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Josh Turknett, MD is a trained neurologist, author, host of the Unshackled Intelligence Podcast, and the founder of the Brainjo Collective. Not only has he authored books on migraines, he is also the leading light in enhancing human cognition and human potential.

Transcript

Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz: Hi, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Body Clock podcast by Owaves. Today, I have a very interesting guest, Josh Turknett, who is an M.D. and a trained neurologist. He’s written a book on migraines, as well as being a leading light in enhancing human cognition and human potential. He is founder of the Brainjo Collective, as well as host of the Unshackled Intelligence Podcast. How you doing, Josh?

Dr. Dr. Josh Turnkett: Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz: No, I’m glad you could be on because the intelligence and neuroscience is some of the most interesting topics that are expanding today and there’s no one better than you to have on the show to discuss that.

Dr. Josh Turnkett: No.

Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz: Before we start, let’s just set a bit of a baseline for the listeners. So you obviously, you’re an M.D. trained in neurology. So you’re trained in how to tackle disease, but you’ve got an interest in prevention of almost cognitive enhancement. So how did you get interested in this field and what was your journey into this?

Dr. Josh Turnkett: So, yeah, so that’s a fairly long story. I’ll try to hit the highlights. But so as you say, I’m a train neurologist. So I completed medical school back in 2001 and entered into the field of neurology, partly because, you know, this was obviously the brain has been a very active area of research, you know, over the past several decades. So 2001, we just had the decade of the brain. There was a lot of excitement about, you know, what lay ahead in the future. And so part of the reason for this, you know, for wanting to sort of take my interest in the neurosciences into that area was because I figured I would see some pretty transformational treatments during the course of my career.

And I still remember it. In fact, when I was a senior medical student, I was doing a rotation in behavioral neurology, which is actually my personal area of interest. And I asked one of the prominent researchers there in Alzheimer’s disease, you know, when he thought we might have a cure for Alzheimer’s. And he thought about it for a minute and said, you know, he thought a reasonable estimate was ten years. And, you know, it’s not news to anybody to say that we haven’t gotten there yet. That was almost 20 years ago. And really.

And Alzheimer’s and almost all of the other major diseases that I see, day in a day, as a neurologist, we don’t have anything that’s really incrementally better than what was available back then in 2001 when I was entering into this field. So, you know, you have that which is a frustrating place to be in. And I think when you consider how much the rest of the world has changed over that period of time, how many technological advancements there have been, you kind of makes you stop and think-it should make you stop and think-you know, why is that? What’s going on?

Is there something fundamentally wrong with how we’re kind of going about trying to treat neurological illnesses and really most of the conditions that doctors are seeing day in and day out. So cut to about…let’s see, I think was 2010. I started kind of getting interested in nutrition and mainly through some sort of random stumbling around the Internet. I found a blog by a radiologist, actually, Dr. Kurt Harris, who is no longer blogging, but he wrote some really great stuff in the kind of the early days of the paleo movement. That was really influential. And then I found Gary Taubes’s book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.

And altogether, you know, I realized: number one, my idea is kind of about sort of the basic foundations of health and nutrition were wrong and had been inherited kind of from the conventional wisdom and stuff that we’d been told in medical school, which really wasn’t grounded in the kind of solid foundation. And so, you know, that led me to research into those topics further. And ultimately, I ended up kind of overhauling my own way of eating and living. I’d sort of bring it more in line with what I thought was the foundation of a healthy lifestyle.

Not really because I was trying to solve any particular problem, but just because, you know, I wanted to afford myself the best chance of a life well-lived. And after doing that, you know, I experienced all sorts of you know, great things that I imagine some of your listeners are probably familiar with. But, you know, adopting pretty much a sign of kind of an ancestral health or paleo-model and, you know, lost, you know, abdominal fat or on my midsection and had all this energy that I didn’t used to have of and my digestion improved, my skin improved, but the most significant thing was about six to eight weeks into it.

I noticed that I hadn’t had a headache. And I’m a neurologist, and I’m a longtime migraine or migraine suffer. And my migraines had steadily worsened over the course of my twenties and thirties. And so by the time I had made these changes, I was probably taking something, a prescription medicine, to relieve a migraine maybe 60 times a month or more. And so to have gone six to eight weeks, you know, with nothing was pretty remarkable. And I actually remember exactly where I was when it happened because it was so significant. I called my wife. I said I haven’t had a headache in this long.

And could it be this, you know, dietary changes that I made and things continued along those lines for the next several months. And in fact, that whole first year, I had one migraine and it was during an anniversary dinner when I went off my plan, but that was a remarkable experience. And so, you know, I began doing more research, found that other people had similar experiences after implementing either kind of an ancestral diet or even just low-carb type diets and began using it with patients and, ultimately, decided that this was too significant to keep to myself. So that’s when I wrote a book about it and that was published in 2013.

It’s called The Migrant Miracle, but it’s basically the ideas, you know, applying ancestral health principles in an ancestral diet lifestyle as a means of treating migraines. And, you know, that’s been transformative. And so that whole experience, you know, made me realize or rethink a lot of things, both in terms of how we go about treating people in the neurology clinic. Why I hadn’t seen any of those transformative breakthroughs over the course of my career? And you know what I should be doing with my life as a neurologist going forward to make the most impact.

So that’s kind of a story of how I got to where I am now, and where I’m very passionate about getting these ideas out into the world. Because, you know, I think we have the tools and what we need to make the kind of impact that I was hoping for. You know, when I went into neurology in the first place. But it’s going to take some pretty significant structural changes and significant changes kind of in the conventional wisdom about health and nutrition.

Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz: That’s quite a phenomenal journey and story. So it seems that you’ve kind of transformed your life as well.

Dr. Josh Turnkett: For sure.

Dr. Sohaib Imtiaz: So Owaves focusing on circadian rhythms in particular. What’s your day to day routine? How do you live a healthy life?

Dr. Josh Turnkett: So the first step for me, I think, I try to kind of keep the 80/20 principle in mind, meaning that, you know, I wanted to find the biggest levers that we have to move us forward. So in my initial time, it kind of implementing this stuff, you know, getting rid of added sugar in my diet, you know, getting rid of the wheat and gluten grains, you know, those alone made huge impact. So now, you know, the eating part of everything is just a second nature. So, you know, I stick to just a Whole Foods diet, you know, mainly just meat and vegetables and that alone is a huge, you know, a huge benefit.

And I wouldn’t switch to any other way. Kind of along the way, you know, as you get more and more into this stuff, you try to you know, add more and more things to the way you eat and live to optimize things even further. And there’s been also a lot of sort of improvement and progression in the ancestral health world. In terms of understanding, you know, the sorts of things that we can do. And the sort of the governing principle that I think about and I think probably it’s familiar to you and your listeners is this just concept of mismatch, right? Is bringing my day-to-day experience as much in line in a modern world with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, right?

You know, most of our regulatory mechanisms are still finely calibrated to that particular environment. So that is to m