Be Smarter, Sharper and Healthier
Upgrade Yourself
Max Lugavere(USA)
Filmmaker, Author, Researcher
Max Lugavere is a filmmaker, author, and science communicator. He is the director of BREAD HEAD, an upcoming documentary which is the first to track the science of dementia prevention. He has hosted content for WebMD, Vice, and Yahoo Health and is a recurring "core expert" on The Dr. Oz Show where he covers the latest in Alzheimer's disease and dementia prevention research. His Facebook vlogs have garnered thousands of fans where he delivers bite-sized blasts of easily digestible information on health science topics ranging from intermittent fasting to the microbiome. He is a prolific speaker and has given talks at high-profile venues including the NY Academy of Sciences and Equinox's 2016 High Performance Living Symposium. HarperCollins is publishing Max's first book in 2018, an evidence-based guide to optimizing mood, cognitive performance, and brain health with food.
Upgrade Yourself explores cognitive optimization through metabolic health, emphasizing the brain
Brain health is a lifelong cascade that we have the power to seize the reins of. By taking steps to optimize our cognitive function, we not only protect our future, we actually make ourselves happier and perform better in the process.
Summary
- The brain uses two fuel sources: glucose and ketones. Ketones are a clean-burning fuel that generates more energy with less oxygen, providing anti-aging benefits for cognitive health.
- Ketones act as signaling molecules that boost brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which promotes neuroplasticity, new brain cell growth, and increased blood flow to the brain.
- Intermittent fasting and low-carb diets trigger ketone production by tapping into fat stores, helping to prevent the metabolic decline and oxidative stress associated with dementia.
- Maintaining insulin sensitivity is vital for cognitive health, supporting mood regulation, muscle growth, and the efficient recycling of cholesterol particles in the liver.
- Simple lifestyle habits like consuming daily dark leafy greens and regular sauna use can significantly reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease through essential nutrients and heat stress.
Article
Brain Health Began Long Before Memory Failed
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm, Max Lugavere Made The Case That Cognitive Longevity Was Built In The Kitchen, The Sauna And The Metabolic Machinery Of Everyday Life
There was something quietly radical in the message Max Lugavere delivered at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm** on **19 May 2017** in **Stockholm, Sweden**. In a conference culture often seduced by gadgets, metrics and futurist sheen, Lugavere, speaking as part of **Upgrade Yourself**, brought the room back to something older, more intimate and far more consequential: the brain’s hunger for energy, and the long metabolic story that may shape whether clarity endures or fades.
His presentation, **“Be Smarter, Sharper and Healthier,”** unfolded as both a scientific argument and a personal reckoning. A filmmaker, author and researcher from the United States, Lugavere had not arrived at dementia prevention through abstract curiosity. He had arrived there, he said, through his mother’s decline, and through the unnerving discovery that the biological changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease can begin decades before a family ever hears a diagnosis.
“The brain is the most metabolically hungry organ in your body,” Lugavere told the audience. “Metabolism is truly everything because it supplies your brain for all its many vital processes.”
That line sat at the centre of his talk. Brain health, in his telling, was not merely about crossword puzzles, supplements or late-stage medical rescue. It was about fuel. It was about oxygen. It was about insulin sensitivity, oxidative stress and whether modern life had pushed the human brain into a metabolic environment for which it was never designed.
The Brain’s Double Fuel System
Lugavere’s most compelling frame was elegantly simple. The human brain, he said, runs on two fuels: glucose and ketones.
Most modern people rely overwhelmingly on glucose, drawn from the carbohydrate-heavy rhythms of the Western diet. But ketones, produced when the body taps into fat stores, were presented as the cleaner, older and perhaps more protective source of energy.
“Ketones are an anti-aging and geroprotective source of brain fuel,” Lugavere said. “They generate more brain energy by using less oxygen, essentially helping to stack the odds of cognitive longevity in your favor.”
That matters because oxygen, while indispensable, comes with a cost. The process of metabolism produces oxidative byproducts, and in neurodegenerative disease the burden of oxidative stress is often higher. If ketones can generate energy with less oxygen, the implication is not magical but meaningful: less metabolic wear, less strain, fewer opportunities for cellular damage to accumulate over time.
In Lugavere’s account, ketones were not just fuel. They were also signals. They appeared to increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a growth factor strongly associated with neuroplasticity, learning and the brain’s ability to adapt.
“Our brains are highly plastic, which means that we can change and grow new brain cells,” he said. “We are no longer limited by the old belief that our brains peak in our twenties and then begin a long, gradual process of decay.”
For a field haunted by the spectre of irreversible decline, that was the hopeful hinge of the talk. The brain could still change. The question was whether daily life made that easier or harder.
A Warning From Decades Before Disease
If there was urgency in Lugavere’s presentation, it came from timing. He stressed that the pathology linked to Alzheimer’s can emerge in the brain many years before symptoms become obvious. By the time memory loss sends someone to a neurologist, the process may already be deeply underway.
That is why his emphasis fell so heavily on prevention. Not cure. Not rescue. Prevention.
He referenced work associated with the **Karolinska Institute**, whose research he described as especially exciting, and invoked validated lifestyle interventions as evidence that cognition is shaped across the lifespan. The broader point was unmistakable: brain decline is not an event that begins at retirement age. It is a slow cascade, one that may be influenced in youth, middle age and every ordinary year in between.
Fasting, Ketosis And “Biochemical Liposuction”
Some of Lugavere’s language flirted with the theatrical, but his argument remained practical. The fastest route to ketone production, he said, was fasting. Once glucose availability falls, the body turns to stored fat, opening what he called the “ketone fire hose”.
Intermittent fasting and low-carbohydrate eating, in this framework, were not fads but metabolic tools. They encouraged the body to shift away from constant glucose dependence and toward a state in which fat-derived ketones could help fuel the brain.
This did not amount to a blanket demand for permanent carbohydrate abstinence. In fact, Lugavere warned against simplistic thinking. He argued that insulin itself is not the villain. Insulin sensitivity is the goal.
Maintaining sensitivity to insulin, he said, supported healthy mood, muscle growth, thyroid function and the recycling of LDL-related particles in the liver. The problem, in modern societies, was not that insulin existed but that bodies had become chronically resistant to it under conditions of abundance that never paused.
The result, he suggested, was a culture metabolically overfed and neurologically underprotected.
The Case For Muscle, Greens And Heat
The most persuasive section of the talk may have been its least glamorous. For all the summit’s futuristic framing, Lugavere repeatedly returned to habits so basic they bordered on unfashionable.
A large daily salad of dark leafy greens, he said, remained one of the most effective interventions available. Magnesium, potassium and prebiotic fibre were not exciting in the way nootropic stacks are exciting. But they mattered. So did exercise, particularly for preserving insulin sensitivity and building muscle mass, which he described as a kind of “glucose bank” for the body.
Then there was the sauna.
At a Nordic event, the subject landed with particular force. Lugavere pointed to research from Finland suggesting that frequent sauna use was associated with a markedly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia over the long term, with a dose-response pattern that made the findings difficult to ignore.
Heat, in this reading, functioned as a hormetic stressor: a manageable biological challenge that prompts the body to adapt. Sauna use, he suggested, may bolster insulin sensitivity and support the expression of protective factors such as BDNF.
It was not presented as a miracle. Correlation is not causation, and Lugavere acknowledged that uncertainty remained vast. But the accumulation of simple signals was striking. Sweat, movement, plants, fasting, metabolic flexibility. The old tools, sharpened by new evidence.
Biohacking The Environment, Not Just The Body
One of Lugavere’s more thoughtful observations concerned the limits of the biohacking ethos itself.
“A large portion of biohacking is not just about our biology, but about hacking our environment,” he said. “We must find harmony because we live in a very different world today than the one in which our brains originally evolved.”
That was a subtle rebuke to the notion that every problem can be solved by adding one more device to the wrist or one more data stream to the phone. The mismatch, he argued, was civilisational. Food had changed. Activity had changed. Exposure to constant abundance had changed. The challenge was not just to optimise within that world, but to push back against it.
His point was not nostalgic. It was evolutionary. The human brain developed in a context of fluctuation, movement, scarcity and recovery. Modern life offered sedentariness, sweetness, chronic stimulation and constant access to food. The distance between those worlds may be one reason so many people feel metabolically frayed.
Humility In A Young Science
The strongest moment in the talk may have been its most modest. Lugavere resisted the false certainty that often shadows wellness discourse. He admitted that Alzheimer’s research is still young, that much of what is known has emerged only recently, and that no one can promise complete protection.
“The more I learn about this field, the more I want to know and the less I feel like I know,” he said. “I think that is ultimately how we should live, staying curious and recognizing that there are always more discoveries to be made.”
That humility gave weight to everything else. This was not a sermon of guaranteed outcomes. It was a call for informed vigilance.
In the closing exchange, when asked whether serum BDNF testing had practical value, Lugavere answered with restraint. BDNF, he noted, fluctuates too rapidly for routine clinical utility. More useful biomarkers for long-term brain health included **homocysteine** and **HOMA-IR**, a measure of insulin sensitivity. It was a fitting ending: less seduced by novelty, more interested in what can actually guide action.
The Long Future Of The Brain
The deepest truth in Lugavere’s presentation at **Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm** was also the simplest: the brain does not suddenly break. It is shaped, fed and strained over decades.
That means prevention is not glamorous. It may look like skipping a meal, lifting weights, sitting in a sauna, eating bitter greens and learning to value metabolic health long before symptoms arrive. It may mean recognising that cognitive optimisation is not a niche pursuit for obsessives, but an argument about how to live before illness writes the ending for us.
The promise Lugavere offered was not immortality, nor even certainty. It was something more sober and, for that reason, more powerful: the idea that neurological resilience can be built early, patiently and on purpose. In a culture trained to respond only when damage becomes visible, that was a difficult message.
It was also, perhaps, the smartest one in the room.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Stockholm