Max Lugavere: The American Diet Is Making Us Sick | Stories of Us

We as a population need to understand the limitations of our health care providers. They're doctors, they're there for when we break a leg. They're not there to instill wellness onto you. They're there to provide sick care. My name is Max Lugavere and this is my story. I grew up in New York City, in Manhattan, in a neighborhood called Murray Hill, which is sort of like on the east side. As far as I can trace back, I'm a, you know, thoroughbred New Yorker. I grew up in a very small Jewish family. My mom was pretty religious and so was my grandmother, but I've never been personally religious. My family was not political. I think that's part of the reason why I came out so apolitical myself. You know, I've always been more interested in the arts and cinema and music. I started to spend more time around my mom, who was in her late 50s at the time. Still sprightly New Yorker. And at a certain point, my mom started to complain that she was experiencing brain fog. If you would have asked me at the time, I probably would have assumed that that, to some degree, is just a part of getting older. It all came to a head one weekend and my mom announced to the family that she had been having cognitive problems and that she had actually seen a neurologist. My dad asked my mom for her to recall the month. My mom couldn't do it. Then she started crying. And that, to me, was like in a movie when something really profound happens and you hear the sound effect of, like, the record stopping. I had to really take a more active role in understanding what was going on. I had had a lifelong passion, essentially, for health, for nutrition. I had been working for six years as a journalist, as an investigator of sorts. So I was going to investigate what the hell was going on with my mom. And so I started going with her to doctor's visits. We couldn't get a diagnosis for her. In fact, we experienced what I've come to call over the years, diagnose and adios, you know. Ultimately, we had to book a trip to the Cleveland Clinic, which is like where you go when you're desperate. And it was there in Ohio that my mom was, for the first time, diagnosed with a neurodegenerative condition. And she was prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. And I didn't know anything about those two conditions at the time. But as I would read more and more and more, and I learned that these drugs have no disease-modifying effect, and that ultimately whatever variant, whether it's Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, whichever of these two monsters my mom had were progressive and incurable, that was like the line in the sand where health ceased to be this casual interest. From that moment on, it became not just a passion, but an obsession. Why did this happen to my mom? What could be done to help her? And what could be done to prevent this from happening to myself and others that I care about? I think the most startling discoveries, one was that dementia often begins in the brain decades before the first symptom. It's not genetically predetermined. We have genetic risk factors. But ultimately, whether or not a person develops Alzheimer's disease is due to an interaction between genetic risk factors and that person's environment. I think a lot of us also believe that cognitive decline is par for the course of aging, that it's a natural aspect of aging. It's not. You know, what is typical isn't necessarily natural. Many people typically today, you know, they experience some degree of cognitive decline. But that's just because our health is so, you know, we're in such poor shape from a public health standpoint. And our environment has become essentially toxic. The other thing that was clearly a misconception that I was harboring was that dementia is an old person's disease. And my mom was not old. In fact, my maternal grandmother, so my mom's mom, she passed at 96 and was cognitively sharp as a tack. So there was like this really tragic overlap where my grandma was living in the same house as my mom. And my mom had a dementia diagnosis. And her mother was cognitively completely intact. It was the most surreal thing. Something had changed between my grandmother's generation and my mom's. What was that, right? Somewhere along the line, our food supply became ultra-processed. Those foods came about probably when my mom was in childhood. The food pyramid, right, which every 24-hour cycle implored us to consume anywhere between 7 to 11 servings of grains per day. We were told for many decades to minimize our intake of fat, dietary cholesterol. Now, to be frank, that was a public experiment. Nobody at the time had thought of the implications of fear-mongering these otherwise incredibly nutrient-dense foods. And that's exactly what it was. It was fear-mongering on a mass scale. We also grew up with chronic exposure to these fake fats, these refined, bleached, and deodorized grain and seed oils. It was this slurry of fake fats and refined grain products that we were told were heart-healthy. At the end of the day, these foods are designed to be over-consumed. And these foods underlie the epidemic of chronic conditions that we're now seeing saddling society. I felt really strongly that this is a topic that more people needed to be talking about. And at the time, nobody was talking about this. People just thought that dementia was like this thing that, you know, you either developed it or you didn't, but that we could actually take steps in our lives that we could, you know, perhaps eat a certain way or live a certain way. That was just like this incredible idea. 2013, I decided to begin work on a documentary about dementia, but through the lens of prevention. And it went like crazy viral. Just goes to show you how direly people were hungry for this kind of information, right? That was the on-ramp to my next project, which was my book, A Nutritional Care Manual for the Human Brain. And yeah, and then sometime after that, I launched my podcast, The Genius Life. In 2018, my mom's cognition seemed to deteriorate relatively rapidly. Ultimately, she was diagnosed with a condition called Lewy body dementia, which is like having Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease at the same time. So they did an MRI, and what they found was a tumor on the head of her pancreas. And the doctors gave her three to six months. December 6th, 2018, she passed away and we were there, all there beside her. Whenever I have doubt or feel like unsure of myself, I remember that the reason why I'm doing any of this is because of her. By helping others, what she went through, what my family went through wasn't in vain. We as a population need to understand the limitations of our healthcare providers. They're not there to instill wellness onto you. They're there to provide sick care. Healthcare is what happens when you're negotiating with yourself to get off the couch, off your butt, right, and make it to the gym. You shouldn't need to be a PhD or an MD or a dietician to know how to feed yourself and loved ones. One of the things that motivates me is that message of empowerment, that you should do your research, arm yourself with knowledge, and then also, not just to keep that knowledge locked up, but to act on that knowledge. Depending on like which political tribe you're a part of, like there's almost like a diet associated with that tribe, you know? Like on the left, there seems to be this like promotion of like plant-based diets, like eating for the planet, and then on the right, it's okay to eat animal products. If my views on a certain topic sound a little bit more conservative, great, some of my views might sound more liberal. I don't care. The kind of diet that I generally endorse is now being referred to as like trad for traditional, and like caring about my fitness is like trad. It's like now conservative, you know? It's insane. I feel as a result, it's left me with this sense of like political homelessness, you know? We have a sick population. I mean, today, 9 in 10 adults have some component of metabolic illness, right? So the fact that these public officials are trying to like influence our diet based on variables like planetary health, like we have any idea. We need facts about how to right this ship. I think you have to take care of yourself, and you have to look out for others that you care about. How do you not become just another statistic? Consume a diet that's built primarily around minimally processed whole foods. Don't think of this as a diet. Think of this as a lifestyle. I don't like the term diet because it implies that your current way of eating is temporary. Try to instill healthy habits that you can sustain. Your health is not swayed in any one direction with one meal. It's about your dietary pattern as a whole. If this video is reaching you, then you are already empowered to take action in your life. Have an open mind. Be a critical thinker. I stand up for reason and common sense. That's my whole thing. Thank you so much for watching this video. To keep PragerU videos free, please consider making a tax-deductible donation.