can which is which is so amazing and i think it really what's so important about it is that it gives us agency for this category of conditions for which there really are no meaningful treatments i mean i saw this firsthand with my mom the drugs that are typically prescribed to treat conditions like alzheimer's disease parkinson's disease louie body dementia they're biochemical band aids they're minimally effective at best particularly with at best with regard to the to the rare forms of dementias and it's why there's this sort of cold joke that um i discovered is is is circulated amongst neurology residents in med school that neurologists don't treat disease they admire it and that to me as the son of somebody who had dementia for many years and really suffered with it that just wasn't good enough and so i've dedicated my life at this point to trying to understand everything there is to know about the about diet lifestyle how it relates to brain health and to spread that message to people of all ages so as you know i'm i'm very interested in the apo e for mutations sometimes called the alzheimer's gene and you know 30 of people actually carry that either one or two mutations hope luckily most people carry one of the mutations but a lot of people go well you know number one i don't want to know if i carry that mutation because there's nothing i can do about it and number two well now that i know i have that mutation there's nothing i can do about it so what say you yeah so that's a great question um so the apo e for allele as you mentioned very common increases one's risk for developing um alzheimer's disease anywhere between two and fourteen fold but it's not a uh determinant gene it's a risk gene so whether or not somebody develops alzheimer's disease is ultimately determined by their environment the dance that their environment plays with that genetic risk factor you can look to other parts of the world where the apo e for allele is just as prevalent and um and popular and the apo e for carrying population has little to no uh risk of developing dementia there correct what that suggests is you might be genetically at risk for alzheimer's disease in the united states and then move to a less industrialized part of the world like an ebadan uh nigeria for example and see that risk completely abolished so again it's not a determinant gene um a very small percentage of patients with alzheimer's disease carry uh one type of a determinant gene called um early onset familial alzheimer's disease but that's very rare that makes up two to three percent of alzheimer's cases that the vast majority will develop late onset sporadic alzheimer's disease and for that condition yes we absolutely do have a say um i think that uh and and and also it's worth mentioning that there are genes that people have that have yet to be discovered that might cancel out the impact of the apo e for allele this is called polygenic risk so you know you have a you have a smorgasbord of genes baked into every cell in your body and yes the apo e for allele um exists it's the most well defined alzheimer's risk gene but it's not the only alzheimer's risk gene and there are genes that are that that that substantially modulate the impact that the apo e for allele has on your health with regard to the apo e for allele i think that one of the the major issues that it seems to cause is that it puts us at risk for vascular dysfunction um and one one of the purported mechanisms by which it increases our risk is by putting carriers at risk for um hyperlipidemia so like hypercholesterolemia for example um i actually think that this is uh this is a great insight um if it holds true because we know way we have ways of of ensuring that people that carry this gene um are able our their bodies are better able to manage lipids dietary fiber for example helps to improve the liver's ability to recycle LDL cholesterol we were talking um dr gundry when you were on my podcast recently about how they found that coffee has an ingredient in it has a has a compound in it called caffeine which actually acts like a natural pcs k9 inhibitor pcs k9 inhibitors there's a new class of cholesterol lowering drug on the market called pcs k9 inhibitors that basically the the way in which they reduce cholesterol in the blood is not by stopping your liver's synthesis of cholesterol which is actually we we need cholesterol cholesterol is a vital life-giving nutrient right found in in every cell membrane and that's the way that statins work statins block the liver stop the liver from producing cholesterol but these this new class of drugs i think is actually can be quite helpful in the sense that they improve the the efficiency and the efficacy of your liver at plucking up these remnant LDL particles from your blood right and how amazing is it that coffee that green tea that dark chocolate all have this natural compound in it called caffeine which acts like a natural pcs k9 inhibitor yeah and as you and i know there are multiple studies looking at the benefits of drinking like up to five cups of coffee a day in in brain health and protecting your brain so yeah it's so true i mean coffee is a great source of and it's it's the primary source unfortunately for most americans of polyphenols which you talk about all the time we know that polyphenols support gut health we know that they act as a as a prebiotic source for the colonic microbiota to ferment and churn out postbiotics which can be very helpful from the standpoint of modulating inflammation in the body and yes observationally we see that people who drink more coffee have a have a have a degree of protection against alzheimer's disease parkinson's disease multiple sclerosis and also cardiovascular disease so this new study gives us a potential mechanism right which i think is which i think is so powerful yeah the the exciting thing particularly about the microbiome is that really every day we find a reason why genius foods are having a genius effect and a lot of it is modulated by the microbiome and you know and you go you spend a lot of time in the book you know talking about you know how important that these genius foods are for our gut bacteria to actually benefit directly and make all these other products that are really going to manifest in in better brain health and and in better better mood better mental health and you know i applaud you for pointing out in the book that this isn't just about your thinking process uh and how your brain processes information it's about literally how your brain emotional processes work um you want to spend a little time talking about that was that was that was that a surprise to you i know you came at this to prevent uh you know brain decline but um go ahead yeah no that's a great that's a great question um actually yeah it was a surprise and it was a major motivating factor to to write my books because i started out really passionate about dementia prevention right um and i i realized that dementia begins in the brain often decades before the first symptom so this was a topic that i felt people of all ages needed to be thinking about their brain health right and the choices that they make day to day and how those choices can inform the way that their brains work but i was i there was a point at which i felt i was there was a i had reached a uh a conundrum because i knew being a younger person that young people didn't care about dementia right so i knew that if i wrote the dementia prevention book that i wasn't actually going to move the needle on this condition that i wasn't actually going to further my goal of actually helping people prevent their own dementia because young younger people weren't going to buy it if i wrote the dementia prevention book so i kept researching i kept researching and i and i stayed open-minded and i stumbled upon this burgeoning field of psychiatry being called nutritional psychiatry and nutritional psychiatry we're just really at the tip of the iceberg but we are seeing now thanks to a slew of randomized control trials that have come out the kinds of trials required to prove cause and effect that have used food as an intervention with major mood disorders i mean imagine that for decades you'd go to your psychiatrist and you'd present with a dour mood and they they write a prescription for a pharmaceutical monotherapy right a drug that you would take that would attempt to modulate levels of a certain neurotransmitter in your brain but now thanks to places like deacon university the food and mood center there led by um felice jacka who's a wonderful phd who's spearheading a lot of this work we see that a dietary pattern akin to the kind of diet that i describe in genius foods and in genius kitchen can actually significantly reduce symptoms of depression even in people with major depression to the point of remission where as the control group that received standard of care didn't have such success so when i stumbled upon that kind of of work i was like okay this is my trojan horse this is something that everybody wants everybody wants a better performing brain everybody wants a brain that works as well as it ought to not as not merely as well as we've come to uh accept right but a brain that really lives up to our birthright and so i started to go down that rabbit rabbit hole and i realized that the same compounds that are present in these foods that support optimal brain health also support good mental health whether it's zinc vitamin b12 preformed omega three fatty acids creatine which is uh uh uh uh a carnit nutrient found naturally in fish and beef supports brain energy metabolism so for people who feel like they don't have enough energy um throughout the day it could be due to the fact that they're just not getting enough of this nutrient in in their food um a wonderful source of dietary protein you know our brain thrives when our body moves and protein is uh i know you talk a lot about protein in the context of longevity but from the standpoint of mobility of muscle health um having high quality protein in your diet is really quite important um and so and and also with in light of all of the research showing just how important exercise is from the standpoint of mental health right like mental exercise is now medicine for the brain we can say that with certainty with regard to our mental health we can say that with certainty with regard to our predisposition to cognitive decline exercise can now significantly help prevent a condition called mild cognitive impairment which is pre dementia um it also is as effective as drugs at reducing blood pressure one of the pivotal studies in the field of dementia prevention um a seminal study that was published recently was called the sprint mind trial that found that for people that were um at risk for developing mild cognitive impairment and who had hypertension when pharmacologically treated for their hypertension they saw a significant risk reduction for the development of mild cognitive impairment which again is pre dementia so people who had high blood pressure we know that high blood pressure is a risk factor for dementia when treated with a pharmaceutical agent they slashed their risk for developing cognitive impairment we now know that exercise is just as effective at at reducing high blood pressure and without any negative side effects okay so so we know we know all this but you make a really good point in genius kitchen that food companies number one know this as well but they don't want you to know this and so what's in it what's in it for them why are we so tempted by all these wonderful foods that are killing us oh man well it's about the bottom line food companies love having repeat customers and they know that one of the best ways to earn the loyalty of a consumer is to is to blow their minds with hyper palatable ultra processed foods that's literally what ultra processed foods typically found within the aisles of most major modern supermarkets do they push your brain to a literal bliss point beyond which self control becomes futile because these foods light up reward centers in our brain that um that really make it difficult if not impossible to to stop eating once once you've once you've dug in to the pint of ice cream or you've had maybe a handful of those tortilla chips we tend to think of it as a moral failure when we're unable to moderate our consumption of these foods but the reality is that these foods are very hard um to to to moderate and that's because willpower is a finite resource and these foods hijack um any semblance of willpower that we may have there was a study that that was published in 2018 funded by the national institutes of health that found that when people eat these kinds of ultra processed foods so packaged shelf stable foods frozen dinners fried foods um commercial bread products that when eating to satiety in the scientific literature the term is ad libitum feeding people end up eating a calorie surplus of about 500 calories if you eat 500 if you're in a calorie surplus and you eat 500 more calories and your body burns every day for a week that's a pound of fat gain that's a pound of fat stored every single week that adds up to a spare tire really quickly conversely what this what the researchers in this study found was that when they gave the same subjects access access to minimally processed foods the kinds of food that you the food the type of dishes that you would cook for yourself for example they came in at an effortless calorie deficit when eating to the same degree of satiety they were just as full they were just as satisfied by their food but they ended up at a calorie deficit of about 300 calories so right there that's an 800 calorie swing right 800 calories that's a lot of calories that's an 800 calorie swing determined purely by the quality of the food that you're eating many people who are overweight who struggle with their weight who feel that sense of moral failure over and over again because they can't stick to whatever diet it is that they're on and they get told by their doctors by their nutritionists just eat less move more over and over and over again that sense of failure that deficit of willpower right that's because they're putting the cart before the horse they're trying to moderate how much they are consuming of the foods that they were eating that got them into that overweight state in the first place but the real insight from this study is the quality of the food that you're eating dictates the quantity of the food that you're going to eat and so that's something that food manufacturers don't want you to know right because because the the the the the perspective of a food manufacturer is all foods fit it's not our problem that you're overweight you just ate too much of what it is that we're putting out of what we're manufacturing you just ate too much it's your fault it's your lack of willpower all you got to do is eat less and all of your problems will be solved but their foods are not designed to be moderated they're designed to create repeat customers are designed so that you eat more of them and so that's why I think those are the first foods that people ought to cut out especially when on a weight loss journey but also for good health we know that the consumption of ultra processed foods in fact every every 10 percent increase in ultra processed food consumption is associated with a 14 percent increase risk of early mortality so these foods are literally killing us and and a little it's it's the dose makes the poison to some degree obviously which which um which that that study has shown but uh but the the best you can do at minimizing your consumption of those foods the better off you'll be and again the healthiest people buy a narrower range of good for you foods and they buy those foods on loop so we I think most people maybe by now are are figuring out that a lot of these things are not good for us and yet the addictive quality of these foods makes it really hard to give it up or wean yourself off of it and you spend a great deal of time in the book giving us hacks of okay you know instead of a highly processed grain product for munching on take us through a few steps to wean ourselves off of this stuff we love you you bring up macaroni and cheese for instance that you know the ultimate comfort food and you've got a great recipe for macaroni and cheese that uses carrot noodles in in the new book so yeah help help us out here because you and I are obviously on the same page here yeah that's what actually one of my favorite recipes it's funny that you brought it up it's a it's a vegan so my book my cookbook is not a vegan cookbook but it's a this dish is a vegan so it's it's a dairy-free mac and cheese using carrot noodles so it's gluten-free dairy-free it is so indulgent and tasty and I think that's one of the great things about knowing how to cook about culinary literacy and unfortunately culinary literacy has been outsourced right we've outsourced so many so many aspects of what it means to be a self-sufficient human these days because we live in the era of specialization right we outsource our health literacy we outsource financial literacy and culinary literacy we outsource too when we go to restaurants and when we order food on our food apps it's become so easy to order a meal comprised of comfort food and have it show up on our doorsteps moments later but by learning how to cook and this doesn't have to be difficult you can make some of your favorite comfort foods and have them actually provide an additive benefit to your health as opposed to taking away your health right like you can actually make fries super healthy because potatoes are actually a fairly nutrient dense food right purple potatoes are a staple in okinawa which is one of the world's blue zones I know you you you talk about blue zones all the time right you can make uh fries with purple sweet potatoes and and and bake them and they come out delicious you can use extra virgin olive oil if you want to add a little bit of fat to it really really increase the the indulgence factor but my vegan carrot noodle mac and cheese is so tasty and really I mean that's a recipe like many others that I include in genius kitchen to show people that you can have foods that are indulgent that taste delicious but that aren't going to hijack your brain's reward centers and be so easy to over consume that you end up putting on uh unintentional weight as a result that's not what this is about genius foods genius meals to me are foods that that satiate your body in a way that processed junk just can't rich in in components like fiber which we know mechanically stretches out the stomach makes you feel really full protein which is the most satiating macronutrient fat which helps slow digestion of food right so anytime you add fat to a to a dish you're slowing digestion you're maintaining that that um that feeling of satiety you know if you fill yourself up on low fat foods you might feel full um in the moment but you're going to feel really hungry pretty soon after and that's because low fat foods digest so rapidly fat slows down what's called gastric emptying so whenever you add fat to something it um it slows down the rate of absorption and it makes you stay full longer um it's one of the reasons why I add now heavy cream to my coffee I used to drink my coffee black sometimes I still do enjoy black um but when I add heavy cream to it um on a on an empty stomach it slows the infusion of caffeine it makes me feel a lot better it makes me feel a lot less jittery than when I just drink it black which for many years I was doing so knowing how food affects your hunger your behavior I think it's all part of the process of learning how to better nourish and satiate your body um and minimize your risk for unintentional unintentional weight gain um today but chronic disease in the future as well a point you mentioned early on that I want to come back to um we now know that you know signs of brain damage Alzheimer's uh are occurring 20 maybe 30 years before the actual outward signs appear and I think that's it's really important for realizing okay you know I'm in my 30s or I just turned 40 eh I don't really have to worry about it because I don't really care what's going to happen you know when I'm retired and I can sit in my easy chair but these are these are steps that every one of us regardless of our age needs to take you know when I was a pediatric heart surgeon I could actually see in the blood vessels of children and teenagers that I operated on already plaques on the inside of their blood vessels um the Vietnam war where a lot of our guys came came home in body bags these guys in you know late teenage years early 20s had plaques in their aorta in their coronary arteries and you know as as young people so you're right it's it's never too early to start making these changes no I mean unfortunately we're seeing hypertension increase in prevalence in children and adolescents we know that hypertension damages the blood vessels that go up to your that feed your brain blood oxygen antioxidants building block nutrients today at least one in seven adults has a memory complaint has some form of subjective cognitive impairment one in six adults is on some kind of psychiatric drug generally that number shoots up to one in four for women over the age of 40 which is heartbreaking to say the least I mean before my mom had a diagnosis of of dementia one of her physicians a psychiatrist actually thought that all of her symptoms were due to depression which is really quite sad when you think about it the the willingness to just chalk up the symptoms that we're having to to depression right especially in in women now there are some kinds of dementia that symptoms that may look like dementia when somebody is clinically depressed it's called a pseudo dementia but um but yeah people are not generally happy with the with the way that their brains are working and rates of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease are increasing and as you mentioned they begin in the brain far earlier than the presentation of symptoms and this isn't just a question of diet it's a question of our lifestyles we are more sedentary than we've ever been before we also live in environments that are increasingly polluted there are a number of studies that are coming out about from very polluted parts of the world that are showing us that air pollution with in particular fine particulate matter PM 2.5 actually can pierce the blood brain barrier and can instigate pathology that's really similar to Alzheimer's disease pathology but decades before Alzheimer's disease would typically emerge in the brain so there are all these different factors but I think food is something it's such a it's such a potent leverage point because we all eat at least three times a day we know you eat once a day Dr. Gundry but but most of us eat two three times a day and snack in between so with every bite you take that's a choice that you make for your for for your cognitive destiny and um and again it's it's that leverage point and one of the reasons why I wrote genius kitchen is because beyond um conversations about protein fat fiber one of the most powerful leverage points that a person has is just cooking at home more learning how to cook at home more when you can make the same dish at home that you would get out at a restaurant and it's going to have fewer fat calories fewer calories overall less sodium and and also improve the dynamics of your family while you're at it cooking at home with family members loved ones it's one of the best ways to bolster relationships to bond to communicate to express love and these all play a role in living a genius life in in helping to kick the can down the road with regard to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia right social connection plays such a huge role and there's no better way to um to to show love to somebody than by cooking and sharing a meal with them so uh and actually one of the unique features of the blue zones is this family food connection um and so met so much of the Mediterranean diet you know the meal may last two hours um you know at at least not some grab fast you know let's wolf this down and go on to the next activity but you you spend a lot of time in the book and in congratulation on how do you learn to cook I mean it is really a lost art I mean where where do you start uh you you you break down the genius pantry come on how do we start get give us some give us some hints I I know nothing about a kitchen that's not true folks yeah no it's a it's a it's a great question it can be intimidating to the uninitiated but I think you have to you have to draw inspiration from parts of the world like the Mediterranean region where they prioritize quality of ingredients over quantity of ingredients so by stocking your kitchen with just a small handful of essentials you can do so much having a good extra virgin olive oil some really high quality salt now if you're like me you have three different kinds of salt in your kitchen you've got your fine salt you've got your coarse salt and you've got your flake salt I actually recommend having all three types of salt because salt generally is very inexpensive but it's one of the best ways to elevate your cooking to restaurant quality I love cooking for example a steak or a piece of fish or even roast up some vegetables and finishing whatever it is that I'm making with some flake salt they do this in high-end steak houses it's a very inexpensive way to really elevate the quality of your cooking and the experience of eating with a with a high quality salt pepper garlic powder I mean these are just the bare essentials and you can do so much I mean you can make vegetables delicious with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil garlic salt pepper I think that one of the the biggest areas where people mess up with regard to home cooking is that they just don't season their food well if you ask any professional chef what home chefs do wrong they don't they under salt their food salt is crucially important it lights up reward centers in our brain because salt for the vast majority of our evolution was actually a new provided a nutrient that was very hard to come by right sodium sodium is actually a macro mineral which means that for good health you need to consume a relatively large amount of it every day and once you cut out the ultra processed packaged foods the question then becomes well where are you getting your sodium from because dr. gundry it's only 11 percent of the sodium that americans ingest every day that come from their own salt shakers and from the salt that they add to their own recipes the vast majority of sodium that your average american ingests comes from ultra processed foods shelf stable canned foods fast food and restaurant food that's it that's where that that's where that all of that sodium comes from but once you cut those foods out to feel good you need to you need to bring salt back to the table I find it very ironic that most registered dietitians will say if if they for whatever reason are advising you to cut down on your sodium intake they'll say stop adding salt to your food when the irony is that the number one source of sodium in the american diet it isn't processed meat it isn't canned foods it's bread and rolls but when was the last time you heard a registered dietitian tell you to avoid bread and rolls no they tell you to stop salting your food making your life miserable the life of your kids miserable probably if you have them because some of the healthiest foods in the supermarket produce right brussel sprouts broccoli cauliflower simply aren't palatable without adding a little bit of salt so knowing how to salt your food to me that's I mean that is like that's the base of the culinary food pyramid knowing how to season your food well well I'm going to keep pressing you where where do you start I mean do you start cooking some eggs and working on the seasonings you've got some cool egg recipes with broccoli in your book I mean just how do I how do I start I want my bowl of cereal every morning max I have to I have to have my bowl of cereal which probably has folks I did this for a patient a couple weeks ago his bowl of rice checks had 14 teaspoons of sugar that was hidden on the label and he thought he was eating a low sugar food and he was shocked so yeah how do we start how do you start well I think that one one useful tip is that you should taste your food as you go provided that it's that it's safe to do so but there are no points to be won for not tasting until you finish the dish sometimes people feel that it's that it's more indicative of a skilled chef to not have to taste their food but tasting as you go is a really great way to see how textures and flavors develop over time over the course of the cooking process and cooking low and slow is something that is also really important getting getting acquainted with lower cooking temperatures and spending more time in the cooking process getting rid of the cereal for example and and bringing eggs back to the breakfast table is crucially important eggs I actually have coined the term cognitive multivitamin to describe eggs egg yolks contain literally everything that nature a little bit of everything that nature has deemed important to grow and sustain a healthy brain it's no wonder that egg yolks are rich in cholesterol because the brain is rich in cholesterol you don't need to eat cholesterol to support brain health but typically where you find dietary cholesterol you find nutrients that that are good for the brain and the egg is the perfect illustration of that it's got a little bit of vitamin b12 omega 3 fatty acids and to cook a scramble well most people they make scrambles admittedly people tend to make breakfast when they're in a rush but the best scramble is going to come when you put the heat on as low a setting as possible and you constantly stir it low and slow a good scramble should take 10 minutes to cook you're going to end up with eggs so good you've I mean you've never had them as good as as you will if you if you try cooking them low and slow as opposed to overcooking which most people do when they make a scramble the danger with overcooking eggs it's not just a culinary concern you're potentially damaging the delicate fats and the cholesterol content of those eggs you're causing oxidation of the delicate fats and the cholesterol that egg yolks contain for me I love to make a scramble on very low heat constantly stirring and and doing that until they'll just before the eggs get to a consistency that I like because the eggs will continue to firm up after you take them off the heat so you want to stir them until just before your desired consistency you take it off the heat and you plate the eggs and they'll continue to firm up they'll continue to cook so that's that's crucially important the same way that you take a steak off the grill just before it gets to your desired temperature because it continues the core it continues to heat up so too with eggs you want to take them off the heat just before and they come out delicious Dr. Gondry and then you finish them with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil which we know is medicine for the brain you throw on a little bit of flake salt maybe nutritional yeast which is a rich source of b vitamins a food stable that I happen to love and you've got yourself a killer dish that would rival the any any restaurant's egg dish I love your description of slow you know slow cooking in regards to a chicken leg you make the point that one of the benefits of slow cooking is breaking down a basically inedible substance collagen in all these tendons in like a chicken leg and you vividly describe biting into a kind of not well cooked chicken leg and you go oh yeah this doesn't taste good but at the same time if you spend some time slow cooking that chicken leg like most traditional cultures have learned you you break down all that collagen into a succulent easily absorbable food oh absolutely I mean this is another area where most people screw up in the kitchen they cook these kinds of parts of the animal too fast not allowing the collagen that they contain to break down and form gelatin which is that that super delicious butter soft component that occurs when you cook collagen low and slow joints like the chicken drumstick chicken thigh have four times the the collagen content of chicken of chicken breast meat for example white meat yeah and anybody who's ever been and I get I even in restaurants like I'm shocked when I when I bite into a chicken leg in a drumstick in a restaurant and it's undercooked because you get those you get all those tendons that are just gross I'm sorry but like if you're not cooking a chicken leg low and slow you can a chicken leg cook low and slow the meat is fall off the bone there's not there's almost not a single component to the chicken leg that isn't delicious right when you cook it low and slow and I think that's I mean that it's it's so crucially important and I'll add that for people that are on low income that have tight budgets with with regard to cooking cooking your meats low and slow is another is a fantastic way to economize because you can buy whole chickens and by cooking low and slow you turn those parts of the chicken drumsticks chicken thighs what have you into amazing foods and it's also a way to buy to economize with regard to um red meat because you can buy cheaper cuts if you can't afford the most pristine beef tenderloin grass-fed rib eyes that that that you'd like to well guess what you can buy cheaper cuts and all you got to do is cook them low and slow and it becomes this pull apart fall off the bone I mean that's how brisket is made right brisket is made by cooking beef it's a it's typically a very tough meat yeah but the the beauty of well-cooked brisket it's been cooked low and slow all the collagen melts down it breaks apart the proteins and it becomes butter soft I've got a number of recipes um that actually use those cheaper cuts of meat in in my book genius kitchen it's it's so important ribs for example um I don't know dr. country where you stand on on ribs but I happen to love a good rack of organic baby back baby back ribs ribs and you can make the most amazing ribs in your in your home in your oven you don't need to go to a fancy barbecue restaurant never pay for them you can you can make them all it takes is a little bit of time in genius kitchen I have the best rib rub dry rib rub you've ever had in your life no added sugar no you know calorie dense sauce required just use this rub you throw them on a rack of ribs you put them in your oven low and slow for three and a half four or five hours I mean the longer the better and it breaks down again the collagen the connective tissue and it makes the ribs fall off the bone it's just it's so great and knowing how to cook like that um it's just uh it's so empowering and it's such a crowd pleaser as well because again these are foods as as you you know with regard to one of your questions earlier dr. gondry these are foods that we typically think of as as being junk foods right like going to a a barbecue restaurant and and indulging but you can actually make all these same foods with just a few minor tweaks and make them actually quite healthy and just as delicious if not more so yeah the um it's interesting that you know traditional cultures cultures that are doing you know doing very well from a brain health standpoint they've been experts at long slow cooking for generations because they're poor and they have to get something you know out of these horrible you know cuts of whatever animal they're eating and it's you know the slow cooking process that's so important the other thing i'm going to have to let you go but i think i'm going to tell you audience particularly ladies listening or watching you're you're obsessed with collagen you've got your collagen smoothies your collagen drinks your collagen bars and what you hear heard here is your boneless skinless chicken breasts is a horrible source of collagen compared to a thigh or a leg uh you know four times as much right four times much yeah so and so get get the dark meat get rid of the white chicken breast which really is not nature's energy powerhouse for your brain quite frankly uh yeah so that's a great take home message and thanks you know thanks for sharing that i hope you enjoyed this episode of the dr gundry podcast make sure to check out the next one here two-thirds of all Alzheimer's patients are women which means that for every man suffering from Alzheimer's there are two women and that is something we just don't talk about