 Hey everybody, it's Dr. Gendry. Delighted today to have a good friend who I've gotten to know over the last couple of years, Mac Lucavere, who's got a great new book out called Genius Foods. Max was kind enough to send me an advance copy and quite frankly, I couldn't put it down. I thought that and don't get blushing. There it is, Genius Foods. And Max, you know, you've got an amazing personal story about how this came about. And why don't we start with sharing everybody how the heck a guy like you ended up writing a book like this? Yeah, so my, it's a great question. First of all, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. You know, I'm a big fan of your work and I've interviewed you many times. So it's kind of cool to have the tables flipped. My background is in journalism, so I began as a health and science journalist. As soon as I graduated from college, I began working for a TV network that really allowed me to cut my teeth with some of the best journalists, Peabody award-winning journalists in the field. And when I left that full-time job to explore what I was going to do with the rest of my career in my late 20s, it was then in my personal life that my mother started to display signs of memory loss and cognitive decline. My mom was a young person. She was 58 at the time. She was vibrant. She had blonde hair. Not that blonde is necessarily a sign of or a marker of youth, but, but, you know, my mom was as spirited as, you know, a New Yorker is. My mom is a born and bred New Yorker, fast talking, fast walking, ran a business, raised three children. And it was at the age of 58 that my mom started to show the earliest signs of dementia. She also had a change to her gait, which is the way that she walked. And this is something that became very apparent to me and my brothers. But because I had no prior family history of any kind of dementia, we were at a complete loss as to what might be going on with my mom. I mean, I didn't even know it at the time. But, you know, movement is something that is by and large dictated by your brain health. I thought that it was a muscular thing or that my mom just needed to get to the gym and stretch more. But lo and behold, the journey to try to figure out what it was that my mom had led to me visiting some of the top neurology departments in the United States. I remember distinctly going to the US News and World Reports annual listing of neurology departments and making checkboxes to try to figure out which department we would go to first in search of answers. And the journey culminated with my visit to the Cleveland Clinic with my mom. And, you know, the Cleveland Clinic, what I heard about it back then was that they were known for really assembling a team to help diagnose complex medical problems. And it was there that my mom was diagnosed for the first time with a neurodegenerative disease. She prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, even though her symptoms didn't fit neatly into either diagnosis. And that was probably one of the most traumatic experiences of my entire life. I was not really told much about my mom's condition in the doctor's office. He ran a bunch of tests that are very kind of surreal and almost absurd to the lay person's eye, to the untrained eye. And he essentially prescribed these biochemical band-aids without telling me much about what they do or recommending any kind of dietary or lifestyle intervention that might help my mom. So when I got back to the hotel that weekend and I started to google the drugs that my mom was prescribed, it dawned on me that my mom was prescribed drugs for both of these diseases and that they have no disease modifying effect and that they are highly limited in their efficacy to boot. So I was traumatized. I had a panic attack and I basically decided from that point on that I would learn to the best of my ability from the leading experts in the field what would lead a person to develop dementia. Because I had no prior family history of the disease, I had a hunch that there had to be something in the environment that was contributing to what I was seeing in my mom. And I started looking into PubMed into all the primary literature to really look at the associations and the mechanisms at play that would lead a person living in the western world to develop this disease. And then I began reaching out to scientists and researchers around the world and that culminated in my writing Genius Foods which basically is a seven-year journey, all of the insights that I've learned from the top researchers in the world, self-experimentation, population studies, clinical trials, animal studies. It's really what I think to be a synthesis of the best available evidence in terms of how we might live to protect our brains and also enhance them. Great, and you know one of the things I like about the book is this is often very dry scientific material and you know sometimes it takes a degree in neurology and training in neurology it even makes sense of these things. But what I think you've been able to do for the lay reader, which is obviously who this book is for, is to distill these really complex things and put them into actionable items. You know, through the years I've become good friends with Dr. Dale Bredesen, who I think you've met, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's. And one of the things that Dale has taught me, actually Dale's wife taught him. Dale was a bench researcher and an excellent bench researcher particularly on how the APOE4 gene works and behaves. But his wife who is a practicing physician, they love to tell the story, she finally one day said you know all this bench research is great but you know why don't you put this into action with real human beings rather than with a bunch of mice. And he says gee well that's an interesting concept. So you know taking this very complex stuff and dialing it down to actionable items I think is really where your book is going to have a really profound impact. And congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Yeah I mean you know as a young person speaking for the millennial demographic you know I know that dementia is not something that's on the minds of most millennials you know they're like when I talk about my passion for dementia prevention they say you know come back to me in 40 years but the reality is that Alzheimer's disease begins in the brain 30 to 40 years if not more before the first symptom. I mean Parkinson's disease which is the second most common neurodegenerative disease by the time you show your first symptom 50% of the dopaminergic neurons the neurons involved in movement in the part of the brain the substantia nigra affected by Parkinson's disease are already dead. So Genius Foods to me really was about Trojan horsing the best information when it comes to preventing Alzheimer's disease which is you know now the the conversation surrounding prevention in Alzheimer's disease finally is in the zeitgeist but you know when I began writing it four years ago nobody was talking about Alzheimer's as a potentially preventable disease. So it's the best synthesis of Alzheimer's prevention and everything that we know about the prevention of other neurological conditions but it's it's packaged in the language of performance because what I learned over the course of my research is that the same things that you can do that will shield your brain against the modern world and protect it and help facilitate healthy cognitive aging also make your brain work better in the here and now so that you can have more energy you can have more mental resilience cognitive clarity the same factors that are that act as a neuro protective you know as as neuro as as offering neuro protection also improve executive function which some researchers believe is more important to a person's success than IQ. So it is it offers a lot for the person just trying to improve the way that their brain works day to day but again it's a trojan horse because you know people that aren't necessarily my goal my secret goal Dr. Gundry is that people that don't know that they're interested in dementia prevention are going to pick it up and inadvertently potentially prevent their own dementia so that's that's really my my passion and you know I've seen the monster that is dementia I see it every single day and so you know the fact that my mother has a form of dementia has kept me very honest in terms of the way that I communicate science that the degree of hope that I offer people that are already affected by cognitive decline and it makes me want to really communicate the science with the level of optimism that I feel while also doing it responsibly because I think that's the most important thing we live in a time where you know information is ubiquitous it's coming at us 24-7 but at the same time it's become ever more difficult to know what's true and know what's hype and you mean fake news exists come on it you know it does exist it does exist meet you know some of our most trusted media outlets are more driven by driving clicks to their websites than actually making people healthier and this is illustrated by headlines that you often see about health you know one day you'll see a headline that fat is back and the next day you'll see a headline that high fat diets are damaging to the brain the reality is that fat is our brain's friend you know our brain is constructed of fats and the kinds of fats that you eat moment to moment weigh in very heavily on the performance of your brain as well as its predilection for disease so these nuances are often lost in the media and in genius foods I really try to separate fat from fiction so to speak cute love it yeah one one of the things I've had the pleasure of presenting at some of the neural conferences at stanford and Harvard MIT over the past year and some of them just speaking of fat in the brain I think most people should realize that our brain is 60 to 70 fat and half of the fat in our brain is a component of fish oil which is called DHA and interestingly enough the other half is actually arachidonic acid which gets the evil omega-6 I've always told people if arachidonic acid was that evil then why is your brain you know half arachidonic acid and there's now been some beautiful studies of MRIs of people's brains as they age and people who have the highest omega-3 index which is basically looking at EPA and DHA attached to red blood cells over a two-month period the people with the highest index of omega-3s have the biggest brains and the biggest areas of memory the hippocampus and the people who have the lowest levels of omega-3 have the most shrunken brains and the smallest areas of hippocampus memory and that's actually you know number one scary stuff but it's also as you point out empowering because a simple change in diet and maybe you can elaborate on that can just give your brain the fat it needs to actually work absolutely you know researchers speculate that it's access to DHA fat from fish from you know properly raised pasture raised animals that catalyzed the growth of our brains so the that's why today in the modern world the consumption of foods that are rich in these fats are associated with bigger more robust brains and one of the mechanisms behind that is that DHA fat promotes the up regulation of a powerful growth hormone that's been called miracle growth for the brain its proper name is BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor and you can actually sprinkle BDNF on neurons in a petri dish and you actually will see them sprout dendrites which are thought to be the physical correlates of memories in that petri dish like a like a chia pet you just sprinkle BDNF on those neurons and that's actually BDNF is increased when we consume more DHA fat simultaneously inflammation is a well known brain drain when it comes to BDNF and the other component of fish oil EPA is a really powerful anti-inflammatory so you've got those two fatty acids working in tandem to help promote healthy brain volume you've got DHA fat and you've got EPA fat and these foods are or these fats rather are omnipresent in fatty fish the fat of wild salmon sardines which I love mackerel herring these are all powerful brain foods and in fact genius foods as we highlight them in the book and also they're found in appreciable amounts in the fat of grass-fed beef much smaller much much to much lesser degree than in fatty fish but they're present as well as in omega-3 enriched or pasture-raised eggs many people the the conversation around omega-3 fats sometimes includes plant-based forms like from flaxseed oil and chia seeds I know you're not a fan of chia seeds but but you know these are these are actually not very efficiently converted to their usable forms in the human body so I like to make the recommendation that people should really opt for preformed EPA and DHA from fish oil if you're a vegan or vegetarian algae oil is helpful or krill oil yeah you're right I take care a lot of vegans and vegetarians in my practice who have made the mistake with with good intention of using flaxseed oil as a source of omega-3s without realizing that these are short chain omega-3s and our enzyme system to build short chain omega-3s into long chain omega-3s is is very poor a fish on the other hand is superb at doing this and I see all of my vegans have really nice levels of a short chain omega-3s but they have absolutely no DHA and EPA and it's it's completely now replaceable algae-based DHA and there's no reason not to do that you're correct a number of my vegans and certainly my vegetarians will take krill oil thinking that well that's a harmless sort of plankton and but one of the important things about krill oil and I have a lot of patients who try to use krill oil there's not much DHA in one of those capsules of krill oil and I'll have people say oh I take krill oil it's much better than fish oil and when we actually measure the DHA and krill oil eaters or swallowers they just don't get enough so you got to take a lot of krill oil yeah yeah and also EPA which is you know to a much less appreciable degree in krill oil and and finally the trials the actual science it's much more limited when it comes to krill oil when compared to fish oil there's a bounty of research being done on fish oil and that degree of research does not exist for krill oil so I think you know if your if cost is an issue which I know for most people it is fish oil is really the best the best way to go yeah and most commercial fish oil now is molecularly distilled so you really don't have to worry about mercury or other toxins in in most of the you know good quality fish oil out there and even Costco sells a couple of good fish oil products they have a couple bad ones too but that's a whole other story so okay so all right we're going to build our brain with fish oil with DHA and EPA what are some other usable steps and let me let me before you say that obviously millennials when when I was a baby boomer we knew we were going to live forever and never suffer anything that happened to our parents and you know our parents were really stupid and then we became our parents and it's nice to see actually millennials or the current new baby boomers sorry about that but you are and one of the things that's important to realize is that when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s there was really very very limited dementia we knew of you know one old person who wasn't very sharp anymore but for the most part it did not exist there were not nursing homes you know spanning blocks with full-time caregivers of people they just did not exist and we now as you are well aware of have this epidemic of dementia and we've seen it really in two generations really actually my generation was the first and our parents was the first generation that this has happened to and I think in your world travels you've I'm sure run into societies where dementia is an incredibly tiny tiny portion of late adulthood absolutely can you explain that absolutely yeah I mean there have been studies done on Japanese nationals you know people that live in Japan have typically low rates of Alzheimer's disease there's a very low risk but what happens when those Japanese nationals move to the United States they have rates that mimic the incidents that you see in your average American so it seems that there's something about the Western diet and lifestyle that is interacting with our genes in a harmful way when it comes to our brain health you could also take a look at the Yoruba people in Ibadan Nigeria where the ApoE4 allele is very common it's just as common there as it is here and yet it has little to no association with Alzheimer's disease so what that suggests is that the increased risk that we see in carriers of the ApoE4 allele which by the way make up 25 percent of the population so one in four viewers watching this are going to carry that allele seems to be more an interaction between that gene and the Western way of life the Western dietary pattern that really seems to put a person at increased risk for this disease the ApoE4 allele might be the canary in the coal mine for the Western way of life and what that suggests is that if you have this allele which puts you at anywhere between two and 14 fold increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease in the United States you could just move to Ibadan Nigeria and see that risk completely abolished so to me that is a really strong indicator that the soaring rates of Alzheimer's disease that we're seeing today which by the way are expected numbers are expected to triple by the year 2050 really is the function of a diet that's become saturated in refined processed carbohydrates unhealthy industrial grain and seed oils a sedentary lifestyle chronic stress i mean these are all factors that play a role in positive or negative brain health so you know for people out there that are concerned about the ApoE4 allele and actually that's one of the reasons why i discovered your work many years ago is because you talk a lot about the ApoE4 allele which i'm very passionate about the nutrigenomics surrounding this allele because many people carry it and it is the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene so i think it's uh it's fascinating at the very least but on the other hand you know looking at the associations that really seem to interact with it and put a person at higher risk is really important in terms of steering a population away from Alzheimer's disease which is a horrific disease for which there is no meaningful treatment so yeah that's right it's interesting i have a number of people with the ApoE4 gene now in their mid 90s who are perfectly bright they they drive to see me they remember my name and most importantly they know their way home which becomes very critical as you get older and one of them in particular has always struck me she's a black woman who grew up in north carolina and she i i met her in her late 80s and she was bright and she carried the ApoE4 and i said you know tell me i said man this is impressive you know you're smart and all this what do you eat and she said well it's really interesting i i came out of the box wanting to eat greens and i could not eat enough greens and i really didn't wasn't very interested in meats and things like that and all i wanted was big pelates of collard greens all these greens and i said you know it's fascinating it's a you know you didn't know it but you you chose the right diet for your gene or coming out of the box and you're right the nigerian studies are fascinating because they do carry a very high percentage of the ApoE4 and there have been age match controls with blacks in indianapolis and i'm sure you're aware of and in fact the nigerians despite carrying the ApoE4 they don't get Alzheimer's disease whereas their age match control blacks in indianapolis do and it's it's clear that this is an environmental food based problem and so let's get back to okay so we've got fish oil everybody's getting what other things are you going to have particularly millennials do so that you know they're not drooling in their oatmeal when they're 60 years old yeah so i mean in genius foods i really take strides to make all of the recommendations actionable so one of the top things that people can do every single day is eat a huge fatty salad people kind of laugh at me on instagram because i tag my salads with hashtag huge fatty salad but it's really important you know research out of rush university shows that people who eat a large bowl every single day of dark leafy greens have brains that look on scans 11 years younger and when i say a fatty salad i don't mean throwing cheese and tortilla strips and ranch dressing on top of that salad oh no really yeah i mean sorry to break it to you but no i'm a huge fan of extra virgin olive oil there's no better vehicle for extra virgin olive oil than a salad all consume kale which is a powerful source of magnesium and soluble fiber which feeds the gut bacteria spinach which is a top source of magnesium and folate which the brain needs to create energy and arugula which is a top source of dietary nitrate which is really good for the healthy functioning of all of your blood vessels and i'll douse it with extra virgin olive oil one or two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and i eat that every single day along with some you know i'll throw some apple cider vinegar in there maybe some lean protein uh or not so lean protein um an egg perhaps um and uh and that's a really good way eating a large daily salad every single day you know a lot of people think about salads um in terms of you know weight loss and satiety and things like that but it's a really powerful way of checking off so many of your nutritional boxes i mean you're getting chlorophyll which is rich in magnesium you're getting dietary fiber you're getting that extra virgin olive oil which recent studies have shown in animal models that of all the fat types extra virgin olive oil really seems to promote longevity when looking at mice which you know it's easy to do these studies because mice only live about two years so in terms of the oil that you want to really have in your diet for liberal consumption and i know you agree with this is is really extra virgin olive oil and uh yeah i'm a huge fan of physical exercise you know physical exercise is really one of those things um genius foods focuses on the foods that you can eat that are going to improve the way that your brain works but there is also a very significant lifestyle component to the book and i talk about the kinds of exercise that you can do to really optimize brain function as well as a new type of exercise that i highlight in the book and that is thermal exercise so recent research very new research out of finland has shown that people that use sauna therapy um four to seven times per week have a remarkable risk reduction for developing dementia about 65 percent and this is very striking uh news because you know in finland sauna use is sort of like taking a shower it's so common in finland because finland is the sauna capital of the world on average there's one sauna per household if you were to do that same study in the united states i would say well people that have access to saunas usually have expensive gym memberships and things like that right this is why i think it's so important to understand how science is done um because you know taking this research done out of finland really tells us that you know there might be something to that link and actually when we look at what uh heat therapy um does for the brain it's it's pretty powerful essentially heat um exposure activates proteins in your body called heat shock proteins that act like little scaffoldings like you see scaffolding on the side of a building they act like scaffolding for your proteins to prevent them from misfolding this is really important because when you take diseases like alzheimer's disease or parkinson's disease these diseases are known as proteopathies so basically they're related to misfolding of proteins in the brain amyloid beta in alzheimer's disease and alphasinuclein in parkinson's disease so essentially by doing physical exercise you activate these same proteins by sitting in a sauna you're activating the same same proteins they act like scaffolding to prevent those proteins from becoming misfolded which would then allow them to clump up potentially and form the plaques that characterize these diseases so yeah it's fascinating i mentioned in my first book that um actually i got interested in heat shock protein because it was a way of preventing uh cardiac cells heart cells from dying during occlusion during a heart attack and we could do heat shock conditioning to prevent this from happening and so uh in my in my first book i recommended that during the summer everybody needs to come to palm springs and in fact uh our tourist population in the summer is mostly northern europeans who actually come here you know for the 100 and 110 and 115 degree heat and it's they they're laying out by the pool in a continuous sauna and we always you know you said boy what a bunch of idiots well they're not a bunch of idiots they're actually getting heat therapy yeah it's very important you know our bodies were honed in the hot east african sun and so and and they know that heat can kill you but at this so at the same time you know we're hard wired with these uh little genetic apps that kick in when we are under the threat of heat stress and you know too much heat will kill you obviously the same way that too much exercise uh could kill you drinking too much water can kill you but there seems to be this narrow range where um you know sitting in a sauna engaging in high intensity exercise really seems to bring about very positive biochemical changes um which leads to enhanced uh cellular resilience and this benefits the way that your brain works as well as helps protect it against disease in the long term okay so we're gonna take some fish oil we're gonna pour olive oil on everything and as you know my favorite saying is the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth we're gonna do some saunas or we're gonna do some high intensity exercise give me one last thing that we shouldn't do that we're currently doing um to really help our brain so for the last tip I would say you know uh there's no need to eat constantly throughout the day um there's now a lot of buzz surrounding intermittent fasting and various fasting protocols you know we didn't always have food around we weren't always able to summon our food with a few swipes on our smartphone there weren't supermarkets on every corner there weren't corners for the vast majority of our evolution fruit was available seasonally um we had to really work hard for our food in fact we had to chase our food um for the vast vast vast majority of our evolution so today the balance between being in a fed and fasted state has been lost we are chronically in the fed state the lever is jammed with us constantly eating from sun up to sun down so one of the recommendations in my book that I make is rather than get hung up over the details of how many hours you're fasting is that most people will benefit from not eating for an hour or two after they wake up and not eating for two to three hours before they go to sleep so it really simplifies uh the notion of intermittent fasting gets the numbers out of the way and it basically just says you know when you're waking up you have a hormonal milieu a hormonal environment in your body that wants to burn fat and your brain loves to burn fat i mean certainly burning fat makes us look better in bathing suits come beach season but the brain loves to partake in that party because when your brain is running off fat as a fuel source it's a very clean burning fuel and um when we wake up in the morning cortisol is the body's chief catabolic hormone it basically is elevated it's the highest that it's going to be throughout the day the day generally speaking and it wants to liberate stored fats stored sugars stored amino acids all for use as fuel and too often we thwart the opportunity that our brain has to use fat for fuel because we eat first thing in the morning and especially in the modern world we're eating carb rich foods um that's not good because you know cortisol is the body's chief catabolic hormone it wants to break things down and carbs cause insulin to become elevated which is the body's chief anabolic or building up and growing hormone it's the body's chief growth hormone so you don't want to have those two hormones elevated simultaneously from an evolutionary standpoint it makes no sense your body gets totally confused so when cortisol is elevated in the morning you don't want to eat or if you do eat you want it to be mostly fat and protein and you want to really start you know have your first bite maybe an hour or two or even three after waking up that allows your body to really promote fat oxidation which is really beneficial to the brain it seems and then before bed you know first of all your body wants to wind down at night so you know metabolism slows but also while you sleep your brain undergoes many sort of custodial maintenance processes something called the glimphatic system becomes activated in the brain which turns your brain sort of into a dishwasher where cerebrospinal fluid gets swooshed all throughout the brain purging it of toxins that build up during the day so this is a newly discovered system we don't have all the answers we probably don't even have a fraction of the answers but it's believed that by having insulin elevated during this cleanup process that the brain undergoes every single night it might interfere with that process so i advise not eating for two to three hours before you go to sleep or again if you do sticking to foods that don't uh stimulate insulin so fattier foods nuts perhaps um and foods that have a little bit of protein maybe um although protein does stimulate insulin but to a much lesser degree than carbs um and really sort of uh you know regaining that balance between being in a fasted and fed state i think that's very important yeah so that's a great recommendation thanks dr yeah again as a as a as a baby boomer our parents would tell us that we couldn't go swimming for an hour after we had lunch because we would get horrible cramps and die and drown and there was actually some truth to that wise tail that dovetails into what you just said is that after we eat we put a lot of our blood flow down into our intestines for the purpose of digestion and it's actually shunted away from the brain and the brain is by far the hungriest most energy needing organ we have and some Dale Bredesen's work has shown that if you eat near the time of going to sleep what's happened is your blood flow which prompts this lymphatic washing of your brain is diverted down to your gut and it isn't up in the brain to take this cleaning washing machine to full power and so uh yeah the only you know don't eat when you first get up i mean when we came out of our cave we didn't say what's for breakfast there was no breakfast you know there wasn't a refrigerator there wasn't a storage system and we had to find breakfast and quite frankly it probably took us many hours to find breakfast and so yeah so millennials uh you know listen to your head brain millennial here get genius foods it's the work of genius in the forms of mac there it is get this book enjoy it it's an easy read and you know even a blonde from new york can get it like max started the the story with i don't think he meant to imply that blondes were going to get dementia but they don't uh my wife my wife's a blonde too all right so max good luck with the book i know it's going to be phenomenal um you bless you for all the research you've done and can't wait to see in person one of these days again soon same dr g thank you so much it's been a pleasure