 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. It's an exciting day today. You know, the world has changed a bit since our days as hunter-gatherers and it's left our brains in a state of despair. And you might be feeling that today, so please stay tuned. You know, according to the World Health Assembly, the burden of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions is on the rise. No joke. The good news is we can turn things around. In a moment, I'm going to speak with the renowned health journalist, podcaster, and New York Times best-selling author, Max Luccavair, who I consider a colleague and friend. In his latest book, The Genius Life, Max says that we can heal our bodies and brains by changing our lifestyle, improving our cognitive function and emotional wellness as a result. Today we're going to discuss how. Max, welcome back to the Dr. Gundry podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's always a treat to get to talk to you. I've learned a lot from you over the years and I value our friendship, so thanks for having me. You have been an outspoken health and wellness advocate actually for years now. I know, but tell our listeners how you got into this line of work. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I began as a generalist, journalist. That's a bit of a mouthful. I consider myself having been a bit of a stem cell in my previous line of work in that I was undifferentiated. I used to work for Al Gore who had a TV network called Current TV. It was not a political network, but I was there as an investigator to tell stories and convey stories that were not being told and to do so in a way that was engaging for younger people. I could draw younger people into the worlds of geopolitics, of technology, of the environment and science and things like that. Climate change. That was a small part of it, actually. I did that for six years and it was a great opportunity to cut my teeth as a storyteller, as an investigator, and that was my first job out of college. Then when I left that to try to figure out where I was going to go with my career, it was then in my personal life that my mother got sick. As anybody who's ever had a loved one get sick knows that once you get that first diagnosis, the world stops. That is indeed what happened to me. It was at the Cleveland Clinic in 2011 that my mother at the age of 58, very young, was diagnosed for the first time with a neurodegenerative condition. It was a rare form of dementia called Lewy Body Dementia, which I'm sure you're familiar with. It was sort of in the zeitgeist a couple of years ago when it was revealed that that's what Robin Williams was diagnosed with just prior to his unfortunate suicide. For those who have never heard of Lewy Body Dementia, it's essentially like having Alzheimer's disease in Parkinson's disease at the same time. That's what my mom had. It was awful. It was traumatic. At that time, when the initial trauma subsided, I decided to use every tool within my toolkit to try to understand why this would have happened to a woman that was so young. I had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease. It sent me down the rabbit hole to try to discover what it was about my mom's diet and lifestyle and the environment around her over the years that would have predisposed her to developing that condition. It was kind of sad and ironic that at the same time that my mom was succumbing to this condition, my mother's mother, my maternal grandmother, was actually 96 and she was cognitively healthy. She was actually in relatively good physical health. And so, what the heck? It caused me to have this hypothesis that I've explored in all my work since then that something had to have mutated in between my grandmother's generation and my mother's generation to the degree that something in my mom's environment, whether it's the food, whether it's industrial chemicals that were all routinely exposed to, whether it was her lifestyle, something pulled the trigger on her having developed this condition. And, you know, she passed away about a year ago, a little over a year ago, and that was the worst experience I'd ever gone through. And it motivates me to this day and that's what The Genius Life is really all about. It's a book in which I look at all of the different aspects of our modern lives and what in each area might be tweaked so that we might feel better and have better health, both in the short term as well as in the long term. So, how do you go about researching something like this? I know, you know, your first book, The Genius Foods, is done very well. And so, where do you go from there? You obviously said it's probably more than food. Yeah. Yeah, well said. I mean, I think food is a huge part of the equation and it's something that people feel very emotionally invested in because our diets in a way become a part of our identity. You know, it's very funny, actually, when you look at people's social media profiles, they're very often inclined to put their diets in their bios, in their social media profiles. Why do people do that? Because we tend to feel so strongly about our diets because everybody eats, right? And what we eat is so ingrained in our sense of self. And once we have that diet, you know, when we find a diet that works for us, what do we want to do? Well, we want to evangelize it. We want to become proselytists for our diet. So that's why I think diet gets most of the attention. But actually, diet is just one part of the pie. There are so many other aspects of the way that we live that are important when it comes to feeling good, having lots of energy, having a brain that works as well as it ought to, not just as well as we've accepted it to. And of course, procuring our long term health. And so, every topic that I cover in my book, The Genius Life, is certainly deserving of its own book. So I try to basically look at all of the breadth of research that's out there in regard to nature immersion. So our relationship with the outdoors, you know, with the external world, our relationship with light, our relationship with time, so many of these aspects have basically become deranged and decoupled from our biology. And so that's really where I began. I began looking at, I began with nutrition because I've had a sort of lifelong passion for nutrition and that's where my sort of bias was initially. But, you know, there were other aspects of my mom's life that I think were probably not helping all that much in terms of her health. I mean, my mom, and not to put any blame on her or anything like that, I mean, you know, science is evolving and we know things now that we didn't know five years ago, 10 years ago, and certainly not 30 years ago. But she, you know, was never, she never really exercised until her later years. And we now know that exercise is crucial in so many ways. It's one of the most powerful, actually disease modifying interventions that we have for a condition called mild cognitive impairment, which is like a form of pre-dementia. It is super important for mental health. I mean, there's now, you know, we're now at a point where we have, in recent years, a number of meta-analyses published showing us that whether you are anxious or depressed, exercise has a disease modifying role to play in terms of your mental health, which is a major problem. I mean, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide now, or it's set to be. And so that's something that, when I look at previous generations and the fact that leisure time physical activity was not part of the, you know, ingrained in the constitution of previous generations, the way that it is now, you know, it makes me kind of sad. And then you read statistics like that the fact that today a third of people do not engage, still do not engage in any leisure time physical activity. And it's a major problem. I mean, you look around and people are not well, you know, half of adults are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. Two thirds of adults are either overweight or obese, which we know, you know, infers problems on multiple organ systems in the body, not least of which the brain. And so exercise is a big part of the problem. The environmental working group estimates that your average adult now spends 93% of their time indoors, either in their cars or in their homes. So what about our indoor environments? Are we getting what our biology needs from our indoor environment? Are we getting exposure to healthy full spectrum light? Certainly not. When you realize how widespread and pervasive circadian disruption is. So our bodies, you know, function on this 24 hour clock. And we need the light to help anchor our bodies internal clocks, which affects everything from how well we digest food to our energy levels to our mental acuity and alertness. So I know this sounds like a lot. But I've looked at all of these different, these different realms, and I've tried to sort of distill them and synthesize them in a way that's accessible and approachable for readers in the book to help them arrive at some sense of how they might live for better, for better health. So you are, you know, you're obviously interested in, you know, emotional aspects of anxiety and depression. What do you think in the modern world are the biggest triggers for that now? Why? How is it different now? Yeah, I think that's such a good question. The triggers are I mean, they're everywhere. I think, you know, part of it has to do with the fact that we do spend so much of our time indoors and just getting outside into nature is such a salve for the soul. I mean, research out of Japan is now, and it's this research is incredible, increasingly being done around the world, but they're looking at a form of therapy called forest bathing, where they find that the minimal effective dose is just 20 minutes, just a 20 minute immersion into a natural environment as opposed to an urban environment can have a significant effect on levels of cortisol in the body that they, you know, that they were able to ascertain via a salivary test. So that's crucial. I mean, we know that stress is related to cardiovascular disease. I mean, you know better than than anybody, but it's also related to worse brain health. It's obviously has an impact on mental health. Chronic stress also affects your blood pressure in a negative way. And one of the things that I look in the book that I examine in the book is the role of healthy blood pressure on brain function. And actually, having healthy blood pressure is essential for having a healthy brain. There was this great trial that I talk about. We're getting a little bit off the topic of mental health, but the sprint mind trial, which was recently published that found that when people were being with high blood pressure, were being treated for that with a pharmaceutical to a more aggressive degree than what they would have normally been, you know, treated at to reach an even lower systolic blood pressure, but still within the healthy range, obviously, they were significantly able to avert developing mild cognitive impairment. So I mean, we have no there's no pharmaceutical drug on the market, specifically FDA approved to prevent MCI. So yeah, get you know, being getting out into nature, I think it's a great way to boost your mental health as well as, you know, your brain health as well. I think well, wait a minute, I'm from the northern Midwest originally, are you are you going to tell me that when it's 10 degrees below zero, and there's a foot of snow out, and I need to go get my 20 minutes for mental health to go outside? I think it's probably still worthwhile to be to be outside. I am, you know, it's really funny. I so I have a podcast. Also, it's also called the genius life. And on it, I interviewed a brilliant neuroscientist from Stanford named Andrew Huberman. And he was telling me that literally this is something that his lab studies. And so, you know, he was sharing this information with me. And I haven't read, you know, what he's published on it necessarily. But just by by loosening your gaze to a more panoramic vision, you can have an effect on your body's nervous system. You can actually engage your body's parasympathetic nervous response, which is more associated with like resting and digesting and basically being being not stressed out. And so that's easy to do when you're outside, right? When you when you perceive the perceptual vastness of an outdoor weather, whether it's snowing or whether you're on a you know, on a mountaintop in the summer, it doesn't make a difference. But staying within the confines of our apartments, of our cars, of our offices, and keeping our our eyes focused on what's immediately in front of us. I mean, that's a new axis through which we might be, you know, getting getting stressed out. There's also, you know, noise exposure, you know, in the indoor environment can sometimes be noisy, whether we have the TV on or stereos or we're dealing with screaming children. I don't have to deal with that yet, thankfully. But yeah, getting outside and experiencing peace and calmness and allowing your gaze to broaden out to that to that panoramic vision, those could all be beneficial on your on your mental health, no matter what time of year it is. Yeah, as a kid, again, we would be out in sub-freezing temperatures, bundled up, playing all day, and we actually had like three changes of mittens and gloves because they get soaking wet in the snow, and we come in and we change our genes because they get soaking wet, and then we'd run back out. And, you know, maybe we weren't that dumb after all, and you know, our mothers and fathers are like, you're gonna freeze to death. We're gonna play. We have to understand that kids instinctively understand that. It's like our dogs, you know, come on, you know, let's get out. My dogs look at me twice a day and say, come on, more on, let's go. And it's like, what do you mean let's go? It's time for your walk. And I think we have to get, understand that kids and dogs understand this instinctively, that we got to be out there. That's where we came from. Yeah. Right? And I think that's what you say. Right, exactly. You're, you made me, I mean, there's so many things that I want to like that that you reminded me to bring up. I mean, when you look at a kid, first of all, I mean, the whole movement pattern, all the movement patterns of a child and the way that children breathe are so much healthier than the way that we do now. You know, I'm into vocal health, actually. It's something that I think is really important. And so, you want to be able to like breathe with your diaphragm. It's a lot easier to teach a kid to sing because they know how to naturally breathe than it is to teach an adult because we tend to breathe with our chests, you know, when you really want to practice breathing with your diaphragm. They also, if you ever watch a child squat, they squat and lift things off the floor with perfect form. So, you're right, there's a lot to be learned from our children. But you also made me think about the fact that going outside in the cold, I mean, that might have completely, that might have mental health benefits completely independent of, you know, the fact that it's a more natural environment than our indoor environment. Our bodies have these hardwired, you know, thermoregulatory mechanisms that basically gather dust when we spend the entirety of our time inside and under the, under the, you know, in the comfort bubble of chronic climate control, which is what I like to call it. Which is what I like to call it. But just going outside, experiencing cooler temperatures, even mild ambient cool temperature can actually boost mental acuity, brain health and things like that. There have been a number of interesting case reports published about people actually self-treating their own depression with like cold water swimming, so winter swimming, cryotherapy and things like that. And the beautiful thing about these is whether or not they actually work for you, there really are no negative side effects. Correct. So, yeah, I'm all about that more natural, you know, embrace of whether it's variation in temperature or just, you know, getting out of your comfort zone or just, you know, being outside no matter what time of year it is. Speaking of indoor air, it's some of the worst air in the world, my wife's mother always forced them to sleep with the window open and she grew up in Connecticut where it's pretty cold in the winter and my mother always cracked a window even in the dead of winter in Omaha and Milwaukee and we still do that actually now. I curse my wife when the heat comes on, but what about opening a window or unleashing the seals of our hermetically sealed houses every now and then? That's such a good question. You know, actually something that I talk about in a book is a real medical diagnosis. It's called sick building syndrome. So a lot of people that have unexplained symptoms and they go to the doctor and the doctor sends you home and says, you look, you're fine. You know, a lot of people can actually be suffering from the confluence of pollutants that we're actually exposed to indoors, which is counterintuitive because we tend to think of pollutants being primarily outdoors, you know, on the street, for example, or in our in our places of employee. But yeah, the home is can can actually be vastly more polluted than the outdoor environment. And that's because a lot of our, whether it's our furniture or our carpets or the paint used to, you know, to coat the walls in our homes can actually be packed with pollutants ranging from plastic compounds like BPA to phthalates, which are used to create, you know, our furniture and even in fragrances that you'll find in common household cleaning products. What about the new car smell? I love the new car smell. Yeah, I mean, that new car smell is owed to a process called offgassing. And so we're inhaling all kinds of compounds from and I couldn't possibly name them all but formaldehyde and things like that, that you definitely don't want in your system to any significant degree. We have flame retardants in our furniture, flame retardants are also used to, you know, in children's clothing and pajamas and things like that and mattresses and the like. And we, you know, originally we thought that these compounds were inert, but actually we know that they're able to enter the environment, they're able to enter the air, they're able to form the dust in our homes. So if you, you know, I think it's really smart for a homeowner to have, to wet dust frequently. So if you're using like one of those dry dusters, like a feather duster, you want to get rid of that because what you're doing is essentially you're just redistributing dust and the primary components of dust, aside from dead skin cells, are these compounds, like little plastic nanoparticles that slough off from our furniture, from our carpets, and we breathe them in, they get into us. And so you want to wet dust so that it actually grabs up the dust and then you want to throw that out, the cloth. It's a, I think having plants in the home, also really essential, plants actually can help clean the air. And I talk about some of the plants that are most effective at doing that in the genius life. And yeah, so what if you don't have a green thumb, what if you kill everything that ever lived in your house? Not me, I'm thinking about someone else. I don't, I definitely don't have a green thumb, but I have some plants like just off the top of my head there's a plant called the rubber plant, which is very good at cleansing the air. They're definitely a handful of others. You could also get an air purifier, you can vacuum an HVAC vacuum or air purifier is also very effective. But you're absolutely right. You should also have a well ventilated home. And the irony is that buildings and homes now are becoming less and less well ventilated because it saves money, a home that actually is more hermetically sealed, you're going to have less cost in terms of the heating and air conditioning cost. And so that might seem like it's a good thing, but it actually might not be such a good thing from the standpoint of our biology. Great for our wallets, but not so good for our health. All right, so when we started this, you mentioned that dementia was really that with your mother was the driving force that started you down this path. What are you going to tell us in the genius life you can do to forestall dementia, avoid dementia? What's the tricks? Yeah, I mean, dementia is such a huge topic. And in the United States alone, 50 million people suffer from dementia. 15 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease alone. And those numbers are expected to explode in the coming years. So this is really a lifestyle guide given the best available evidence how one might live and eat to essentially avoid that condition. So there's definitely a strong nutritional component to the book. But I do talk a lot about the role of the environment on brain health. So as I mentioned, having a healthy blood pressure, that's crucial. I mean, you really should make sure that you've got your blood pressure under control. And I think that there are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to how to maintain a healthy blood pressure. So a lot of people go straight to salt, eat less salt, right? Well, actually, I think that the reality is a little bit more complex than what we've been led to believe. In fact, a very large meta-analysis was recently published that found that it wasn't necessarily the salt per se that had the biggest impact on people's cardiovascular health, but it was what they were consuming the salt with, where do people eat enough potassium, right? So when you consume enough potassium containing foods, which where do you find potassium? You find potassium in healthy foods. Fruits, vegetables, salmon is actually a wonderful source of potassium. That any impact that sodium might have on your blood pressure for, I would say, the majority of people is going to be moot. And the other thing is that most sodium is found in packaged processed foods, which we know are not good for us. So ultra-processed foods that line our supermarket aisles and canned foods and the like, they're all saturated with sodium. And I think that it's probably the foods, not the sodium that they contain that are the problem. Yeah, I agree with you completely. Speaking of blood pressure, I'm going to throw in a really nerdy study. A few years ago, I usually presented the microbiotic conference over in Europe. And there was a phenomenal paper that discovered that there are smell, olfactory nerves that not only live in our nose, but they live in our kidneys and they live in our heart. And you go, well, what the heck do you have a nose in your kidney for, a nose in your heart? What are they there for? And what they propose, and actually I've seen it in my patients, is they're actually smelling in your kidney what I call bug farts, that the microbiome produces certain compounds that are smelled by the kidney in the heart. And these compounds in what I call bad bugs are picked up by the kidney. And the kidney senses impending danger and constricts blood vessels to the idea is to trap bacteria, which was once our mortal enemy, in the walls of the blood vessels where white blood cells could grab them and not let them out. And we can actually measure tension in blood vessels with blood tests and also with devices. And we showed that changing the microbiome and getting rid of biofilms, which we talked about in a recent podcast, actually lowers blood pressure. And I think it's because these olfactory sensors in your kidney no longer smell these bad bacteria farts and they relax. And that's do do do do. So there are ways that we, I mean, we're so naive about all of this that there's nerves that smell in your kidneys and in your heart. It's amazing. I mean, we have taste receptors in our gut that are on our tongue. It's like biology is so amazing. And you learn something new, or at least I feel like I do every single day about it. It's just so awe-inspiring. I wonder, so are you talking about nitric oxide? Because the bacteria in our mouth, actually. Well, absolutely. There's beautiful studies that if you use a mouthwash that kills off your oral microbiome that you're no longer able to convert nitrates into nitric oxide. And your blood pressure goes up. The human study showed that blood pressure went up about five points systolic when you use mouthwash. And who cares about your fresh, minty breath if your blood pressure goes up? But no, this is actually a different effect. It's not a nitric oxide effect. It's a direct vasoconstriction effect. Amazing. Amazing. It's actually based on the arena and angiotensin system. So your kidneys produce more arena to constrict your blood vessels. Amazing. Yeah, just because of bad bugs. Yeah, well, I mean, the microbiome is crucially important for everything from cardiovascular health to brain health. And it's this burgeoning line of research. And I'm so excited to learn more about it. But let's get back to brain health and exercise. Because I know you're really excited about this in the book. And your mom was not an exerciser. And I, in my longevity paradox, I mentioned some very good studies, particularly with women that exercise throughout their lifespan is very good at preventing dementia. And even in the people who were genetically predisposed to develop dementia, that dementia occurred 11 years later than if they didn't exercise chronically. What's going on with that? Exercise is medicine for the brain. It truly is. I mean, it's, you know, when we talk about the hierarchy of things that are important when it comes to procuring good brain health, I think exercise is probably at the very top of the pyramid. In fact, in fact, the evidence now is just overwhelming. There's a new treatment guideline for physicians. If you have mild cognitive impairment, which again, you know, is a pre-dementia, it can often and it often does convert to more severe forms of cognitive impairment, physicians should now can now and should write exercise on a prescription pad. According to the American Academy of Neurology, it's a treatment for MCI. And there is no pharmaceutical drug that's currently approved to treat MCI. So via a myriad of different pathways, exercise is crucial. It helps us to sweat, right? So when we sweat, sweating is one of the primary detox modalities, you know, when we sweat, we release a lot of the kinds of pollutants that we were talking about earlier. It boosts a miracle grow protein in the brain called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is decreased by as much as 50% in patients with Alzheimer's disease. But we can actually boost levels of BDNF in the brain with exercise. What form of exercise? Well, you know, I think there's a bias in the literature for aerobic exercise, but I think it's starting to come to light that whatever the form of exercise you like to do, it seems that whether it's yoga or resistance training or high-intensity interval training, they all work to have a very similar effect. And in fact, I think that resistance training is probably the most important form of exercise. Because when you're having a weight training workout, you actually do get a cardio workout. But I think growing stronger muscles and achieving a healthier body composition is crucially important. I mean, there's now a documented relationship between the strength of our muscles and the health of our brains. Muscles are important. Having stronger muscles are important for hormone homeostasis in the body. So basically, making sure that your hormones are functioning the way that they ought to. Conditions like type 2 diabetes are characterized by insulin insensitivity. And there's no better way to make your body more insulin sensitive and to reverse insulin resistance than resistance training. And in terms of the mood, in terms of your mood, exercise is crucial. It helps your brain create serotonin more easily, which is a neurotransmitter involved in mood, as you know. And it's also involved in executive function, which is essentially how your brain gets stuffed on. So that's crucially important. It reduces inflammation. And exercise, when put head to head against pharmaceuticals that are prescribed to treat blood pressure, exercise for people with high blood pressure works as effectively, according to a large meta-analysis that came out over the past year. So it works all of these different pathways. The problem with pharmaceutical drugs, and I'm not against pharmaceutical drugs, certainly. Do I use them? Do I have to? Of course. Do you break a leg? I'm going to put a cast on you. I mean, if you're not going to work, cast the rest of your life. If there was a drug that I could have given my mom that would have helped her, I would have, you know, in a heartbeat run to the pharmacy to fill that prescription. But the problem with many of these drugs is that they target single chemicals or single biological pathways. Exercise works the entirety of the system. There's no drug on the market as powerful, you know, in terms of its medicinal, almost medicinal effect on the body as exercise. Exercise is medicine. OK, but it's so much easier to swallow a pill. And but I think your point is really good. It's you got to find something that you enjoy doing. Yes. And again, just this week, I wrote a prescription to get a dog to one of my patients. And I've had so many patients come back with that prescription filled and framed because they said, this is the, you know, this changed my life because dog makes you exercise twice a day, you know, whether you want to or not. And walking, it turns out, the old idea that you had to walk 10,000 steps a day for exercise, it turns out, was actually fabricated by a Japanese company that sold pedometers. And the more recent evidence says that 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day are effective. And I think the other thing that's interesting in studying, you know, blue zones, those places in the world with extreme longevity, and I'm the only nutritionist that spent most of my career in a blue zone, Loma Linda, California, they all live in hilly communities and they walk against gravity. And quite frankly, working against gravity is some of the best strength training that ever existed. And a quick tip, there was a very famous Austrian study that wanted to see the effect of uphill hiking versus downhill hiking. And obviously they expected that uphill was a lot better for in downhill. So they went to a mountain where there was a cable car. And half the participants had to hike up and then ride the cable car down. The other half had to ride up and hike down. And guess what they found, not only in cardiovascular fitness, but insulin sensitivity and muscle growth was exactly the same. Oh, wow. So are you going uphill or downhill? Yeah, because you're breaking against gravity on the downhill. It appears to be easier. You know, everybody volunteered for the downhill. Take that. But yeah, it was equally as effective. So I tell my patients, look, I know you're not going to climb the stairs in a building or to your apartment, but walk down and you'll get a benefit. Yeah, I mean, you bring up, you bring up a great point. And I detail this in the book. In the medical literature, walking, doing chores around the house, chasing your kids or pets around, these all fall under a category of activity called non-exercise physical activity. And non-exercise physical activity, as the name implies, it's not deliberate exercise. It's anything other than sitting on your couch and watching reruns. And it's crucial, actually. It burns a massive amount of calories. So in a time when so many people are overweight, people tend to think that you're going to the gym and running on the treadmill is a great way to burn calories. Actually, you burn vastly more calories, just doing things in your life other than sitting down and being sedentary. In terms of brain health, there's very interesting research. First of all, being sedentary for an extended period of time literally drains the blood from your brain. I feel this in terms of my mental health when I'm sitting for an extended period of time. But all it takes is every half an hour, two minutes of just doing a lap around the office or around your house to normalize cerebral blood flow. And don't stop at the M&M jar. Don't stop at the M&M. Eat your coworkers desk. Yes, maybe go for a drink of water or something. But yeah, just simple movements create these microvaculations in your blood pressure. It basically causes your blood to pump independent of what your heart is doing, and it causes blood to basically shoot up to the brain. And there was an interesting study that was performed on older adults that found that people with greater levels of non-exercise physical activity. So again, just these simple movements, spontaneous movements, whether it's cooking or doing laundry or chores, as I mentioned. Gardening. Gardening was able to help these people actually avert cognitive decline even when brain scans revealed that they had Alzheimer's pathology in their brains. So like amyloid plaque. So it seems like simple daily movements, if you're able to continue doing that, it's gonna help potentially shield your brain against whatever is going on below the surface. Got any one or two workout tips that people can do quick and easy? I mean, come on, everybody wants a quick fix? Yeah, a quick fix. Well, the quickest fix I think is gonna be what's called HIT or high-intensity interval training. They've found that with basically 10 minutes of high-intensity interval training that people are able to achieve the same improvement in their cardiorespiratory fitness. So basically fitness is the short hand way of just saying that. As people who did, it was either a half an hour or 45 minutes of steady-state cardio, which is amazing news, right? I hate steady-state cardio. In fact, I don't do it very often. Not nothing against people who like to do it because it is still very good for you. But I'm not one to wanna go to the gym and spend half an hour on the treadmill, but what the study found is that by doing high-intensity interval training, you're able to actually boost your cardiorespiratory fitness, your heart health, and that obviously has an effect on brain health as much as steady-state cardio. And so the difference between the two, steady-state cardio is something that you can do for half an hour or 45 minutes on the treadmill, right? You're just plotting along on the treadmill at sort of a moderate intensity pace. You can hold a conversation with somebody if they're jogging next to you on the treadmill. That I don't think is very much fun. High-intensity interval training, on the other hand, is taking an activity, like riding on the stationary bike or doing sprints up a hill, or even sprints down a hill, but that's probably a little bit more dangerous, you know? But doing sprints up a hill or I like to go to my gym and they have these battle ropes, big, heavy ropes that I like to swing around, and you do 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 seconds of all-out reps. So giving it your all, like literally, you know, the speed at which you do it doesn't matter so much is the effort that you put in. So you want to put in, you know, everything you've got, and then you do that. And you don't do it on a full stomach. Don't do it on a full stomach. Yeah, because it actually might make you nauseous. But you give it everything that you've got and then you recuperate for a minute. So you do that for 10 to 20 to 30 seconds and then you recuperate for a minute and then you do it again. And you do three to four to five reps of that and that's only gonna take about 10 minutes. And you do that and it's been shown that that actually can boost your fitness to the degree of running for 30 minutes on a treadmill. So I mean, that's a way more efficient way. You're gonna get a lot more bang for your buck, I think, doing HIIT. And, you know, doing HIIT is not without risk so you obviously want to check your physician before starting that. But highly recommend using that as a tool in your toolkit. Yeah, because you definitely do, if you're doing it right, get your heart rate up and really get it up. Yeah, I do a spin HIIT class every week for 30 minutes. And, you know, I'm in the breathless zone and I track with a monitor and I go, whoa, I'm not supposed to be up here but I'm okay and it's a great stress test. Yeah, but yeah, check with your physician if you're gonna do HIIT training. Okay, food, we talked about number one food that a person should avoid. I think you've mentioned this if you want good brain health, what is it? Yeah, I would say, I would definitely say ultra-processed foods, you know, I would have probably had a different answer if you would have asked me three years ago, but whether it's refined industrial grain and seed oils like canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, you want to avoid those oils, those oils are usually used to create processed foods, you know, ultra-processed foods. Processed foods also contain refined grain flowers and the like and so I'm not a fan of those foods and one of the reasons really for that, aside from the fact that we know that those oils are unhealthy and that those flowers shoot your blood sugar through the roof and can cause refractory hunger afterwards as soon as you get the insulin drop or the blood sugar drop that often ensues. I mean, those are bad enough, but the problem with these foods, which has been shown actually over the past year and a half in a study from the National Institute of Health was that these foods actually drive their own consumption essentially to the tune of about 500 additional calories a day. So if you're building your diet around ultra-processed foods, it's gonna be infinitely more difficult for you to maintain a healthy weight or lose weight because these foods perpetuate their own consumption, whereas if you try to base your diet instead around whole foods, whatever, I mean, we like to get into the nitty gritty of what whole foods to, you know, are gonna be better for you and what whole foods you're probably better off avoiding, but at the end of the day, I think- Not whole grains, I hope. No, I'm not an advocate of grain consumption because I think grains are essentially cattle feed. They don't offer any real nutritional value. It's mostly just energy, which I think most people have too much of in their bodies as it is. And I'm not talking about the sense of energy. I'm talking about stored energy on our waistlines. But yeah, ultra-processed foods drive their own over consumption. They basically short-circuit your brain's willpower, so if you've ever cracked open a bag of a pint of ice cream or a bag of chips or even, you know, dipped into the bread basket at your local Italian restaurant, you know that these foods are very difficult to moderate. And so I think it's best to try to avoid them altogether. And you know, a snack here and there is not gonna kill you, certainly, but we now have data that suggests that these foods, you know, these foods actually, the types of foods we eat influence how much of them we eat. So even though you might be thinking to yourself, it's so difficult to eat less. I can't possibly eat less. Look at the kinds of foods that you're eating and you might be able to glean some insights there in terms of why you feel like your hunger is so insatiable. Yeah, it really lights up, you know, pleasure centers in the brain and hunger centers in the brain. And you can look at this with spec scans and PET scans and these foods, you're right. They make you eat more and seek out more. They do, yeah. This was shown. It's like the invasion of the body snatchers or something. Yeah. It's, whoa, okay. Well, okay, so we don't wanna eat those things. So what are you gonna eat instead? What are two or three foods that we should be eating? Yeah, I'm a big fan of, I think a perfect brain food, if I had to pick one, is the avocado. Avocados are a wonderful brain food. You know, they are packed with potassium, which we talked about earlier, which is important for healthy blood pressure. They're packed with dietary fiber, which we know is really good for the microbiota. You know, the gut buddies, as you like to call them. Yeah, gut buddies. The gut buddies, so they can have their gut farts or whatever rude term that was earlier, which I really appreciated. You know, they're packed with healthy fats like monounsaturated fat, which I know you've interviewed David Sinclair, I believe, and he recently posted a study that found that monounsaturated fat actually can activate some of our body's sirtuin gene pathways, which is amazing. So you know, monounsaturated fat, great for the heart, cardiovascular system, for the brain, might have an anti-aging effect. And avocados are very concentrated in compounds called keratinoids, particularly lutein and zeaxanthin, which I talk about in the book. I think that these are sort of the unsung heroes of the produce section of the supermarket in terms of having good brain health. I mean, we already know that lutein and zeaxanthin are important to help prevent age-related macular degeneration at about six milligrams per day combined, but they have done studies where they found that 12 milligrams, so if you're able to increase your keratinoid consumption, that these keratinoids actually also are able to accumulate in the brain and enhance cognitive function. So I eat a high keratinoid diet. I'm always trying to get more lutein and zeaxanthin in my diet, and avocados are a very good source. In fact, there was a study that used an avocado. It was a randomized control trial where they gave subjects either avocados or potatoes or chickpeas, and they found that avocado consumption, because of the keratinoids in them, these compounds actually led to an improvement in cognitive function in this older adult population. So they're an all-in-one brain food. I'm a huge fan of avocados. And then if I had to pick one more, man, I would say, well, I would have to say fatty fish. Wild salmon, sardines, it's really hard to talk about brain health without giving a hat tip to fatty fish just because they're packed with DHA fat, which is so important for healthy brain function. It's one of the most important structural building blocks of the brain. So if you're growing up some wild salmon, throw some avocado on the side, and you've got your perfect genius meal right there. All right, I'm gonna eat shellfish instead of fatty fish, and you'll find out in the next book why you're gonna eat for brain health. Oh, man. Oh, wait, I forgot to mention, we also wanna drizzle some extra virgin olive oil in there. Oh, thank goodness. All right, so we can agree there, that extra virgin olive. Yeah. Yeah, which is also mostly a mono-insaturated fat. But studies show that it's a great way of producing BDNF and grow brain cells with olive oil. So, okay. Yeah, huge fan. Okay, also, good point in avocado studies show that the compounds in avocado will allow you to absorb more of the vitamins and minerals from the food you eat than if the avocado isn't there. Plus, a study in humans show that an avocado a day produces weight loss compared to not eating an avocado. So everybody who's fat, phobic, oh, I can't eat an avocado, I gain weight. It makes you lose weight. Yeah, I mean, avocados are, they're a wonderful food. It's sort of like nature's, or it's like, well, you know, because butter is natural, I was gonna say nature's butter, but they're sort of like a plant butter, you know, essentially, but not these fake, super unhealthy alternative butters that you'll find in the supermarket. Likes, yeah, those are bad. Scary stuff. Yeah, scary stuff. But an avocado, avocados are amazing. All right, one more thing before we let you go. Sleep is really good for you. Everybody now agrees. Everybody now agrees. And nobody's getting enough sleep. Nobody's getting enough sleep. I think a third of adults get fewer than six hours per night. And this is unfortunate because sleep is the master regulator of our body's hormones. So if you're trying to make a dietary adjustment with poor sleep, it's gonna be infinitely more difficult to do than when you're well rested. Because when you're well rested, you know, you're sort of, your executive function is firing at full capacity. An executive function is, again, it's that sort of cognitive domain that allows us to be in control of our lives. And when you're underslept, you're essentially not in control of your life. You're allowing your brain to be operated by these more reptilian parts of the brain that are just all about survival. Gotta find the sugar. Gotta find the fatty foods. You know, gotta find, gotta, you know, I mean, those are those base level emotions. It becomes a lot more difficult to emotionally regulate when we're underslept as well because of that disconnection between two parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, which is sort of how we handle uncertainty and fear. In regards to brain health now, I think the research is overwhelming that, you know, sleep is crucial for an optimally performing brain. On just one night of poor sleep, they can measure in cerebrospinal fluid, increases in the two proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. So amyloid beta, which forms the backbone of the plaques that aggregate and, you know, characterize Alzheimer's disease and also tau protein. To the degree that on one night of poor sleep, there's an increase of amyloid beta by about 30% and tau by about 50% in cerebrospinal fluid, which is kind of shocking. Which is scary. Yeah. Okay, all right, so okay, you scared me. Give us one tip, how do we get better sleep? I know there's lots of ways, but give us one that we can institute. One tip for better sleep. And there's a lot in the book. There's a lot in the book, yeah. I mean, I would say, I think, you know, getting good sleep really, it hinges on how we spend our days, you know? So I mean, I think a lot of your listeners are probably expecting me to have a one magical thing to do right before you go to sleep. But actually, what we do in the mornings dictates how well we sleep at night to a significant degree. And I would say that making sure that you're getting good, bright, you know, sunlight in through our eyes, whether it's behind a window or even if it's an overcast day, getting bright daylight in through our eyes for about a half an hour every morning or at least before noon is gonna have a major improvement in the way that we sleep. Because people who do that tend to have earlier melatonin production. Melatonin is the hormone that makes us sleepy. At night, it's also involved in cancer protection and all that stuff. So melatonin is a wonderful hormone that we don't want to suppress. And so getting good adequate light during the day, I mean, you could go outside as we discussed earlier and spend that time in nature while you're allowing your eyes to, you know, expand to that panoramic view while the sunlight is coming in, even if it's an overcast day for half an hour. And that'll really help you sleep a lot better. In fact, and I talk about this in the book too, a lot of older adults, there's this stereotype that the older you get, the less sleep you get. You know, older adults tend to not sleep as well. Why is that? Well, you know, I think we don't have an answer for certain as to why that is. But I think, and a hypothesis that I advance in the book, you know, there is a, the lens of our eyes actually becomes more yellow as we get older. And that can actually affect photoreceptors in our eyes called, or proteins in the eye, called melanopsin proteins that are involved in the anchoring of our body's circadian rhythm. And so you might actually need more time in the sun in the morning, if you're older, for example, if you're in your 60s, 70s, or 80s, then a younger kid, then a kid might, or a teenager might, because of that discoloring of the lens that occurs. And so I think getting out into the sun is crucial for a person, for so many aspects of health, not least of which sleep, across the age spectrum, but it becomes, you know, it becomes probably exponentially more important as we get older. So how about if you live in Michigan or Seattle, what about a light box therapy in the morning? I think light boxes can be great. In fact, really what you need is a light intensity of at least 1,000 lux. So lux is a unit of light, how we measure light intensity. And the light intensity that basically sets off those proteins in the eye, the melanopsin proteins that set our body's circadian rhythm, require about 1,000 lux, which we know that if you are under the bright fluorescent lights of a supermarket or a drugstore, the light is able to reach that intensity. And so if you get a light box, you just wanna make sure that it's at least 1,000 lux. And when- Does 1,000 lux cost 1,000 bucks? It doesn't cost 1,000 bucks, thankfully. Thankfully, but there's an app that you can get for your smartphone. I believe it's actually called Lux. It's not as accurate as some of these more professional devices, but you can get a good sense of the amount of light intensity that you're exposed to at any moment with this app on your phone. And so you wanna make sure that in the morning you take out the app, whether it's by an open window in your living room, or even if you have a half an hour commute to work, and you just take your sunglasses off and make sure that your eyes are getting that bright light and it's at least 1,000 lux. And that'll have a major effect on your sleep, according to the best available evidence. All right, great tip. Oh, Max, it's always great to see you and thanks again for coming on the program. Where do people find you and the Genius Life? You can head to geniuslifebook.com or you can pick up the book anywhere books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and yeah, it's- And your local bookseller, please. Yeah, support local bookshops. And any cool websites, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Yeah, I'm very active on Instagram, so come and say hi. It's at Max Lugavere. My last name is L-U-G-A-V-E-R-E. For those of you who are watching, there it is. Yeah. All right, and if you wanna, you know, debate Max on Instagram, I guess he's going at it today as we speak, but don't go too far down those- No, yeah. Social media's funny. We didn't even talk about that, but you're right. It's like one of the, that's one of the area, another one of the areas of modern life that leads to this pervasive and insidious stress that we all have. And you know, I've kind of opened myself up to the public, and you know, I sometimes, I can't help myself engage in like little tiffs on Instagram, but it's all, you know, it's all in good fun, and you know, I'm always open to challenging, you know, having my ideas challenged and listening to other people. I'm very open-minded, so I welcome it. Great, all right, well thanks again. It's now time for the audience question. Rochelle Glam Six on YouTube wrote in and asked, Dr. Gundry, what say you about the bio-identical hormone therapy Suzanne Summers talks about in your podcast with her? I'm very curious about your perspective. That is a great question, and I bet Max and I could go on for several hours about that. And I was actually, we were talking about this before the show, and we've had some interesting responses, very positive to that show on Instagram, and some very questioning responses on Facebook about Suzanne's positions on bio-identical hormones, and I'll tell you what. We're gonna put together a podcast on that subject, and I'll give you my honest opinion of doing this now for, now over 20 years, and I'll give you, and quite frankly, Palm Springs and Santa Barbara are two of the epicenters of bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. And I'll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, and hopefully you'll get some information. But great question, thank you for asking it, and I'm not gonna answer it today. Okay, Max, again. Dr. Gundry, thank you. We'll hopefully see you next time. Can't wait, yeah, and we'll have you back on my podcast, and thank you for helping spread the word about the genius life. Yeah, it's really important, Max goes far more than just genius food this time around. It's the whole kitten kaboodle, as we used to say. All right, see you next time on the Dr. Gundry podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, because I'm Dr. Gundry, and I'm always looking out for you.