141. Max Lugavere: Seed Oils, LDL Cholesterol & Inflammation

Least healthy foods in the supermarket make the loudest claims.

It should be banned, that ultra-processed foods are allowed to make health claims.

It's such a large percentage of our public policy and nutritional research is funded by pharma.

I think this has got to be partially responsible for an upside-down food pyramid.

You know, lucky charms more nutritious than GrassFed Steak.

I'm happy with products marketing how they've been produced.

If it wants to stay organic, great.

But it's the health claim.

Just be a level playing field to inspire consumers to learn for themselves.

We're both connected to this Make America Healthy Again movement.

I'm optimistic that we can raise more awareness around this topic and call for better science.

We've privatized profits and we've socialized the expense.

Medicare is picking up the cost of this burgeoning, explosive era of chronic disease and morbid obesity.

Obesity has tripled over the past 50 years.

Our genes have not changed all that much.

Our lifestyle, our food environment has dramatically changed.

In a perfect world, what are some real actionable things that the government could do to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time?

The motivation is there to uncouple some of the many conflicts of interest.

I remain totally optimistic, but what can they do?

You know, I think for one.

Ultimate human.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

I'm your host, human biologist Gary Breca, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.

And a trip to LA would not be complete without having Max Lugever back on the podcast.

It was one of the best podcasts that we've launched.

I mean,

the story that you told about your journey with your mother and Alzheimer's

and how you really became an advocate.

And I say this all the time.

I feel like I start every podcast the same way, but I've truly found that people

that are the most impactful, the most passionate, the most driven and purposeful are people that solve the problem in their life.

And you really solve the problem when, you know, your mother was probably the closest, I'm going to assume relative to you, you know, went through that time and you just said, I, I need answers.

And so if you guys have not watched the podcast that I did with Max on the journey with his mother and how he became an advocate for mental health, it's a really, it's a phenomenal podcast.

I linked all of the research in the, in the show notes and even gave a link to the documentary that he did with his mother.

I was, you know, before every podcast, and I know you so well, and we, we just had a great time at the Maha Ball, which was awesome.

We had a great time at the turning point ball, which was, which was a great time.

Other than the weather, it was like a friggin' nine degrees and

all the women were walking a mile in open-toed heels.

I know.

It was like being in a cryotherapy chamber.

Yeah, I didn't think about it that way.

I should have turned that into a positive.

I'm getting all this vasoconstriction and brown fat activation and dopamine, but I was actually pissed off.

So maybe the dopamine didn't work.

I know.

When you're constricted, you're wearing a tux.

It's like, oh.

But I ran into

a great clip that you did.

And I think it was either during a congressional hearing or when you were on Capitol Hill not too long ago.

And you made a comment and you said, if your grocery store has a health food section, what does that tell you about the rest of the grocery store?

And,

you know, as obvious as that is, it just made me go,

you know,

it is so true.

And it's so interesting how, you know, we're both connected to this Make America Healthy Again movement.

And we're both committing time and resources and our platforms to it.

And it's astounding to me how

bad it's really gotten.

You know, just how far away from the basics, you know, eating whole foods and nutritious soil and getting back to the basics, the war on saturated fat, the, you know, the promotion of

seed oil, the allowance through grass, this generally regarded as safe guideline that the FDA has that we can actually take microtoxins on a regular basis.

And so I want to kind of roam around that with you because I consider you an authority on that.

And maybe we should start with one of the most controversial topics, which is seed oils.

And I think that a basic explanation of what is a seed oil, why is it bad for you and so pro-inflammatory?

We had an awesome discussion before the podcast started about its impact on LDL cholesterol.

And I thought that your viewpoint on that was really good because you talked about the house of cards collapsing on LDL cholesterol.

So I wonder if you might expand on that.

Yeah.

So seed oils are

obviously very controversial today.

Everybody's talking about them.

I actually, I think, was very prescient in my, you know,

diving into this topic in my book, Genius Foods, which came out in 2018, which I, the manuscript I wrote around 2016.

And there have been other people sort of...

broaching this issue.

I mean, Weston A.

Price, I think, was one of the earliest.

Yeah, Paul Salandino has been big on it.

Talk about it.

Yeah,

Dr.

Kate Shanahan.

You know, the evidence is kind of all over the place.

And I think it's a little bit,

we have to talk about seed oils not as a monolith, but with nuance.

And, you know, when discussing these kinds of oils, there are the culinary oils like sesame seed oil, which have been used in various traditional cuisines for millennia,

which I think can be perfectly healthy and add great qualities to certain recipes.

And,

And I think those are fine.

But the oils that are in question, particularly today,

are what are sometimes referred to as RBD oils, which stands for refined, bleached, and deodorized oils.

These are the highly marketed cooking oils that have only really had a presence in the human food supply for the past couple of decades.

The issue with these, and even within the refined, bleached, and deodorized seed oil category.

First of all, when you say refined, bleached, and deodorized, I mean, you should come to a full stop right there because there's no mechanism in nature for something to be refined, bleached, or deodorized.

Correct, yes.

So, I mean, we've now, I think many of us in the nutrition community are placing an emphasis on awareness around ultra-processed foods, right?

We generally want to, you know, minimize our consumption of ultra-processed foods, which now make up 60% of the calories of your average adult.

But what about ultra-processed food ingredients?

And these refined bleach and deodorized seed oils are ultra-processed.

By definition, a food that is ultra-processed is something that you couldn't possibly make in your own kitchen if you tried.

Now, you could make

sesame seed oil in your kitchen, right?

To make sesame seed oil, you press sesame seeds.

You could conceivably make extra virgin olive oil in your own kitchen.

I mean, humans have been making and consuming extra virgin olive oil.

for centuries.

I'm a huge fan.

Me as well.

I actually start the morning with a shot of it.

But you couldn't realistically create um one of these rbd oils like soybean oil or corn oil in your kitchen they often require industrial machinery chemical solvents like hexane so right off the bat these oils are ultra processed we we we know that um the ultra processing designation comes from the nova paradigm out of latin america and so it's a little bit unclear i think the technical definition might not necessarily place you know corn oil and soybean oil under that in that category, but they are.

There's no question you couldn't make them in your own kitchen.

I mean, you would, you would need some serious chemistry to do so.

Right.

Plus, most of us don't have hexane and sodium hydroxide just lying around.

Exactly.

There's actually a,

there was a viral video on Instagram by a really wonderful content creator, and I forget his name, but I'll send it over to you and you can perhaps include it in the show notes.

It's actually a guy who seems to, who appears to have a chemistry background, attempts to make a refined bleach and deodorized seed oil in his, in his home kitchen.

And it's pretty terrifying, really?

Actually, yeah, yeah.

The all the myriad production steps, but it's, it's, you know, nobody's doing that at home for the most part.

I'm going to try and dig that one up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Callie just did a Callie Means,

another good friend of mine and someone I deeply, deeply respect just did a post on

the sequence in the manufacturing of seed oils.

I thought it was really good.

Yeah, they're often exposed to high heat.

So, but you know,

it it should be said that processing doesn't necessarily make a food unhealthy, right?

Even within the bucket of ultra-processed foods, ultra-processed foods are not a monolith.

Some are better for you than others.

So, what is it specifically about refined, bleach, and deodorized seed oils that make them,

that

should ought to inspire caution when over-consuming them?

Well,

for one,

They are novel fats.

So, you know, again, these didn't exist in the human food supply prior to 50 to 70 years ago.

So right off the bat, I think we should, you know, embrace

by default, what's called the precautionary principle.

So the less time a food or an ingredient or product has, you know, humans have been exposed to it, the more skepticism, the more caution, the higher the burden of proof should be on that food to prove itself as safe, you know, as opposed to the burden of proof being on the...

consumer or the researcher to prove it guilty, right?

It should be guilty until proven innocent.

And that's what's referred to as the precautionary principle.

It's something that actually in the EU,

that seems to be the norm for food additives and the like.

Here, the burden of proof is usually on the consumer to prove something, to prove that something is unhealthy.

And usually that occurs years, if not decades, after many, many people have been exposed to it.

And we've seen that with Red Dye 3, which was just banned.

Yeah, that was a good move.

After decades.

Which is a start.

We need to go through the other 40 and some of the other ones.

There you go.

So I think the precautionary principle is super smart.

It's something that we don't generally abide by here in the United States.

And I think that's unfortunate.

So these ultra-processed oils are, they're novel, right?

Now, again, that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right?

So we have to peel back the layers of the onion even further, right?

The problem with, I think one of the major problems with these oils is that they're predominantly comprised of polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are the most chemically unstable.

So among the fatty acids that predominate our diets,

you've got unsaturated fatty acids and you've got saturated fatty acids, right?

Those are the two major categories.

Saturated fats are the most chemically stable.

They tend to be solid at room temperature.

And under the bucket of unsaturated fats, you've got your polyunsaturated fatty acids and your monounsaturated fatty acids.

Polyunsaturated fatty acids are very

prone to a chemical process known as oxidation, where essentially the oils go bad, they go rancid.

And that process is

catalyzed by exposure to light, heat, and oxygen.

And so these refined bleach and deodorized seed oils are per, they tend to be predominantly polyunsaturated in nature.

And that's not the case for all of them because there are

seed oils like high oleic sunflower oil, which I actually think is fine because it's mostly monounsaturated fat, which has a degree of chemical protection.

It's less prone to this oxidative process.

But polyunsaturated fats are essentially naked because they're the most prone to oxidation.

And they're extracted from the food matrix, which often coincides with antioxidants that protect those fats.

In fact, in nature, where you see higher levels of polyunsaturated fats, you also see higher levels of certain antioxidants like vitamin E,

whose role in nature is

is mainly to guard these polyunsaturated fatty acids against oxidation.

So in foods where you have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats, you see higher levels of vitamin E, which is why nuts are one of the primary sources of both polyunsaturated fats in

the diet as well as vitamin E.

Okay, I didn't know that.

Polyunsaturated fats are not inherently unhealthy, and vitamin E is super important from a brain health standpoint.

The problem is when we extract these fats from the whole food matrix and we expose them to these

caustic chemical solvents like hexane, or others,

and then we expose them to heat, which often occurs during the deodorization process.

And then we further use them to cook them,

to cook with, which ironically is what they're marketed as being ideal for.

Then you're further catalyzing this oxidative process to these polyunsaturated fats, which are very vulnerable.

And, you know, oxidation occurs when we ingest these fats in us, you know, right?

But it can also occur in the external environment, when they're used in the fryer setting, when they're used to, you know, create ultra-processed foods.

And so that's potentially really harmful.

Right.

The other problem is that there are byproducts of oxidation.

So it's not just that the fatty acids themselves become oxidized, but

all of these other nasty compounds are generated.

When a high polyunsaturated fatty acid dominant seed oil is exposed to high heat and reheated in particular, you know you're not just damaging the fatty acids, but you're generating all of these noxious compounds like acrolein and 4-hydroxynonanol, which have been shown to

be cancer-causing

and

be associated with conditions like Alzheimer's disease, 4-hydroxynonanol in particular.

And this doesn't exist in the seed oil initially.

This exists when the seed oil becomes oxidized.

And I think the

oxidation process, which is also a pro-inflammatory process in the human body, when you have oxidative free radicals in the human body, you create inflammation.

And you see, again, it's not causal, but it's correlated.

You see a significant increase, dramatic increase in the consumption of things like refined sugar, but also the consumption of seed oils.

I mean, you really can't get away from them.

I mean, even if you go to, you know, my favorite thing is that most of them have a heart healthy label on it.

American Art Association, so there's a beautiful picture of a heart with a smiley face and their and and the bright eyes that's on the on the bottle of seed oils.

But the

amount of their consumption too is, well, people go, well, I don't grab Wesson oil off the off the shelf, but you know, you start spinning around the labels of your, you know, your salad dressings and most, you know, a lot of your seasonings and

even some

extra virgin olive oils.

You know, and until Paul Saladino brought this to my attention, it was a few years ago, I actually thought extra virgin olive oil was extra virgin olive oil.

And then when you spin the label around, it's like extra virgin olive oil, palm oil, cottonseed oil,

canola oil.

And it's right in the bottle that, and all it says on the label is extra virgin olive oil.

And it's, and, you know, part of, I think, um,

the issue and what, you know, hopefully we're, we're, we're going to help solve with this Maha movement is that, you know, the average consumer doesn't stand a chance.

I mean, I can consider us to be pretty woke and educated in this arena.

And, you know, just getting to the grocery store and just getting through that is a, it's a task.

And so you think about the middle American mother and fathers trying to do the right thing about the family and trying to raise their kids and trying to eat healthy.

And, you know, as I'm cruising down the aisle, I things like see things like fortified, enriched, heart healthy.

Okay, those are the things that I'm going to grab and throw in my, you know,

into my basket.

Yeah.

Right.

It's a bit, it's a, it's a huge problem.

And

yeah, you know, I'm

I'm optimistic that we can raise more awareness around this topic and call for better science.

Because, again, the science is a little bit all over the place.

And this is a controversial topic.

Not everybody, I mean, it's actually very,

this is a very

unorthodox perspective that we should be avoiding seed oils.

I mean, I'll say with all, you know, transparency that like, if you were to ask your average dietitian, for example, what they think about seed oils, they'll say that they're not only...

they're not only benign they're and not harmful but they're actually good for you so i think um

you know this is something that we're going to need a lot more research to say with certainty but um based on this line of thinking that i've you know at least begun to lay out i think that we should all have a little bit more uh skepticism around them and um you know like linoleic acid which is the form of polyunsaturated fat that dominates these seed oils is also found in extremely healthy foods like again nuts and seeds and things like that and you find linoleic acid in um animal source foods egg yolks and things like that And so a lot of the observational data on this, like when they'll correlate blood levels of linoleic acid, for example, to certain health outcomes,

you know, it actually seems positive from that perspective.

But there are a lot of confounding aspects to that observation.

For one, nuts and seeds and other foods,

as I've mentioned, that are high in this fat are healthful.

And then also there is what's called healthy user bias, where

these oils are adorned with the heart healthy logo on them.

So a health-conscious person might be more inclined to consume canola oil and corn oil and soybean oil.

Now, is their health good because of these oils or perhaps in spite of these oils?

Because I mean, that's a health-conscious consumer, right?

Maybe they're more inclined to take a multivitamin or maybe they're less likely to smoke or drink alcohol excessively.

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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

Well, you know, I think you see such a parabolic rise in nearly all forms of chronic disease, autism,

ADD, ADHD, OCD, manic depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, and then also the more physical characteristics, obesity, multiple chronic disease in a single single biome, all of which the United States is leading the world in.

As we drop to 66th and like 66th in life expectancy, you know, we are leading in these areas that we don't want to lead, especially after spending $4.5 trillion a year on healthcare.

If we spend $4.5 trillion, man,

we should all be flying around with CAPE.

For $4.5 trillion, we should be the healthiest nation in the world.

And

I'm always cautious to say the pandemic of obesity or chronic disease is directly related to seed oil consumption.

I think it is multifactorial.

This is certainly a factor.

You know, I don't think that the jury is out on,

you know, oils becoming rancid at high temperatures.

And therefore, you know, at least, you know, to be prudent.

If you were to wipe seed oils out and add things back in, let's say room temperature oils like extra virgin olive oil or cooking in

high-smoke point oils like coconut oil or grass-fed butter, ghee butter, tallow, some of these oils that actually can withstand those temperatures.

Quite frankly, I think things taste better

personally when you cook in those oils.

And they're the only things you really need to have around your kitchen.

But

this

process of oxidation in seed oils, what are some of the outcomes of having these oxidized oils in high volumes in the bloodstream?

Well,

one

effect, which they've, so people can look up,

there are two,

there's a lot of, there are many different researchers, you know, working on this, but

there have been some really interesting papers, clinical trials, by a

researcher with the last name of Ramsden and then Taha.

And there was one paper in particular that I often cite.

It's actually a review, so it's pretty easy to read by Taha, single-author paper published in 2020, looking at linoleic acid and its impact on the brain, which is obviously a topic that I'm incredibly passionate about because my mom had dementia from a young age.

And I'll never know what caused her dementia.

I don't know if it had anything to do with, you know, her exposure to these, her lifelong exposure to these kinds of fats.

But yeah, it doesn't seem that consuming excessive amounts of linoleic acid, which again predominates these oils in question, linoleic acid has easy access to the brain.

And it's a fat that's incredibly prone to oxidation

because of its, you know, its polyunsaturated nature.

And the human diet is now, I mean, saturated with this type of fat.

I was reading a study that came out in 2023

and

it painted the picture very plainly that, you know, in 1910, more than 90% of the fats in the human diet were of animal origin.

90%.

Wow.

Yeah.

And now that figure is like, it's less than 15%.

I mean, it's way lower.

And the bulk of those fats have been replaced by these grain and seed oils.

Like most of the, the, the majority of fats in the human diet today come from soybean oil.

Right.

And corn oil.

Yeah.

And canola.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, it's, uh, it's shocking.

So the fact that these, you know, the idea that these fats are benign and not having some kind of physiologic effect, I mean, it's just that that doesn't even pass like logical muster, you know,

like, of course, they're doing something.

We just have to figure out what that something is.

One thing that they do do, and this was actually shown in a paper by Ramsden, I forget which year, but people can look this up, is that they increase in the blood something called oxalams, oxidized linoleic acid metabolites.

And these have been associated with Alzheimer's disease.

I mean, these, these complexes.

Atherosclerosis.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Narrowing of the arteries.

You find a lot of these oxidative species, you know, at the site of

inflammation and also, you know, at the site of, you know, where cholesterol coalesces into, you know, these plaques.

And I think often we

blame cholesterol for crimes it's not committing.

You know, I often refer to cholesterol as a fireman.

You know, if your house catches fire, the fireman shows up to put the fire out.

But he didn't just show up randomly, randomly, right?

I mean, if this Airbnb never caught fire, firemen would never show up in the driveway, right?

But if it did, they would show up to extinguish the fire.

Cholesterol is usually called to the site of inflammation.

And I think it's something that goes lost on a lot of folks.

They just think because of the presence of LDL cholesterol, especially, especially if LDL cholesterol is in higher amounts, then I have a higher risk.

for narrowing of the arteries or arterial sclerosis.

But

that's like making the argument that if there there were more firemen, we would have more fires.

But you know, that line of thinking is not true.

And I think it is about to be majorly disproven.

But one of the things that I liked that you were saying before the podcast started was

we have to understand that

these polyunsaturated fatty acids are built on the backs of this entire house of cards built around LDL cholesterol.

And if one of those cards, like polyunsaturated fatty acids, falls apart, the house of cards starts to come down because you're like, well, if

the fact that these, because the, the, the,

the pro seed oil discussion is,

well, they lower LDL cholesterol.

And isn't LDL cholesterol terrible?

Isn't LDL cholesterol bad for you?

Isn't LDL cholesterol the genesis of all heart disease?

I mean, shouldn't you, if you have high LDL cholesterol, lower it as low as you possibly can?

And if seed oils lower LDL cholesterol, then the argument's over.

They're, they're not

bad for you.

Yeah.

I mean, I've said that LDL cholesterol isn't just a biomarker, it's an industry.

And it's not just one industry.

Yeah, I love your one-liners, man.

It's like, like the health food line.

I'm going to borrow that.

You can see it start creeping up in podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Feel free.

Use it.

Use it.

Credit me.

But

or don't.

I don't know.

Be clear.

So it's an industry.

This LDL cholesterol is an industry.

Yeah.

And so, like, this notion that seed oils are good for you,

you know, refined bleach and deodorized seed oils are good for you.

It's true that seed oils reduce LDL cholesterol relative to certain saturated fatty acids.

And so you have to accept that as being a benefit, because if that's not a benefit, then suddenly animal source foods are not the dietary villain that they're often made out to be.

And suddenly, statins, their LDL

lowering

effect might not necessarily be

of benefit.

Statins have pleiotropic effects.

They're also anti-inflammatory.

But exactly.

Yeah.

Very interesting podcast with Dr.

Gundry on that

and talking about the

research on

the minimal impact that

statins had on life extension, which was very, very minimal, and the impact that it had on cardiovascular disease coming from the anti-inflammatory effect, not actually from the LDL lowering effect.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's

the house of cards that you referenced is something that I think it's really important.

Like

that seed oils are heart healthy is a card in that house of cards.

And for us to challenge that assumption, well, then that might lead to

a reassessment of all of these other assumptions that we make about what causes heart disease.

Maybe saturated fat isn't the dietary villain that it's, you know, often for decades made out to have been.

So

yeah, that's why I think it's,

it's been a real challenge to, to actually address this stuff because there's so much commerce tied to it.

And I'm not saying that LDL cholesterol is unimportant, that Abo B is unimportant, but the

but you know, heart disease is multifactorial.

And yeah, I don't think it's directly causal for LDL cholesterol or directly causal for seed oils either.

But I think the more of these things, you know, it's interesting as I sort of travel the world and talk to experts like yourself and other experts and PhDs and MDs and researchers and leading minds in the field.

Yeah, so we're we seem to be coming full circle, you know, and just getting back to the basics, you know, a lot about what you talked about, how

a lot of these polyunsaturated fatty acids weren't even in the diet in the 1900s.

And you also saw significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease is a relatively new phenomenon, especially in younger ages.

In older ages, it was certainly a phenomenon, but

it's becoming younger and younger, and so is metabolic syndrome.

I read a really interesting article and had a discussion with Dr.

Gondry about this: about

the metabolic syndrome, which we were discussing before the podcast, abdominal adiposity, hyperinsulinemia, hypertriglyceridemia,

elevated

or suppressed HDL, cholesterol, and high blood pressure.

We really tend to think of these things as these are older age problems, right?

Like, like we think Alzheimer's, dementia, cognitive decline.

I'll start worrying about that in my late 60s, my early 70s.

But all of these things have a genesis that's decades earlier than they manifest themselves.

And obviously, diet plays a huge role in that.

Now, I know you're a meat eater, like I am.

and I've often heard you dispel a lot of the vegan vegetarianness.

I'm not saying attacking vegans and vegetarians, but just

dispelling the myth that you can't be healthy unless you're eating an entirely plant-based diet.

Yeah.

Definitely worth pushing back against because there's so much money that goes into the promotion of plant-based diets, right?

Right.

But yeah, no, I'm an unapologetic omnivore.

I think that people are best suited to eating both plants and animals.

And, you know, there's like the ethical question that always arises.

And I think that's a good, you know, these are important questions.

Animal treatment in this country, particularly in the CAFO system, is like really aberrant and it's not great for the environment either.

But from a nutritional value, I think it's, you know,

should not be controversial that animal source foods are can play a really important role in the optimized diet.

They comprise some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet.

Red meat in particular, I think it's a repository for not just really high-quality protein, the highest quality protein, but creatine, carnosine,

vitamin E, you got a tiny amount of omega-3s

in grass-fed, grass-finished red meat,

taurine even.

There are carninutrients, nutrients that are found exclusively in animal source foods that I think we shouldn't be neglecting.

And so, yeah, I take a really

unapologetic stance.

And, you know, the epidemiology surrounding red meat is really terrible.

It's, you know,

most of the time, I find can't be trusted, you know, barely scientific, uses what I've called food frequency questionnaires, where, you know, within the category of red meat, you'll see hamburgers

at the population level, people who are eating more hamburgers or eating more fast food.

And it's like, is it the bun?

Is it the high fructose corn syrup ketchup on the burger?

Is it the french fries that

came with it?

Exactly.

It's the shake that came with it.

100%.

So, you know, observational research tends to paint red meat as a dietary boogeyman.

You know, those observations, those associations are easy to find.

Red meat associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer, you know, all this stuff.

But

the issue is really diet quality.

Randomized control trials do not bear out.

those observations.

And those observations also, those increase in risks that you tend to see, tend to be very small.

They're increased,

the risks are relative risk.

Yeah.

Increases in relative risk.

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Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

Interestingly,

I didn't mean to cut you off, but we talked about this yesterday on a podcast at a pediatrician on, and we were talking about statistical data.

I have a background in probability and statistics and mortality modeling.

And by asking a different question, you can get a completely different answer from the same data.

And one of the things that we were discussing was if you have, you know, 100 people in a population, for example, and one person is helped by, let's say, a pharmaceutical intervention, and you tweak that pharmaceutical intervention, and now 1.5 people out of 100 are helped.

Well, that's a 50% increase

in the efficacy.

And so now,

you know,

consumer sees, well, there's a 50% improvement in,

you would think, well, it went from one to 50 out of 100, but it didn't.

It went from one to one and a half out of 100.

And you know, the stat claims a 50% improvement, which I guess hypertechnically is true, but

when you're looking at the data,

it's misleading.

And that's a lot of what happens with epidemiological studies.

Yeah, 100%.

It's like if you are, if they take a group of, I mean, we'll just say like 100 people and

they see four of those people getting

a negative

health outcome related to a certain variable, like red meat consumption, four of those people out of 100.

And then

another cohort that, you know, maybe is meat avoidant, you'll see

three people, you know, have the same health outcome.

The headline will be 25%

reduction.

Risk reduction, right?

But it's just going from four to three.

And it's like red meat, you know, maybe was assessed via these food frequency questionnaires, which are notoriously inaccurate.

Yeah.

And there's all of these other variables.

There's, you know, healthy user bias.

There's multi-collinearity.

There's like all of these other

collinearity, which I was, I got into the multi-collinearity.

Damn, I've been in the industry a long time.

I know you heard of that.

I got into a debate on multi-collinearity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I got into a debate with one of these like vegan science communicators.

Their whole shtick is like promoting, you know, their, their activism around that diet, that lifestyle.

And,

you know, there was a.

They can be so pedantic, you know, and we got into this debate about semantics and healthy user bias versus multi-collinearity.

They're related concepts.

But yeah.

So that's why those kinds of studies, I think, are really not trustworthy.

They're useful for generating hypotheses.

Right.

But the randomized controlled trials don't really tend to show any negative health effect from the consumption of red meat.

In fact, one meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials was just published that found that of all the cardiovascular biomarkers that were assessed

across myriad randomized control trials using red meat as an intervention, the only potentially negative effect to come from red meat consumption up to about six ounces of, or on average, six ounces of red meat consumed per day, was a tiny, tiny, tiny bump in LDL cholesterol.

And it's like, is that bad?

No, probably not.

No, so it's not.

I did a whole podcast on this with Dr.

Arceem Mahotra, who's a cardiologist out of the UK.

He's up for a cabinet position in

the new administration.

It's not the American Heart Association, but it's another cardiovascular society, and

running the health and human services.

And he said, the very first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to decorrelate LDL's direct risk for cardiovascular disease.

And

we saw this in

our mortality tables where we used large data because when we were determining mortality, we used voluminous pools of data because we were putting people into a cohort of a thousand lives.

And we didn't use randomized clinical trials.

We used actual data, day, date, time, location, and cause of death, and triangulated that back into the record.

And if elevated LDL cholesterol was correlated to decreased mortality, we would have had it as a risk factor, what we call morbidity factor, a comorbidity factor, but it wasn't.

In fact, it was oppositely correlated in older ages that the higher the LDL cholesterol, the more it was correlated to longevity.

We didn't, at the time that I was there, process death claims on centenarians, which we would see from time to time.

Sometimes in life insurance, the policy does what they call endows.

So if you actually make it to age 100, the death claim pays.

So kind of

fun to like screw your children and make it to 101 years old.

Hey, dad just got his life insurance.

I'm fucking 101.

I'm going on a binder.

You know,

I just got 10 million tax-free.

But what was interesting about these death claims is many of them died in

a hospital or scare living facilities or

other kind of areas where we had blood work.

And

universally across the board, they had what we would consider to be

elevated levels of LDL cholesterol.

And yet these are the centenarians.

And great longevity, wow.

Yeah, and great longevity.

So he and I went deep down the rabbit hole with this.

If you want to check that podcast out, it's Dr.

Asim Malhotra.

But I saw a tweet of yours that

I want to dig into because I happen to agree with it.

Agree with most of your tweets.

Aside from being funny, you've got some great one-liners.

But

you tweeted about the five best sports supplements, creatine, beta-alanine, nitrates, caffeine, and protein.

And I wonder if we might

discuss that.

I mean, obviously, I think protein is

pretty well vetted and discussed.

I don't think anybody considers protein to not be excellent for sports nutrition.

But what about beta-alanine, creatine, nitrates, caffeine?

Why did those make your top five list?

Yeah, well, actually, that was a review that just came out, and it sought to elucidate the five top sports supplements.

So the five top sports supplements, according to this new review, was creatine, which was sort of the king.

I would, by the way, agree with that.

Yeah.

I think it is the most underserved nutrient in

40-plus-year-old females, you know, especially perimenopausal, premenopausal, post-menopausal women.

Yeah, it's the bomb.

I mean, it has a really

long historical track record for safety and efficacy.

And they're now starting to,

research is starting to mount showing that it has a cognitive benefit, supplemental creatine.

It can improve cognition when people are underslept, which is a great thing.

Pretty much everybody.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

It might have a cardiovascular health benefit.

So I think creatine is amazing.

I take about five grams a day.

And it seems to be, I mean, save for people with, you know, kidney disease,

you know, and other medical conditions, it seems to be very safe.

And what form of creatine?

Monohydrate, by far.

The monohydrate or the HCl.

Yeah.

Most of the research is on creatine monohydrate.

Okay.

Yeah.

So creatine HCl might be as efficacious and safe, but I don't think we know.

And

monohydrate is super cheap and it's very easy to find.

And yeah, most of the research, you know, and so centers on that.

And how does beta-alanine play in into that?

That's a good question.

I mean, beta-alanine is not something that I'm all that familiar with, actually, which is part of the reason why I was like reading that research review because it's not something that I currently use.

But it did seem to make the list.

And there is this interesting thing.

It does give you tingles when you take it.

Like a niacin flush or something.

Yeah, something like that.

It does feel very similar to that.

But yeah, but the fact that it made the top five, I mean, that to me.

Yeah, and then nitrates, because we classically would look for nitrate-free meats and consider nitrates to be things that are embedded in highly processed meats.

Yeah.

And are these the same nitrates?

Same.

Wow.

Yeah.

So maybe we're coming full circle on the.

Well, nitrates basically support your body's nitric nitric oxide pathway, which

normalizes blood pressure, can reduce blood pressure,

and also increase blood flow.

So, I mean, everybody's familiar with the certain pharmaceutical that works to increase blood flow in a region of the body

that's

facilitative of sex.

But interestingly, there have been some reports and actually some research on people taking that same drug.

Viagra, if you haven't guessed,

in the pre-workout setting, and it seems to actually improve muscle protein synthesis on par with one to 200 milligrams of testosterone in this small study.

So, nitrates, yeah, might have a really powerful effect.

I mean, not least of which you're going to probably see a better pump from it, but it might have enduring, you know, an enduring impact on muscle protein synthesis.

Yeah.

And just so we don't leave the vegans and vegetarians totally out of the conversation, like, what are some important things for vegans and vegetarians to pay attention to?

You know, I often just highlight the fact that there's a widespread assumption that if it's not meat, it's healthy.

But, you know, if you look at beyond burgers and non-burgers and you read the list of ingredients in there, the number that I can't even pronounce and don't even recognize.

You know, polysorbate 80, and there's just all kinds of binders, fillers, gelatins, thickening agents,

things that are put in there for consistency that you do not find anywhere naturally in nature.

But for vegans and vegetarians, what are they particularly depleted in and what do they need to replace that a meat diet is giving them?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, vitamin B12, we all know,

is most easily obtained from eating animal source foods.

But if I were going to go vegan, which I won't be anytime soon,

but I would say a nice omega-3 supplement, like an algal-based omega-3 for DHA fat, very useful.

I don't think we can rely on plant-based forms of omega-3s

to adequately support our needs from

an omega-3 standpoint.

So, you know, I would definitely be supplementing with pre-formed omega-3 fatty acids.

Algae is a great option there.

I would also supplement with creatine.

You know, at this point, the evidence is pretty strong, strongly in favor of creatine.

Yeah.

so I would definitely take that.

Creatine is found exclusively in animal source foods.

Yeah.

So uh and it's it's synthesized.

So it's it's vegan.

You know, you could you could take that.

Um

those would be my two you know supplemental,

I guess, like the high leverage you know um nutrients that I would look into.

There are there are a lot of other nutrients though that I think are valuable that vegans likely uh under consume.

I would put uh choline in there, which is really important for brain health.

Yeah.

You can find choline in animal source, in plant-based foods.

I mean,

choline does exist, I believe, in soybeans and cruciferous vegetables, but in much lower concentration than animal source foods.

So you can supplement it from a vegan source or from a vegetarian source.

So yeah, there's like

a choline supplement.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Like city choline and stuff.

Because I think what, you know, you and I are both

involved and really, as we discussed at the beginning, putting our platforms behind this Make America Healthy Again movement, which I'm super excited about,

and hoping that it can coalesce into

more of a

well-organized movement.

A lot of us are trying to do that.

In a perfect world, what do you see as

what are the biggest threats right now to society because of our, you know, the corruption in our nutritional research and the corruption in our

food supply, chemicals in our food supply?

There's so much,

like banning red dye three was amazing.

And then everybody, of course, everybody crawled out of the woodwork and said, what about a red dye number 40?

And what about yellow 90?

And I agree with that.

But

in the perfect world, where do we start?

And

what are some real actionable things that the government could do public policy-wise or

to restrict certain corrupted practices to make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time?

Great question.

Yeah, I mean, I'll preface by saying I'm not formally involved in any way in the

administration or

we're kind of like tangentially,

you know, at this point, supporting, you know, it's a fantastic initiative.

I remain totally optimistic.

I know, I know you are as well.

But what can they do?

You know, I think for one, RFK Jr.'s,

you know,

the motivation is there to uncouple some of the many conflicts of interest with our regulatory agencies,

whether that's the FDA.

You know, almost 50% of the FDA's budget comes from what are called user fees, which are predominantly from the pharmaceutical industry.

So getting the Food and Drug Administration's budget comes from user fees.

What is a user fee?

So user fees are basically the application fees that these,

you know, and other forms of fees that the pharmaceutical agencies pay into the fda

um to you know i believe look at data with regards to drug trials and things like that

um

so sort of like administrative fees that the pharmaceutical companies pay into into the fda um

a proportion of that comes from the food industry but most of it comes from the pharmaceutical industry yeah want to get an extra hour of quality good sleep every single night let me tell you how i do it my wife and i sleep on eight Sleeps Pod 4 Ultra.

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Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

And what other areas could this movement really make?

big pendulum swings with, you know, small amounts of action.

I've heard Kelly Means talk about

ending the direct

advertising to the consumer because that allows the control of the narrative and stops anybody from speaking out.

But what are some other areas where this Make America Healthy Again movement can make big strides in short periods of time?

What are the must-goes in the food supply?

Yeah, well, I think

that getting pharmaceutical ads off of TV, that's easier said than done, to be fair.

You know, a lot of these networks, I mean, if you watch the nightly news in America, I mean, most of the ads are for pharmaceutical drugs.

Right.

You know, right.

So,

you know, I don't know the, I don't, I don't know the proportion to which those, the revenue of those companies, those conglomerates come from their advertising.

It's as high as 74%.

It's probably what I've read.

Yeah.

And, you know, and, but the, the crazy thing is that those ads are not even necessarily there to influence consumer spending, which is what we we would,

which is what even I assumed, you know, prior to Callie coming on to my show and pointing out that, no, they're actually spending that money to influence the platforms.

Right.

You know, if you look at every control,

the control owner.

Exactly, as you've said.

Yeah.

So

I think, you know, uncoupling that would be amazing.

I think

getting the conflicts of interest out of the USDA, which, you know, I don't know how that's going to unfold.

I mean, it was just announced that

Trump nominated a former C, I believe she CEO of one of the largest seed oil lobbying groups to be the chief of staff for the USDA.

So I don't know how it's all going to shake out.

At the point at which we record this, RFK has not been confirmed either.

So I feel like there are a lot of moving parts.

And once he, you know, if he gets officially confirmed, you know, we might see major sweeping changes.

But,

you know, I personally would really love to see this is something that I would love to see.

I think it should be banned that ultra-processed foods are allowed to make health claims.

I think it's really screwed up that you can, you know, that

the

least healthy foods in the supermarket make the loudest claims, whereas the healthiest foods in the supermarket don't make any claims.

You know, most of the healthy, the healthiest foods in the supermarket, the grass-fed, grass-finished red meat,

eggs,

you know, extra virgin olive oil, like very, very seldom will you see any, even avocados, like you don't see health claims on those foods.

Berries, You don't see health claims.

Where do you find the health claims?

On all the ultra-processed garbage foods, the seed oils, the commercial cereals marketed towards children, of course.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's, I actually never thought about that.

That's a really good angle.

I mean,

such a large percentage of our public policy nutritional research is funded by pharma.

And

I think this has got to be partially responsible for an upside-down food pyramid.

You know, Lucky Charm is more nutritious than grass-fed steak.

And if there's any any mechanism to flip that

pyramid or to be a little more truthful, I'm of the same mindset that you are.

We shouldn't restrict free choice, right?

Like

people buy cigarettes, they obviously, I don't think anybody buys a carton of cigarettes and doesn't know what the risks are, but they're an adult and they know what the risks are, they can grab that off the shelf.

I think what you're pointing out is intentionally misleading, you know, heart healthy, fortified, enriched.

and, you know,

high fiber.

And then on the back, it says high fiber diets are related to

improvement in cardiovascular,

you know, reduction of cardiovascular disease, an improvement in a reduction in colon cancer and things like that.

And, you know, leading you to believe that that box of cereal reduces your risk of colon cancer.

I'm happy with

products marketing how they've been produced.

Like, I think if it wants to say organic, great, you know, but it's the health claims.

And I'm happy to say, you know, across the board, no health claims on even foods that I would consider healthy.

You know, I think it should just be a level playing field to inspire consumers to learn for themselves, to seek out their own sort of education around this topic.

But it's like, once we start allowing foods to make health claims, that's actually,

it sounds like on the surface, that would be a good thing, you know, like a ranking system for foods and things like that.

But there's just too much money involved.

And it's like, who's to say what's healthy and what's not?

Right.

You know?

So I think just

across the board, banning health claims, I think that would be great.

And then leaving it up to consumer choice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would agree with that too.

I mean, I have high hopes for this movement to just create less leverage and more transparency, because I think one of the major things that's gone wrong is we've privatized profits and we've socialized the expense.

And when I say socialize the expense, Medicaid, Medicare is picking up the cost of this burgeoning,

you know,

explosive era of chronic disease and type 2 diabetes and morbid obesity.

I know you've been outspoken about classifying obesity as

a disease, and certainly about it being genetic.

So, talk a little bit about that.

I mean, do you think that

obesity should be considered a disease?

Yeah, I think it's a, you know, I mean,

it's highly responsive to our diets and our lifestyles.

So it's not something that we can um

that we that we're

that we're unable to address with our own agency in the world but i push back what i push back primarily against is the notion that it's genetic you know there are certainly genetic influences but this idea that it's primarily genetic that's bs you know

um i mean obesity has tripled over the past 50 years our genes have not changed all that much you know but our our lifestyle our our our food environment has dramatically changed.

Absolutely.

And so.

And from a mental health perspective, what do you think is most, because you're a huge mental health advocate, but

what has most dramatically impacted our mental health?

And for those folks that are listening, we just gave five of the top

supplements

for fitness and for sport.

What about for good mental health, for cognitive health?

We've actually started the discussion on nicotine.

Oh, yeah.

I'm not quite there yet.

You know, we had this discussion in Maja, but I'm on the precipice of it because I've heard Huberman talk about it.

You know, Ben Greenfield's big on it.

Dave Asprey and I spoke about it on his podcast.

You and I have spoken about it.

I'd love to, because I think as soon as you say nicotine, people think cigarettes, vaping.

We're obviously not

talking about those things.

Nicotine, yeah, nicotine is a, I mean,

I um

there's no such thing as a, as a free lunch.

And I think nicotine has some benefits and it has some definite downsides.

The benefits are that it improves cognitive function.

It's a well-studied neurotropic.

It might benefit mental health.

Also with fear extinction and things like that, there are some studies that I'm actually seeing some of the cancer binding site research, which seems to be very promising with even some oncologists recommending pure nicotine patches for

patients that are going through oncology oncology treatment.

I don't purport to know the science behind that.

But if we just stick into cognitive function, you know, as a cognitive enhancer,

I would say the majority of

people over 40 would say, I have some level of brain fog, some level of short-term recall issues, or some level of focus and concentration issues.

So if we're just isolating, you know, cognitive function and the neurotropics, where do you fall on what you feel are the best long-term for our brain health?

Aside from maybe the short-term impact of nicotine?

Generally speaking, like aside from nicotine, I would say, you know, choline is definitely important.

I try to, you know, prioritize choline in my diet from eggs,

red meat, fish, things like that.

I think collagen plays an important role in longevity and systemic health.

I think brain health probably does.

I think the problem with collagen is people think that we can target direct collagen, right?

If you eat collagen, it shows up as collagen in your skin.

But, you know, I always use the analogy that we don't eat our nails to grow our nails or eat our hair to grow our hair.

Fair.

And collagen

is going to provide, you know, it's an incomplete protein.

It won't really build muscle, but I think it can

become amino acids, which can then become collagen, elastin, fibrin in the skin.

Do you take it?

I don't take collagen.

I take these.

I take these perfect aminos because that's all eight of the essential amino acids.

And these actually have nucleotides in them, too.

And I take it because it it has such a low caloric impact, less than two calories,

but it provides the equivalent of 29 grams of whey protein.

So especially, you know, working out in a fasted state, you know, I find that the essential amino acids, they're essential for a reason.

And if you look at metabolic processing conversion, as soon as you're deficient in even a single one of the essential amino acids, the balance of those are going to become fat or sugar.

So the eight essential amino acids in the right ratio is critical.

And obviously, you can get them from high-protein sources, but I think that

way better than BCAAs alone.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the branched chain amino acids are, you know, just leucine, isoleucine, valine.

And usually they're in the right ratios, that two to one, one ratio.

But the branched-chain amino acids are only three

of the necessary amino acids.

And I think the old adage used to be, well, BCAAs are

either metabolized at the muscle level or they're the most commonly used at the muscle level.

So we should take branch chain amino acids, you know, prior to workout or during a workout.

But I think you should take full spectrum of the essential amino acids prior to workout or during a workout

so that you can build anything from that complete protein.

You can build natural killer cells, you can build collagen, you can build muscle,

you can build anything from those essential amino acids.

Well,

this is amazing, man.

I'm super excited about

anything that we can do and our peers can do to have a positive impact on this Make America Healthy Again movement.

I'm also not directly involved with the administration, but tangently

and significantly supporting that movement.

So as you know, I ask all of my podcast guests, and you can't give me the same answer that you gave last time.

Should we look up his last answer?

Ooh, I wonder what it was.

I asked them all the same question

at the end of the podcast before we go into my VIP community.

And after you answer this, we're going to go into a private room.

If you're interested in becoming an ultimate human VIP, you can go to theultimathuman.com and just sign up to be one of my VIP Ultimate Humans.

We do private podcasts.

I do a lot of one-on-one and group settings, answering questions.

We do challenges.

We're just building an incredible community of like-minded folks.

And I give discounts on all of

the products that I endorse.

But before we go into the private podcast for my VIP community, I ask all the guests the same question.

You know, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

Damn.

That was the shortest answer we've ever had.

Great.

Thank you, Max.

I forget.

I completely forgot how I answered it the first time.

I don't know.

For some reason, my brain is going to like James Bond, you know.

To be really good at karate and shooting with a gun.

Like

strong, strong in body

and in intention and to, you know, and in values and

to be a high integrity person, to be a self-sufficient person.

I think that's, you know,

and

obviously health, I think, is a crucial one to embody

making sure that you're strong, that you're

taking care of your body, that you're prioritizing self-care.

And then I also think it's important to like show up in the world

presentable, you know, and to have respect for not just your body and your mind, spiritually, your relationships and all that stuff, but also

how you're perceived.

Some people scoff at like, appearance and things like that.

Like, it doesn't matter.

It's shallow.

But, you know, I think like

because my mind went to James Bond, I'm also thinking about, well, he's a person who dressed really well and he showed up really well and he was, you know, always presentable.

And,

and, uh, and I think that's why he's, he's such an iconic character.

I happen to be a big James Bond fan.

I think everybody growing up was a big James Bond fan.

Favorite Bond?

Who's your favorite Bond?

Who was the English

Bond?

The heavy accent English actor.

I'm having a brain.

What was it?

Sean Connery.

Well, Well, no, well, it was actually Sean Connery.

He just faked the British accent.

Did he?

Oh, yeah.

I guess he did.

Oh, yeah.

He did.

He faked a really thick British accent, but

I love the Sean Connery.

Mine is Daniel Craig.

Sean Connery was like,

he was a badass at 75.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was an older person.

Like Clint Eastwood, you know, like kind of like tougher and more chiseled at 75 than at 45.

He was, yeah.

Daniel Craig for me is the goat.

Yeah.

Roger Moore.

Roger Moore is your favorite bond.

Cool.

I'm so

serious in a while.

I don't know who the next Bond is.

Maybe it'll be you, Gary.

Hey, I'm in.

Universal Studios.

I'm here if you guys want to send me a contract.

Well, guys,

as always, I'll put the links to any of the topics that we talked about below to the extent that they're research.

I'll also try to dig up the studies that you referred to if you helped my team get those.

So I can link those in the podcast below.

Where can people find you?

I mean, my audience, for the most part, is familiar with you, but where can people find you?

Yeah, my podcast, The Genius Life, is my pride and joy.

So come over and listen to that if you're into podcasts, as I'm sure you are if you're listening to this.

And I'm also very active on X and Instagram, which I know you are as well.

Very.

Okay.

Well, VIPs, we'll see you in the private room.

And the rest of you guys, until next time, that's just science.