The Terrifying Link Between Diet & Mental Health - Max Lugavere - #709

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Max Lugavere. He's a health and science journalist, filmmaker, podcaster and an author. To maintain peak health, nurturing a healthy mind and body is key. Simple daily habits and foods can make a massive difference to limiting and even reversing cognitive decline as you age. And today, we get to go through some of Max's favorites. Expect to learn why California is banning Skittles, how worried you should be about artificial sweeteners, tactics for how to kill your sweet tooth, why raising your baby vegan might be child abuse, the biggest issue with the demonization of red meat, the specific ways you can prevent dementia from happening and much more. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've won Whoop for over four years now since way before they were a partner on the show and it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It is so innocuous. You do not remember that you've got it on and yet it tracks absolutely everything 24-7 via something from your wrist. It tracks your heart rate. It tracks your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night. It puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple, easy to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I am a massive, massive fan of Whoop and that is why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. You can join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 4 strap, plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free and if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Max Lugavere.
Gavin Newsom signed Bill 418, which will prohibit any food containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye 3 California becomes the first US state to ban Skittles and 12,000 additional products for cancer-causing additives. What's going on?

**Max Lugavere** (2:33)
It's hard to take a firm stance on this, because on the one hand, I do think it's largely virtue signaling and perhaps a bit of fear-mongering. California is kind of known for doing that. A lot of products that are sold in California, for example, like coffee. A product as innocuous as instant coffee has to come with the warning label that it contains acrylamide, a compound that in vitro, at least, is a known carcinogen, right? You can find this on instant coffee sold in California.
It's not uncommon to be in a parking garage, for example, and see a sign by the elevator or staircase that by being in the parking garage, you're going to be exposed to chemicals known to cause cancer and that are teratogenic, birth defect causing. So California is known for being a bit of a hypochondriac state. And so that's where I think a lot of this comes from. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of big government. I'm a fan of small government and less regulation as opposed to more, but I do kind of think that where regulation is perhaps warranted is in with regard to the food supply, the food system. Because if you let the market decide, you end up with things like Mountain Dew flavored hot dogs, which we've seen go viral on social media. Or yeah, I mean, these are, it's unclear whether or not these were real or computer generated. But I mean, you see all the time, you know, there's like all kinds of crazy products in the supermarket that are just, you know, their sole intent seemingly is to hook consumers onto this addictive, hyper palatable, hyper calorie dense product. You see it in fast food all the time. I mean, I'm not sure what country I was in, but I was walking around and there was like a glazed donut hamburger that some mega chain was offering somewhere. So like, if you let the market decide, the market is ultimately going to cater to what the people want, and people don't have like stop gaps, you know.

**Chris Williamson** (4:29)
Old roads lead back to Haribo Tangfastics or something.

**Max Lugavere** (4:32)
Yes, there you go. Exactly, those kinds of products. So I do think that a little bit of regulation is important. And I think, you know, this perhaps is a step in the right direction because we know that the food supply is essentially toxic. We live in a world now where 73% of items in your average supermarket are ultra processed. This is according to a new study that came out that used a machine learning algorithm that looked at all the products available to your average consumer in your average supermarket. And the vast majority of them are ultra processed, which we know has been linked to every poor health outcome imaginable these days. So, you know, when banning or at least regulating these kinds of products, which at the end of the day, ultimately are proxies for ultra processed foods, like you're not going to find red dye 40, right? In something that mom cooks. I think that's a positive thing. But again, California is known for fear mongering. I don't necessarily know how evidence based the fear that a lot of people have towards these products are. The recent aspartame controversy was a good example of that. I don't have a dog in the fight with regard to aspartame.