The Only 7 Foods You Need to Heal Your Brain, Gut & Body

Nutrition for men over 40 shouldn’t be confusing. Here are the 7 foods you actually need to support your brain and body.

We cover the critical role of dietary fats, specifically why the yolk in your eggs is essential for sustained brain health. We also look at the place of meat products in your diet, distinguishing between foods that offer an immediate energy boost and those that build the foundation for optimal health over time.

No renting. No drifting. Just standards.

Transcript

Auto-generated from the episode audio and lightly formatted. Each timestamp links to that moment in the video.

0:00 The problem with diets is that every week there’s a new list. 20 superfoods on Monday, 15 swaps by Friday, or some podcast telling you the complete opposite. So, what are men over 40 supposed to do? Just freeze and do nothing? I’m not guessing here. I work with high performing men in their 40s and 50s. And I spent my own money figuring out which of these shortcuts actually do nothing. So, this is just a short list that actually held up. Seven foods. And at the end, the one thing I take off your plate first, and I’ll walk through what each one actually does at a body your age. and what it’s replacing on your plate. Before I start, one thing. Every food on here had to clear two bars. It had to matter nutritionally, but you also had to be willing to still be eating it in 8 months from now. Guys, treat a diet like it’s a weakness, right? Like it’s something you were supposed to white knuckle with enough discipline to get through anything. But it’s not, right? A diet you quit in just 3 weeks does nothing for you. So, I’m not handing you the perfect list. What I’m trying to do is hand you one that’s you actually stick with. Number one, eggs, right? And eggs go first because it’s the highest

1:01 Lever swap that you’ve actually got. And it takes you all about what, six minutes to make. This one’s replacing the cereal, the bagel, the pastry, or this I don’t really do breakfast. I just grab a coffee. Because most men over 40 eat a breakfast with basically no protein in it. And then they wonder why they fall off a cliff at 10:00 in the morning. And that 10:00 a.m. crash is traces straight back to your breakfast. Okay, you ate at a bagel at what, let’s say, 6:30. your blood sugar is going to shoot up and then it came crashing back down and now you’re sitting in a meeting feeling slow and stupid for no reason. And that’s not a willpower thing. Protein and fat in that first meal flattened that whole thing out. Three eggs at breakfast and that crash is just not going to show up the same way and you’ll feel that the same day. And that’s what I like about starting here. You get a win that you can actually feel. And the second thing about this same morning eggs are about as filling as a food gets. So the guy who eats them at 7:00 isn’t digging through the pantry at 10:00. A lot of that afternoon grazing gets set up way back because of the breakfast intake. Now, the part that matters most is the part that you are not actually gonna

2:02 Fill. Every man over 40 is losing muscle whether he trains or not. And the thing that slows it down is hitting your protein target over and over, meal by meal. Eggs are complete protein and they’re high in lucine. Lucysine is a signal that switches muscle building on. Most men eat almost nothing at breakfast. A little at lunch, then a big pile of it at dinner. So in that one signal a day when you could have had three. Fixing breakfast does not just add protein. It adds a trigger that you were skipping, right? And there’s one more thing about eggs. The yolk is the one of the best sources of fat that you can get. The fat in it actually feeds your brain. You won’t feel that one this week either. That’s the one for the long game. So here’s a timeline. The crash and the hunger, that’s day one and you’re going to feel it fast. The muscle stuff is months out and only if your training and the rest of your eating is there too. And it’s always going to give you both ends of it, right? Because if I tell you something is a fast win, and it actually is, then you’re going to believe me a little more, right? And when I tell you about the slow stuff, you can’t feel it. And I already know the first comment. What about cholesterol? It always comes with eggs,

3:03 Right? Look, for most people, the cholesterol you eat has a lot less to do with your blood cholesterol than you would actually think. Saturated fat and refined carbs do a lot more of that. But there’s a minority of men who are hyper respponders, and their numbers do move on cholesterol they eat. And there’s exactly one way to find that out which guy you are. You test it. Food is the floor and your blood work is what’s going to tell you if you are the exception. And by the way, three eggs is somewhere around 18 grams of protein. I’m not prescribing that number. It’s just an easy way to picture what hitting that target looks like. Number two, cottage cheese. Just plain cottage cheese. And I’m going to come back to that word plain because it’s the part guys get wrong. This one’s for that 3 p.m. slot. It’s replacing the protein bar, the flavored yogurt, the fistful of whatever is in the pantry when the afternoon hits you. And it does one job and it does it slowly. Cottage cheese is mostly a casein protein and casein curdles up in your stomach and drains out slow over hours. A protein bar fills you for what 15 or 20 minutes. This covers the whole 3 to 6:00 p.m. window where most men over 40 start losing the

4:03 Day. Do it once and you’ll fill it that afternoon. The grazing just doesn’t happen. You get to dinner not starving. So dinner is a calm decision instead of a pantry rate. And honestly, that part matters more than most snacking does. And the math here is just in your favor just as much. A cup runs about 25 grams of protein and around 200 calories. That bar you’re replacing is about 15 grams of protein for every 250 calories. And it’s a candy bar with the fitness label on it. So you’re getting more protein, fewer calories, and hours of coverage. The bar gives you a spike and a crash, and that’s it. And there’s a second reason to keep it around. It’s an actual real source of calcium. And your bone density after 40 is heading the same way your muscle is. And nobody’s checking on it until something breaks. Couple of notes here. Cottage cheese is high in sodium. So, if you’re watching your blood pressure, buy the low sodium version as it’s a non-issue. And if dairy doesn’t sit well with you, don’t force it. Put another low protein in that slot and move on. All right, let’s get back to the plain part. Cottage cheese has an image problem for men our age, right? And I know it does because

5:04 It’s the stuff our moms ate off a canned peach what back in 1985. And that’s just a memory talking to you. It has nothing to do with the nutrition. And the fix is in one word, plain. Because the second you start buying the kind with the fruit stirred in, you’re right back in the exact sugar problem that I’m about to show you. But now, before we get to number three, I want to stop you on that yogurt aisle and have you stay with me for a second because there’s a trap sitting right next to that cottage cheese. Flavored yogurt and granola. A man dumps both into his bowls and what happens in his head is he’s handled breakfast. He doesn’t count it. He doesn’t question it. He just stops thinking about it. Same move as the green powders I told you to stop buying. The label did the thinking for him. So he quit checking. Now I’m not going to sit here and call it candy because that’s an exciting version and isn’t quite true. Granola’s got real fiber in it, real nut, right? No debate there. Some of the sugar in it is the flavored yogurt is just lactose that was always in there. If I told you it was poison, you’d go read one label, see I was exaggeration and and click off and that would be fair. And the honest version says plenty on its own. Flavored yogurt carries way more added sugar than the

6:04 Guy pouring it in would ever guess. Granola is one of the most calorie dense things in the whole store and almost nobody’s ever weighed out the real serving of it. So, a bowl of man swears is light and is carrying a lot more than he would ever think and it’s got a fraction of the protein that plain cottage cheese sitting on the shelf over wood. So, I’m not calling it bad food. It’s just the same trick, just a different aisle. Something dressed up to sound like it’s the thing that it’s replacing. And that’s the trap. You let the label do the thinking for you. And that’s the same one the whole supplement aisle runs on. It’s why guessing costs a man over 40 so much more money over the years. You get out of it by knowing your exact numbers. That is why there’s an actual physician belt into what I do. So, if you want this built around your real panel in your real week, that’s the work we do together. And the leak is down in the description. Everyone else stay with me. The next four is where the floor really gets built. Number three, lean red meat two to three times a week at dinner. Now, this is the one that takes the most heat every time. So, I’m going to give it to you in the straight

7:04 Version first. what it does that nothing else on the list does well. Red meat is the most protein dense food a man actually will eat because he wants to. And that’s where the part of that matters probably the most. Cuz when you want to eat something, you’re way more likely to do it because a guy who is eating steak is going to hit his protein target on a random Tuesday without ever thinking about it. And the guy that’s like choking down his fourth chicken breast by the end of the week is out of it by Thursday, right? And around that protein also, you’re getting a B12 that only shows up in animal foods which you absorb worse as you get older. and zinc, which most men wear run a little low on, is going to help as well as your iron does because your body absorbs it way better than the iron you would through plant. Plus, you also get a little creatin. That’s a package that’s generally hard to put together anywhere else in one meal. Now, the honest part, because there are two different claims about red meat, and the public argument mashes them into one. So, let’s talk about it. Processed meat, that’s your bacon, your deli meat, uh your hot dogs, the stuff that has a real and pretty consistent link to, you know, cancer. And that’s a stronger evidence that I’m not going to sit here and stand here and

8:04 Try to argue with you on it because it’s right. I can see that one. But unprocessed red meat, an actual steak, that’s a much weaker and messier picture. It’s mostly observational and it’s all tangled up in this fact that people who historically ate a ton of it and smoked more, uh, drank more, carried more weight, and ate fewer vegetables. That doesn’t make the concern zero. It just makes it smaller and a lot less certain than the headline you got handed. So, here’s the line I’ll stand behind. the bun, the fries, the sheer volume, and the processing. That’s where the actual problem lives. Okay, a couple of unprocessed servings a week sitting right next to the lentils and the vegetables that are also on this list is way down on a man’s real problems. Near the top of that list is 10 years of undereating protein while he slowly loses muscle. That’s what actually is costing him. And there’s one more thing with red meat. Men don’t minstrate. Well, at least the biological ones, right? So, men don’t have a monthly way to clear out iron. And there’s a small number of men out there who are walking around with a condition called hemocromotasis and have no idea. And for those specific men, more iron is

9:04 Generally the wrong direction. For Tillin, it’s one in line on a basic panel. So, this is a great food for most men. And there’s a subset of men that that it’s not going to be great for. And the only way to find out which one is for you is to measure it. Same as everything else I tell you. Measure it and then you know. and on the saturated fat in your let’s say LDL. I’m not going to sit here and relitigate a whole contested science fight on camera. If yours runs high, that’s a number to keep an eye on with your panel in a conversation with your actual doctor. It’s not a reason to be scared of a steak. Number four, salmon twice a week. And this one’s the packaged item. It’s on the list even though nothing it does is completely unique to it. You’ve got about 40 g of protein in a 6 play. So, it clears the protein bar on its own. But what earns its spot on this list is the omega-3s. the EPA and the DHA. And these are actual belting materials. DHA gets physically built into your cell membranes heavily in your brain and your eyes. EPA is what your body uses to build molecules that calm inflammation down. And on top of that, you get vitamin D, which is hard to get from

10:05 Food at all, plus B12. Now, this one’s a slow one. The fullness at the mill, sure, you’ll get that. But everything else is months out because you’re changing the actual makeup of your cells, and that takes time to show up. The eggs paid off the same day. I’m telling you right now, salmon will not give you the same feel that week. And I’m telling you that upfront. You need to eat it anyway, though. And if you watched my supplement video, you probably got a fair question right now because I kept fish oil in the cabinet. Here’s why both are true. Two servings of salmon a week does not move the needle for me. And my panel is what actually showed me that gap. The fish oil is what closed it. And I only know that because I actually measured it. So eat the food for everything else in the package. And then supplement the gap that the food is leaving. But you need to know where the actual gap is before you do that. Two things people always ask me, farmed or wild. The best one is the one that actually you buy because both are good sources of EPA and DHA. The fish runs low on mercury. So that’s not the thing to worry about here. And if the price is your real objection, sardines, there’s your answer cuz it does the same job for a fraction of the

11:05 Cost. Number five, lentils. This is the fiber one and it’s the one you don’t want. I know that. So I’m going to make you care about the problem they fix, okay? because that’s how we get past this. The lentils just is the cheapest tool for it. You’re replacing the rice or the potato sitting next to your dinner. You keep the meal you actually like. You’re just swapping out the most boring thing on the plate, right? And fiber is doing two different jobs here, okay? The the soluble kind for it’s going to form a gel in your gut and it’s going to slow everything down. That’s going to flatten the blood sugar rise off the same plate of food and it drags bile acids out. So, your body has to burn cholesterol to make more of them. And that’s one of the better established ways for food to lower your LDL. The other kind feeds the bacteria down in your gut and they turn into the fuel that cells lining your colon runaround. And that’s the direct answer that red meat I was just talking about. That concern I conceded back to number three is the food that pushes it back on it and it was sitting the on this list the whole damn time. You also get about 18 g of protein in a cup plus magnesium, potassium, and iron. Couple caveats

12:05 Here. Most men aren’t eat anywhere near close to the fiber that they should. And the ones who do think about it treat it as it’s a bathroom thing, which is probably the least important thing it does. It’s a metabolic input. It’s a cardiovascular input. Treat it like it matters for your heart because it does. And if you jump from zero straight to a cup a day, your gut’s going to complain for a couple weeks while the bacteria catches up. So ramp up a little slow. But the part that really lands for this audience is the price. Lentils are the cheapest item on the whole list. And it’s really not close. A couple dollars a bag. That’s a week a sides. And I just got done admitting I threw real money at supplements that did nothing for me. So the cheapest thing on the list having better evidence behind it than half the cabinet did. That should feel good. And if you really won’t do lentils, black beans does a similar job. Number six, kisserous vegetables. So So that’s broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, cabbage. This one’s replacing that green powder. And there’s an actual mechanical reason the vegetable does something that scoop just can never do. So, when you chew these up or you you cut them, an enzyme inside the plant is going to turn

13:05 Into raw compounds into actually active ones. And you’ve probably heard some of these. And these, what they’re going to do is they’re going to turn your body into its own detox machinery. Now, I don’t mean it’s going to detox like in the wellness sense. Nothing is getting flushed out of you. You already own a whole system for clearing out all the stuff that needs to be cleared out. And these compounds just turn up the dial on it a little bit. And the reason the powder can’t pull all that off comes down to one enzyme. And that enzyme that makes the active compound only fires when the fresh plant tissue gets damaged. In a dry shelf stable powder, it’s mostly gone already. So even if you set the whole dosing questionable aside, the scoop physically can’t do what the vegetable does. And this isn’t a whole food snobbery type thing. This is a specific chemical reason the scoop fails. And then there’s a reason that’s specific to men our age. The same pathways these vegetables support are involved in how your body clears out estrogen byproducts. So, a man who’s like over 40 is usually going to tend to carry a little bit more fat and that nudges a bit more testosterone over towards the estrogen range. So, supporting the pathway that clears these

14:06 Byproducts is a real men’s health reason to eat them. Beyond the usual eat your vegetable stuff your mom probably told you, this is exactly the spot where the supplement industry turns around and sells you these capsules to promise you evidence that’s not clearly backed up at this point. The food is well established. The pill is the version that gets oversold. Then you got the ordinary stuff that still counts fiber. So, it’s doing its part just like the lenol did for you. Vitamin K, folate, and a lot of volume for almost no calories. So, what you’re doing is you’re being able to fill up on something that basically cost you nothing. You won’t fill it any of this, by the way. It’s a long game item. The only thing you’ll notice soon is that a big pile of vegetables at dinner just makes you eat less of everything else without even trying. And one note, if you’ve heard this whole thyroid thing that matters at extreme raw intakes and if you’re already, you know, deficient on some of these items, it does not matter at a normal plate of cooked broccoli. Number seven, extra virgin olive oil. And that word extra virgin is the whole item because the plain refined stuff has had the good part stripped right out of it and that’s a fat and that’s it. Extra virgin is unrefined and

15:07 That means polyphenols survive in it. And the polyphenols are the active part. What they do is that they can actually stand behind and reduce the oxidation of your LDL. And oxidized LDL is a lot closer to the thing that actually damages your arteries than the plain LDL number by itself. You also get the monounsaturated fat and some vitamin E along with it. And there’s a great little way to check you bought the right thing. Good extra version catches at the back of your throat and makes you cough a little. That’s because there’s a compound in there and it works as a rough quality test. And if your bottle has never once done that to you, you probably bought refined oil with a nice looking label. Buy it in the dark bottle with a harvest date on it because the cheap stuff gets cut down with other oils. It’s replacing that bottled dressing with sugar in it and the butter or margin you put on your vegetables. You’ll feel nothing from this one ever. And I mean that. It’s the purest long game item on the list. So, why does something this small even make the cut? Two reasons. One, it’s the only item on here that ask you to change nothing. You

16:07 Buy a different bottle one time and you keep doing the exactly what you were doing already. And two, it’s the thing that makes numbers five and six survivable. Lentils and broccoli lose most men on taste flat out. And the reason is nobody ever taught them how to cook a vegetable in a little fat. Olive oil is what turns the two items you don’t want into two things that you’re actually going to keep eating. So, it barely counts as its own food. It’s really just what makes the other two before it worth eating. So, those are the seven. Now, before I give you the one thing to actually take off your plate, look at what every one of them had in common. They all went into a slot that was already full. Breakfast was already happening. The 3 p.m. crash was already happening. Dinner already happening. All you did was decide that those slots and what they’re made of. The one thing I remove is different because it’s the only thing on your plate that isn’t in a slot at all. Liquid sugar. So that’s soda, juice, the sweet and coffee drinks, the energy drink, the sports drink you’re having while you’re not actually playing a sport. And it earns the removal for one reason. It’s pure addiction. It displaces nothing. It satisfies nothing. And there is one thing you can take away

17:08 Without deciding what goes into its place. It’s hundreds of calories a day that never once registrated to you as a food. And the reason it works is dead simple. There’s no fiber. There’s no protein. no fat and there’s no slowing it down. So, it’s all hits at once. Everything else on this list is slow on purpose. The cottage cheese, the lentils, all of it. This one just hits and that’s it. And that’s the one thing that’s going to sting a few of you is the orange juice because it sits in the same spot in your head that the green powders did. It reads as help, but it’s sugar with the fiber taken out. And the fiber was the one part that actually mattered. Now, I’ll be straight with you because somebody’s already typing probably in the comments right now. For a lot of men watching this, the biggest lever of all is alcohol. Three or four drinks a week is totally different conversation than three or four at night. And the alcohol hits you at your sleep. It hits you in your recovery a lot harder than the soda ever will, but I’m still not putting it into this slot. And the reason is simple. The whole list lives or dies on what you’re actually still doing in 8 months from now. And quitting drinking just doesn’t fit that test. Cutting it out means renegotiating your whole social calendar, which is

18:08 Completely different beast than swapping one food for another. What I’ve actually watched work is moving a man off reactive drinking where the night just decides it for him over to deciding before he ever walks in the door. And that one holds, right? Telling some executive to eliminate it completely buys you about three good weeks and then nothing. Right? Alcohol is a bigger number, but that’s in a different video. One more thing before I wrap up. I don’t want you walking away thinking this one works on a perfect week. It doesn’t have to because a week that actually tests the system like this is a bad one. A travel week, a slam week, the kind where everything is just working against you. This is what a hard travel week looks like. You leave, you might not know what your schedule is. You might have client dinners. And so, there’s a lot of unknown variables to it. But when you have some of these variables like seven foods that you can concentrate on at certain points of the day or when you’re at the table and you concentrate on those, you’re making small changes in your life. And that work week travel turns into something where you’re coming home dead, tired, you know, inflamed or just haven’t gained weight into something that’s more manageable. And that’s it. In one week, four out of seven on a travel week and then back to normal when you’re home. That’s the

19:08 System that’s going to actually survive life. That’s unpredictable. The guy who runs a perfect seven out of seven at home and then completely falls apart the second he travel is doing worse over a full year than the guy who just holds four. So, let’s step back and look at the whole picture here. The green powder, the protein bar, the granola, the orange juice. Those are four items. The same trick showed up. Something dressed up to sound like a healthy thing get replaced so you feel like you handled it when you really didn’t. And that’s most of what the food industry is selling you. A reason to stop looking. These seven foods aren’t some correction you might need and might not. They’re the floor. You’re going to eat breakfast. You’re going to eat dinner. You can’t opt out of any of it. The only thing you get to decide is what it’s all made of. So, decide on it on purpose. Build your protein floor with the first four. Build your fiber and your vegetables with the next two. Let the olive oil carry the two you’d otherwise quit on. And take the liquid sugar off the table completely because it’s never really a slot that you should have had to begin with. You do that and you’ve built the floor. And listen, if a man ever only does number one, just the eggs and nothing else, he still came out

20:09 Ahead because he’s got one more real protein meal in him today than he had this morning. You just need a floor and you need to still be standing on it from 8 months from now. Food is the floor. And once the floor solid, the next question is which supplements are worth your money and which ones aren’t. And I spent a whole lot of my own money finding that out. That’s the video sitting on your screen right now and that’s the one I want you to watch next because the fastest way to waste money after 40 is to start buying stuff before you even know what you’re short on. And that’s the only thing that ever tells you that is your own numbers. And I’ll see you over there.