What Causes a Good Brain to Fail? - with Max Lugavere | The Empowering Neurologist EP. 66

Wow, this looks awesome.

Well, I'm interested to see how you like it.

I've never seen olive oil poured so liberally. Oh yeah. It looks amazing.

Well, you know, in the study I had mentioned here earlier, those individuals were using a liter of olive oil a week each person.

Wow.

Why not? I mean, it kind of rewrites the story on fat, added fat. Downtown, isn't it?

So good. Oh my God.

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. David Perlmutter. Welcome again to The Empowering Neurologist. Let me just say at the very beginning that I understand maybe I overcooked the omelet a little bit. What can you say? I really enjoyed spending time with Max Lugavere. He is our guest today. He is the author of this new book, Genius Foods. It's really, really good. Max is a powerful citizen scientist, and I think you're going to hear a very interesting story from Max about what compelled him to get into this area of science right off the bat, and then what he did with it. Let me tell you a little bit about Max. He's a filmmaker. He is a TV personality involved in health and science, a health and science journalist. He's the director of the upcoming film Bread Head. Which is the first-ever documentary about the prevention of dementia, what we can do to prevent dementia through our choices in terms of diet and lifestyle. He is also the author of this really terrific book, again, Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life. Max is a contributing writer to things like Medscape, Vice, Fast Company, and The Daily Beast. He's been featured on NBC Nightly News, Dr. Oz Show, The Doctors, and also in The Wall Street Journal. He is a very sought-after speaker. He gets invited to a variety of venues, including some very esteemed academic venues, like speaking at the New York Academy of Sciences. And Max has created materials that are used by healthcare providers around the world to provide clinical practice ideas and techniques for actual implementation of strategies to prevent dementia. So I'm really looking forward to our interview. Let's get started. Hi, Max. How are you doing? Doing

great. Great to be here.

Well, I want to just jump right in, and I'd like you to— if you could tell our viewers What is a citizen scientist like you doing in this arena? How did you get so involved in wanting to learn about dementia?

Yeah, so my background is in traditional journalism. When I graduated college, where I double majored in film and psychology, I ended up getting a job working for a TV network that was founded by former US Vice President Al Gore. I got to really cut my teeth with the best of the best in terms of storytellers and journalists in the business, Peabody Award-winning content creators, and my passion really has always been to tell stories that I felt like were undertold and could make a positive impact on the world. That was my personal mission from day one working in media. When I left Current TV to try to figure out where I was going to go with my career 5 years in, it was then that in my personal life, my Back home in New York City, my mom started to show signs of memory loss and cognitive decline. The term dementia, Alzheimer's disease, I mean, these were not in my lexicon at the time. I had no prior family history of dementia. But when I would start to spend more and more time with my mom, I would notice that it was almost as if her brain's processing speed had downshifted. It's sort of like when you have a web browser open with too many tabs. Uh, going on at the same time, and you're trying to watch a video and the frame rate starts to stutter and you're like, what's going on? That's pretty much— that was pretty much the subjective experience that I had being around my mom, who her whole life has been this sort of spirited, fast-talking, fast-walking New Yorker. Um, I have vivid memories of, you know, being in the kitchen with her, uh, cooking a meal and asking her to pass the salt, for example. And I would be at the other side of the kitchen and the salt would be in the cabinet right above where she was standing. Uh-huh. It would be quicker for me to walk around my mom and to open the cabinet and reach up and grab it than it would for her to process the command and act on it and hand me the salt. It just seemed like something was off. In tandem with that, her gait had changed. This is something that back then I couldn't make the connection between the brain and the way a person Walked. I assumed that it was a muscular thing. I was like, Mom, maybe you need to work out more or stretch a little bit. But lo and behold, this ignorance that I had ended up with me going with my mother to various neurology departments around the United States. I distinctly remember going to the US News and World Report's website and looking at the hierarchy of neurology departments around the US and creating little checkboxes. We ended up going to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. We were fortunate enough to be able to go to Columbia and NYU here in New York City where my mom lives. But in every single case, what I experienced was what I've come to refer to as diagnose and adios. Although in the earlier doctor's visits, we couldn't even get that because it was unclear as to what— condition my mom had. So it all sort of culminated for me and her in a trip to the Cleveland Clinic, because before I had any sense of what functional medicine was or anything like that, I heard that the Cleveland Clinic was known for taking a sort of all-hands-on-deck approach to people with complicated health problems. And we visited the, the Cleveland Clinic. You know, I remember we had a suite at the Holiday Inn. They assembled a team for my mom, and it was there that a neurologist for the first time diagnosed my mom with a neurodegenerative disease. And he wrote— the physician wrote a prescription for, you know, these biochemical Band-Aids. I didn't know what they were. He didn't take the time to explain to me what they were for. But I remember Googling the chemical names later on that night in the suite at the Holiday Inn. And learning for the first time that my mom was prescribed drugs for both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. And, you know, I mean, at that point my world came to a screeching halt. It was just— I mean, it was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack. It was sort of like the confluence of the fear and the helplessness, thinking that my mom could die from these diseases. At such a young age. It just— it was probably one of the worst experiences of my life, having all of that sort of come crashing down on me. As soon as that subsided, I mean, human beings, we're incredibly resilient creatures. We can habituate to almost any emotional state. It was a really strong call to action to me to learn everything I possibly could about how diet and lifestyle might have contributed to what my mom had developed. The fact that I wasn't a medical doctor, the fact that I wasn't a scientist didn't occur to me as being a barrier to understanding. I just basically began Googling, and as a journalist, I knew how to pick my sources. And actually, the first place that I went was straight to PubMed, which is available to anybody and everybody. And at a certain point, I began to use my calling card to reach out to scientists and clinicians around the world. I mean, David, you were one of the first people that I reached out to because in one of the peak moments In those moments of my desperation and helplessness, I stumbled upon your work, and it was incredibly inspiring to me. So it's an investigation that began 7 years ago and continues to this day and will continue until the day that I die, trying to understand not only how this happened to my mom, but how to prevent it from happening to myself and how to prevent it from happening to other people that I care about.

One of the main themes in your book is the powerfully detrimental role of inflammation. And as we know, not just in the brain but throughout the body in terms of chronic degenerative conditions. But if you can just walk us through how inflammation seems to be pretty much the cornerstone across the panorama of neurodegenerative conditions, and beyond that, what it is that seems to be literally fanning the flames.

So inflammation gets a bad rap these days because of the pervasive Incidence of low-grade chronic inflammation, which is sort of a unifying theory of modern disease. As you mentioned, it's believed to be the cornerstone of all chronic conditions these days, everything from Alzheimer's disease to Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, all instigated by inflammation. But what is inflammation? Well, inflammation, at a certain point in our evolutionary history, evolved as a powerful defense mechanism against the infectious threat of pathogens and as a way to recover and repair against injury. When you stub your toe or when you get a scrape or a cut, the heat, the flame and inflammation that you feel is really your body coming to the rescue, your immune cells coming to the rescue to defend against something that could ultimately have killed you back before the invention of emergency rooms and antiseptic. It's not a bad thing, but the problem is today it's become chronically activated by our diets and our lifestyles. Our immune systems have become activated in response to what we're eating and what we're doing or not doing. This is a problem that is not without collateral damage. A lot of these immune cells, they basically leave damaging products in their wake. A brain functioning in a low inflammation state is really a brain functioning at its best. There's a really strong link now that has emerged from the literature between major depression and chronic inflammation. It's called the inflammatory cytokine cascade. Model of depression. Being inflamed affects our higher-order cognitive processing, processing. And new research actually strengthens, strengthens this notion that Alzheimer's disease and the buildup of these plaques once thought to cause Alzheimer's disease might actually be sort of like an innocent bystander, or even something that might have evolved to protect against inflammation in the brain.

Let me stop you right there. I'd like to walk through that. Let's unpack that just a little bit, and that is, what you're saying is that the beta amyloid that is the focus of all these drug development efforts to either target the enzyme that makes it, target the enzyme that breaks it down, or even immunize a person against it, that beta amyloid might not be the cause of Alzheimer's and might actually be there as a response element Yeah,

wonderfully said. The best analogy that I can draw is to what's happened with cholesterol and our understanding of the role of cholesterol in heart disease over the past couple of decades. When cadavers that had died from heart disease were opened up, their arteries were found riddled with this plaque that is constituted by and large by cholesterol. It was assumed that cholesterol was the causative force in heart disease. So too, we now We do have imaging technology that allows us to look into the living brain, but for the most part, up until very recently, the only way that Alzheimer's could truly be diagnosed with unmistakable certainty was on death. They would open up the brain of a cadaver and find these plaques there. It was assumed that for a very long time, these plaques were the causative force in Alzheimer's disease. I mean, it makes perfect sense when you're looking at a time slice of an Alzheimer's-riddled brain. But what has occurred recently in terms of our understanding about Alzheimer's disease and heart disease over the past couple of decades is that both cholesterol and amyloid may be there at the scene of the crime, but not the suspect itself. So that's led to a growing number of researchers now to look at earlier developments in the cascade that will ultimately decide One's cognitive fate. In fact, just to go back to the pharmaceutical quest to find a drug treatment, I mean, it was just announced that Pfizer was shuttering their doors on pharmaceutical intervention going down that road of the amyloid hypothesis as you described it. There was another big company that announced a major failure. Alzheimer's drug trials have a 99.6% fail rate. If I were an investor, it's not an area that I would invest in. I would certainly invest in prevention, as much as I would die to have a cure for my mom tomorrow.

I hear you. We're both in the same position. Along those lines, an interesting report was just published by the American Academy of Neurology in the journal Neurology. It was called Practice Guidelines, and it was really a recommendation by our body, our governing body, if you will. or at least the body that kind of sets what should be considered standard of care in the field of neurology, about what should a practicing neurologist do in terms of recommendation for a patient who has what we call mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, perhaps pretty much the prodrome for, or the harbinger for future dementia. We know that most cases of MCI do ultimately manifest as full-blown dementia. What can we do right now? What is appropriate to do? What is the recommendation for doctors to do when we're dealing with a patient with MCI? And this study was published a couple of weeks ago. They looked at 8 different pharmaceuticals. They found that none of them was to be recommended, none whatsoever. They did find only one prescription that was shown to reduce the risk of developing dementia, The prescription was for exercise. How does exercise then factor into— I know you talk about it. The book is called Genius Foods, but obviously you go well beyond that. Take us through exercise in terms of what you've learned.

Exercise is just a powerful tonic for the brain. It coats our brains in feel-good chemicals. It actually increases serotonin in the brain by causing your muscles to suck up branched-chain amino acids, basically allowing tryptophan, which is your brain's— it's the precursor amino acid to both serotonin and melatonin easier access into the brain. It makes you feel good. Endorphins are definitely upregulated, but also exercise powerfully leads to an upregulation of BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It's been dubbed the Miracle-Gro for the brain. It promotes both the survival and growth of new neurons, which is really important for neuroplasticity. When I talk about exercise as a medicine for the brain, essentially, it's also not without— it's without negative side effects. You feel great, you look better naked, and it's, as you mentioned, the guidelines were just updated in terms of how physicians should treat mild cognitive impairment, which often, but not always, converts to full-blown Alzheimer's disease. It's one of the best treatments for Parkinson's disease that there is. Research shows that medical school curricula are criminally under— exercise is criminally underrepresented in the curricula of most med schools. It's not something that most physicians really know about. In terms of a practical protocol, I think aerobic exercise, there's a bounty of research on the power of aerobic exercise, but at the end of the day, the best exercise for you is going to be the one that you enjoy doing the most. I like to imbue my day with movement. I take the stairs whenever I can. I go on brisk walks, and I ride my bicycle whenever possible. Then I like to actually go to the gym and do high-intensity exercise. High-intensity exercise is basically when you push your body to its peak limit of physical capability. It basically is the equivalent of sending a text message to your genome to get stronger. This not only manifests as bigger muscles and greater strength, but that same stimulus actually works on your brain cells. It allows for something called mitochondrial biogenesis, which is the creation of new mitochondria in your brain cells. Very important stuff. They've shown, and I detail this research in Genius Foods, that by doing high-intensity exercise, you can actually boost your cardiorespiratory fitness in about 20% of the time when compared to more steady-state cardio, getting on the treadmill. That's great news to me in particular because I hate running on a treadmill, and that's usually what most people think of when they think about doing more exercise.

You know, Max, an interesting study appeared just a couple of months ago in the journal Neurology, put out by the American Academy of Neurology, and it really is apropos our discussion. I mean, it looked at, yes, when individuals carry certain gene markers like the APOE4 gene— allele, rather— and the ABCA7, for example, and others that tend to increase the risk of the markers of Alzheimer's like beta amyloid and phosphorylated tau protein in the spinal fluid, proteins in the spinal fluid that are seen to correlate with Alzheimer's. There was an interesting relationship. If you carry the genes, chances are you'd have high levels of these markers in your spinal fluid. But if you carried the genes but had high level of cardiorespiratory fitness, then the correlation broke down. In other words, you could have the genes, you were physically fit, diet, and you didn't have as much or as high a level of these Alzheimer's markers, if you will, in your spinal fluid. I think it again speaks to the notion of overriding your genetic predisposition by making lifestyle choices. That's what your book is all about. People understand it's well beyond foods, and you cover a lot more material than that. Apropos what we were talking about in terms of the lymphatic system. Earlier, and the brain's lymphatic system, the glymphatic system. I think that segues nicely into sleep because we know that during sleep the glymphatic system is activated, clearing the brain of debris. What did you learn in your investigations about the importance of sleep as it relates to the brain?

Yeah, sleep, sleep is critically important. I mean, first of all, in terms of allowing you the hormonal fortitude to make all of the other changes in your diet and your lifestyle necessary for a healthy, high-performing brain, there's nothing better than Sleep. I mean, when you sleep, you basically are ensuring that you are at the most insulin sensitive that you can be given the rest of your diet and your lifestyle. Sleep is a master hormonal regulator. Your average person, even somebody who's metabolically healthy, on one night of sleep deprivation is about 25% less insulin sensitive the next day, essentially making them pre-diabetic Temporarily for that next day. So there's that in terms of helping you make better decisions. Then of course sleep, when you sleep during the slow-wave phase of sleep, your brain's glymphatic system becomes activated, which was discovered by Jeffrey Iliff and his team, basically swooshing cerebrospinal fluid around your brain, the sort of vasculature In your brain, the glymphatic ducts basically swell up to 60%, clearing itself of the amyloid precursor protein that builds up over the course of the day, which essentially can help those proteins against clumping and misfolding and things like that. They've shown in healthy people that are underslept that amyloid levels are higher just with one night of sleep deprivation. It's critically important, and it's also, of course, when your memories consolidate. I like to think about sleep as being the ability to save your memories from what's in your RAM to your hard drive. It's sort of a computer metaphor. When information is stored in the computer's RAM, it's temporary, but when it's stored on the hard drive, it becomes permanent. That's sort of how I liken memory consolidation as it relates to sleep.

Well, you know, it's an interesting metaphor because earlier you were talking about your mother and she appeared to you as if, like, you have too many applications open on your desktop. Again, a RAM issue. You just don't have enough room on the playing field to, you know, to have everything going on in the best way that it possibly can. You talk about— I don't want to use the term superfoods, but some foods that you think are really key for brain health, and I think you led off with olive oil. What's so special about olive oil? I mean, you know, we love it if you saw the video, right? We

love it. Yeah.

Tell us what you've learned.

Well, in terms of its polyphenol content, it's the top oil that exists. It's rich in these plant compounds that have been shown to activate gene pathways involved in repair and restoration. It's got one in particular that I'm a big fan of called oleocanthal, which has been shown to be as anti-inflammatory as low-dose ibuprofen. Without any of the potential negative side effects. Going back to inflammation and how detrimental inflammation is to the brain, olive oil seems to be powerfully anti-inflammatory. Of course, it's associated with the Mediterranean dietary pattern, adherence to which is related to reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease. And that's just at the epidemiological level, but we know from randomized controlled trials like the PREDIMED study done out of Barcelona, Spain, which are the kinds of trials required to prove cause and effect, that when giving people up to a liter of olive oil to consume per week, that their cognition improves, they have reduced risk for developing cognitive decline, they were even able to lose weight and improve cardiovascular risk markers. So extra virgin olive oil is really incredible. And in fact, there was an animal study that was performed recently that I think is also telling. They gave mice over the course of their lives either high-dose safflower oil, high-dose fish oil, or high-dose extra virgin olive oil, and they found that the olive oil was the most longevity-promoting of all the oils. It makes sense because fish oil, as great as we both know that fish oil and the fat in fatty fish is, we're meant to consume those fats in trace amounts in whole foods. Today, our food system has become awash in these kind of polyunsaturated oils, but extra virgin olive oil, I would say, is the chief oil to consume liberally. It seems that monounsaturated fat, which is the predominant fat in extra virgin olive oil, we are really benefited by consuming in fairly high degrees according to the research.

Well, I remember back in the video that I poured a lot of olive oil on your omelet, and you were a little surprised. I think you get the message now, right? More olive oil, the better. PREDIMED study, I mean, you know, i.e., we're saying more fat. Who knew? Now, there's— there was a nice discussion in your book about furans and the discovery of furans, and I think that's probably a topic that many of our viewers may not be familiar with. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so one of the pioneering biochemists who really unveiled the danger of consuming polyunsaturated grain and seed oils en masse, discovered these tag-along molecules that occur in the fat of fish. Now, we all know that the fat in fish is benevolent, both from randomized controlled trials as well as the association between eating fish and reduced risk for disease, but these furan fats basically seem to zap free radicals, sort of like— I don't know, like a starship essentially. That's actually what they look like, what their chemical structure resembles. It's pretty interesting because studies on fish oil don't always have the expected beneficial effect because of the processing that's sometimes required to extract these oils. That's right. While these furan fats are not fully understood, of course, it's possible that They might be sort of your brain sleeper agent. They occur alongside these fats when they're found in the wild and might actually be quite beneficial. I cite a case study with a Japanese population and the green-lipped mussel, them having reduced rates of arthritis, and the researchers speculated that it might have something to do with the furans as opposed to just the fats by themselves. It's very interesting stuff. It's perhaps premature I wouldn't say that we should all rush out to make these a supplement because that would be sort of a reductionist approach that I don't think is really all that helpful, but I think it is worth pointing out that there are a myriad of nutrients in these whole foods that are— some are more understood than others, some have yet to even be named, and by sticking to healthy whole foods like fatty fish, I think that we're really— Yeah.

Well, what did you learn about the difference between farm-raised fish, for example, and wild fish?

Yeah, so wild fish, I mean, much higher in omega-3 fats, much lower in omega-6 fats, better for the environment, obviously. I'm particularly fond of a compound found in wild salmon called astaxanthin that I don't think enough people are talking about. Carotenoid. It's a marine carotenoid, so similarly to beta-carotene, lutein, and zeaxanthin, but this is found predominantly in krill, in crustaceans, in wild salmon. It's what gives wild salmon their, their rich pink or almost reddish color, and it's been found to activate actually longevity gene pathways and promote neurogenesis. It's a compound that, again, I think we give a lot of the credit to the DHA fat and the EPA fat found in wild salmon, and certainly those fats are very good for us, but then in wild salmon, we also have this compound called astaxanthin. I even supplement with astaxanthin. I get it from Hawaii, Hawaii astaxanthin. It's great.

I know the product, I think. That said, just so people know, when you're buying fish at the grocery store and you see this deep, rich, red Atlantic salmon, it— keep in mind that Atlantic salmon didn't come from the Atlantic. It's farm-raised. And, you know, creative individuals involved in raising fish have put dye in the food to dye the meat that beautiful gold-orange color. Yeah. So it does tend to fool us. So, you know, in the natural world, as you mentioned, astaxanthin is acquired during the normal feeding process of wild fish. One of my favorite foods is avocados, and you've got great things to say about avocados.

Avocados are amazing. Actually, they kind of resemble like a bomb, and I like to use the metaphor that when you consume an avocado, you're dropping a bomb on inflammation and oxidative stress in the body. I try to consume a half to a whole avocado every single day. To me, they really resemble the perfect brain food. They're rich in monounsaturated fat. They're rich in carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin, which have been shown to boost brain processing speed. They're an abundant source of fiber. You've done a lot of incredible work on really exposing the role of the microbiome in brain health, and we need to feed the microbes that live in our gut dietary fiber. Your average medium avocado has 12 grams of dietary fiber, which the bacteria will happily ferment. They have a party when doing so. Then also potassium. A lot of people think that the only place to get potassium in the modern supermarket is from a banana. Oftentimes, the banana, for most people, it's a glucose bomb that they didn't need to begin with, whereas an avocado has double the potassium of a banana. That's really important for healthy nerve function, for blood pressure. I like to talk about— in the book, we go deep into detail on the latest understanding of the etiology of heart disease, which I think is so important. What's a whole chapter on heart disease and vascular health doing in a book about the brain? The brain is fed blood and nutrients by this intricate network of microvasculature that if you were to take out of your head and line end to end these little blood vessels would span 400 miles. We need to nurture that network. First of all, the second most common form of dementia is vascular dementia, but some of the cognitive deficits that we associate with normal aging might be owed to little outages along that network. I think anything that we can do to nurture the body's— Blood vessels. Network of blood vessels, I think, is profoundly important. An avocado is just a great all-around brain food.

Eating those high-fat foods and being really restrictive on sugar and carbohydrates might tend to push somebody into ketosis. You discussed how that might be beneficial for the brain, the so-called ketogenic diet.

Yeah, absolutely. Ketosis is when your brain— I liken it to The universe's most advanced hybrid car. So the most advanced hybrid that I think most people know of is the Prius. No affiliation with Toyota, but it's a, it's a great car, and it's able to deftly switch back and forth between using gasoline for fuel and electricity. And in the metaphor of the Prius, electricity is sort of like the clean-burning fuel. Well, so too in the brain, we have an alternate fuel that the brain actually loves to use. And those are ketones that your liver will happily convert from fat. And so this is actually a really powerful brain fuel. There was the first— recently the first trial was published where a ketogenic intervention was used in patients with Alzheimer's disease, actually, and it showed a significant improvement in cognitive function while these patients were on a ketogenic diet. I think being in intermittent ketosis is valuable for most people just because it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we wouldn't be chronically in a fed state 365 days per year. When we allow our brains to begin using ketones for fuel, not only is it a very clean-burning fuel source, meaning it creates a lot less free radicals and oxidative stress in the brain, but ketones act as a signaling molecule. I know you've interviewed Dominic D'Agostino who talks a lot about this. Basically, it flips switches in the brain involved in neuroplasticity and promoting the expression of BDNF, which is so benevolent as a sort of Miracle-Gro protein for the brain. I also go into the notion that certain brains, perhaps even from birth, might function better on ketones than glucose. They've done work with ApoE4 carriers, which is the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene, and it seems that these brains from the age of 20 have difficulty creating energy from glucose. There's a wonderful term coined by Sam Henderson, who's an Alzheimer's researcher, that our modern diets have become essentially keto-deficient. In the book, I suggest that people try experimenting with ketosis because a lot of people report greater clarity, but I also think that in terms of longevity and healthspan-promoting Fuel system, I think there's definitely no harm in trying, and there's a lot of supportive research that it might be a good choice.

Well, you actually discuss in the book the work of a particular physician whose husband developed Alzheimer's disease, Mary Newport, and how she became very vocal about what she was able to do for her husband by changing his diet to one that favored the flex fuel, favored fat as a fuel for the brain as opposed to carbohydrates, and her fairly remarkable observations. Many of our viewers will remember our interview with Mary Newport. So there's a— this data is really evolving very, very quickly, and it's very— it turns out to be very powerful on multiple levels, not the least of which is emulating our ancestral environment and therefore catering to our ancestral genome. But beyond that, from a biochemical perspective, you hit the nail on the head, not just as a fuel but as a signaling molecule, specifically beta-hydroxybutyrate as well. Well, listen, this has been very, very exciting. This is a terrific book. I'm, you know, I was very happy to support it because, you know, it's written by you. It's not— I think it's a powerful advantage that it's written by a non-PhD, non-MD, and, you know, truthfully, the amount of research that went into this This needs to go into every book, and oftentimes that doesn't happen. So congratulations to you, Max. It was great.

Thank you, David, and thank you for being an inspiration to me and to so many other people. I just, you know, it's an honor that my book is now in your hands because for so long, you know, I really looked to you as a massive inspiration, and you continue to be one. So thank you so much.

Well, you're very kind. Hope to see you soon.

Same.

Okay, bye for now. I really enjoyed talking to Max. He's doing such fantastic work. Again, here is his exciting book, Genius Foods. You can find this book everywhere. Really terrific information. Hope you enjoyed the program. Have a little something here at the end that you might enjoy as well. Bye for now. So a little sunshine, make a little bit of vitamin D, so prevalent in America Vitamin D deficiency. People need to get a little sunshine and keep in mind you're gonna make vitamin D out of cholesterol, that wonderful life-supportive chemical that was so demonized all these years. So important. So people have circulating cholesterol and you can actually put it to good use by getting some sun which then converts it to vitamin D. That's right. You don't even have to take vitamin D. A little sun You know, a few minutes of sun, good for you. And even open your eyes a little bit, take a look, let some sun into your eyeball where it actually will help make vitamin D in the back of the retina. Coconut, I mean, these are coconut trees right here, and I planted that coconut tree, as a matter of fact, from a coconut probably, oh, 25 years ago. Obviously I planted it from a coconut, what else would I plant? Eating coconut oil, and especially when you're restricting your carbs, you're powering your brain with an incredibly new pathway, ketones, that are super efficient in creating brain energy while at the same time reducing the production of free radicals. So really has a lot of traction these days.

That's amazing, ketones.

It'd be a great name for a band.

The Ketones?

The Ketones.

The Ketone Bodies.

The Ketone Bodies. I love that. You better get the hashtag.