Kind: captions Language: en 9 and 10 adults today have some component of metabolic illness for the first time in human history we have more overweight people walking the Earth and underweight and by and large people are being taken down by these kinds of diseases of civilization diseases that are that are essentially driven by being undernourished and overfed those three factors make those kinds of foods particularly when they're all you have access to a recipe for disaster American Americans by and large are not in a good state of health right nine in ten adults today have some component of metabolic illness which is a really sad statistic but it's true nine and ten do you think that you can be profoundly overweight and still be healthy I think that you can be more healthy or less healthy at a given weight but it's it's without controversy better to not be obese and today why why would you say that's without controversy because I would say certainly in Instagram circles that's going to be very like people are going to push back on that I can already feel them typing in the comments as we speak um so in what way is that incontrovertible well obesity is not healthy um it's a disease and I think today we have a number of different sort of voices that are coming at us that are trying to obfuscate the reality of the fact that obesity is a disease now it is associated with the onset or worsening of non-communicable chronic conditions like type 2 diabetes your risk for developing type 2 diabetes is dramatically higher if you're obese cardiovascular disease it's not good for your joints it's an inflammatory condition um neurodegenerative disease so it's it's by and large not healthy that being said I think it's a positive thing that we're seeing people at different stages on their fitness journey today but to point to somebody who is obese and uh try to put a spin on it as if that's an aspirational state to be I completely disagree with that and I would say that all of the you know most credentialed medical experts would also corroborate that that being said beauty is subjective right so to conflate Health and Beauty I don't think is is smart I think that we should all practice self-love there shouldn't be any shame attached uh to obesity we should we should be encouraging yeah we should be encouraging people um to you know to to shift their body at any stage to a more healthy State and it's also true I should add that you can't really tell much about a person based on how they look from the outside and you can also be unhealthy and underweight which is it which is a major medical problem but today for the first time in human history we have more overweight people walking the Earth and underweight and by and large people are being taken down by these kinds of diseases of civilization diseases that are that are essentially driven by being undernourished and overfed and I think that the foundation of this this epidemic where by the year 2030 one in two people are going to be not just overweight but obese right are Ultra Ultra processed food products that by and large we over consume today your average American today derives 60 of their calories from Ultra processed foods these are the foods that line our Supermarket aisles so just to make it really simple for the audience you know our supermarkets tend to be designed the same way it's the perishable fresh food that tend to be around the perimeter the aisles have all the Shelf stable convenience foods that are minimally satiating highly calorically dense and Hyper palatable so those three factors make those kinds of foods particularly when they're all you have access to a recipe for disaster and so it's it's driving disease I think in a major way and when it comes to the food the kinds of things that people should be should should learn how to identify and thus avoid I think we have to all be more mindful of the added sugar epidemic added sugar is Insidious today it's in everything it's in it's in sauces it's in coffee beverages right we go to coffee chains for a cup of coffee we end up drinking dessert your average person today is consuming 77 grams of added sugar every single day so just to visualize that added sugar so this is sugar for which we have no biological necessity no biological need it's the sugar that food manufacturers are pumping into these Ultra processed food products is there some amount of sugar in that product that's not considered added sugar or every gram of sugar in that is added sugar yeah if you were to look at the nutrition facts label label of an apple it would say zero grams of added sugar but an apple a honey crisp apple has about 24 grams of of sugar in it it's not added but the sugar in an apple for example is bound to the food Matrix which includes fiber it includes polyphenols lots of water so it's it's highly self-limiting and that's not the case with these Ultra processed food products we don't Tire reveting them there was a seminal study published in 2018 funded by the NIH that showed us when you give adults access to an ultra processed food diet and you and you tell them to basically eat until you're full eat until you're satisfied they end up eating to a calorie surplus of about 500 additional calories and that I think goes back to the fact that these foods are minimally satiating and added sugar in particular we don't Tire of eating it we have let's get into why sugar so bad so you know we started this by saying that one I want to reinforce many people that I love I grew up in a morbidly obese family so when I say that I don't pass judgment on them love them to death but want to see them live as long as possible I'd love to know if anybody's ever done a study of like um what age do we see what BMI because I'm guessing that as you get older the BMI just starts dropping dropping dropping dropping dropping until you basically you don't see obese 90 year olds right yeah that's true it's really there's something fascinating there in terms of it's what it does to longevity so going from that standpoint that I'm guessing that basically everything that we're going to strip out of people's diet is because it causes some variation of metabolic disease we're making the base assumption that our North star's longevity Health span and call it performance yes yeah okay so um if we're knowing that we're marching towards that and sugar is the first thing that we strip out give it to me at a biological level why are we stripping sugar what's it doing metabolically that's gonna really ruin our ability to live for a long time in a healthy way and at high performance well I think that the the perception around sugar has sort of evolved which is which is a very positive thing I don't I don't necessarily think that a little bit here and there is toxic in any sense I don't think that sugar is the sole Smoking Gun for the Obesity crisis there's nothing inherently fattening about sugar but it's yeah I mean well I mean the dose makes the poison or I would say that the reason why sugar plays a role added sugar plays a role in the in the Obesity epidemic is because we don't Tire of consuming it and it's addition to ultra processed food products make contribute to the characteristic known as Hyper palatability so it makes those Foods prone to over consumption all right is hyper palatability the problem or is there another mechanism that kicks in so here's a theory I forget exactly who put this forward but basically hey fruit comes around in the fall fructose is designed to make you fat it basically makes my chondria less efficient on purpose you start kicking off all of this basically you're wasting energy raising your body temperature uncoupling something and it lets off heat and you're doing all of that in conjunction with making your cells more insulin resistant so that you're basically storing more of the glucose in your bloodstream so it's not basically getting out of your body or even getting shoved into your fat cells because you want to keep your fat cells the way that they are you even want to store some of the glucose in the bloodstream and you're doing all of that trying to give your body the signal to store store and the reason that worked from a longevity standpoint is you're more likely to survive the winter yes and so you've got sugar not only as a hyper palatability thing but that it's also a signaling molecule telling your body winter is coming store this [ __ ] up um yeah yeah no it's true so we have to we have to kind of reconcile two truths here so the first truth is that um sugar when sugar is present in the blood when our blood sugar becomes elevated it tells our pancreas basically to secrete the hormone insulin which is the fat storage hormone it's secreted basically and it's and it serves two essential roles one is to shuttle glucose into you know into the cells that that need it right so your musculature your skeletal muscle your liver these are the only places really that are able to store sugar in the body and they store it for a good reason because they use it as an energy source right when you're doing high intensity or anaerobic exercise your muscles require stored glucose in the form of glycogen to perform that high intensity work the second function that insulin serves is it gets the sugar out of your blood because when you when your blood sugar is chronically elevated that's toxic it's actually glucotoxic we know that chronically elevated blood sugar damages your blood vessels it glycates your your red blood cells right that's something that you can measure with a test called the hemoglobin A1c and Insulin also turns your fat cells into a one-way valve so it prevents lipolysis which is the release of free fatty acids from your fat tissue basically and that does serve a purpose of helping to partition energy so that when when sugar is available our muscles are burning sugar as a per as opposed to burning fat so it does block the burning of fat however if you're in a if your body is in a calorie deficit it knows that you've got energy stored in your fat tissue and so it's going to be able to circumvent the fact that insulin typically acts like a one-way valve on your on your fat cells so when insulin is elevated calories can flow into the Vets into the fat cell but they can't flow out um but again if you are if your body is starving for energy if you're in a calorie deficit insulin is going to come down and those calories are going to be released anyway so I think even if you have glucose in your bloodstream yeah I mean think look at bodybuilders who eat massive amounts of carbohydrates while in a calorie deficit they are still able to get shredded right so insulin you need elevated insulin to store fat but if you're in a calorie if you're in an energy deficit your body is going to be able to draw those calories regardless right what is up my friends I have huge news for you about one of the most exciting and important projects I've ever worked on in my life as you guys know it is my mission to help teach people about how to build a mindset and the skills that they're going to need to live an extraordinary life and over the last few months I've been working hard behind the scenes to create a brand new tool that will help you do exactly that it's called project Kaizen and I'm proud to announce that I'll be bringing it to the world later this year project Kaizen is a web 3 based game like experience that is a story based world that's going to allow you to get inside build an avatar that is aspirational of who you want to become and then take the path of the warrior seeking continuous Improvement inside of a story world and game experience alright my friend I cannot tell you how excited I am about this amazing new project which I think ushers in a whole new form of entertainment and I want to meet you inside of Roger Kaizen and help you have fun with these ideas of always getting better right click the link and join me in Discord and until then my friends be legendary take care peace so now then let's look at other qualities of sugar so I hear a lot of calories a calorie and hey look at the guy the twinkie guy ends up losing fat get it you just explained why but if my cells are made of the things that I eat am I really by doing a Twinkie diet or something like that where I'm eating you know different oils I'm eating trans fats whatever am I doing damage to my body at a cellular level that might not be detectable from just looking at me and seeing that I'm either in shape or Not In Shape yeah so I don't want people to think that I'm promoting a high sugar diet because again sugar it's got this hyper palatable quality also thanks to really robust meta-analyzes we see that people healthy individuals who are on high glycemic index diets so diets that are very sugary right diets that contain a lot of refined grain products are at are at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes so we know that chronic elevations of blood sugar even if you're if you're young and healthy is not good it's not good to your metabolic system it glycates the proteins in your body and I'm I have this hypothesis that uh it's really lifetime exposure of glucose um that over the long term is is damaging um and lifetime exposure basically implies the area under the curve of all of the you know all of the glycemic excursions that your body has seen over the years right so I think that's one reason to reduce glycemic variability also we know that when we eat high sugar when we ingest a high sugar bolus it tends to drop our blood sugar because again insulin it removes sugar from the blood but the way that it works the pancreas is not an instrument of precision it functions more like a blunt tool so for somebody that's eating a lot of sugar it actually can send your sugar your blood sugar below Baseline which can trigger anxiety in people who are prone to it it can leave you feeling hangry right consuming lots of sugar also outside of the conversation regarding weight which again is ultimately um dictated by energy balance consuming a high sugar bolus can also elevate your blood pressure which we know is a risk factor for neurodegeneration we've seen that one high sugar bolus about 75 grams of sugar can cause your systolic blood pressure to elevate for two hours post ingestion which is no bueno we've also seen that a high sugar bolus can reduce testosterone by about 25 percent which also persists for two hours yeah why any guesses why we'd have an evolutionary response to Sugar that lowers our testosterone that's a good question I'm not I'm not sure although I would you know I think that when we see an onslaught of sugar in the blood particularly from in these in these clinical studies they're using the these sugary beverages oftentimes from what are called oral glucose tolerance tests there's no a hunter-gatherer would have never had access to that kind of rapidly digested sugar Deluge right because we would have had fruit and our fruit as hunter-gatherers would have been a fraction of sweet as they are today but the notion of fruit juice or a sugary High glute 75 gram glucose beverage for example didn't exist um so I think what it does it sends our body into a stress State um and so that's I think one of the reasons why we see the elevation of blood pressure and I would also assume because stress can reduce testosterone I would I would guess that that's one of the mechanisms there as well so that's really interesting yeah it's um I mean we are seeing a decline in testosterone that's in general though in general yeah are we I've always assumed that's multifactorial that's poor diet that's adding on weight that's uh some of the societal things that are happening that's uh BPA all of the above it's like a big well all of the above but as I mentioned in that study where they saw a 25 reduction in testosterone they used a 75 gram sugar bolus right as I mentioned your average adult today consumes 77 grams of added sugar wow every single day so they're consuming that every day so yeah the added the added sugar thing I think is uh it's a problem now again if you have a big calorie budget if you're a bodybuilder if you're um you know if you're if you're burning an uh an intense amount of calories on a daily basis you do have a discretionary caloric budget but for your average person again today your average person is overweight bordering on Obesity um has some component of metabolic illness glucose dysregulation I would say that being being a sleuth and being able to identify added sugar and then and then cut that out or at least minimize your consumption of it I think you'd be doing your health major favors so one more question along that so let's say that I'm a bodybuilder I'm yoked huge muscle mass and I am burning a ton of calories I'm using my muscles a lot and I live for the next 30 years on a high sugar diet by calorie but I live in a caloric deficit so I still look awesome six pack abs I'm lean do you think that I'm going to be getting glycated tissues like is there am I paying a price internally even though I'm lean if I were to do it for that long I don't think anybody's done that study but just curious so there's a there's a debate actually raging right now um in the in the sort of nutrition Community as to whether or not chronic glucose spikes which yield chronic insulin spikes is at the etiology of insulin resistance or whether it's purely uh uh and sort of energy toxicity scenario um what we do see is that insulin resistance precedes chronically elevated insulin by sometimes 10 years so it might be the case that those chronic spikes of insulin um wrought by chronically eating you know high sugar regardless of where you are with your calories might actually cause somebody to develop insulin tolerance because cells develop a tolerance to chemicals that they are chronically exposed to right and so if we're chronically exposing ourselves our tissues to high levels of insulin via our diets regardless of where you know whether or not we're in a calorie deficit or Surplus then they might they might theoretically develop this the sort of insulin resistance and there is a debate about that so you know I'm my get my best guess would be because of these meta-analyzes that are showing that high glycemic diets will will predispose us to developing type 2 diabetes I think it's best to really minimize glycemic variability to know um you know the kinds of foods that are going to cause your your blood sugar to go through the roof and then to to minimize them and to use glucose yielding starches as a as a performance enhancing tool really um and I you know I I eat starches I eat sweet potatoes and and you know the occasional grain um but I am ultimately looking to make sure that I'm keeping my blood sugar stable because you know whenever your blood sugar is elevated you're you are essentially glycating the proteins in your body you're damaging the proteins it's this it's this sort of non-enzymatic reaction between sugar in your blood and protein and it essentially drives Decay and damage also when your body's in a low insulin State you're allowing for Gene Pathways to to activate that are associated with longevity like foxo3 cert one so these are all very complicated sort of Gene Pathways but um we know that chronically high levels of insulin are sort of like in opposition to those to those pathways all right so we've got sugar yeah we're not going to mess around with that uh what else are we removing from our diet are we messing with dairy where are we at on that oh man I love this question so I've actually my my views on on Dairy have evolved um recently Dairy is when you look at a glass of milk it's a solution of water and fat right but the fat doesn't stay at the top right right let's have some sugar in there oh there is lactose yeah there is a natural source of it is a natural source of sugar but um it's not like oil and water right the fat globules are suspended in the solution of of essentially 95 water which is what milk is right the triglycerides in Dairy are bound by A lipoprotein essentially like you know you've heard of lipoproteins like your LDL cholesterol milk is comprised of lipoproteins called milk fat globule membrane and these globules are comprised of proteins like sphingomyelin which is an important structural component of of myelin right the myelin sheath in our brains it's comprised of phosphatidylcholine so I think that actually there's a lot of good stuff to be had in full fat Dairy and it also these globules in milk affect the way our bodies respond to them so Dairy is unique among fat containing foods in that it's got a higher proportion of saturated fat than any other food so if you look at any natural fat containing steak Yeah steak is actually about 50 percent monounsaturated fat and you've got a fair amount of polyunsaturated fat in steak particularly grain-fed steak and then you actually have a relatively small proportion of saturated fat in the steak even though it gets like people are like oh my God the saturated fat mistake um Dairy has a much higher proportion of saturated fat and yet paradoxically we see that people who consume full fat Dairy tend to have better cardiovascular health better metabolic health and I think it's due to the the presence of this milk fat globule membrane so my hypothesis is that it's really good for brain health if you can tolerate Dairy so a lot of people are lactose intolerant but um if you think about it when a baby is born especially a human baby right a human baby continues its development in the world it's actually sometimes referred to as the fourth trimester of development and um breast milk is loaded with these globule with these globules right that must be there in at least in some way to support the development of the brain which is undergoing rapid organization and growth um during the time in which a baby is is feeding right so um so I've actually I've become a big fan of full fat Dairy I think it's a great a great food but I will offer the caveat and this is another area with regard to Dairy Where My Views have evolved um and and uh and we could also even perhaps call this a food that I've that I would recommend avoiding for some um and I know I'm gonna get some hate from the Paleo Community for this but uh I think that butter is actually a food that's worth um relegating to uh like the Indulgence category and the reason for that is that when first of all butter is a man-made product Dairy is made by Nature right but butter is made by people and um when you churn cream you disrupt the milk fat globule membrane so this is one of the reasons why if you melt butter and you put it in on in in some water it flows to the top so that Global membrane has been disrupted and I think that's one of the reasons why you see in clinical studies that when you feed people either cream or butter they both start out as cream right I mean cream is cream obviously but butter starts out as cream butter seems to have an adverse effect on blood lipids whereas cream doesn't so it's this it's the presence of this like milk fat globule membrane that I think makes uh the fat in full fat Dairy very healthy um but it's disruption I think is what can lead to adverse a sort of adverse lipid response in some to to butter when you say an adverse lipid response you're saying I eat the butter and it changes the composition or the amount of the lipids in my blood yes so like it'll raise like LDL cholesterol and actually the mechanism by which saturated fat raises LDL um is is quite interesting it reduces availability of the LDL receptor on on liver cells on hepatocytes so the way that your body works it's like a very elegant plumbing system your liver sends out these apob containing particles lipoproteins right like milk fat globular membrane but in your blood LDL vldl what have you and the idea is before lung you want the liver to suck those particles back up right the liver will dismantle them use the cholesterol to create bile acids for example um and it relies on the availability of these they're literally called the LDL receptors on the surface of the liver and saturated fat actually rate causes an elevation of LDL cholesterol in the blood in the blood because it's blocking the uptake yes in the liver interesting yeah and not all saturated fatty acids do this I should add so I mean there's you know Nuance I think um we've heard for many years and and something that continues to be echoed by uh particularly the vegan Community is that saturated fat is bad but a fat is not a fat just like a carb is not a carbon a protein it's not a protein um certain saturated fats do do this uh more than others and so it seems to be the case that butter um reduces availability of this of the LDL receptor whereas other full fat dairy products don't which is which is fascinating so why then has Dairy been on everybody's Hit List in terms of creating problems is it just that so many people are lactose intolerant or is there some other element to Dairy that creates other problems you know that's a really great question I think it has to do with the I mean many people are lactose intolerant I think there's a big push now towards plant-based diets there's a lot of money behind it right a push towards the consumption of fake meat products right which which I like to call the equivalent of human pet food you know it's like Ultra processed junk but also and I I drink this stuff sometimes but like almond milk and macadamia nut milk all these all these like plant-based milks there's a lot of money going into them so there's this big push away from dairy milk um and also admittedly like in the Wellness Community Dairy has been demonized for some time people will say that it's inflammatory um meta-analyzes actually show that that for most people Dairy is actually not inflammatory um so I'm going to give you a weird anecdote it is purely anecdotal sure but I was on Saturday and Sunday I was eating the toppings off of Domino's Pizza and the only toppings I get are cheese and I would do really light sauce so even that was like very little so I would do the cheese olives pepperoni and I was eating it and loved it and I just started noticing on a Sunday that every Sunday night I would feel like hot from the inside of my body wow and it was just like a little uncomfortable and I'd sleep a little weird that night and I'm like why am I always on Sunday and on like Saturday I would allow myself to cheat so if I wanted a candy bar to have a candy bar if I wanted a bit of ice cream I'd have ice cream but on Sunday I wouldn't so Sunday it was just the toppings from Domino's there was nothing else in my diet that I would consider you know sort of a cheat and finally I was like is it possible that I have a bad reaction to Dairy so let me do the same thing but go to like really light cheese and it stopped happening interesting so I was like whoa the only thing I affected was the amount of cheese that I was in taking over multiple meals because I would get a pizza on Saturday and a pizza on Sunday so I'm now cutting both of them in half effectively in terms of the amount of cheese and the the effect went away 100 now I know that's anecdotal but I was like whoa maybe Dairy really is doing some negative thing so you couple that with all the literature saying there's an issue I know a lot of people have skin responses like acne and stuff from dairy right everybody's different so I wouldn't you know I'm not uh saying that everybody should should go out especially if you know that you're sensitive to it um I mean some people do feel better cutting out casein which is why aren't you saying like at a meta level the people that and I mean maybe this is the people that eat dairy or pre-selected because they're not lactose well they're also there's confounding variables here right because like Domino's Pizza who knows like if that's even she don't you dare say something bad about my dominoes no I mean I'm being glib but like who knows what is it is it is it just cheese or maybe it's like some kind of like processed cheese cut with grain and Seed oils that's terrifying but very possible it's yeah it's a proposition it is possible so I would I would try to like a B test that by going and getting some like some some higher quality cheese that you know is just cheese um and also there could be some kind of interaction with like the you know the oils and the emulsifiers that are sometimes used I mean that's the thing is that restaurants are notorious Cost Cutters I'm a big advocate of steering away a as best as one can from grain and Seed oils because in restaurants we know that they're just they're heated and they're reheated and they're they become toxic you know essentially by the time they're served on the plate um and so that's just a problem with like with eating out in general you can't always predict how a food is going to make you feel my wife knows that all too well and we had the very uh uh unpleasantly eye-opening experience of realizing that even a lot of high-end restaurants when they say that it's just olive oil it's really blended oil and so you now have to ask very specifically is this blended oil or is this 100 extra virgin olive oil the servers will never know they always go back and act as a chef and then they're always as surprised as anybody else and say oh my God we you know I didn't realize but this actually is blended oil yeah we're like whoa yeah so and that just absolutely ruins Lisa's stomach so oh yeah it's bad I I mean there's there's I mean this is controversial too there there is within the nutritional and medical Orthodoxy there is still a major push towards these Ultra refined refined bleached and deodorized green and Seed oils which to me are such low quality food I mean let's just I mean just from a food quality standpoint alone and give me some of the um we're talking canola oil here like what's that not necessarily the name brand yeah like what's the type of thing I'm pulling off the shelf so canola oil is probably and I'm not an advocate for the consumption of canola oil but it's probably the best of the Gaggle really it's it's got a higher proportion of monounsaturated fat which is chemically quite stable I'm not advocating for it I personally avoid it um but why do you avoid it if it's well because it's in that it's in that category of of refined bleach and deodorized Grain and seed oil so canola oil corn oil soybean oil so it's offensive but the least offensive right okay that's how I would so I get then what makes it offensive what makes it the least offensive well one of the major problems with these grain and Seed oils is that they have a very high proportion of what's called polyunsaturated fatty acids pufas for short and poofas are not in any way dangerous right they're found in all fat containing foods contain some proportion of pufas right so grass-fed beef has pufas in it wild fatty fish has poofas in it avocados have some components some proportion of pufas in it the issue is that in Whole Foods those pufas which are very delicate and damage prone they're prone to a form of chemical disfigurement called oxidation they're protected in Whole Foods by the antioxidants that nature has has has packaged them with right nature thought ahead nature was like these fats are very delicate they're very damage prone let's bundle foods that contain these polyunsaturated fats in any significant quantity with vitamin E which is one of the most important fat soluble antioxidants in nature right the issue with grain and Seed oils is that a these fats are rich in polyunsaturated fats which are very delicate damage prone and whether it's via heat or or mechanical or chemical extraction they're subject to forces that accelerate this oxidative process right light heat and oxygen all catalyze and accelerate this oxidative process and they're stripped of the antioxidants that in Whole Foods would protect them so the reason why I would say that canola oil is you know maybe the best of of the worst is that it's got a lower proportion of these polyunsaturated fat of these polyunsaturated fats on the other hand it's got a higher proportion of omega-3 fats which are actually more delicate and damage prone than omega-6 fats so I'm not again advocating for their consumption but um but you know it's got a high proportion of monounsaturated fat which monounsaturated means it only contains one double bond which means that under normal circumstances it's actually quite chemically stable that monounsaturated fat is the primary fatty acid found in extra virgin olive oil it's also found in abundance and grass-fed beef and wild salmon and the like but all of these grain and Seed oils whether we're talking about canola oil soybean oil grapeseed oil is probably the worst because it's about I believe 80 to 90 polyunsaturated fat in during the production chain they all undergo a process a step called deodorization which is the food industry's equivalent of the witness protection program it basically it takes these oils which would otherwise contain really bitter flavors noxious noxious uh Aromas that that consumers wouldn't want right and it it it absolves them of any character that's the deodorization step now the issue is that that step creates a small but significant amount of trans fats which we know there's no safe level of trans fat consumption I mean the FDA banned their most common uh occurrence The partially hydrogenated fats what is up my friend Tom bilyu here and I have a big question to ask you how would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of one to ten if your answer is anything less than a ten I've got something cool for you and let me tell you 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until then my friends be legendary peace out why is that so my understanding is probably a super lay person's understanding of trans fats is that basically the the bonds in it become rigid so it's normally the fat molecule is quite squishy and it becomes rigid and then when those when you uptake that into your body and you use those fat cells to make your own cell membranes you're using these rigid brittle um fat cells and so it makes the actual membrane on your own cells brittle and rigid is that more actually what's happening yeah I mean that's what happens when it once those those fats have become have been integrated into the phospholipid bilayer which is what it's called which is how those fats sort of Orient themselves within the um the cell membrane but it comes down to the double bonds and the fact that they are electrochemically unstable um and monounsaturated fats the mono implies that they have one double bond the polyunsaturated fats the poly in polyunsaturated fats imply that they have multiple double bonds and so on the spectrum of monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats the monounsaturated fats are actually more saturated because they have fewer double bonds when you have a double bond actually so double bonds generally they what they do they make a a cell they help promote the characteristic of membrane fluidity which is actually the opposite so it they because these double bonds they cause a kink in the fatty acid chain it doesn't allow the fatty acid um the fatty acids to to aggregate as tightly as they would with saturated fats saturated fats are straight and so that allows them to pack together more tightly on that's why saturated fats are solid at room temperature polyunsaturated fats actually generally promote this characteristic of membrane fluidity and we need polyunsaturated fat so this is not to demonize them in any way we need both the omega-6s and the Omega-3s and actually the polyunsaturated fatty acid that's most abundant in Grain and Seed oils linoleic acid we do have some physiological requirement for that fat right the issue is we over consume it today and we consume them in the form of these grain and Seed oils which again are prone to oxidation and lipid peroxidation in particular is a major contributor to oxidative stress in the brain so we don't even have the long-term data that makes me feel comfortable consuming these kinds of fats at the level that your average American is consuming them we know that they lower LDL relative to saturated fat and I think that's one of the if not the reason that the medical and nutritional Orthodoxy loves them um but yeah they're prone they're prone to oxidation and we know that the brain is a crucible for oxidative stress and not just do they oxidize but they generate these really toxic secondary products of oxidation like aldehydes certain aldehydes which we know are no bueno so I take a sort of precautionary principle approach you know with these with these fats and I think that I think that they're they're definitely worth avoiding also 20 of the oxygen that you're that you're using you're 20 of whole body oxygen consumption is being used by the brain and the Brain accounts for two percent of the body's Mass so 20 of the oxygen in in a container that that speaks for two percent of the mass of your body right it's a container that's ultimately the size of a grapefruit right so you've got all this oxygen being used to create energy in this tiny space and your brain is comprised primarily of these kinds of fats polyunsaturated fats that's why we need to get them from diet right we need to get them but we should be getting them from Whole Foods from Wild fatty fish from nuts and seeds from um avocados you know but that's why the brain is essentially a crucible for oxidative stress and oxidative stress is at the foundation of conditions like Alzheimer's disease of Parkinson's disease it can exacerbate pre-existing disease States right so it's a big problem and I'm I'm not going to say that you know we have all the data to say that these seed oils are The Smoking Gun with with conditions like Alzheimer's Disease by the way these are multifactorial conditions so you know I'm not I don't want to scare people into thinking that these oils are the cause of the of those conditions and we we honestly don't have that data to say even that they're that they are with with absolute certainty that they are causally related that's the hypothesis but I don't think that we will ever have that kind of data that's sort of my plea to people right and the medical order is what is to is to approach these oils with great caution because they didn't exist in the human food supply prior to 100 years ago and mechanistically we see that they're so prone to this this sort of chemical chemical degradation and disfigurement and that's relevant to the brain and also I'll add as another important point that the context in which these oils are being consumed is generally a diet that's low in antioxidants low in in fat soluble antioxidants like vitamin E which we know is crucially important vitamin E is one of the most important to get vitamin E so almonds are a fantastic Source avocados are a fantastic Source grass-fed grass-finished beef is a great source of vitamin E you've got three times the vitamin E and grass-finished beef as you haven't grain finished beef generally in nature wherever you find polyunsaturated fats you find in the appropriate proportion vitamin E that's like Nature's Way to protect these polyunsaturated fats so we're eating more polyunsaturated fats than ever before in human history and we're consuming less vitamin E I think 90 percent of adults don't consume adequate don't consume an adequate amount of vitamin E which is actually vitamin E represents about I believe eight isoforms of vitamin E we under consume I mean all of them because we're not eating we're eating so few Whole Foods these days and we're over consuming these these grain and Seed oils the more polyunsaturated fats you consume the higher your requirement for vitamin E and most people aren't consuming adequate vitamin E so I think it's a I think it's a huge problem and anecdotally totally anecdotal you know that I got started because my mom was very sick she had a form of dementia for many years she had Lewy Body dementia yeah that's what Robin Williams said right yeah yeah crazy horrible disease horrible disease and and my mom passed away three years ago and this is just an anecdote take it with a grain of salt but um my mom ate a diet that any dietitian of the 80s and 90s would have said she's on the right path well done I grew up with these grain and Seed oils in my kitchen right big plastic see-through jug of corn oil by the stove margarine in my fridge yeah I grew up eating these kinds of fats now I'm not going to say that they are what caused my mom's condition but I do you know I it's it's my hypothesis hypothesis that along with the over consumption of grain and seeds with with refined grain products rather these oils um yeah I don't think that they're doing our health any favors yeah I want to go back to this idea of victim blaming you're such a kind person and I love how you're trying to position this to make sure that the most people can hear you assumingly possible but what I don't want to get lost in there is that like I'll speak for myself I have unintentionally made a lot of poor choices with my diet because I didn't know better and then I've intentionally made poor choices with my diet because it was a lot of fun and it's really important to me to now be at a place where I'm at least more or less to the best of everybody's belief at this point I know what to do to like if I'm feeling inflamed and my joints are hurting I feel in control I know what to do to bring that pain down so I just want to make sure that it doesn't get lost in the kindness that there really are there's cause and effect to what you eat and while it's not all known it will for sure change over time you definitely shouldn't feel bad about even eating things that you know are bad for you like don't don't feel bad about it right like when I eat bad foods I'm not feeling guilty I'm like I this is a trade-off right I may be shortening My Life by some amount but this is really fun so I'm going to do it and certainly if I didn't know any better I mean Jesus what can you do numbness really know like you know what are we doing like when I discovered that blankets had like you know crazy chemicals in them I went out and bought an all-natural blanket that [ __ ] is scratchy so now I still use my old filled with terrible chemicals blanket because it's soft as hell so you know my thing is look we're I don't want anybody to feel ashamed or anything like that but I want people to understand that you can get control of this that if your diet is leading you somewhere that you don't want to go that you really can learn about it and make choices that will yield a very different outcome so for me I look at my family they're all morbidly obese and I coming from the same stock was headed in the same direction learned about nutrition and was able to take myself in a completely different direction so I really want people to understand you can eat whatever you want and I'm not judging you I think it's amazing make your choices um but hey if you're ever getting a result that you don't want you can make a new choice and get a new result yeah so beautifully said and to me I think what it what it really comes down to is giving people to the tools to make uh to to to make an informed choice at the end of the day because a lot of people when they show up to their doctor's office with these conditions that take years to develop years if not decades right they're like why me and so as long as I think I I know that I'm putting good information out to to help people make an informed Choice then then by all means indulge when when you choose to because no single meal single Indulgence is going to sway your health in any direction positive or negative no you know it's not eating for optimal brain health isn't about eating a handful of berries every once in a while it's about your dietary pattern as a whole it's about how you're eating every single day um and with regard to I mean other things that I think people really ought to stop doing that will uh make a measurable have a measurable positive impact on their health can we talk about mouthwash for a little bit yeah yeah you're trying to like really [ __ ] me up with this mouthwash thing yeah this is a this is something that um the more I learn about it the more uh the more convinced I am that this is something we need to be talking about because nobody is right um there's a lot of money that goes into the the sale of mouthwash in fact I was at a drugstore um not too long ago and I saw this big ad imploring people with type 2 diabetes which is very common in this country right that periodontal disease is a big problem for for people with type 2 diabet diabetes so they should buy our mouthwash right it's a big mouthwash brand but mouthwash is a major problem and I'll tell you why people who frequently use mouthwash what you're doing is you're nuking bacteria in your mouth that are required to create and recycle nitric oxide and we create nitric oxide in different ways one of the reasons why nose breathing is so important because we create nitric oxide via the nitric oxide synthase enzyme in the epithelial epithelial cells of our paranasal sinus but oral bacteria are play a crucial role in this nitric oxide pathway um and the the reason why is they help to reduce nitrate from food to nitrite so reducing it means that they're removing an oxygen molecule and it's nitrate that enters that basically creates nitric oxide in our blood vessels and they also recycle the nitric oxide um that we produce endogenously when we're exercising so so far these are a lot of words that like I sort of understand but like what's the real impact of my twice a day Listerine habit so studies show and we need more research but what they've shown in obese patients is that people who use antiseptic mouthwash that's the key word so mouthwash that is germ destroying bacteria antibacterial mouthwash twice a day or more have a 50 increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes right so weird and doubling of risk for hypertension so high blood pressure but it makes sense when you realize that you're killing the bacteria that help to increase levels of nitric oxide but what is nitric oxide doing in the body that would impact type 2 diabetes because it's not just involved in blood pressure it's a it's a cellular signaling molecule that's involved in insulin sensitivity which is weird important insulin resistance is the Cornerstone of type 2 diabetes so it's basically affecting our body's ability to process sugar so if I were wearing a continuous glucose monitor and I'm using my Listerine and then I stop would I notice a difference in my reading if you're wearing a continuous glucose monitor and you stop you could potentially yeah you could potentially see um if if this Bears out right because these are correlational studies sure but um if this is borne out um you would potentially see an improvement in your body's ability to partition sugar if you cut out but here's the thing is that one even just one use can increase your blood pressure um and also they've shown and this was a randomized control trial they've shown that using antiseptic mouthwash after a workout so we know that exercise is as powerful as medicine for helping to normalize our blood pressure yep they found that using mouthwash after exercise negates to a large degree the anti-hypertensive effects of exercise so it basically negates some of one of the most important benefits of exercise using mouthwash after a workout so the take home is don't use antiseptic mouthwash after a workout now the type of mouthwash that they use in that study is called chlorhexidine which is a I believe it's a prescription only antiseptic mouthwash but I would not regularly use an alcohol based mouthwash for the for that reason because you're basically nuking the bacteria you wouldn't take an antibiotic every day we know that antibacter we we've overused antibacterial hand soap so why who in their right mind would would think that it makes sense to sterilize the oral cavity every single day you're supposed to have bacteria in your mouth yeah but like it my mouth literally tastes better if I do Listerine because there are days where I'll just brush my teeth and I forget or I'm traveling and so I only have toothpaste I don't have the Listerine yeah and I'm like I notice well the increased risk was was seen for people who use it twice or more per day so I mean you could hypothetically use it for use it use it once a day if you wanted um but I I personally wouldn't I would tongue scrape which is a great way to freshen up the mouth like with your toothbrush just yeah you could use it you could do that you'd brush your tongue flossing you well there there are actual like these medical tongue scraping really uh things that you can buy yeah because a lot of the like the the bad breath bacteria it Aggregates on the tongue but yeah I mean I think like flossing regularly I I mean it blows my mind that there are people that don't we're getting way off topic but like it blows my mind that there are people that don't floss like all I need to do is floss once and see what I'm pulling out of my teeth and that to me is like I floss now twice a day um I also you know brush I um think that you know fluoride has has antiseptic uh properties so I personally use a fluoride free um toothpaste I use toothpaste with hydroxyapatite which um is actually fairly common in Japan there are studies that suggest that it's as good at re helping to re mineralize teeth as fluoride so I use a an hydroxyapatene is a natural component of bone and teeth so there's no sort of antiseptic quality of of uh nanohydroxyapatite um so I floss a brush and then I eat an evolutionary evolutionarily appropriate diet I cut out the refined grain products which we know are easily retained by Oral bacteria and are highly karyogenic I actually talk about this ingenious yeah they promote the formation of caries which is the the medical way of saying cavities got it um yeah they promote the growth of streptococcus streptococcus mutans which is the primary cavity-causing bacteria in the mouth um but the problem with rinsing with uh antiseptic mouthwash is you're nuking the bad bacteria but you're also nuking the good bacteria the bacteria that help to break down nitrate in our foods like beets and arugula right beets in arugula we know are rich in nitrates but if you're regularly rinsing your mouth with antiseptic mouthwash you're you're basically disallowing the ability of your food to have a neuro a cardio protective effect right like you could be eating all the beets and arugula you want but if you're destroying the bacteria in your mouth that are required to reduce the nitrate that those foods contain to nitrite you're you're basically like a you're you're wasting your money and you're wasting your effort because we rely on oral bacteria to um to derive maximum benefit from those Foods right all right super interesting now let's get into what are the things that we should be adding I like your take on meat um I have now I've really tried to go plant forward so um we have there's a guy here on the team who has a really big percentage gap between his chronological agents biological age so um I was like what do you do and he had been vegan for years so I was like all right let's do this and he gave me this concoction to make in the morning it's largely fruit though and I was like there's no way you're gonna die like when I first saw him eating it I was like bro like that there's no way that's good for you and his body composition of course he's very very skinny has a hard time putting on weight so I was like is he like skinny fat and you know so anyway let me try this wearing my continuous glucose monitor I eat this thing now if you eat it slowly you go up to about 120 or I go up to about 120 and you say that's where he goes as well 120 and he stays if I eat it fast I'll go all the way up to 150 uh which for me that's like sort of red light High um yeah so that is questionable but but I've my body composition did not go up so I don't know if it's just depressing my calories and the overall caloric intake on the Smoothie isn't very high I don't know but um but I don't feel great and so I notice on days where I have it I'm just meh I don't know I it's not traumatic it's not bad it's not brain fog it's nothing if you were going to give like a sense of what's the qualia of your day I would just say I'm off a little bit I wouldn't be able to pinpoint it it's not brain fog it's not lack of energy I don't know just don't feel normal now if I eat meat I feel like a million bucks I'm ready to rock so have you reverted your position then like have you gone back to like a more yeah oh if I if I immediately I do both but there might be three or four days where I'll go and I won't have the Smoothie so on those days I would say I feel normal because I always feel good because my diet's clean just year round um and when I have the smoothie I feel a little bit off but it's not catastrophic by any means um and for body composition reasons sometimes I'll do the shake just because it does seem to help me stay tight even though it's fruit which I still can't wrap my head around how that's true uh but it is certainly makes me feel Fuller from a muscular standpoint um but yeah so anyway I keep trying to go plant forward I'm never loving the way that I feel there's a lot of Dogma around like either moral reasons for needing to go plant forward but I like the way that you had a take on meat in the book I'd love for you to go into that why meat let's get into the weeds a little bit on amino acids yeah yeah there's this you know I mean we talked about this push towards plant-based eating and I think that it's it's great to include plants right I mean it's we see that fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with reduced inflammation with with longevity all these all these really positive things right observationally when we look at People's Health and their meat consumption habits people who consume more meat just because meat has been demonized for so many decades at this point people who consume more meat and especially processed meat they tend to have worse Health outcomes but that's because people who eat more meat tend to be more sedentary they tend to smoke more people who are vegan tend to be more health conscious right they tend to um or or people that have plant heavy diets right people who are here's a good example of of healthy user bias right like if you were to look observationally at the population level at all the people in the in the U.S who eat quinoa and then you were to sort of um rank them in terms of how much quinoa they're eating right I guarantee you you would see the people who eat quinoa often have great health outcomes right is it because of the quinoa or is it in spite of the quinoa right that's where we have to recognize when you start eating quinoa you're shopping at air one there you go yeah the fact that you know how to pronounce quinoa is a good sign right that's a good sign which most people wouldn't know how to pronounce quinoa right especially if they're not Health Food Shoppers or if they're or or health conscious for that matter and so that's the that's the limitation with I think epidemiology when it comes to teasing out the value or the health effect that meat can have right but when you look at what meat is I mean it's a pristine source of protein it's the highest quality highest biological biological value source of protein to be found in nature right we can look at the digestible indispensable amino acid score which is you know the latest and greatest way of measuring protein digestibility we see that meat is consistently at the top I mean soy comes close uh but you know eggs whey protein aggressive beef chicken always at the top um the proportion of essential amino acids is phenomenal right like you've got a very high proportion of the nine essential amino acids very uh concentrated in branched chain amino acids which we know are crucially important for halting muscle protein breakdown and stimulating muscle protein synthesis we know that high protein foods meat in particular also tend to contain a lot of really important micronutrients that that are typically under consumed today in their most bioavailable form I'll add so you know when you're getting micronutrients whether it's B12 or iron or zinc from an animal sourced food those micronutrients are Plug and Play to your body right they don't have to undergo complex biochemical transformation that vary in in the in their efficacy from person to person right like plant-based Omega-3s for example alpha linolenic acid very constrained in terms of our ability to generate the biologically relevant omega-3 fats icosapenta enoic acid and ducosa hexaneic acid DHA fat from the plant-based form right women are about 10 times better at it than men women I think about 10 percent of the plant-based Omega-3s that they that they ingest will get converted to DHA fat it's thought that women have a higher ability to do this because of childbearing right but men um less than one percent of the plant-based Omega-3s that we ingest actually get get converted to DHA fat so that's a miserable I mean statistic right there whereas the DHA fat that you ingest from wild salmon or from omega-3 enriched eggs plug and play for the human body and this is true for all the I mean many many of the micronutrients that you see in in animal products and they're without anti-nutrients that can potentially hinder their absorption so so I'm a big advocate of the consumption of meat I think it's I think it's really important and also I'll add that there's this big issue of food access and food distribution in this country right you can go into any almost any supermarket in this country and buy a pack of ground beef right and to me that is a going to be a much healthier dinner than boxed mac and cheese right you can go into any gas station almost and find canned tuna right which is going to be a pristine source of protein great source of minerals like selenium and such and so I think we we have to really um be careful not to demonize these kinds of these kinds of foods now I'm not saying everybody should go out and become carnivores right that's not my Approach but I think we do need to get back to some sort of semblance of common sense when it comes to the kinds of foods that we know that humans have been eating since we've been human yeah it's interesting watching some of the nature shows and seeing like um there are like take the Pelican a pelican will try to eat a cat it's not like you know we have this image of like oh uh monkeys only eat you know shoots and leaves no no if they can get a hold of something they will eat it Nature's wild yeah Nature's wild um so yeah I think it's pretty clear from an evolutionary standpoint that humans are omnivores and I like the idea of eat what you need to build and so if you need to build muscle and you know brain tissue and all that well then you're gonna eat the things that are actually that versus eating a plant which has those you know amino acids for the most part but not quite in the most available form um it's very interesting yeah also I mean low-fat vegetarian diets are associated with with reduced testosterone it's not like plants don't have a potential downside right I mean we have to talk about the fact that plants today grown especially in the industrial plant agriculture system harbor heavy metals um they are vehicles for herbicides and pesticides which you know I mean I'm not saying that organic is better than conventional I think there's debate on a healthy debate on that um but uh but yeah I mean I think I think it's about ultimately um a balance a balance of both but um but protein I think is important it's highly satiating it assuages our hunger I think in a really powerful way right which fat and carbs can't do um again the the fact that high protein foods contain are a repository of other micronutrients which we know are beneficial um I think it's I think it's really important and there's this fear now I think around protein and Longevity and we know that people who are people over 65 who eat higher levels of protein have increased longevity reduced risk of cancer um and uh and so yeah I take a I take a pretty Firm Stance on that eggs for example eczara another food that you can go anywhere in this country right food deserts you'll be able to find eggs right they're not going to be the most pristine pasteurized eggs that you and I might find in our local Whole Foods for example but there's still a health food there's still a cognitive multivitamin right egg yolks are incredible so um so yeah I'm really against the sort of fear-mongering around around is there such a thing as too many eggs ate a lot of eggs yeah a lot there's a eggs dietary cholesterol we now know has very little long-term effect on on serum cholesterol there might be an acute effect um because when you eat more cholesterol when you when you through your diet ingest more cholesterol your liver is going to create less of it when you ingest less your liver is going to create more so the body wants homeostasis right the issue is that there's a bit of a lag time so if you uh from one day to the next start eating more cholesterol um dietary cholesterol if you're on a low cholesterol diet then you start eating more cholesterol you may perhaps see an increase in your blood lipids but that will normalize over time um the the key sort of needle mover on cholesterol tends to be saturated certain saturated fatty acids um and we talked sort of about this but um but I you know with foods like butter coconut oil they'll raise your your LDL cholesterol and there's really no nutritional value to I think like eating an excess of of isolated fats right you're gonna when you when you adopt a diet that contains animal products like red meat you're gonna you're gonna have a cholesterol level that's lower than I mean that's I'm sorry higher than that of a of a vegan perhaps but I think that there's benefit to um there's there are other other benefits to be had from consuming these Foods right the benefits outweigh the risks the fact that meat can help you stay robust and healthy it can help optimize your testosterone your your hormones your testosterone um the fact that it provides all of these other micronutrients that help your body carry out all of its many sort of faculties um I think is is non-trivial it's a non-trivial benefit yeah man speaking of non-trivial benefits where can people follow you thank you brother um so I'm very active on Instagram at maxlugavier I host my own podcast called the Genius life yeah you've been on it um love to get you back it's called the Genius life and my new book genius kitchen is out now wherever you buy wherever you get your books so awesome all right guys your health is everything please take it seriously get it right this guy does it right you will definitely want to pick up the book uh he's got multiple books all of which will lead you to a lifestyle that you will never regret getting into and speaking of things you will never regret if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace study that showed if you actually increase your level of Omega-3s by an extra serving a week or two like from wherever you are with your starting point you can increase your longevity your Survival by 4.7 years