Dr.Mindy (00:01.366)
Well, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, I have to start by welcoming you back to the Resetter podcast. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.

Austin (00:09.294)
I'm excited to be back.

Dr.Mindy (00:11.382)
So I've been spending a lot of time looking at brain health in general for women over 40. And recently there was a stat that came out that said that the number one health concern for men was mental health and the number two concern, the second biggest problem for women was mental health. And then we tack on the fact that one out of three women are gonna experience Alzheimer's as they age.

Can you help us understand what is happening to the brain in this modern world right now?

Austin (00:44.686)
The aggregating theme with what you're saying is that brain health is the most important thing. And even for those who haven't recognized it personally, let me just explain why that's the case. Anything that you care about in your life, whether it's being able to run a marathon, being present for your grandkids, doing a good job at work, having stronger relationships, is a primary reflection of how things are going within your brain. And so we have these disease outcomes, something like Alzheimer's disease or depression, major depressive disorder.

Dr.Mindy (01:07.288)
Mm.

Austin (01:14.21)
that we could clearly say something is going wrong in the brain. And often we'd use something like a pharmaceutical or more intensive management to target pathways within the brain. But what I would like for people to understand is, this is a continuum, it's a spectrum. And even if you don't have a bona fide brain disease that you're seeking medical care for, your brain is the most important thing that you own. So optimizing brain health should be a principal priority for everyone, as well as helping to prevent these conditions that can be so problematic.

And you alluded to this, but Alzheimer's disease, which is expected to affect up to 150 million people in the coming decades, is one of the biggest problems that we see in medicine, not just because of the number of people, the millions of people currently experiencing it, but because when you see what happens to a person you love when they lose their brain function while they're still present, you understand how devastating that can be.

Dr.Mindy (01:47.128)
you

Austin (02:07.104)
And mental health conditions, which some people look at as diseases of the mind rather than the brain, still happen in the same neuroanatomical basis or the same neurobiology as what happens in Alzheimer's disease. So major depression, which affects around 300 million people around the world, anxiety disorder is a similar number, not to mention all the other people who are experiencing high degree of stress that is compromising their day-to-day function. These are the most important issues of the day. And it's so important that we refocus our efforts on it right now.

Dr.Mindy (02:35.733)
What are the early signs? Cause I think it's so hard to see yourself because you're analyzing, you're using the organ that you're concerned about to analyze if your mental cognition or health in general is going in a wrong direction.

Austin (02:52.3)
That's such an interesting question. So I trained in internal medicine and the time that I would become most invested in a person's brain function being problematic is when they would test positive for a screen for something like major depression because at that point you can prescribe pharmaceuticals, you can refer them out to psychotherapy. Similarly, what you see with a condition like Alzheimer's disease is once a person starts to have significantly impaired cognitive function,

then you start to worry about mild cognitive impairment, MCI, which then leads to a diagnosis eventually in many cases to dementia, at which case you can say, well, they have the diagnosis, we can give them drugs, we can put them on some sort of a protocol. But where we need to be focusing our energy is on the fact that, again, this is a continuum.

like heart disease, which remains the number one killer, very few people think to themselves, well, I had a healthy heart, but then I had a complete occlusion of my coronary arteries that just sprung out of nowhere overnight. We think about it as building up over time. And so what the research tells us as it relates to conditions like Alzheimer's disease is that there are about 315 million people right now who have what we would call kind of preclinical disease, which means they have changes occurring in their brain linked to Alzheimer's disease.

Dr.Mindy (03:48.619)
Yeah.

Austin (04:06.05)
but they don't even have cognitive issues that they're aware of right now. And then that kind of transitions into around 70 million people with prodromal Alzheimer's. So this would be people with impaired cognition, but not super impaired cognition. To go back to the central theme though, for these people who have changes in their brain related to the subsequent development of Alzheimer's disease, this could be happening 20 to 30 years before they get a diagnosis. And that's a really central piece to understand. The other piece of this equation,

Dr.Mindy (04:20.386)
in.

Dr.Mindy (04:30.518)
Right. Yep.

Austin (04:36.078)
that very few people talk about is what does the continuum look like in the development of mental health issues? You know, it's easy to think about depression as something that you can diagnose that did not exist before as though you wake up one day and there's a serotonin change in your brain and now you're experiencing depression and now you're a candidate for a drug. But for many people, we now know from research on things like lifestyle, so exercise, diet, stress mitigation, sleep.

that these things can actually predict risk for developing subsequent mental health conditions. So while there's no single variable that will account for everyone in terms of knowing for sure that you're going to develop a mental health or cognitive health condition, the point that I would make is that when we're starting to feel a lot of fatigue, which could be an indicator of poor sleep, which is shown to be a precursor to conditions like major depression and to Alzheimer's, we should be paying attention to that. If we're feeling more brain fog throughout the day,

Dr.Mindy (05:22.936)
Hmm.

Mmm.

Austin (05:33.783)
Sure, we could say, it's just because I'm a little bit stressed at work, but actually there may be something to consider there. And similarly, experiencing chronic stress, which is probably the single most common mental health issue, it's not just that the chronic stress over time leads to worse overall health, but again, it preconditions people to be at higher risk for conditions like depression and dementia. So.

Dr.Mindy (05:53.816)
Hmm.

Austin (05:57.251)
The point here I'm making is that all of these things that we might just kind of look at as part and parcel of what a typical day looks like are actually data that our biology is giving us to understand what's happening in our brains. And the worst thing that we can do is ignore it until things get so bad that you need the diagnosis.

Dr.Mindy (06:12.642)
Yeah, yeah, it's so true. My 90-year-old dad is showing some extreme signs of dementia now, and you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this recently. I could go back 20 years ago and see little small little micro moments where I was like, that's what was going on there. yet again, you're trying to understand it with the organ that has got the disease state in it.

Austin (06:41.198)
It's, it's so true. And one of the most common things that's seen in the clinic, and when I was in the VA, this happened all the time is the partner bringing in the spouse and saying, Hey, I'm worried about them. So in the VA would be the wife bringing in the husband saying, Hey, I don't think his memory is really what it should be. And the husband often would say, well, it's fine. But that's the challenge is once the actual organ starts to fail.

Dr.Mindy (06:47.768)
Mmm.

Dr.Mindy (06:52.376)
Yeah.

Austin (07:03.968)
It's very hard. It's not like it's a knee where you can point to it and say, it's in pain or a heart where you can say, hey, I'm having trouble going up the stairs. It's very hard when the organ that is being affected is the organ that's necessary to determine something is wrong.

Dr.Mindy (07:08.216)
Mm-mm.

Dr.Mindy (07:17.802)
Yeah. So when we look at the modern world, I did so much research on this with weight loss and fasting and even menopause. I came to this conclusion that we are at an evolutionary mismatch. The human body is not thriving in this modern world that wants us to absorb so much information, wants us to stay comfortable, wants us, giving us foods that are addictive, know, making us dopamine addicted.

So help me understand and my audience, what's going on in our lifestyle? Is there a starting point? Like, is there a place we can absolutely say, do this first and you're gonna put yourself on a good path?

Austin (07:59.607)
If you're listening to this podcast or watching this podcast, you're already so much further along because you're curious. And the first step is curiosity. We can go through the statistics talking about the majority of Americans with one chronic disease, 40 % with two or more, the fact that most people are on drugs, all of these things that your audience knows well, right? That the 90-ish percent of people have cardiometabolic dysfunction in some way, shape or form. The next step is to kind of ask why and am I willing?

Dr.Mindy (08:03.734)
Hmm. Yeah.

Austin (08:27.406)
to kind of acknowledge that those norms, those defaults, those baseline statistics will apply to me unless I do something differently. And it's a really good conversation because there's no single thing, right? For some people, the best next thing to do is to go for a walk, right? Just movement. Movement increases molecules like brain drive, neurotrophic factor. Going for a walk consistently may be one of the best ways to decrease your chances of Alzheimer's disease. There was a JAMA study published a couple years ago.

Dr.Mindy (08:40.556)
Mmm.

Dr.Mindy (08:48.888)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (08:57.452)
showing that people who were roughly around that 10,000 step a day line in terms of how much they were walking were at a slightly higher than 50 % lower rate of developing dementia over the study period. the walking piece could be great. It could be diet. I think diet's really interesting in that it's something so intrinsic. You can't avoid the fact that you have to eat. And so therefore, why not make each meal a slightly better bet for health?

Dr.Mindy (09:11.053)
Mm.

Dr.Mindy (09:14.336)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (09:23.116)
One that I talk about a lot now is air quality. You have to breathe air. Why not make that air slightly higher quality? We know that air quality is associated with, for example, metabolic disease, that certain things in our air may predispose us to weight gain beyond even the well-established data showing that air quality influences brain state. But the simple answer to your question is that the next best step is the next best step that's going to work for you as opposed to a blanket recommendation that every single person has to do this next thing.

And that comes after people understand that the modern world is set up for your health failure, that that is the default, especially in the United States, unless you start making changes to become a little bit of a weirdo and do things differently than your neighbors.

Dr.Mindy (09:59.053)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr.Mindy (10:06.613)
Yeah. That is the most important thing I have heard in a really long time is for people to understand that the modern world is set up to create health failure. And then we have, like you and I were talking about when we started, then all of a sudden we have the health influencer or the podcast host who comes in or the wellness expert that comes in with the solution.

And there's never just one solution and there's not one hero. I strongly believe everybody should be their own hero.

Austin (10:38.307)
Let me just say one more thing to that, I think this really sets the stage for a lot of what we're going to be talking about. It's easy to point fingers and blame corporations, governments, people as being somehow evil or against you, and that that's the reason why things are so bad. But I think a much maybe more boring but actually more helpful explanation is simply incentives. And if you ask the question of what is the incentive structure for whoever is giving you this information,

Dr.Mindy (11:00.97)
Hmm.

Austin (11:05.047)
it's pretty quick that you can get to this question or answer as to does this actually fit with my personal incentive structure? for example, if you go on social media, content on social media is incentivized to be as catchy as possible, keeping your eyes on it as long as possible. And does that actually fit with giving nuanced, helpful information that's going to best benefit your health? No, it doesn't. If you're a wellness brand and you produce a product that people need to feel unhealthy in order to take,

Dr.Mindy (11:09.271)
Yep.

Dr.Mindy (11:19.712)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Dr.Mindy (11:28.62)
Yep.

Austin (11:34.805)
Is that product really aligned with people feeling healthy? You could potentially answer that it isn't, right? If it's designed to be something you take forever. This doesn't mean that wellness companies and wellness brands don't work. But if you really get down to it, there's a reason why there isn't a ton of content out there about just doing simple, boring things each day, even though they are the most effective strategies that have ever been studied in terms of improving health outcomes.

Dr.Mindy (11:54.742)
It's really true.

Dr.Mindy (11:59.362)
Yes.

Austin (12:00.931)
And that's because there's no incentive behind it. There's no financial remuneration for people who create this type of stuff. Whether you're in the government or whether you are a corporation or whether you're a individual on social media, that stuff just doesn't catch on. And so it's not a good use of people's resources. It doesn't change the fact that as an individual, that's the most important thing. And sometimes just turning off the stream of content can be the best next intervention for exactly that reason.

Dr.Mindy (12:15.918)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (12:28.567)
Yeah, we were talking about this before, know, I've really taken my brain to longer content. So I'm listening to podcasts, I'm listening to books, I'm reading books. Like I remind myself to stop being addicted to the short little pithy little content. then another, to your point, I will just totally be transparent. On YouTube, we've made a conscious decision to not do a scare tactic title.

that and not give fancy flashy information that pulls people in but has no substance because to me that's like junk food. It's like ultra processed food for the brain. So, and because of that, we have slower growth on YouTube. But what happens is people stay and listen because they're going deeper, which is what we need to do. So what you just said is spot on.

Austin (13:14.329)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (13:24.099)
People want your attention and they're gonna do it by throwing a scare tactic at you. And the minute you grab that scare tactic, now you're in their web, which is what's scary.

Austin (13:33.377)
Mm-hmm totally agree

Dr.Mindy (13:36.343)
So let's dive into food though, because that's my favorite topic. And I really think for me at 56 years old, food is all for my brain. That every time I put a meal together, I'm thinking about my brain. So talk us, walk us through like what obviously should we be avoiding and what should we be focusing on when it comes to food?

Austin (13:57.711)
Great, so for the next five hours, we'll cover nutrition. I love what you're saying. I love what you're saying around eating for a purpose. And that's such an important switch between the way most people eat now, which is to accomplish an end, which is to eat the meal, just to get it done, or it's kind of incidental, right? You're watching your show and you want to be putting something into your mouth because it slightly increases the pleasure. So to say you're going to enhance the quality of your meal,

Dr.Mindy (13:59.98)
This is true.

Austin (14:26.607)
to improve an outcome that you care about, in this case brain health, I love that. Generally speaking around food, based on the data published by Tufts that has a whole food is medicine program, lack of good nutrition is the number one driver of poor health outcomes in the US and poor diets are the leading cause of death in the United States. Why that matters so much is because the quality of what we eat,

Dr.Mindy (14:27.107)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (14:30.743)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (14:48.291)
crazy.

Austin (14:50.593)
not only influences every significant pathway related to immunometabolic dysfunction, so everything from increasing inflammation if we eat an unhealthy diet to increasing our chances of metabolic disease, obviously what your listeners are incredibly attuned to based on the content you've produced. But beyond this, the food that we consume becomes the structural building blocks of our entire body, including our brain. It's not like we're capable of creating de novo molecules from the atmosphere, we're not plants.

Dr.Mindy (15:12.281)
Mm.

Austin (15:20.365)
we require consumption of the building blocks for our bodies and for our brains each day in the food that we eat. And in addition to this, the nutrients that we consume turn into the neurotransmitters in our brains. So they influence how our neurons work, that somewhere around 80 billion neurons in our brain is influenced by every bite of food that we consume. One thing that I find fascinating beyond this is as you're looking at a complex system like the brain,

It's easy to focus on, well, it's the neurons and the neurotransmitters, but it turns out that roughly half of the cells in your brain are not neurons. They're called glial cells. And so they have names like astrocytes, which are central to brain metabolism, microglial cells, which are central to brain immunity. And leading journals are now showing that the food that we eat programs these cells towards a state of balance or imbalance. And this may be one of the central drivers of conditions like Alzheimer's, depression.

Dr.Mindy (15:59.418)
Mmm.

Austin (16:18.093)
and other neurodegenerative types of conditions. So food is a central part of this equation. As I alluded to earlier, the thing about food is you don't get to opt out. mean, some of your audience does if they do for a time fasting, but you know, if you fast forever, you're not gonna have a good time. So clearly you need to be focused on the quality and certainly timing and other variables, but certainly the quality of what is in every bite that you consume.

Dr.Mindy (16:30.101)
Hmm. Yeah, this is true. Yep. No.

Dr.Mindy (16:43.833)
Yeah.

Austin (16:43.859)
And I think it's a totally different way of looking at nutrition rather than just as calories, but as data, as information, as signaling that influences every aspect of our physiology.

Dr.Mindy (16:55.257)
I think this is such a beautiful way to look at it. I'm thinking of like, you know, the pre-packaged ultra processed food. It has all this, these sensational words on the outside and bright colors. mean, people don't even realize that the packaging is meant to pull you in. And then you get into the food and the food is meant to stimulate dopamine in your brain. It's like a fast reaction to happiness. you, part of me thinks you could look at the packaging. You could just look at the packaging.

Austin (17:23.341)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (17:24.513)
and say, is this gonna create a healthy brain or not? I think it's a beautiful question.

Austin (17:27.705)
Listen, if you want to get yourself riled up on this topic, one of the topics that I I get focused on sometimes is what's happening with kids. And so I'm an adult doctor. I don't really focus as much on children. But in the years since I first wrote this book, Brainwash with my Dad in 2020, I've just recognized that it is this incredible continuum of programming. But the most important time for that programming is what happens

Dr.Mindy (17:37.667)
Yeah, phew.

Austin (17:55.907)
before birth, so epigenetics, preconception, and then what happens in those early years of brain development where, you know, people may not know this, but the brain produces a ton of extra connections between neurons called synapses, and then it prunes them incredibly aggressively in our early years. So in essence, what it does is it over creates connections, and then it prunes them back based on what it thinks are the best pathways available. So,

Dr.Mindy (17:57.913)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (18:24.375)
That is a reflection of what happens in our environment. And then you ask, well, is it the case that we are being programmed towards unhealthy patterns in early life that will last us for the rest of our lives? And the answer is yes. So just as a couple things here, think about children's cereal. Cereal is its own thing. Breakfast cereal is a huge scam. I will just go ahead and die on that hill. It is such a...

Dr.Mindy (18:37.23)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (18:46.284)
Agreed.

Austin (18:48.731)
an incredible co-opting of what breakfast should be. But if you look at the boxes of children's cereal with the cartoon characters, where they're located on this shelf in the store, which is a science called planograms, it is all designed to get children hooked on some of the worst quality food that we produce. And when researchers look decades later, they show that people's patterns of early life cereal consumption predicts their preferences for that cereal in adulthood. So it's not just

Dr.Mindy (19:01.249)
Mmm. Mmm.

Dr.Mindy (19:06.924)
true.

Austin (19:16.449)
a time bound thing where, well, I ate the pirate cereal when I was younger. It's the same pattern that will predispose you to metabolic dysfunction over decades. And I think that's just generally unfair.

Dr.Mindy (19:29.291)
Yeah, I'm having a flashback of when my children were little, you're absolutely right. They put all the cereal, you would go in the cereal aisle and all the movie characters would be right at their eye level. And I'll never forget arguing with my son when he was like six or seven about Shrek breakfast cereal he wanted. And I was like, and I'm like, we're not buying Shrek breakfast cereal. And he said, why? And I said, because Shrek doesn't know anything about health.

Austin (19:42.328)
Yep.

Austin (19:56.175)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (19:56.323)
Like I was just like trying to show him that just because it's your favorite little character doesn't mean he knows anything about health.

Austin (20:01.251)
Yep. Well, I mean, we could talk about celebrities or athletes repping alcohol and junk food and just how these connections have become so warped. the theme that I would put for people is marketers spend billions of dollars each year to convince you to do things that maybe you wouldn't have done otherwise. They spend this money to change your brain so that you select their products. And if this money is going towards a kid,

Dr.Mindy (20:08.207)
Right.

Austin (20:27.705)
Do we think that a kid who isn't able to drive, who isn't able to choose whether they want to drink alcohol because we know their brain is still developing, has the necessary resources to fight off that TV ad for junk food? The answer is no, but we just normalize this because it seems like it shouldn't actually work. The same can be said for adults, by the way. I think we have this incredible myth that's been put upon us, which is...

Dr.Mindy (20:39.778)
Right, so true.

Dr.Mindy (20:45.497)
Yeah.

Austin (20:54.179)
that we should as a community, as a country, be protecting consumer choice and therefore we should make more options available to adults, whether that's they should have access to junk food or cigarettes or alcohol because we want people to have the opportunity to make whatever choice is best for them. And the reality is that's not how the human brain works. So I know we're touching here on some kind of neurobiology and that may not be where you want to go, but this is a myth because we know

and marketers know better than we do, that you can absolutely bias people's decision making not only by having better marketing content, but by creating products that change our neurochemistry to make it more likely that we continue to eat that bad food. By changing our biology, when we build up adipose tissue in the wrong spot that produces inflammatory molecules, that has an association with more impulsive decision making.

Dr.Mindy (21:32.174)
Yeah.

Austin (21:48.483)
So it's not as though everyone's starting from the same place. We are literally reprogramming our brains to make it harder for us to make healthy decisions. And again, that starts before we're even born.

Dr.Mindy (21:49.754)
fascinating.

Dr.Mindy (21:59.131)
That's crazy. Okay, talk to me about nutrient dense food because there's a few words that I hear people throw out like you should have an anti-inflammatory diet. You should eat more nutrients. But I think the lay person doesn't under can't translate that.

And even those of us that are educated on food, they say that the broccoli we're eating now has a lot less nutrients than the broccoli that our grandparents ate. And so how do we know what a nutrient-dense food is that would support our brain?

Austin (22:28.783)
Yeah, it's a great question because if you conflate it with energy density, then you could really run into trouble. So usually the way people look at this is key nutrients linked to health kind of divided by calories. So basically you want the biggest number possible. So more nutrients relative to calories versus if you drink a soda that has nothing of value, but a ton of calories coming from sugar, very low in nutrients.

Dr.Mindy (22:37.081)
Mm.

Dr.Mindy (22:47.098)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (22:54.329)
There are lot of different ways that you can define this. Different people have their preferences in terms of saying what a nutrient score of a food might be because you're kind of variably defining the nutrients that we're focused on. I think the big picture wise, right? So people have different ways of saying this, but eating food that comes from plants and animals that ate those plants as opposed to food that was made in plants, the more ingredients you see on the back of a box or some sort of middle aisle of the grocery store, chances are the less.

Dr.Mindy (23:04.996)
Yeah.

Austin (23:22.945)
relative nutrients you're getting compared to the calories. And it's absolutely not the case that it's all about calories. I think that's really important to state. But when we're eating a ton of calories from unhealthy sources, that absolutely has a role to play in weight gain and trouble with kind of regulating our immunometabolic state. So where my research has been mostly focused, though, is not just on maximizing general nutrients, but on a certain group of nutrients that has been kind of named the dark.

Dr.Mindy (23:24.986)
Hmm.

Dr.Mindy (23:31.502)
Yeah, thank you.

Austin (23:52.737)
matter of nutrition, is something that's both very exciting and very poorly known to most people right now. And to help people understand why this is kind of a new paradigm that's also incredibly ancient, you've got to understand that in the last hundred or so years, we've completely kind of sequentially transformed how we've looked at food and what is important in food. know, most people watching will probably know

calories will probably know fats, carbs, and proteins. Those are the macronutrients. They probably know about micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. And if you go to the USDA, the website, they focus on about 150 total in the micronutrients and the macronutrients. So that's kind of the core kind of set of molecules, compounds that people are aware of as it relates to what is in their food. But not only is that anywhere but complete,

Dr.Mindy (24:21.998)
Yeah.

Austin (24:46.841)
but it is a great representation of what humans continue to do within nutrition and just in general, which is have this hubris, which is we now understand something that nature has perfected over billions of years. We now know exactly what is in this piece of broccoli. We now know exactly what is in this piece of meat. And we can then distill it down to its individual components. Because what wound up happening is in America and then largely the world, in order to produce

Dr.Mindy (25:00.238)
Mm. Mm.

Austin (25:14.703)
more readily available calories, we kind of stripped away and industrially engineered a lot of the foods that used to be far more comprehensive. So we converted what nature had already created into something that we felt covered the bases. And we've been wrong so many times, which is why we have to keep fortifying food, adding back in the vitamins and minerals, which is, if you look on cereal, it's not like,

Dr.Mindy (25:32.814)
fascinating.

Dr.Mindy (25:40.473)
Mm.

Austin (25:41.679)
The wheat that has gone through 18 phases of processing just has a bunch of vitamin B in it. It has to be put back in. It has to be enriched and fortified because we've stripped away those nutrients. But the hubris here, and the problem is we then assume that it's equivalent because we labeled 10 or so vitamins and minerals and put that back into the food. And what the research is telling us, and what's fascinating here is we're not talking about fringe journals. We're talking about last year in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr.Mindy (25:57.531)
Mmm.

Austin (26:09.047)
An article that was called the chemical complexity of food and implications for therapeutics where they talk about this problem, which is we keep tethering to this very small subset of molecules in our food where we know simultaneously that there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 139,000 molecules in this so-called nutritional dark matter that have this immense untapped therapeutic potential. So that's really where my research is focused. And what I love about this and apropos of our previous conversations is I'm not

Dr.Mindy (26:14.01)
Hmm.

Dr.Mindy (26:32.772)
Fascinating.

Austin (26:38.785)
necessarily creating anything. I'm simply rediscovering what nature has been doing forever and finding ways to make that more interesting and applicable to human health now when so much of this magic of what's already in our food has been lost due to ultra processing.

Dr.Mindy (26:41.678)
Hmm.

Dr.Mindy (26:56.45)
You know, I find I do the same thing. I keep coming back to the human body and nature and how they come together in health.

So I really resonate with what you just said. It's like, can biohack, we can get all excited about biohacking and supplementation, all that. But then at the end of the day, you come back to the simple idea that before you start to spend hundreds of dollars on supplements, how about you look at the quality of the food you're putting in your mouth? They say, you know, people who don't fast, but they're saying 17, about 17 times a day, somebody's putting something into their mouth. So give us an example of a dark matter food. I really like this concept.

Austin (27:35.309)
Yeah, well, I guess all plant based foods are going to have this incredible composition of this dark matter. Certain plant based foods will have more than others. now research, specifically research coming out with a researcher named Stefan von Vliet out of Utah State University, are showing that metabolites of this dark matter are differential in for example, a grass fed cow versus a feedlot cow. So you can actually see the signals, the echoes, right?

Dr.Mindy (27:59.92)
Fascinating.

Austin (28:03.637)
of these molecules based on what these animals ate and certainly based on what we consume now too we're looking at. So these molecules there are many there's organosulfurs, there's polyphenols, there's terpenes. I'm particularly focused on polyphenols and polyphenols are a group of they're secondary metabolites from plants. There's about 8 000 plus of these. There are many different types in here many people might be familiar with one which is called resveratrol which is a still being molecule.

Dr.Mindy (28:03.823)
Yeah.

Austin (28:32.587)
The largest group within the polyphenol family is called the flavonoids. So that includes molecules like quercetin, EGCG, which is found in green tea, delphinidin. And again, they're found distributed throughout the plant food kingdom. But what makes them so fascinating is that they are preferentially concentrated in plants that have to build resilience against environmental stressors. So

Dr.Mindy (28:36.879)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (28:59.927)
Some people may be familiar with this, but just bear with me. In the longevity space, there has been all this kind of research around how can we harness certain molecules to combat aging? And the pathways there relate to things like reversing senescence, which is kind of a programmed aging of our cells. They're targeting things like immunosenescence, which is the programmed aging of immune cells. And they're trying to reverse some of the signals that have been put on our DNA over time, which is called epigenetics.

Dr.Mindy (29:15.717)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (29:29.773)
to make ourselves younger. And resveratrol emerged in popularity a while back, became very popular, didn't necessarily pan out in terms of the human research. But the point here was that these plant-based molecules, which are in essence, longevity molecules that plants use to survive against environmental stressors may have benefit in humans. there's a huge family of them. What's very interesting now is that we're starting to see

again, top tier journals publishing on the utility of optimizing towards these molecules and specific classes of these molecules to enhance pathways related to cognition, to boosting BDNF, which is kind of like a miracle grow for the brain, to enhancing metabolic function, to decreasing visceral fat, which is a really interesting tether to longevity and brain health. But it all comes back to the central question of how can we borrow from this magic that nature has?

already designed for us as opposed to what we're seeing a lot of right now, which is kind of going to the extreme end, which is to say, we've identified this singular molecule in this plant and we've refined it to such an extent that we know it's going to do something and eventually becomes a pharmaceutical. So somewhere in this, there is this question of how can we harness what nature has already created, what people have been eating historically for thousands of years. There's tethers to the Blue Zone diet. So the work that Dan Buettner has done, but also just in general.

Dr.Mindy (30:43.33)
Right.

Austin (30:56.847)
People who tend to live long and healthy lives are not people who are the hardcore biohackers. They're people who do things regularly that optimize for longevity. And one of those things seems to be eating a diet rich in these polyphenolic molecules.

Dr.Mindy (31:02.657)
That's so true. So true. Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (31:10.841)
Yeah. Yeah. So I found a couple of interesting statistics on polyphenols because

through a different lens, I've been really interested in polyphenols through the lens of olive oil. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on olive oil because that's sort of maybe the most well-known polyphenol food that people can associate. And here were the two statistics I heard is that you have a 25 % lower risk of cognitive decline if you're eating polyphenols and

there are only five to 10 % of polyphenols are actually absorbed in the small intestine. So walk us through, there's a lot of nuance, but I wanna make sure my audience understands what foods to eat and how powerful they can be and how powerful they're not if they're cooked wrong or they're eaten when combination wrong. Like how do we get the most out of our polyphenol rich food?

Austin (31:51.044)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (32:09.785)
So in the United States, the number one source of polyphenols is unfortunately not olive oil, but it's also something that still may be quite good for us, and it's coffee. And the reason for that is that when you taste bitter foods, that typically is a signal that it is rich in polyphenols. So if you think about olive oil, if you're drinking or eating real good olive oil, it should have a bit of a bite to it. It shouldn't just taste generic flat.

Dr.Mindy (32:16.151)
Okay.

Dr.Mindy (32:20.674)
Dr.Mindy (32:31.929)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (32:35.993)
Yeah. Yeah.

Austin (32:37.913)
What you're trying to taste are those polyphenols. Similarly, if you're drinking coffee, coffee is bitter, not because, you know, hopefully you're getting a, or not getting a burned cup of coffee, but because those coffee beans are very rich source of polyphenols. Dark chocolate is bitter, not because somebody messed it up and didn't add the sugar, but because it is rich in polyphenols. So in essence, bitter is a signal for polyphenols. And I think something that's interesting to your audience,

Dr.Mindy (32:55.546)
Right.

Austin (33:05.377)
is that research now shows that some of these bitter foods and the polyphenols in them can actually activate receptors that increase production of molecules like GLP-1. So there's all these signaling pathways for bitter sensing that are bigger than just this idea of, I consume some healthy molecules. Now, the other thing that you brought up, which is really, really interesting, is that the vast majority of polyphenols pass to the large intestine before they can be absorbed. So they pass through the small intestine and into the large intestine.

Dr.Mindy (33:14.913)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (33:23.183)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (33:32.889)
Mm.

Austin (33:34.287)
And this actually speaks to one of the most fascinating kind of nature to human transition points that there is because while we may not be able to absorb and metabolize those polyphenols, the gut microbiome can. And what's fascinating here is that we're now looking at research showing that polyphenols act as a form of prebiotic. So most people think about fiber as the prebiotic, but it turns out the polyphenols can actually influence the composition of the microbiome. And beyond that,

Dr.Mindy (33:47.725)
Interesting.

Dr.Mindy (33:57.53)
Interesting.

Austin (34:02.477)
when microbes metabolize polyphenols, they turn them into new versions of those molecules. And it may be that those molecules have more of an ability for us to absorb them and utilize them. Beyond even that, however, polyphenols may be influencing what happens in the gut immune system, may be influencing what happens with the molecules that bacteria create, like short chain fatty acids, which can then link to cognition. But the specifics as to, well, is it that if I was to take

a gram of quercetin, then I consume a gram of quercetin, it gets into my bloodstream, that's not how this works. What's far more nuanced is that you're in essence taking these plant-based molecules and you are changing what is happening with your internal ecosystem, with the microbiome, with your immune system, and the sum total of those things is what's been linked to better overall health, better immune health, better brain health. So it's not...

Dr.Mindy (34:37.956)
Mm.

Austin (34:55.521)
simply that the goal, like it might be for vitamin D, is to consume a certain amount of milligrams each day, and that's going to have the same effect, whether you consume it all from resveratrol or from quercetin. It's instead asking this question of why is a food producing these molecules, and how can we start to see how we can transfer the longevity effects that the plant has, or the general kind of biological benefit that the plant has.

Dr.Mindy (35:13.019)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (35:21.783)
into something related to human benefits. And that may mean that we need to look at antioxidant, neurotransmission, immunity, metabolism, and other pathways as opposed to simply making the blanket statement that is, you're deficient if you take enough from any source you're covered.

Dr.Mindy (35:37.275)
Right. So, you we put a lot of emphasis on macros. I feel like we moved from calories to macros. I know some people are still in calories. I talk to those people. They always are asking me questions. And now I actually feel like we're moving away from macros. we're moving, yeah. Like as I'm listening to you talk, I'm like, there it is again. We're getting out of the counting. And could it be as simple as,

Austin (35:57.059)
We are. Yep.

Dr.Mindy (36:06.946)
How many bitter foods do you have in a day?

Austin (36:09.665)
It you know, I think that that is an interesting way to contextualize this any person you talk to right now that's in the diet space is going to tell you that there are specific composition of macros is the key and You know, I'm not I'm not super old. I'm not super young but I've seen every iteration on the macros that's known to man so it was no fat no carbs and now it's protein cookies with with every meal and It's just

Dr.Mindy (36:23.035)
Right.

Dr.Mindy (36:30.704)
Yeah, me too.

Dr.Mindy (36:37.413)
Yeah.

Austin (36:39.479)
It's not that there isn't something to it. It's simply that it is such a kind of cursory explanation of what we actually know works and coming back to blue zones and people who tend to live long and healthy lives. These are not people who are carefully tracking their macronutrient content. And they're also not people on these cycling diets because what winds up happening coming back to an incentive plan is that people who try these crazy diets, they do them for maybe a month or two, they might lose some weight.

Dr.Mindy (36:47.494)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (36:54.62)
Well said, well said.

Austin (37:09.261)
and then they gain it back. And that works great if you're writing a diet book, because next year I'll tell you, hey, here's the new one, and it maybe will work for a little bit until it fails, as opposed to asking the people who are healthiest don't do this. What is it that they do? And what they do is they create a scenario where healthy choices are just built into their typical daily habits. So coming back to kind of this bitter food idea, we're now starting to see

Dr.Mindy (37:20.048)
well said.

Austin (37:35.947)
interventions, interventional trials, not just observational data that are linking polyphenol consumption and by extension foods that are rich in polyphenols with better overall health and especially better brain health. And so I think the most interesting of these is not a supplement based trial. It is a food based intervention that is a sustainable dietary pattern. And so let me just talk about this here for a moment. So it's called the direct

plus GreenMed study. And for those who haven't checked it out before, it's led to a host of different publications across a number of different journals. And so what they did in this study, it was 18 months. They had 224 people who completed the trial. They had three interventional groups. One group basically just did a healthy diet. The second group did a Mediterranean diet, which included about 400 additional milligrams of polyphenols.

And then they had this green med arm, which was the Mediterranean diet plus additional polyphenols. So they got roughly 1200 additional milligrams of polyphenols per day over this 18 month period. And again, this is a dietary intervention. And what they looked at at the end of this study were a couple of things. The one that was maybe most interesting to me, they did MRI at the start and MRI at the end. And they showed that in the green med diet, they had the slowest rate of atrophy in the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.

Dr.Mindy (38:42.811)
Right.

Austin (38:56.953)
So this is dietary study showing that they slowed down the amount of loss in the memory center of the brain. They did a subsequent analysis of that and they found that it was linked to improvements in hemoglobin A1c, so metabolic function and consumption of green tea and a random thing that they studied which is called duckweed, which is this kind of like pond scum that just happens to be super rich in polyphenols. Just to stay on this because again, it's really, really important for people to know.

Dr.Mindy (39:10.298)
Amazing.

Dr.Mindy (39:21.724)
listening.

Austin (39:25.219)
they did an additional analysis and they were looking at weight loss and they found that both the Mediterranean group and the green med group lost the same amount of weight. So was about 3 % of their body weight over this 18 month period. But then when they did detailed MRI scanning, they were able to find that the Mediterranean diet plus the green med intervention had doubling of visceral fat loss. So what we're talking about here is that the increased consumption of these molecules, which

By the way, in this study, they found that this loss of this visceral fat was correlated with higher levels of polyphenols in plasma and consuming more green tea and walnuts and duckweed, that the consumption of these molecules in essence reprograms biology from the inside out. And this is not talking about some sort of crazy biohack where you have to dial in your supplement at a certain level. We're talking about a dietary pattern that prioritizes polyphenols. That is something that is historically

Dr.Mindy (40:08.764)
listening.

Dr.Mindy (40:18.652)
Mmm.

Austin (40:19.693)
what most of the healthiest diets on earth do. This just happened to be a study with people who are kind of not starting out in a blue zone. These were people in an Israeli nuclear facility, so it was a pretty well-controlled study.

Dr.Mindy (40:27.749)
Right.

Dr.Mindy (40:31.886)
Interesting. So what else was in the green med diet? This is the first I've even heard of that. That's so cool.

Austin (40:37.071)
for sure. The way it worked is again Mediterranean diet. So olive oil and all the other things that you would consider in a Mediterranean diet, but in the green mad diet, they had people additionally consume green tea, as well as these this duckweed to just give a boosted or polyphenols.

Dr.Mindy (40:53.338)
Yeah, duck. Well, where would you where would you get the duckweed? Because I'm like envisioning like pond scum. And I'm thinking, I'm not sure I like health, but I'm not sure I'm going there.

Austin (41:03.641)
So don't go out and do that. I think you can buy it. There are a couple companies that sell it. I mostly use it at this stage as a proxy for additional polyphenol consumption because they also use walnuts for this. They also use green tea for this. And they showed that all three of those had correlations with improved health outcomes. So we can kind of maybe go through in a moment. I can talk about some of the equivalencies in terms of dosing of foods that are rich in polyphenols. But.

Dr.Mindy (41:05.637)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (41:14.844)
Okay.

Yeah, I love all

Dr.Mindy (41:22.374)
Amazing.

Dr.Mindy (41:28.506)
That would be amazing.

Austin (41:29.559)
I do want to just talk about here again, this is an interventional study with a dietary intervention showing improvements in visceral fat loss, showing improvements in terms of a slowing of rate of brain atrophy, showing improvements. There's also data on epigenetics and liver fat. And again, we're just talking about here, not some sort of crazy intensity diet, but rather introducing foods that are consistent with the Mediterranean diet pattern and high polyphenol foods. There's just just to touch on this briefly.

There are also a couple of studies that have been published in the journal Neurology, Neurology being kind of the number one brain journal, showing that different patterns of polyphenol consumption have been linked to significantly lower risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. So in one study, they were looking at a specific pattern of flavonoid consumption and they found that it was about a 50 % lower risk for developing dementia in the people who are eating the highest amount of this pattern. So there's observational data.

Dr.Mindy (42:03.674)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (42:13.244)
Crazy. So good.

Austin (42:25.283)
and now interventional data showing that people who consume more polyphenols, and it is true that it's also a reflection of a higher quality diet, tend to be far better suited in terms of their brain health outcomes.

Dr.Mindy (42:34.544)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And so, okay, then give me some of other foods. Walnuts is really, you know, we've been talking about walnuts forever and I think it's such an important one. And what I'll tell you, what I find when I advise women on walnuts is they go, ooh, the calories, the calories are a little too high and nuts. I'm like, no, no, no, we gotta get you out of thinking about calories. So what else do we need to think about with these green med foods?

Austin (43:03.405)
Yeah, for sure. Well, I do want to say one other thing around this, which is, and maybe this is a topic for future conversation. So at the first level, the idea is to consume more polyphenol-rich foods is probably a good bet for most people. In the United States, people consume roughly one gram or maybe 800 milligrams of polyphenols a day. Again, mostly coming in terms of the top source, coffee. And one of the things that continues to come up in this research is diversifying your sources of polyphenols, not just saying...

Dr.Mindy (43:30.256)
Hmm.

Austin (43:30.435)
Well, I'm gonna eat a junk diet, but I'm just gonna eat or drink eight cups of green tea a day. Number one, probably too much caffeine. And number two, we want to diversify our sources. But some of the research that we've been doing, particularly around brain health, just to dial in for people who are interested to learn more about where this goes next, is looking at how there are correlations between colors of various polyphenols in foods and various health outcomes. And in particular, we're looking at anthocyanins.

Dr.Mindy (43:37.457)
Yeah.

Austin (43:59.491)
These are a certain type of polyphenol called a flavonoid that are shown to penetrate the blood brain barrier. Population based data suggests that people who consume more of them may have better brain health. They tend to be red or purple or blue in color. thinking about blueberries and blackberries, darker colored carrots and darker colored grains and some interventions show that people who consume more of some of these blueberry based anthocyanins

Dr.Mindy (44:21.372)
Okay.

Austin (44:28.845)
may have improved cognition. just to whet people's appetite a little bit, you know, there's a lot more to talk about in terms of certain families of these polyphenols as they may relate to both signals that you're getting from color in the foods that you're eating and potential organ specific benefits. So this may be one of the reasons why consuming blueberries beyond just the antioxidants, polyphenols are antioxidants, but it may be that the anthocyanins in blueberries may act on brain related pathways, which makes them

Dr.Mindy (44:45.821)
Mm.

Dr.Mindy (44:49.82)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (44:58.721)
a special berry and maybe one to prioritize.

Dr.Mindy (45:02.191)
Yeah. And so could the listener go and just Google high polyphenol foods or I just want to give, because this is exciting what you're saying and I want to make sure people have resources for that.

Austin (45:10.435)
Yeah, let's talk about some of it. For sure. I would say you absolutely can. If you were to Google it, you'll get some information. Let's go over some kind of basic principles. So polyphenol-rich foods tend to be minimally processed plant-based foods. And one of the best signals that it's rich in polyphenols is going to be how much color it has. So not only depth of color, but also diversity of color. So...

broccoli will have different polyphenols than an orange pepper, which has different polyphenols than a blueberry. And again, eating a diversity of colors, you've heard about this eating the rainbow that people like dianaminic and popularized. Right, so it's not just because it looks good on the plate. It's because you're actually giving your body a different set of signals. And maybe more importantly, your gut microbiome a different set of signals of these polyphenol and other plant based molecules that are linked to better health. So yes, eating the rainbow good plan.

Dr.Mindy (45:45.565)
I was gonna say this is eat the rainbow, yep.

Austin (46:04.259)
The most concentrated source of polyphenols in our diet is actually spices and herbs. just, and I'm not talking here about using a bunch more salt, I'm saying diversifying. things like oregano, cloves, cinnamon, these are ways to get more of a diversity of those polyphenols and a much more concentrated source. To give people a little bit of a context for how much this would be. So one cup of green tea is about 300 milligrams of polyphenols, a cup of coffee about 200 or so milligrams of polyphenols.

Dr.Mindy (46:09.661)
Hmm.

Dr.Mindy (46:16.893)
amazing.

Austin (46:32.079)
Half a cup of blueberries about 200 milligrams of polyphenols And again, you can you can go online and you can kind of look up whatever your favorite food is and get a better sense as to the composition What we're looking at right now, so we're doing a large randomized controlled study and we're looking specifically at the impact of dosing of sprouted food for polyphenols and cognition because here's just a really cool little tidbit

Dr.Mindy (46:43.133)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (46:56.251)
Yep. Yep.

Austin (47:00.227)
I mean, you probably already know all about this, but for listeners, when you sprout a seed, it dramatically changes the composition of the molecules in that seed. So the transition from going to a dormant seed to a sprout actually releases enzymes and interconverts some of these polyphenols. So we're using a plant called Himalayan Tartary Buckwheat. And so we are...

Working with research team in Utah and we've actually or they've submitted the manuscript as of last week on this but we have looked at the polyphenolic profiling of the seed of the flower or a sprouted version of the flower and what we've shown is Not only does the sprouting process? dramatically enhance the amount of polyphenols in the kind of finished product compared to an unsprouted version but it significantly ups

the anthocyanin content. It went from about a four times increase from going from kind of a standard flour version to a sprouted flour version. And you're actually getting a decreased amount of some of the alkaloids that, you know, I'm not one of these people who's all about the anti-nutrients. I think that's oversold. But there is an effect of certain plant molecules that decreases absorption. And so it seems like some of those decrease when you sprout foods. So

Dr.Mindy (48:17.223)
Mm.

Austin (48:21.923)
I know we've kind of went deep on this, but sprouting foods can actually enhance the polyphenolic content too. So if you have access to sprouted foods, that's an interesting thing to look at as well.

Dr.Mindy (48:31.901)
You know, it's so interesting because since we moved to Santa Cruz, we have a farmers market with a incredible vendor that sells every sprouted anything you could ever want. And I've fallen in love with sprouts. In fact, I don't buy lettuce anymore. Whenever I make a salad, I put this as many different sprouts together and it's like my body just craves it. It's like.

When I first got them, I couldn't get enough of these sprouts and it felt like it was fulfilling a deficiency. And it really is a powerful food. Keep going, because I think it's so simple and people can do it in a jar in their home.

Austin (49:03.383)
it.

Austin (49:11.129)
So I wanna just make sure we tethered the previous point, which is consuming diversity of polyphenol-rich foods each day, great bet certain foods are richer than others, dark red, purple foods, anthocyanins, maybe a better bet for brain health. But coming back to the sprouting thing, and I think one of the themes that you and I have kind of bonded on over the years is what if we took our kind of need to control and understand everything from like a standard human

Oversight of nature perspective and put it aside for a second and just ask this question of what is nature already doing? What is food already doing and what can we harness as it relates to that and sprouting is a perfect example of that process? granted every food that gets converted from a Seed to a plant has to go through that sprouting phase But think about how much life and opportunity there is in that little period when something is going from a dormant seed to a sprout and what we found is there are these

Dr.Mindy (50:05.756)
Yep.

Austin (50:10.435)
phases between the day that a seed starts to the germination process and the timing of it creating a sprout around around I guess four days or so that it actually Optimizes towards higher levels of polyphenols and what's really interesting is it actually converts certain polyphenols So you're not necessarily getting the same cohort of polyphenols You would get in a sprout as you would in a flower made from that seed Beyond that it's very interesting because for most

So we're using buckwheat, which I don't know if you've messed with buckwheat very much. There's common buckwheat, which is a little bit lighter in color. And then we have this Himalayan tartar buckwheat, which is the seeds basically look like little spaceships. They're basically black and you really can't, without specialized milling equipment, you can't do anything with it because the seeds are so incredibly hard. And we did an analysis on the seed hulls themselves and it turns out that they have very specific nutrients in them.

Dr.Mindy (50:44.945)
Mm-mm, I haven't.

Austin (51:09.571)
that you lose in the flower because you take away the seed, you hull the seed to make the flower. But when you sprout it, you're actually able to convert that seed hull into something that you can use. So what we found in the sprouting is you're actually able to retain all of these nutrients you would otherwise lose in the process. And again, we didn't invent anything here. We basically just asked nature to do what it already does. And now what we're able to see, and again, what we're studying in this large randomized trial is how might that influence

Dr.Mindy (51:17.231)
interesting.

Dr.Mindy (51:31.419)
Yes, so cool.

Austin (51:37.561)
health in humans at scale. It's 850 people against a placebo. So it's going to be some of the best data we have specifically on how sprouting food, polyphenols can influence cognition in healthy adults.

Dr.Mindy (51:50.205)
Yeah, well, I can't once you get that out, let us know because I just think food is medicine keeps coming. We all keep coming back to that. So is nature. So is nature, which leads me to my to my next question. I loved what you put out around bird noises. And it's funny how people hold on to interesting little tidbits of information and they become obsessed on it. But when we switch from nature that we eat,

Austin (51:58.446)
It's a theme.

Dr.Mindy (52:19.774)
to be able to help cognition. I'm experiencing now that I live in nature, how much something as simple as a bird noise, I get in the ocean every day, I have a forest behind me. And when I, now that I am like marinating in nature, I am having a whole different experience with my brain. can you talk, yeah, talk a little bit about that.

Austin (52:41.135)
Absolutely.

Let's let's hit this theme that I think we've discussed a bit which is If you just take away some of the nonsense that we're surrounded by that we've been told is reality you just do better so I know people love kind of like cold plunges because they say that it activates brown fat and uncoupling protein and all that but Sometimes the benefit is simply that it forces your brain to stop thinking about the nonsense around us and simply allows for you to be in your body same thing with meditation with mindfulness but

Dr.Mindy (52:52.08)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (53:06.012)
Hmm.

Dr.Mindy (53:11.09)
Beautiful.

Austin (53:14.467)
I think I'm like you in that, you know, there's something very unique that has actually changed where I've decided to live and the day to day, which is exposure to nature. So big picture wise, a study came out pretty recently showing that even 10 minutes of nature exposure was associated with a lot of health benefits. There's a study I love from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they showed that 20 minutes of urban nature was sufficient to decrease cortisol just once a week. So you don't need that much, but.

What I've been talking about more recently is, yes, it's Burt's and so random here, right? It is a big thing.

Dr.Mindy (53:46.674)
Birding's a big thing though. I gotta tell you here in Santa Cruz, I've met so many birders. I'm like, they like identify as a birder.

Austin (53:55.567)
It's a really funny thing because the people who are into it are really into it. And I was at a neighborhood gathering, I guess about two years ago, and we were talking about hummingbirds because in the Pacific Northwest, hummingbirds are amazing. So we have Anna's hummingbird, have Calliope, and then we get Rufus that are migratory. So you get them probably more of year than we do. right around late spring, we get the Rufus hummingbird that comes back and the male is this bright orange and it's just incredible.

Dr.Mindy (54:18.078)
Mm.

Austin (54:24.493)
I was talking to people about this because they, in theory, have these same birds in their backyard. And one of the people was kind of talking about, yeah, they're a nuisance, kind of like a big bug type thing. And it's just like, how is there such a disconnect between what I'm experiencing and this magic of learning about how hummingbirds are able to shape their wings to change color patterns and me basically setting up my life so that I can watch these guys outside the window and other people that just don't find it interesting.

As it relates to birdwatching or birding and brain health, there was an interesting study that came out recently showing that experienced birders have actual different patterns in their brain in terms of brain wiring in areas associated with attention. So it suggested that birding rewires the brain. And then the data that you had references that listening to bird song is actually associated with certain aspects of better brain function. And...

Again, everyone's different. Some people might get the benefit and some people might not. But any way that you can reconnect to the natural environment, short of, I don't know, being stalked by a mountain lion on the trail, is probably a good bet. And I think that it's something that isn't going to be necessarily as intense as what many people think about with biohacking. know, I do a lot of research in an adjacent space around psychedelics and people say, well, you need the psychedelics because...

Dr.Mindy (55:26.824)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (55:36.872)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (55:46.007)
It opens up all this stuff. And while that is true, what those represent is kind of a more intense version of what many people can get from simply reconnecting to the forest, to the awe that comes from looking at tall trees, to the noted benefits of not only green spaces, but also blue spaces. So if you can get to a coast or to a river, and it's not going to be an instant thing where you're going to go out there and it's going to immediately enhance every aspect of your physiology.

Dr.Mindy (55:56.914)
Yeah.

Austin (56:13.881)
But consider the alternative, which is for most people spending 90 plus percent of their day indoors, where we're spending 11 plus hours of our day engaging with content, digital media, radio, and the like. So just getting outside and paying attention to something that's not yourself, I think, is key. coming back to the point, birding, phenomenal.

Dr.Mindy (56:30.928)
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it. Yeah, like this little bird, you go looking for a bird and a couple different birds and you are really changing the wiring of your brain. I so my audience knows this, but I had a real a healing experience with nature over the last year where I started surfing here in Santa Cruz and I went out for the pure joy of it. I didn't think about the water aspect of it. But after going out on a fairly regular basis within a month, I'm not joking.

The thoughts in my head changed. The worst case scenarios stopped being run. The today's going to be a great day thoughts started popping up. The I can relax feeling in my body was always present after I got out of the water. And so I became obsessed with and I'm sure you've read this book Blue Mind.

Austin (57:21.465)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (57:21.842)
and trying to understand what happens to our brain around water. And when I actually dove into the neuroscience behind water, it blew my mind. I was like, it's bringing cortisol down. The negative ions are helping my body make more serotonin. The ocean has the same mineral balance as human blood. And it all comes back to this idea that we are bringing forward today, which is humans need to be in

Austin (57:24.239)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (57:51.569)
in synergy with nature, whether we're eating nature or we're spending time in nature, but we need to be in relationship with nature to heal. And I let go of therapists, I stopped taking so many supplements, like so many things change just by going in the ocean on a regular basis.

Austin (58:12.065)
I love that so much. Formative memories of my life have been underwater, freediving, a lot of freediving growing up. And I think there's something specific about immersion within water that is very, very therapeutic. I guess it kind of gets us to like the squishy side of stuff, but it is absolutely the case here that being in nature is a good bet. And again, as we're looking at interventions that have been clinically shown to be beneficial to

Dr.Mindy (58:18.686)
Mm.

Austin (58:40.149)
overall well-being to longevity to lower risk of infections, nature exposure not only has that data, but what I love about it and what I love about this conversation in particular is we're talking about something that is freely available to most people. You know, don't have to go to a national park for a week if you can, great, but some of this data shows that just going into a small local urban natural center, meaning

Dr.Mindy (58:54.525)
That's it.

Dr.Mindy (59:03.772)
Mmm.

Austin (59:04.599)
you go to your park, you sit under a tree, there doesn't have to be an agenda. And I think it's kind of the opposite of the biohacking mentality, which is to say, okay, I'm gonna go out here, I'm gonna real quick breathe in all this forest air, and then I'm gonna go back to my helter skelter life. It is the antidote to that. And I think for myself included, it is such a good reminder of something that is often just not prioritized as a wellness intervention because...

Dr.Mindy (59:12.22)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (59:23.666)
Yeah.

Austin (59:30.423)
It's tough to make content or sell a product around it because it is free.

Dr.Mindy (59:34.664)
Yep. Yeah, who's going to make money off sitting under a tree? Like it's, this is where we back to what we were saying. The wellness industry has got the snazzy new biohack or supplement for you. But you know, going out near to your city park and sitting under the tree without your phone on and just letting your brain rest actually may be more beneficial than that thing you just spent a couple hundred dollars on trying to hack the system that's overloaded by a modern world.

Austin (59:46.958)
yeah.

Austin (01:00:04.047)
100%.

Dr.Mindy (01:00:05.735)
Yeah, it's really like you and I do connect on this. I really feel sad the direction I like. I had to extract myself from the biohacking world. It just I wasn't congruent with all of the quick ways that we can hack into our system. And I've come back to me personally that whenever I feel off course, I go back to nature, whether it's nature to eat.

or nature to sit, there's a rhythm there. I don't know if you find this, there's just a rhythm there that's different than you're seeing on your phone or you're experiencing in your day to day.

Austin (01:00:40.121)
For sure. mean, I think we've talked about this bit before. And you know, I bonded with Sequoia over this a long time ago in Clubhouse. so I moved to the Pacific Northwest to do my medical residency. And I stayed out here because of the nature, because of the rivers, because of the forest. And almost any day in the fall that I'm not working, you will find me out foraging for mushrooms. In the summertime, it's foraging for other edibles, lots of berries. This time of year, spring when we're recording, there's

Dr.Mindy (01:00:46.556)
Right.

Dr.Mindy (01:01:06.207)
amazing.

Austin (01:01:08.185)
There's morels and no, I'm not giving up any of my morel spots. But also, yeah, the birds, the walks, we went on a, I think a seven mile walk over the weekend just along the coastline. There are otters and eagles and again, this is all very Pacific Northwest focused. But I think everyone has a little bit of that, you know, even in their backyard. And coming back to the birding point, you know, I did a post about this and I asked people, tell me about your favorite bird that you like spotting.

Dr.Mindy (01:01:13.385)
You

Dr.Mindy (01:01:21.673)
Yep.

Dr.Mindy (01:01:29.329)
Mm-hmm.

Austin (01:01:36.067)
I guess Mindy, you let me know if we have space here for people watching this on YouTube to let us know their favorite bird as well. But it is just so incredible because of how many people love this thing too. And when you can connect with other people, not around something that's so distant from humanity, but around something that is so shared, right? Something that we all, many of us, I guess, love, which is what's just already around us. I think that is such a powerful opportunity.

Dr.Mindy (01:01:38.919)
Yeah, go for it. Yeah, please do put in the comments.

Dr.Mindy (01:01:55.7)
Yep.

Austin (01:02:03.065)
to dismantle what we're told, which is here's how you should be spending your time. So again, for people who are watching this, for people listening to this, you have the opportunity, let us know how you like to connect with nature and specifically like the birds. It is incredible how many people are all about this. think Sean Bean just now has a podcast all about birding in the UK. It's definitely a big thing.

Dr.Mindy (01:02:07.399)
Yeah, yeah.

Dr.Mindy (01:02:24.359)
crazy. But I think that's because we're craving it, you know? We're craving it and we don't even know it.

Austin (01:02:28.397)
Yes. Yes.

Dr.Mindy (01:02:30.609)
It's just, there's all kinds of birding apps. I mean, it's really, I think the theme of this is we've gotten so far off course with what health is. And when you go to your social media, which is the number one place that people are getting health information, even the people that are delivering you health are so off course with what health is, which is why my brain always goes, come back.

Austin (01:02:34.958)
Yes.

Dr.Mindy (01:02:57.117)
to nature, come back to food, master those first, come back to the simple. But to your point, it's really hard to sell the simple, know, so and it's hard for people to hold on to the attention of the simple. But I have found a whole, I have found the greatest therapist in nature and I just pay attention to its rhythm. And when I sink into its rhythm, I start to feel more like myself.

Austin (01:03:24.473)
Well, we were talking a little bit at the start around the content that's being created now, which is sensationalized and is driven to product funnels and all the like. what I would say is what you're creating here with this channel, with this content, is kind of the alternative. so for all those people who are listening, just imagine some aspect of this must resonate with you. And I think it's kind of incumbent on all of us to not expect everyone else to change. One of the most common things people say is,

you have to get them to change and you recognize if they're not ready, you're not going to do anything. And what you can do is you can model it. And I think that this community of people, right, you're already doing these things. So yes, you can model it for others, but also provide support to each other. Something I said earlier on is in order to fight back against a society where poor health is the default, you have to be a weirdo, you have to depart from the norm. And it's never been more true than now. If you turn on the news, if you go on social media, there is...

Dr.Mindy (01:03:58.854)
said.

Dr.Mindy (01:04:16.839)
I love that.

Austin (01:04:23.403)
Lifetime's worth of content that is going to tell you this is the most important thing for you to do for you to say for you to think and Very little of that is actually in any way designed to benefit you but these types of conversations I think are and reconnecting to the nature I think is

Dr.Mindy (01:04:30.652)
Mm-hmm.

Dr.Mindy (01:04:37.821)
Yep. Yeah.

Well, I love talking to you, Austin. I really appreciate your mind and your thoughtfulness, you know, really like, and your willingness to extract yourself from what I call shiny object syndrome. And, and I agree so wholeheartedly with you that even the biohacking world, even the wellness trends, we're just like, I saw the protein water that came out the other day and I was like, what? We can't even sit and eat anymore. We're going to drink our protein and water. Like we've, we're so far.

away from what can heal us and is fairly free. It's not that expensive.

Austin (01:05:15.747)
Yep. Yep. It's the problem isn't adding more. It's in this case doing less. And I think that's so hard because there's very little that is product incentivized for us to do and purchase less stuff.

Dr.Mindy (01:05:22.695)
Yeah.

Dr.Mindy (01:05:27.111)
Yeah, yeah, it's so true. So where can people find you? Because I love your content and I think my audience will too. So where's your primary spot?

Austin (01:05:35.961)
Thanks. Well, you can find me on the mushroom trails, but I won't say hi, if we're looking for the same ones in the social media. Yeah. If you come up, if you come up in the fall, the Pacific Northwest, yep. We go with Sean Turrell's porcini, all sorts of good stuff. You can find me online. My website is, austin Perlmutter.com. I have a newsletter there where I send out information on brain health. So you can sign up for that. free.

Dr.Mindy (01:05:40.957)
Yeah, I want to come forage with you. you take do you take people?

Dr.Mindy (01:05:49.609)
Great.

I would love that.

Austin (01:06:02.415)
I'm on social media at Dr. Austin Promoter on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. I feel like that's more than sufficient. you're interested to learn some about this research, so the research is through a company called Big Bold Health. I'm the chief science officer there and that's where we're doing this randomized study to look at the effects of this food on cognition. And then beyond that, you know, I still do a lot of conferences. So if people are in the conference circuit, come say hi.

Dr.Mindy (01:06:10.931)
That's a lot.

Dr.Mindy (01:06:24.073)
Amazing.

Austin (01:06:29.799)
a lot of brain health, longevity, increasingly some work on epigenetics. So you'll find me talking about that in person.

Dr.Mindy (01:06:37.533)
Yeah. Amazing. Well, keep being a weirdo and I'll keep being a weirdo. I love that idea. And just thank you for your thoughtfulness and how you

not only bring a message forward, but the way in which you help us all see it. It's really, you're gentle with how you deliver information. And I think it allows our nervous system to really soak it in. And maybe it's because you're spending all that time in nature. So thank you, Austin, I appreciate you.

Austin (01:07:04.271)
I appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me back.