Sat, Sep-16-23, 01:20
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Dementia killed my mum — this is what I wish I’d known about brain food
I'm a big fan of Max Lugavere, so it was nice to see this interview with him in this morning's Times.
Quote:
Dementia killed my mum — this is what I wish I’d known about brain food
Jessica Salter meets the science writer Max Lugavere, who is on a very personal mission
Max Lugavere’s charismatic mother, Kathy, was in her late fifties when she began to show strange signs of cognitive decline, first complaining of brain fog, then being unable to grasp words, and struggling to walk — it was “as though she was wearing a space suit underwater”. In the summer of 2011 he remembers her mentioning that she had been to see a neurologist about her memory. His father jokingly asked her what year it was. She couldn’t recall and began to cry. “It was heartbreaking,” he says today.
Lugavere, now 41, moved back home to New York to help care for her after she was eventually diagnosed with rare Lewy body dementia. She died six years later, aged 66.
As a science journalist, Lugavere buried himself in research to try to make sense of her horrifying descent — and, I suspect, as a liferaft to cling to for his own future health. “How on earth could my mum be suffering from this condition of old age?” he recalls asking himself, while his maternal grandmother, in her nineties, was still sharp as a pin. His conclusion: that because there was no family history of the disease, it had to have been brought on — or at least accelerated by — diet, lifestyle and environment.
His personal health odyssey spawned his debut book, Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, which documents the links Lugavere doggedly researched between our brain and the foods we eat. The book, which he dedicated to Kathy, “the first genius I ever met”, came out in March 2018. She died three months later.
Brain health is not a particularly sexy topic, but it’s one we are all increasingly being forced to reckon with. The Office for National Statistics recently reported that dementia and Alzheimer’s disease were the leading causes of death in the UK. And the success of his book, which became a New York Times bestseller, and subsequent podcast, The Genius Life, which has had more than 50 million downloads, has taken Lugavere into the realm of wellness influencer, with a difference.
Although he is lean and good-looking, his one million Instagram followers aren’t fed topless, muscle-baring selfies or a “bio-hacker bro” checklist to do before dawn (he gets up at 7am and has a coffee and breakfast). And it’s not often that a wellness influencer starts raving about the joys of a full English fry-up after a flying visit to London — and then goes to great pains to recreate it back in Los Angeles: “I’ve finally found somewhere that sells Heinz beans,” he tells me over Zoom. Instead, he posts bite-size round-ups of studies on how to improve sleep (magnesium supplements), which salmon is the least fatty and most flavoursome (sockeye salmon; don’t worry, you can get it on Ocado) or the latest science on how to reduce Alzheimer’s-related proteins in the blood (breathwork for 20 minutes a day).
He aims to convince his audience to eat more blueberries, say, or dark chocolate, or leafy greens, through a barrage of evidence that shows direct and precise improvements on cognitive health. This includes a study from the University of Georgia showing that after eating some very specific carotenoids found in green vegetables including avocado, kale and spinach (lutein and zeaxanthin, if you’re curious) participants saw a 20 per cent increase in their visual processing speed.
His own diet was already pretty good. Kathy brought up her three sons in a healthy household, although she was vegetarian — something he worries contributed to her disease. “It became very clear to me that the ideal human diet for the brain to not just survive, but thrive, is an omnivorous one,” he says.
Lugavere eats some form of organic meat most days, with lean cuts of grass-fed beef several times a week. “I think red meat is a health food. It’s incredibly nutrient dense with omegas, vitamin B12, zinc, it’s loaded with creatine which we now see is a very important nutrient for brain health, and it’s high in protein, so it’s satiating.” He cites a 2021 study that showed that a 25g increase in unprocessed meat per day resulted in reduced cases of dementia.
He reassessed the way he was brought up to regard fat with suspicion. “I started to realise that, from the standpoint of the brain, the fats that you eat are really important,” he says. He heralds olive oil as a brain health hero for the phenol-plant compound oleocanthal it contains, which studies have shown has anti-inflammatory effects equivalent to taking an ibuprofen, and of huge importance in protecting the neuroplasticity of the brain.
He became obsessed with the importance of gut health — years before the rest of us. Specifically, how the microbiome is linked to brain health, and thus nourishing the gut with fibre and polyphenols (think extra virgin olive oil, dark chocolate and berries) would also feed the brain.
But most of all he became fascinated with food quality; something many of us are just about cottoning on to now. “I realised that a lot of the foods that I had been raised on, foods that were seemingly healthy, were actually ultra-processed junk that is now associated with increased risk of disease.”
His obsessive research has only deepened over the years since he first published, thanks to making more than 300 episodes of his podcast, for which he interviews experts on all areas from sleep to nutrition to exercise. “The more I learn, the more I realise that I don’t know.”
One area he’s changed his mind on is carbs and the fashion for avoiding them. Previously he followed a very low-carb diet but now eats plenty of slow-release carbs to give him more energy to be active. He still gives refined carbs — and sugar — a wide berth “as they drive hunger, so it’s smart to minimise those”.
He doesn’t agree with the intermittent fasters who skip breakfast. “I think it’s a good thing to consume protein quite soon after you wake up to halt the overnight muscle protein breakdown,” he says. He has a protein-heavy breakfast — his version of a lean English fry-up — about an hour after he wakes, and has three big meals a day, all protein heavy, with lots of vegetables and some starchy carbohydrate like sweet potato or rice. He recommends aiming for 1.6g of protein per kilogram of your ideal body weight a day — double the typical official health guidelines. “Protein is satiating, it supports muscle tissue, it isn’t as easily stored as fat and if you’re prioritising unprocessed, good-quality protein, then it acts almost like a shield against these ultra-processed foods, which are usually protein light, because carbs and fat are cheaper to produce.”
Apart from nutrition, he walks 10,000 steps a day (he hates running) and lifts weights up to six days a week, “but that’s just because I love it; three to four times a week is a good target”. Research is starting to show how resistance exercise increases a protein in the brain (brain-derived neurotrophic factor/BDNF) that is important for neuronal growth.
But he’s not a fanatic. He eats ice cream, goes out for dinner with friends and drinks the occasional glass of red wine. “From a brain health point of view, the ethanol in alcohol is a neurotoxin, and even moderate drinkers do seem to have accelerated brain atrophy, so it’s not a health food,” he says. “But you also need to be able to live a little — what’s the point of building up all of this resilience and robustness if it’s going to prevent you from enjoying life?”
His accidental wellness career is not just a job, “it’s a vocation. I feel like I’ve discovered my purpose in life.” And for that, he says, “there is in some way a silver lining to everything that my family experienced. Ultimately, my mom’s legacy lives on through the work that I’m doing.”
maxlugavere.com
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-food-7cwll26kk
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I wonder what prompted the article, as that book was released in 2018. From the website, he is working in a film about his mum. Little Empty Boxes.
) I'm not digesting most of this stuff. It's not doing me anything but harm unless I choose what works for me.
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