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Home » Transcript of Sugar Cravings, Red Meat, and Your Health: Max Lugavere

Transcript of Sugar Cravings, Red Meat, and Your Health: Max Lugavere

Read the full transcript of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast (EP 456) titled “Sugar Cravings, Red Meat, and Your Health” with filmmaker and science author Max Lugavere. (Jun 18, 2024)

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Hello, everybody. Today, I’m talking with Max Lugavere, who flew in from LA to Washington, DC, to have this conversation with me. He’s a journalist who’s become quite a well-known scientific researcher and popularizer, but also a creative investigator in his own right.

He wrote a trilogy of books, the Genius Trilogy, one on foods, one on life, and one, a recipe book on the kitchen, and is also the producer of a documentary that’ll be released at the end of June 2024, called Little Empty Boxes. All of that was motivated by his mother’s experience with a form of dementia known as… that involves the degeneration of these neurological tissues known as Lewy bodies.

It’s not Alzheimer’s or frontal-temporal dementia. It’s another form of dementia. And he was very shocked by his mother’s illness, which she developed when she was in her late 50s, and also by the dearth of effective treatment that was available to her, and ended up obsessively concentrating on research into the dementias in general, concluding, as have many people in the last decade, that the dementia spectrum of illnesses, and that includes Parkinson’s, by the way, might well be preventable with interventions that are early enough in life, and that many of those interventions might be dietary in nature.

And we discussed why that is, and talked about the carnivore diet as well as a potential diagnostic investigative tool for the analysis of complex disease in general, and, well, I suppose in some ways, celebrate the possibility that dietary modulation might prove to be the treatment of choice on the prevention side for these terrible, degenerative neurological diseases.

So join us for that. So I’m interested in diet, I suppose, despite myself. I would say, because it’s not my natural domain of interest, I’m more interested in psychological matters, let’s say, than physical or physiological matters. I know they overlap, but my attention doesn’t naturally gravitate that way.

But I have definitely learned that many of the things that I would have been tempted to assume were psychological aren’t. I mean, I’ve known for a long time, for example, that endogenous depression, the schizophrenic disorders and manic depression, I never thought of those as psychological disorders. I thought, no, those people are sick. We just don’t know what’s wrong with them.

So I spoke with Chris Palmer in some detail on my podcast, and I just met him again in Boston. He’s got a couple of research projects finishing up. He’s got 15 on the goal, looking at treatment of those disorders with diet. And the first three have been spectacularly successful.

Max Lugavere’s Genius Trilogy

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: So diet, right. So let’s start with your genius work and outline for people what those are and what you’re doing with them and why. Let’s start with that.

MAX LUGAVERE: Sure. So I’ve written a trilogy of books, the Genius Trilogy, as it were. And my first book was called Genius Foods, and it came out in 2018. And it’s a tome to, and an homage really, to the science of both dementia prevention, as well as the burgeoning field that’s being referred to as nutritional psychiatry. So how diet plays a role in mediating mental health.

Insofar as it does play a role, there’s this really exciting area of research looking at how our diets are able to influence our moods, which I think is incredibly exciting. I followed that up with a book called The Genius Life, which was a more lifestyle-centric guide. And then my third book came out in 2020, I’m sorry, 2022, and it was a cookbook kind of bringing everything together. But my work really, I would say, primarily explores the intersection between diet and lifestyle and brain health.

And the reason why I wrote these books is because I was personally affected by dementia, by a form of dementia called Lewy body dementia, which prior to even receiving that diagnosis in my family, it’s a condition that my mom suffered from. I became obsessed with trying to understand all that I could.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: How old was she when that happened?

MAX LUGAVERE: She was 58 years old.

Max Lugavere’s Mother’s Illness

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right, right.

MAX LUGAVERE: When she first started to show these amorphous symptoms that —

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON: What symptoms did she show?

MAX LUGAVERE: So she had symptoms that both occurred concurrently. Some of them were movement related. So rigidity, balance issues, stiffness, I guess rigidity and stiffness are similar. But yeah, a real lack of coordination, reduced swinging in the arms. I’m not a medical doctor, so I didn’t have any framework with which to understand what I was seeing my mom exhibit. I thought, you know, movement symptoms of the musculoskeletal condition, right? It has to be.

But then in tandem with those symptoms, she also displayed stark cognitive dysfunction. And it’s not necessarily that she started to forget simple things like who she was, who her family members were, but it seemed as though her, I’ve likened it to when you have too many tabs open in your browser window. It’s just like the frame rate starts to stutter.

And that’s sort of what I saw in my mom, who was very much still in the prime of her life, had all the pigments in her hair, raised three boys, ran a business. And I had been a journalist prior to that. I had been a generalist journalist since college. Since graduating college, I had worked for a TV network that was co-founded by Al Gore.

It wasn’t a political network, and I certainly was never really that into politics. But I was sort of like this young kid who was given the reins of this TV network that reached 100 million homes in the US.