Stop Doing This Before Bed To Prevent Cognitive Decline, Weight Gain & Disease | Max Lugavere

To actually have good sleep, you need to get outside and get sunlight in the morning.

Yeah, 100%. Good sleep begins actually the morning of and 1000 lux of light. These melanopsin proteins in your eyes that are sensitive, they act like a light switch. They're not super sensitive because as you mentioned, then a hunter-gatherer exposed to campfire or the stars in the sky would have their circadian rhythms all messed up. So it's not that sensitive. It requires, again, 1000 lux and you can easily achieve that by standing by a window for about a half an hour, and even on an overcast day, you're gonna get at least 1,000 lux. Now, the problem is maintaining that circadian rhythm has become one of the central challenges of modern life, because that light intensity, which 150, 200 years ago, nothing would be 1,000 lux. There would be no artificial light source that would reach 1,000 lux, right? But today we have TV screens, we have smartphone devices. You can easily walk into a drugstore or a supermarket and the lighting inside, those bright fluorescent lights are easily 1,000 lux. So, it sends your circadian rhythm deep into the abyss and that's one of the reasons why I think and why it's been proposed that we see ill health associated with people.

It's true. One of the founding kind of father doctors of functional medicine, one of my mentors, Sidney Baker, wrote a book called their circadian prescription, which was all about exactly this circadian medicine. There's even things like chronobiology where there are different chemotherapy drugs that work better at different times, different organs are active at different times and they work better. And I think he even described in the book how in sports, if you look at the statistics, that teams that have to cross time zones typically lose more than the ones who don't and who are playing at home.

Interesting.

Yeah, so it's a huge factor. So besides light, what else have you found that was sort of unusual in your, in your targeting optimization of the brain and the body or the brain body or the body mind or the mind body or. It's the same. There is no separation, is the point.

No separation. I talk about the relationship that we have with temperature and how important that is.

So. Cryotherapy.

Cryotherapy. Yeah. Saunas. Yeah. And I'm, I'm a, I always try to make things like my recommendations achievable by average people. So you might not have access to a sauna, you might not have access to a cryotherapy. chamber. But just getting into colder water, taking a cold shower or exposing your wearing your skivvies like on your terrace during the cooler months can all be a great way of activating these ancient thermoregulatory mechanisms that we all have in us that we've allowed to gather dust because we all live in a state of chronic climate control. And I think that by staying in that climate comfort zone all the time, it undermines some really powerful reparative and restorative pathways that we have in our body. So, what's the science of that? Well, I mean, being exposed to cold air boosts the proliferation of brown fat. So, I mean, we're all afraid of gaining even more fat on our waistlines and on our hips, but brown fat is actually something that we want to have more of. It's metabolically active. It's brown because it actually has a lot more mitochondria than normal white adipose tissue.

Which are the energy factories in your cells.

Energy factories in your cells, yeah. They give you more energy, but they also, this brown fat actually burns fat and it burns sugar. And we can actually increase the amount of brown fat that we have on us. It's not actually visible. You can't see brown fat. It only accumulates in a few parts of the body, in our armpits, around our collarbone, down our spines, shoulder blades. That's where you're gonna see the brown fat. You can't actually see it because it's really relative to the amount of white.

Fat that we carry.

It's like a very small small in concentration, but it's really good for our metabolic health. So, whether that means turning down the thermostat.

You get more brown fat if you expose yourself to cold.

Yeah. Because brown fat, it burns calories to generate heat. So, when you're in a cooler environment, this brown fat is burning calories to generate heat. Brown fat was actually originally identified in babies. Babies, when they get cold, they can't shiver. Babies can't shiver. So they have this brown fat that basically acts like an internal heating pad. And for that reason, it wasn't known whether or not we carried this type of fat with us through adulthood. But now not only do we in fact carry this brown fat with us, which acts like an internal heating pad that burns calories, as I mentioned, but.

We can encourage its proliferation. Yeah, well the Tibetan monks knew this for years. They have a practice called tummo. Do you know about this?

No.

Tummo is amazing. It is a technique called drying of the sheets. And so they train the monks to activate their brown fat through meditation. And they have them up in the Himalayas and the monasteries way up in the freezing mountains. And they practice by dipping cold sheets in ice water and they wrap the monks in the sheets. And the monks have to dry the sheets with their internal body heat. and when they can do that, they send them up overnight into the snow with basically a loincloth and they have to stay alive.

Wow.

And they do and it's quite an amazing practice and we've had such a surge of things like saunas and cryotherapy and we haven't talked about it on the show but there's something called zombie cells. Zombie cells? Like senescent cells?

Yeah, the things that tend to kill.

Us where are these sort of senescent or aging cells and they just create a lot of nasty immune effects and inflammation in the body and it's hard to get rid of them. Cryotherapy or cold exposure is one of the key mechanisms for getting rid of these zombie cells. To help extend longevity. And personally, you know, I found that when I was really sick and even now it's a standard part of my practice, I go into a hot sauna or a steam, get really hot and then I turn the bath big bathtub, only cold water, and they jump in. Wow. And it's pretty invigorating, but you feel afterwards, like your whole nervous system is awake and you're alive and you're energetic and it clears your head. It's pretty striking. Yeah, it is striking.

It's.

When I had chronic fatigue syndrome, it was one of the few things that gave me, like, a half an hour.

An hour of feeling some respite. Wow. Yeah. I use that, that therapy regularly for. I have low back issues. I think a lot of people do. I feel it's like a powerful analgesic, like, I, it's, I I get instant pain relief. What it does for my mental acuity and my mood is, I don't think that there's a drug as powerful as what that does.

Jump in a cold lake, it'll wake you up.

It'll wake you up, yeah. But I also want to mention before moving on from cold that there have also been a number of studies where they've taken people with type 2 diabetes, which is very common. Many people have blood sugar issues.

Pretty much every other human in America.

Yeah, and they found that when taking subjects with type 2 diabetes and exposing them to just mildly cool temperatures, I believe anywhere between, I think it was somewhere between 60 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not super cold. By making no other changes to their diets or lifestyles, they were able to achieve a 40% improvement in insulin sensitivity, which is an effect size that you would expect by putting these patients on a new exercise regimen. Just exposing them to cooler temperatures.

Wow, so you don't have to get out of your chair, you just have to freeze?

Just activate that brown fat. Yeah, leave your thermal comfort zone. Life begins at the end end of your comfort zone, your best biology.

Well, that brings up the next subject, which is nature is medicine. Because we're so isolated from nature, both the light experience we have isn't based on natural light cycles. The temperature experiences we have aren't based on being exposed to the environment like we always have been. And it has really detrimental health effects. So, you talk about nature and how that is really the disconnection from nature is really a source of problems for us.

Major. Today we spend 93% of our time indoors, you know, in big cities, and there's a lot of this research now coming out of Japan on forest bathing. There's actually a Japanese word, I believe it's keroshi or keroshi or I could be butchering it, but essentially there's a very significant portion of the population that gets worked to death in Japan. And there, I mean, 90%, 93% of Japanese people live in cities. So they are far removed from nature. And so this nature bathing line of research has really become a major focus.

Wow.

Yeah. And it's now being studied, you know, increasingly around the world, the relationship that we have with nature, especially as our cities become more and more dense and more and more polluted. But in the Genius Life, I talk all about the how air pollution can affect cognitive function and put us at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. 20% of Alzheimer's cases might be owed actually to heavily heavily polluted air. And today, 52% of Americans live in environments with heavily polluted air.

Isn't there like there's some like UV app on your phone where you can tell the air quality.

Air quality index. Yeah, you can, I believe you can actually, I think the weather app on an iPhone tells you the air quality.

But yeah, my niece lives in Houston. She says every day they get warnings not to go outside.

I mean, it's scary. And our indoor home air can be just as polluted, if not more polluted, than outdoor air. But in regard to outdoor air, what I think is really the most pressing of concerns where brain health is concerned is what's called fine particulate matter. So airborne particles that are two and a half micrometers or smaller that are actually able to enter, we breathe it, we breathe these particles in, they enter circulation and they can pierce the blood-brain barrier and enter the brains. And they're doing studies now in very polluted parts of the world, like in Mexico City, where they'll take children and they'll actually see these particles like magnetite, which is made of iron in the brains of children. And what's very interesting, Mark, you know Rudy Tanzi up at Harvard doing all this research on viruses in the brain and how it can-- the microbiome of the brain. Yeah, the microbiome of the brain and how amyloid might be a response to.

An inflammatory insult in the brain. Amyloid is like the gunk that clogs up your brain if you have Alzheimer's and it's sort of a response to inflammation, sort of like a Band-Aid in a way.

Yeah. What they're seeing now is amyloid presence in brains of people who have inhabited very highly air polluted areas with very high level concentrations of air pollution. Yeah. So, whether it's like magnetite or other fine particles or the herpes virus, amyloid is like this protein which may be actually coming to the rescue. But, the point is, that being in a place where there's a high concentration of air pollution might actually be creating this inflammatory insult to the brain, which is causing this very early presence of the pathologies that we associate with Alzheimer's disease.

So connect back to nature because you're saying we should all move out of cities and become farmers.

More connected to nature.

Yeah, that would be good.

Yeah, I mean there are some things that you can do. So spending more time in nature, I think is super important, especially if you are at heightened genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease. So, if you're an APOE4 allele carrier, making an effort to spend more time in nature.

That's a gene that increases your risk if you have two of those genes, like getting Alzheimer's by 45.

14.4. Yeah. So, doing that, also getting out in nature is crucially important because of the exposure to the sun. So, exposure to the sun, I think, is very important. We were talking all about circadian biology, exposure to bright light, crucially important. Vitamin D deficiency is thought to be a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's disease. There's a review of environmental risk factors that I talk about in the book, and vitamin D was one of the top.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's a big deal because, you know, depending on the data you look at, up to 80% of us are insufficient or deficient. And the way the reference range works is it's based on a population measure. So, you take a group of people, you measure you know, the spectrum of the levels in a population, and then you look at sort of what's the average, right? And you have like two standard deviations from that, and you can kind of determine what's, what's in quote normal. But normal is an optimal. If you were a Martian, you landed in America today, 75% of Americans are overweight. It would be normal to be overweight. It does not mean it's optimal. So the levels we often see in the laboratory ranges are not really where we should be hitting. The levels can be 20 or 30, but you should really probably have 45, 50, 60 at least. And I think, you know, probably 80% of us are deficient or insufficient. And that leads to depression, it leads to increase for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, so many different things. And I think, you know, there's been mixed data about where placing it, fixing it or not. I think it's complicated because when you're like, you know, people are eating, you know, garbage and they throw a vitamin D in there, it's not going to help.

Yes, correct.

If they're not exercising, they're smoking, they're drinking a lot, they're eating crap, taking vitamin D is not going to do anything. But in all things being equal, people who are low in vitamin D have higher risk of this. And if you clean up your lifestyle.

And you're still low in vitamin D, it'll make a big difference. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up context because one thing that very few people know You could be spending as much time in the sun as you want, frolicking all day in the beautiful warming rays of the sun, or even supplementing with vitamin D, but if you're not getting adequate magnesium in your diet, which 50% of the population does not get adequate magnesium, the enzymes that convert the vitamin D that your skin creates into its active hormone form in the body, all are magnesium dependent. And magnesium, half of us don't consume adequate magnesium.

It's found in dark leafy greens, pumpkin seeds, dark chocolate almonds.

And a lot of things cause us.

To lose magnesium, stress, coffee, alcohol, sugar.

All those things we love.

Exactly, magnesium is like an anti-aging.

It's a macromineral, we don't consume enough of it and it's involved in all of the DNA repair enzymes. We're talking a little bit about DNA damage, they all require magnesium as a cofactor. It's involved in ATP synthesis, so energy production.

So true, I see so much of my practice and these patients come in with all these magnesium deficiencies. symptoms and they think I'm a genius when I give them magnesium, they go away. Things like migraines or headaches, constipation, muscle cramps, twitching, palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, anything that's irritable, twitches or spasms in any way or cramps is usually magnesium deficiency. And it's so easy when people take it, they go, my God, I didn't know I was so low. And I think you're right, it's so prevalent. I think as you age also your skin doesn't really convert magnesium, I mean the vitamin D as well either, right?

Yeah. I make specific recommendations in the book for people no matter where they are in their life, no matter what age they are, it's important, you know, context is everything really, but you're right, people who are overweight, people who have darker skin complexions, people who are older, they probably are going to need to spend more time in the sun to create the same amount of vitamin D. Yeah.

I once learned from Michael Holick, who's a vitamin D expert. He said, if you really want to get adequate vitamin D without taking vitamin D, you have to basically be practically naked between 10 and 2 in the daytime for 20 minutes south of Atlanta.

Wow.

That probably isn't happening for 99% of people.

Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. I try to get into the sun as much as I can. Because the other thing about the sun, We as humans, I think that reductionist approach that we were talking about, I think we're hardwired to try to break everything down. I forget who it was, maybe it was Michael Pollan, but in nutrition they call it nutritionism, where they like to break down foods into just the bare essentials to see if we can replicate it in a pill form, and that hasn't really... Or identify, or we even do worse.

We sort of identify the bad ingredients like saturated fat or sugar or whatever, And so we focus on regulating those in food and then the food companies just kind of dial up or down different ingredients to sort of make it healthier, but it's not really, it's still junk food.

Yeah, exactly. And so I think we can apply the same thing to the benefits of getting sun exposure on our skin and in through our eyes. So, I mean, vitamin D is created when the UVB rays from the sun reach our skin, but UVA rays might actually be useful in terms of creating nitric oxide and actually helping us lower our blood pressure. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so blood pressure is another topic that I talk about in the book because it's so related to brain health. If you want your brain to be performing well, if you want it to.

Age well, you really have to make.

Sure that your blood pressure is in a healthy range.

And getting the right amount of sunlight can help. Can help. Getting the right amount of sun. No, you know, mental health is such a big crisis in this country. one in four people experience major depression in their life. It's the biggest cause of the economic burden of chronic disease, not from direct health care costs, but things like disability, loss of quality of life, not being able to function very well in your life. And, you know, vitamin D is one of those things that seems to really impact depression. So you talk about a study in the book, it has to do with vitamin D and depression.

Can you talk more about that? Well, vitamin D is important for the synthesis of serotonin, which is a neurotransmitter involved in mood.

A lot of- It's a happy chemical. It's a happy chemical.

That's what Prozac does. It increases serotonin, right? Increases serotonin. SSRI's, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors can boost serotonin at the synapse, which is- serotonin is also involved in focus and attention and executive function. But yeah, so vitamin D is important in the synthesis of serotonin from its raw materials, one of which is tryptophan, an amino acid. So making sure that your vitamin D levels are in a normal healthy range, important. And you can easily get your vitamin D levels tested from a doctor, it's a very cheap test. The recommendations that I make in the book are to make sure that your levels are somewhere between 40 and 60 nanograms per milliliter. which seems to be a range where we see the lowest risk of all-cause mortality.

Yeah, I mean, I remember reading a study that was incredible that women who had vitamin D levels less than 45 had a 60% higher chance of having preterm labor. And when you think of the cost of neonatal intensive care and taking care of preterm babies, it's staggering. And you're talking about pennies for a vitamin. It can literally prevent preterm labor. So it's really connected to almost everything. And the differences with vitamin D is that not everybody needs the same amount, right? So what should we be taking?

Correct. Not everybody needs the same amount. You really, before you start taking vitamin D as a supplement, you ought to get your levels tested. You know, when we synthesize it from the sun, our skin basically makes what we need and it breaks down the rest. It's almost impossible to get too much vitamin D from the sun.

Although lifeguards can have levels of 150.

That's amazing. Yeah.

And that's not toxic.

Right, I mean it could increase calcium absorption. I always like to recommend vitamin K2 for people that are in, I mean especially at those levels. But with a vitamin D supplement, I think generally there was a research calculation that suggested that for the general population, 2,000 international units a day would be ideal to get the average person to an optimal level. But people again have different, you know, people who are older might need to supplement more. Yeah. People who are overweight might need to supplement more to get the same improvement. And also, again, yeah, people who are.

Overweight tend to be low in vitamin D because it's a fat soluble vitamin. So, it all gets sucked into the fat and it doesn't get into their.

System that we need. Yeah, it gets sequestered by fat tissue. The same also can occur with other fat soluble vitamins like A, E, K.

Yeah, I don't know if you read this morning, this morning, probably not because you probably don't read the JAMA Pediatrics journal every day. Not pediatrics, no. But I do. And, I read this paper this morning that showed that Women, when they were pregnant, took 2,800 units of vitamin D compared to 400, which is in the typical prenatal vitamin, that there was a dramatic reduction in the effects on bad effects on bone when their kids were born. In other words, their kids, their babies, had much higher bone density, and then their risk later in life of osteoporosis was dramatically reduced. So, and that, you know, that's almost 3,000 units, which most doctors don't even think about recommending, and, and some people, you know, may need up to five or ten thousand if they're not good absorbers. And there's genes that affect that. So people might need only a thousand, but I, I think a thousand is minimum for most people. And, and it takes about a thousand units to raise your blood level, 10 nanograms per deciliter. So if you're 20, you need at least three thousand to get up to 50.

Right.

And, and then you can see how you do. But I think people need to measure it, they need to check it, and they need to make sure they're okay. And if not, take the right supplement and not the the kind that you often get from your doctor, I hate to say, which is vitamin D2, which is not an active form of the vitamin, but vitamin D3. And you can get that over the counter now, and you can get thousand units and others. But you want to make sure you measure it, right?

Yeah. I mean, vitamin D2 is the plant based form of vitamin D, and vitamin D3 is the animal based form. It's bioidentical to what we create in our own skin. So you always want to make sure that you're taking vitamin D2. I mean, sorry, D3.

Okay, so there, that brings up a sticky question. So it's usually made from lanolin and other things that you can get it from sheep and stuff. And they're fat. So what if you're vegan? What do you do?

That's a good question. I've vegan sources of vitamin D3. It, that's hard to get.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

It's just one more of those nutrients that you're just not really optimizing for. Yeah.

And often people don't convert vitamin D2 to D3. 3, and if you're a vegan, you want to make sure you're checking vitamin D3. And you can also check D2, so you can see you might have a really high D2, but a very low D3. So it's important to make sure. I once took care of this Hasidic rabbi, and he had a really bad thyroid problem. And I said, you really need to take this combination thyroid, but I don't know if it's okay. Why? Well, it comes from, you know, pig. It's a whole thyroid extract from pig. and it's not kosher. It's fine as long as it's for your health and as long as you're not eating it and it's a medicine, it's fine. So I thought that was very interesting perspective.

Yeah.

So, you know, the other thing you talk about in your book sort of connected this whole circadian biology and how we can reset our clocks is this idea of when we eat because we often focus on what we're eating how much we're eating, but we really don't focus that much on when we're eating. And, there's a lot of interesting research lately on the when, on fasting, intermittent fasting, time-restricted eating, all kinds of ideas that people are having that extend lifespan, that reduce the risk for many diseases. So, tell us more about the importance of when.

Yeah, well, it seems that there's this eating paradigm that's emerging in the literature and it's being called early time-restricted feeding. So basically eating an earlier dinner seems to be associated with improvements in blood pressure and blood sugar independent of weight loss. So a lot of people online will say that intermittent fasting is really only useful insofar as it has an ability to help us control the amount of calories that we consume. But it seems to be the case that by not eating too late at night, because as I mentioned, light is a major time setter that the brain uses to know what time of day it is and optimize its processes accordingly. But food is another time setter and it's a time setter for the periphery, for the clocks that are in our metabolic organs, you know, in the organs of digestion and what have you. And so eating too late at night might actually negatively affect things like blood pressure, blood sugar.

So people like do intermittent fasting or what we call time restricted eating, they'll eat at noon and they'll eat to eight at night. Is that a bad idea? Should be more like eight in the.

Morning till four in the afternoon? I mean, that might be ideal. The issue is that we're not waking up with the sunrise and going to sleep with the sunset like our ancestors might have used to do. We, I mean, wake up a lot later. We go to sleep a lot later. So I think that to try to recreate the optimal eating paradigm for the bodies that we've inherited might be a futile effort. So the recommendations that I make are to not eat for an hour or two after you wake up. Especially if you wake up with an alarm clock, because the problem is a lot of people who wake up artificially with an alarm clock to wake up, get ready for work, their melatonin levels actually haven't properly, it's likely that their melatonin levels haven't come down.

That's why they could be groggy when they wake up.

Groggy, but also less insulin sensitive. So if you're drinking a glass of orange juice or eating a bran muffin.

Or whatever, first thing in the morning.

You probably shouldn't do anyway for breakfast. That's not a genius breakfast, right? Well, your listeners are savvy and they're not eating like that, right? But I hope you're not. But no, I mean, that is a mechanism by which your blood sugar can stay abnormally high, whereas if you just perhaps are to wait an hour, and also a way that you can make sure that your melatonin levels have come down is again to get that bright light in through your eyes in the morning.

So eat light for breakfast.

Eat light for breakfast. Yeah, eat light, especially if you have to wake up early. And then to eat a, I mean, I would say that if you were going to eat a heavy meal, do it in the daytime and then eat a lighter dinner. Of course, you'll be wanting to take.

A siesta in the afternoon. Yeah. So, the Spanish had it right, that's right?

Yeah.

But, you know, the thing is, I agree. I always said you shouldn't eat three hours before bed because your body's getting ready to repair and heal. If it's digesting, it doesn't do such a good job. And if you want to gain weight, best way to gain weight is night eating. It's the best way.

And it's not because, here's the thing. Sometimes I have these confrontations with people in the fitness world who say, well, a bagel isn't magically going to be 200 calories at 8:01 p.m. if it's only 100 calories at 8:00 p.m. And that's true. The calorie content of food doesn't change from one time to the next. But it might actually, the disruption of your body's circadian rhythm might negatively affect hormones involved in energy metabolism, in hunger. So, eating late at night could actually make you more hungry the following day.

My favorite study I read when I wrote my book, Ultra Metabolism, like 15 years ago, was they fed people the same calories in three meals over the day or they fed them like one meal at night and the ones who had the one meal at night with the same amount of calories gained weight.

Wow.

Compared to the other group, even though they eat exactly the same amount of calories.

Yeah. So because it might reduce leptin, which is the metabolic throttle, essentially, that dictates, you know, our resting energy expenditure, it might actually increase levels of ghrelin, which is a hormone involved in hunger. So these are all the indirect ways in which late night eating can actually make you gain weight. Whether or not.

And leptin also actually causes reduction in inflammation.

It's anti-inflammatory. Yeah. Yeah. So the system that we've inherited is very complex, but there's a great way of expressing it that I was able to glean from my interview with Satchin Panda, who's one of the leading experts on circadian biology. At a certain point in the evening, you have to kind of consider the kitchen having closed. You know, when you go into a.

Restaurant after an hour. That happened to me last night. I was in Washington, D.C. and I went with my friend Congressman Tim Ryan. We tried to go to a Mexican place. It was like this healthy vegan kind of taco place. And they were shot. Kitchen's closed.

Yeah. We had to find some other place. Yeah. So, I mean, if you just think about your body in the same way and, you know, it's a little bit of a term of art. You could digest anything at any time of day. Does that mean it's going to be optimal, not necessarily? so at a certain point I would say give yourself an 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. cutoff and say the kitchen's closed in your body and that's it, you know? You're winding down, you're getting ready for bed, you're not going to be as insulin sensitive in the evening as you were during the day. Also, metabolism, you know, especially when eating lots of carbs can cause insulin to spike which can negatively affect hormones like growth hormone, it can affect the way that your brain cleans itself up, because of an interaction with insulin degrading enzyme, which we know dismantles the plaques that are associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Which is often called type 3 diabetes. Alzheimer's is basically diabetes of the brain. If you're diabetic, your risk of Alzheimer's is four-fold higher. That's 400% higher. That's staggering. We also talk about a couple other things that are really great for the brain, like exercise, which I think 80 plus percent of Americans don't get enough of.

So, what's the connection between brain health and exercise? well, exercise is such a big topic and a lot of people are talking about it. I just think that it's really important to underscore that exercise is you're always talking about how food is medicine.

Exercise is medicine. Yeah, I always just say if exercise was in a pill, it would be the most powerful drug ever invented.

It really would be. It really would be. So I'm a big fan of resistance training. I think this is something that not enough people are talking about. Women, I see, can be afraid of weight training. They don't want to get too big and too bulky. I've been trying to get jacked for 20 years. It's not easy. It doesn't happen overnight. Resistance training, going to the gym, getting stronger, building muscle, prioritizing protein at every meal. It's going to cause a recomp of your body, essentially.

And I've been trying. I started at about 60 years old. I'm in the gym. It's Struggle Street, but I'm not struggling like it. But I think it's working. I can see a big change in my body and I feel stronger and Less pain and it's good.

Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, having more muscle on your body provides a sink for excess energy, for excess glucose, excess starch and sugar that's gonna make its way onto your plate inevitably, as much as we try to abide by the blood sugar solution and others who have told us to really... Who wrote that? I mean, great book. It's important to note that like a New York City apartment, and I know you know this, Mark, there's not a lot of place to store stuff.

Nope.

And that's especially true in the body of sugar. We have very limited, you know, there's very limited options in terms of where we can store the sugar that we consume.

Muscle.

Muscle is one of those places. And by growing muscle, by getting to the gym, you provide a sink basically to soak up extra sugar that you might consume or starches or car, what, you know, what have you.

That'S good. Because, you know, yesterday I went to a class called yoga sculpt, which is basically, like, yoga with weights. Oh, wow. Which is hard as heck, but I, you know, I I told myself it was good for me. Max would be happy with me if.

I, if I did that. You're looking, you're looking lean.

I mean, I know. I just, I I didn't want to say this. I probably shouldn't say this, but, you know, I eat healthy and exercise. It's like I, I have to make sure I don't lose too much weight. Wow. Yeah, there's also something happens with exercise is really cool, which is that it stimulates this chemical in your brain. It's like miracle grow. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, so exercise stimulates a protein called.

Brain-Derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF. Or miracle grow for the brain. Miracle grow for the brain, yeah. It promotes the survival of our existing brain cells. It promotes the growth of new healthy new brain cells.

So, it makes new brain cells and it increases the connections between your brain cells so your brain works better.

Yeah, you can actually, I believe there's a YouTube video where BDNF is sprinkled on dendrites which causes them to sprout.

Those are like parts of your nerve cells.

Yeah, it's like the physical correlates of memories actually and so it's like a Chia pet. And we can cause this upregulation of BDNF in our brains by exercising and I think for a long time The emphasis was on aerobic exercise, and aerobic exercise is great. We know that aerobic exercise can cause growth of the memory center of the brain, the hippocampus, which is vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease and aging. But we now know, thanks to new research, that whatever the exercise modality is that you enjoy doing, even resistance training can boost BDNF.

So just being more active. That's great. So you talk about this thing in the book, which is like a marathon in 10 minutes. How do I do that?

How do you basically get the benefits of running a marathon in just 10 minutes? It's high intensity interval training. So along with resistance training, I think HIIT, H-I-I-T, crucially important.

Which is basically exciting as hard as.

You can until you're about to throw up and then stopping, is that it? Pretty much. But here's the good part. You only have to do it for a few seconds, like 10 to 20 to 30 seconds, pushing yourself to your max effort, and then recuperating and then doing it again. And so what the study found is that when you take subjects and you have them do this hit routine, about a two minute warmup and then four or five cycles of all out either cycling or swinging around the big heavy battle ropes, which is something that I enjoy doing or doing sprints up a hill, that people are able to achieve the same boost to their cardio respiratory fitness as people who are doing like 30 to 45 minutes on of a.

Steady state cardio on a treadmill. It's really Sean, there's some great studies that I reviewed about this where if you do high intensity interval training, you literally can exercise a fraction of the time and get far more benefit than if you ran an hour a day. You burn nine times percent more fat and you actually increase your metabolism. And what's incredible about it, it's not just the calories you burn when you're exercise, because you're going to burn more calories if you're running for an hour than if you're doing high intensity training. but it speeds up your metabolism so that when you're sitting down or you're on your computer or you're watching TV or you're sleeping, you're burning more calories. And people who are fidgeters also tend to burn more calories too.

Yeah. People who overeat tend to fidget more. And fidgeting is a great way to burn calories actually. Fidgeting falls under the category of non-exercise physical activity that I talk about in.

The book that can burn...

It's called NEAT, non-exercise activity. Yeah, how neat is neat? You could burn anywhere between 300 and 1000 calories every day just with fidgeting, with chasing your cat around the living room. Yeah, I used to be that guy.

In medical school who kept knocking the kid in his seat in front of him.

It wasn't very popular, but I was always bitching. He probably loved you. But yeah, going back to high intensity interval training, what's amazing about it is it kind of does to your cells what calorie restriction does. And calorie restriction we know is one of the few ways of extending lifespan in smaller organisms, right? High intensity interval training, the way that it works is it creates a momentary energy crisis for your cells, where your cells basically say to one another, we've got to keep up or we're gonna die. And what they do to keep up is they create healthy new mitochondria. There's a process called mitophagy. It's sort of like autophagy, where old worn out mitochondria that have become dysfunctional basically get gobbled up. Yeah. And this is one of the, I mean, mitochondria that don't function well is at the root of aging, at the root of neurodegenerative conditions. So by doing high intensity interval training, we basically get to, it's like the.

Fountain of youth for ourselves and our mitochondria. A few of these things you've talked about are, you know, very interesting. And they have to do with ways in which the body gets stressed that activates a healing response, right? Whether it's it's the exercise intensity, whether it's the cold therapy. These have powerful effects like that. It's called hormesis, which is a medical term for it. And it's actually such a good thing to push yourself a little bit because it actually activates all these healing and repair mechanisms. The time restricted eating, the when to eat, the cryotherapy, the exercise intensity, those are all very scientifically validated mechanisms for activating these healing systems in our body. And they're not that hard, right?

Yeah, they're not that hard.

Roll around naked in the snow. Roll around naked in the snow. Run as fast as you can until you're thrown up for 10 minutes or a few seconds. Yeah. And make sure you don't eat before bed.

And it's so cool. It's so cool. And one of the coolest things about it that I talk about in the Genius Life is the spillover effect that happens. And I don't, I haven't seen this talked about in any other book, so I think this is kind of a novel idea that I one of the novel ideas that I advanced in the genius life, it's that this notion of cross adaptation. So by rolling around in the snow or by sitting in a sauna or by exercising vigorously, these are physical stressors, that hormetic stress that's so good for us, right? We know that when we take cold showers, we acclimate. When we go to the gym, you know, and we get in better shape, we become more capable of doing more exercise. But here's where cross adaptation is amazing. It can actually make us more resilient in other areas of our life. So by getting more resilient, by acclimating and getting more resilient in the gym and taking these cold showers and sitting in a sauna, you actually can become more psychologically resilient. There's this spillover effect called cross adaptation whereby you actually can adapt psychologically by imposing a stress on your body physically. And so what I do is I go through a four-week program where Week one is really getting your stress levels down, boosting your resilience to stress, which we talked about, this is a big topic, and also going through your kitchen and your medicine cabinets and kind of questioning a little bit some of the industrial chemicals to which we're routinely exposed, compounds that might be serving as endocrine disruptors. Yeah, right.

You gotta get rid of all the toxins in your home, the things you wash your hair with and put on your skin and your cleaning supplies and the ingredients in your food and all that, right?

Yeah, just sort of cutting down just to make your, before we start with any dietary changes, it's really about making you the most resilient that you can be. I mean, for example, sleep. If you are trying to radically change your diet and you're underslept, you're not going to be met with success because Sleep is like... I use this metaphor from Game of Thrones. I'm a big Game of Thrones nerd. And in Game of Thrones, at this point, the show's Water Under the Bridge, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything. But you've got to kill the Night King before all the zombie white walkers fall. By killing the Night King, that's what gets all the zombies basically defeated. And so by optimizing your sleep, that's the equivalent of killing the Night King. All the other problems are going to become much easier to tend to. once you improve your sleep, which is crucial. Sleep is sacred. It's another form of medicine. And so that's all week one and then week two and three we go into some dietary modifications. Really, my goal with the dietary recommendations that I make in this book is really in part to heal people's relationship with food, which I think has become so fractured today. That relationship that people have with food, there's like the macro wars, carbs, fat, I don't know what to eat. I make it really simple for people. I say that the best thing that you can do is to avoid ultra processed foods.

And we talked about this too.

So much. Yeah, when you were on my show, which is amazing. I think that if you do nothing else, cutting down on the consumption of ultra processed foods. It's true.

I sort of joking that, you know, I coined this term Pegan. It was a sort of a joke, a Paleo vegan. And my latest book, Food Fix, was number one in Paleo and number one in vegan on Amazon. I'm like, okay, that's it. and I think they have way more in common with each other than they do with our traditional American diet. They both believe in whole foods and lots of plants and just good ingredients and not eating crap compared to the traditional American diet or sad diet, the standard American diet. They're more alike than they are compared to that ultra-processed diet. I think that's such an important strategy.

Well said. I mean, just like ultra-processed foods, I mean, one of the things I feel like few people realize that the mere processing of food can make a food inherently more fattening. If you were to take whole nuts and you chew nuts, almonds, macadamias, whatever, a significant portion of the calories that you're consuming, you actually end up pooping out. Whereas if you were to just process lightly those nuts in a grinder and turn nuts into nut butter, like almond butter, you're absorbing 100% of those calories. And so this is true of ultra-processed foods that.

So make your own nut butter in your mouth.

Is that the idea? Make your own nut butter in your mouth. And I like nut butter too, so not to demonize nut butter or any food really, but ultra processed foods are extremely calorie dense. You're absorbing 100% of the calories. They're not satiating. And so there's that. And then I also make the recommendation to focus on protein, really to bring protein back to the table. I think that's something that the fitness community has embraced for years, but I think most people are kind of confused about the role that protein plays in health. That's like a whole podcast in and of itself.

We gotta come back and talk about that.

We'll come back, yes.

So much conversation. Plant protein, animal protein, should we eat less meat? Should we eat no meat? Should we focus on only plant proteins? I've written a lot about this and I think protein quality matters. I think the utilization of the proteins are different if it's plant or animal protein. I think there are a lot of plant proteins that are great, but you have to eat a lot. to get the equivalent of what you'd get. You know, you eat three cups of beans and good luck if you can eat them to be equivalent to the amount of protein that you'd get in a six ounce piece of fish or chicken.

Yeah, I'm eating three cups of beans. I'm gonna have to work from home that day.

Exactly. Now, like most of us in this space who have had to dig into the science, it always wasn't for a great reason. Like I became an expert in functional medicine because I became super ill and I had to figure out what to do about it. And you had a similar experience with your mother. And we've been in touch a lot about your mother over the years. And she died last year and you dedicated your book to her. And for people who really don't know you or know your story, I'd love to share with the audience what would happen with your mom and how did that inspire what you're doing?

Yeah, my mom is the chief inspiration for everything that I do. She was 58. I was in my late 20s when she started to display these mysterious symptoms. There was a change to her cognitive abilities. It had seemed almost as if overnight she had had a brain transplant with somebody 40 years her senior.

Wow.

And yeah, no, it was crazy. And she also, there was a change to her gait, which is the way that that a person walks. And it was at the Cleveland Clinic, actually, in Ohio, long before I think you had gotten there. But where for the first time she was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder. And the diagnosis was actually pretty murky. It was unclear as to what she had. But nonetheless, she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And just to give some context, I had no prior family history of any type of neurodegenerative disease. As I mentioned, my mom was not old.

She was young. She was young.

She was 58, she was spirited, youthful.

Young to me, I'm 60.

That's like, you know, teenager practically. I mean, yeah, she has somebody in the prime of her life. And when we got that diagnosis, it sent my world into a tailspin. It was the first time in my life I'd ever had a panic attack. I just, I remember sitting in the Holiday Inn in Cleveland, Ohio, after receiving those prescriptions from the, from the, from the well-respected neurologist who we saw just a few hours prior and googling For the first time, the drug names and looking at the Wikipedias for Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, which, you know, I mean, say whatever you want. Those are the places that I think.

Most people go when they, you know.

They consult Dr. Google. Yeah, of course. And so I was no different. That's what I did. I went there. I didn't have a background in medicine, of course. And seeing how little these drugs, these pharmaceutical biochemical band-aids, how little they do for conditions as complex as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, disease. I just, I started to, I mean, freak out, you know, what was going to happen to my mom? Was I going to lose her? Was she going to forget who I was? And that really, that was the line in the sand where from then on, I became just fixated on trying to find a better way, looking for solutions in the medical literature that could both maybe act, you know, therapeutically for my mom. But in tandem with that, I was also trying to understand why this would have happened to her and what could be done to prevent it from happening to myself. And one of the most shocking findings that I stumbled upon, which you know well, is that often dementia begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. And so it became very clear to me that this is something that if we really want to move the needle in this category of diseases, we really have to start today talking about prevention.

It's so true. I think most people don't realize that if you have Alzheimer's, the first changes in your brain can happen 30, 40 years before you forget your keys. and it's actually something you can look at on a brain scan. And I think it, you know, it inspired you to ask a whole bunch of questions that, you know, someone really without a medical degree usually doesn't ask, which is, you know, what causes these symptoms? And your mother has something called Lewy Body Dementia, which is sort of a cross between Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and affects motor function and affects memory and cognitive function. And you sort of had to look in the literature and go, like, well, what causes this? And How do I not get it myself? And so, it was both from the love of your mother and self-interest that you sort of became an expert on how to fix your brain.

Yeah, it's become a major passion of mine to say the least. I mean, I think the brain is the most important organ. It really is who we are. As neuroscientist, D.F. Swaab famously says, and it's actually, he has a book by the same title, We Are Our Brains. And to watch somebody who you love more than anything in the world world descend into decrepitude is the hardest thing imaginable. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy. And that being said, there are ample things that we can do in the literature to protect our brains as they age. And we don't know everything. 90% of what we know about Alzheimer's disease has been discovered only in the past 15 years. But we don't have to sit idly on our hands, and I think that's the point.

Yeah, I think you've been part of our Broken Brain series, and we delve deeply into understanding the various aspects of why brains break and how to fix them. And, you know, as a functional medicine doctor, I've seen so many patients with these conditions actually get better. And, and once you start to understand the biology and how the brain works, what injures the brain, what are the things that are, we call demented genes.

Wow. Demented genes. Wow. Yeah.

And how do you do, like, a cognoscopy as opposed to a colonoscopy, which is how do you really look at all the things that can impact brain function, it opens up a whole world of possibility of how to help these people. And, you know, your latest book, Genius Life, the Genius Life, you expand on the Genius Food Plan and, and, and the whole approach in there that was mostly books on nutrition and how it affects brain health. And, and we know that our brain health and our cognitive function, our emotional Wellness really depends on so many things like our gut. and our hormones and our heart and our nervous system. There's constantly crosstalk and communication. The body's a web. That's really what we focus on in functional medicine. The body is a network. It's all connected. And just because your stomach isn't in your brain doesn't mean it's not related to your brain and your immune system and everything else. So tell us about the research around things that you found that help us to understand how to prevent dementia and how to optimize your brain function.

Yeah. So, I mean, to start off, when I think as a functional medicine practitioner, what I've been able to glean from my exposure to the field through colleagues like you and David Perlmutter and guys like that, you're really having to undo the education in a way that you've had in allopathic medicine that really kind of takes a reductionist approach. Yeah. Looking at the brain as separate from the body. And, in fact, I can corroborate that when I had these experiences with my mother in the clinician's office at the most storied cathedrals to Western medicine, you know, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Columbia in New York, NYU, I've gone to all these places with my mom. It's the same thing. It's, you know, no second opinion.

There's the same opinion over and over.

Over and over and over again. Yeah, and I think that that can be very upsetting and it can, you know, it elicits a sense of hopelessness. And that's what I experienced, that same reductionist sort of approach. I think what's given me the edge, again, not as a trained medical doctor or anything like that, but I think there's a certain level of creativity is required to connect dots and to see patterns where others might not. And as a functional medicine practitioner, my sense is that that's kind of how you're trained. You're trained to think about these topics in a more creative way. And that's something that I just intuitively did when I started to experience what was going on with my mom. And I just intuitively realized that the brain is influenced by the body. How could it not be?

Duh.

So Genius Foods really was a nutritional care manual to the human brain. Unfortunately, the brain doesn't come with an owner's manual.

It was a book that- Neither does the body.

Neither does the body. But that's what the Genius Life to me. that's kind of where I was going with the text as I was writing the Genius Life manual for your brain. Yeah, and the body. And to really unveil the connection that the brain has to the body. I think a lot of people don't realize that they're connected. You can't look in the mirror and flex your hippocampus the way you can your bicep. So I think it's important for people to be able to regain a sense of bodily health. because of all the benefits that that's going to provide to the brain, better mood, better mental health, better cognitive function. So this is a, it's sort of like a care manual to the body and it goes beyond nutrition. So nutrition is just one part of the story, as you know, you talk about that in food fix, but exercise, the relationship that we have with nature, the relationship that we have with temperature, the relationship that we have with light, the ever-present Environmental toxins that your average human is exposed to on a daily basis. These are all the kinds of topics that I wanted to talk about in the book.

Wow, so people talk about lifestyles, you know, what you eat, sleep, exercise, stress. You don't hear people talking about light.

And nature and temperature. Right, right, right. Fascinating. Yeah, they're all super important parts of the puzzle.

I mean, the relationship that we have with light. They're all inputs that regulate our biology in ways that we are Now understanding that we didn't understand before.

Well, consider this. So I started, I was thinking a lot about cancer because my mom actually, Labor Day of 2018, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and another horrific.

She died from the brain disorder.

She didn't.

Pancreatic cancer.

Yeah. I had just gotten back to LA from a trip and I got a call from my brother who was in New York with my mom and she had turned yellow. So usually if you turn yellow, it's either you've eaten too many carrots or you've become jaundiced for whatever reason. And the difference is that the whites of your eyes become yellow when you're jaundiced. And oftentimes you'll see a gallstone, but they did an MRI of my mom's abdomen and what they found was a tumor on the head of the pancreas. And as you know, 90 plus percent of the time when they diagnose pancreatic cancer, it's already too late. And it was brutal and barbaric and it was the worst thing I ever experienced but that my mom developed not one but two of humanity's most feared conditions really made me start to think about the world in a new way. And going back to light, I mean there are certain instances where light, it's been proposed and this is a rapidly evolving science, we're just at the tip of the iceberg, but can actually act as a carcinogen.

Light?

Yeah.

What kind of light?

Well, artificial bright light at night that suppresses the hormone melatonin Melatonin is a key gatekeeper to the process known as autophagy, which is when our cells clean house. And through, you know, it's sort of like the KonMari method for biology that it uses to clean up old, worn out dysfunctional proteins and organelles. It's also involved in DNA repair. So DNA damage is at the root of cancer, aging.

So, we get rid of waste and how we repair our systems is regulated by melatonin. melatonin and light.

Yeah, so I think that's kind of a bold statement and it's a hypothesis that certainly warrants further testing to know for sure, but there is a well-documented increased risk of certain cancers seen in night shift workers, which make up 20% of the global workforce. So getting bright light in through your eyes in the morning is crucially important for anchoring your body's circadian rhythm, which guides everything from how coordinated we feel, how much focus we're able to have, how much energy we're able to have, how well we digest and metabolize food. But in the latter half of the evening, avoiding exposure to extremely bright light, especially if it's on an ongoing chronic.

Basis, I think is we were all being with those goofy glasses with the like Dave Asprey with the orange lenses.

Amber glasses, yeah, like amber colored blue light blocking glasses. I think that among all the wellness biohacking gimmicks that are out there, I think that those among the most useful. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's powerful because I remember reading a number of years ago about studies in animals where they would give them melatonin and it would suppress cancer.

And part of that has to do.

With the light which actually inhibits melatonin. So, if you're, you know, living as a hunter-gatherer, the sun goes down, you maybe got a few candles. Maybe they didn't have candles back then. Maybe they didn't have fire when we start out. And our bodies are designed that way.

Away.

And now we have this incredible light that's such an issue. I remember reading a book a number of years ago called Lights Out. You ever come across that book?

By T.S. Wiley?

Yeah. Yeah. And it was like an eye-opening book, literally. And it was about how the invention of the light bulb correlated with all these chronic diseases we're seeing now.

Huh? Yeah.

I don't, I mean, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. And it talked about the the biology of light and how it impacted us and we don't even think about it. We just are on our phones all night or have computers in our beds, we have bright lights and there are ways to fix it. So, what are the ways people can fix the light problem?

Yeah, well I think there's two things. First of all, you want to make sure that you're getting good quality light early in the day, so preferably before noon. So, not only is that going to help anchor your body's circadian rhythm, but it's going to help protect you against blue light induced melatonin suppression later in the day. So that bright light, you know, the suppression. Go outside, don't wear sunglasses. Go outside, don't wear sunglasses, or don't.

Wear sunglasses when you're driving to work.

If you have a half an hour commute to work. And then get through your windshield? Yeah, yeah. It's all about the light intensity. What you need is about a thousand lux of light, and there's an app that I have no affiliation with, but it's called Lux, and you can There are some questions as to how reliable it is, but I think it could give you a good relative sense to the light intensity in your ambient environment. So if you download the app, you can kind of just, you know, make sure that you're spending time in an environment that's at least 1000 lux in the morning, because that seems to be the light intensity that the melanopsin proteins in our eyes are sensitive to that basically kicks off this 24-hour timer.

Yeah.

So that I think is crucially important.

If you love that last video, you're gonna love this one. love the next one. Check it out here.

It all starts with diet. Diet nurtures our 100 trillion microbial friends that live in the gut and want me to be healthy. They want you to be healthy. But we have to feed them right.

You know, I think about like a rainforest. It's, you know, it got so many inputs and light and water and nutrients.