Avoiding Alzheimer's - Neal Barnard MD

and introduction uh you having a good conference so far good good let me ask you what matters most to you what matters most in your in your life I'm going to guess it's not your car or your clothes or even your house what's most important in your life your health your your family your loved ones well what if I were to say that there's a pretty good chance that you could lose everything and everyone who was most important to you I don't mean that they're gone or that you're gone but that your connection with them is broken and so you've lost them forever let me show you what I mean starting from with my own family these are my mother's parents that's Walter and Irene and Walter was a physician in a little Midwestern town and this was back before there was health insurance so he would treat a patient and sometimes they would pay him with a chicken or a side of beef or some cheese or something like that and it wasn't a terribly healthy lifestyle and at about age 60 my grandpa had a heart attack and not too long after that it was pretty clear there was something more wrong with him than just what had happened in his heart he had never had any memory problems before but he started to become forgetful and he would seem confused and sometimes he would start wandering around town without knowing where he was headed a patient would pick him up in the car and bring him back home and by his mid-60s he was dead now my grandmother Irene lived a lot longer but she had a very similar end of her life where we'd go visit her and I remember she would say me I like reading this magazine and it's so frustrating I get to the end of an article and I can't remember the beginning of it anymore and her memory was bothering her but it got worse and worse and it got to the point where she didn't know when we would come to visit and she just sat in the corner of a room and her heart was beating but all the connections were broken this is my father's side of the family they were in the cattle business and not the healthiest lifestyle perhaps but that's the way it was back then and both of my grandparents on my father's side lived a long life but they had the same problem they both started to lapse into dementia telling the same stories over and over again not knowing their family anymore and for years they just sat in the corner of a room with zero connection before they finally died this is my dad now my dad grew up in the cattle business he didn't like it and so he left and he was in the military for a while and then he became a physician and he spent his life treating diabetes in Fargo North Dakota and when my dad was in his late 60s or there abouts he started to say I am forgetful and my dad was a doctor so he knew what this meant and as time went on he started to talk about his impending dementia and then as time went on he further he couldn't verbalize it anymore and he started to really sink into serious memory problems his personality started to change he became mute and when he died in February we realized that he had been gone to us for a really long time now how many of you have family members or friends or people you've known who have had dementia or serious problem it's everywhere but unlike weight problems or diabetes or heart problems where we know that there's a role for food almost nobody imagines that there's something you could do to protect the most important thing which is your brain and your ability to connect with your loved ones so Alzheimer's disease attacks half of us by age 85 and if you look at the cost all right at the numbers it was a million then it was to a million then it's five and then it's going off the scale and the dollars and cents if you take a person who does not have dementia but is over 65 their annual healthcare costs not quite $14,000 but a person who has dementia well their costs are forty-three forty-four thousand dollars on per year one person per year that if residential care isn't part of it if a person needs to be in residential treatment seventy thousand dollars per year is average today so it bankrupts the individual it drains all the money from your family but the most important thing is the personal costs are just incalculable and it doesn't have to be dementia you don't have to be older how many of you ever said oh it was what was the name of that actor was on the tip of my tongue you can't think of it or you're going into a grocery store and you see somebody at the other end of the aisle I know that person but what's his name sort of duck into another aisle to try to think and of course there you run into somebody else you ought to know these things happen to us all the time well I want to talk with you about how we learn how we remember things how this starts to go wrong and what we can do to kind of bolt this our memory down a little bit so we keep it for as long as the rest of us is alive now at the middle of this picture there's a little red crescent thing called the hippocampus HIPPA contest' hippocampus is Latin for seahorse the early anatomist thought it looked like a seahorse explain it to me I don't know but anyway the hippocampus has a very important job it has to decide what you will remember and what you can safely like not worry about so you're at a restaurant and the waiter comes up and says hello my name is Kelly and the hippocampus thinks and now forget that okay movie times and we don't need that you know my there's a lot of stuff the hippocampus just rules out and says not important but things that are important what it does is it sends that up to the cerebral cortex and that's where memories are coded and saved however when you learn a new fact you don't make a new brain cell to stick that fact into if you did your brain would be so enormous you'd have to carry it around in a wheelbarrow when you learn new fact you make links you make connections you make synapses from one cell to the next so here's a new friend hi my name is John we make connections between these and at first a connection starts out as a tenuous little string from one cell to the next but it becomes stronger and stronger so this little kitti bridge the more times you meet John and you connect John's face pretty soon it becomes a superhighway and that's a person that you're not going to forget hopefully the problem is bridges break or they get congested and if that bridge isn't connecting anymore you see the face the name is just not there in fact to all start falling out of your head so at first this can be lapses this can happen at any age you're a little tired you're not well nourished you know you're not sleeping well the bridges don't function necessarily but if it starts to really become frequent and you're having lots of memory problems the doctor will say well this is mild cognitive impairment you're still yourself but it's taking a little longer to get through your checkbook or words are falling out here and there but then you might be saying I think I might have the beginnings of Alzheimer's disease it could that be doctors look for five things they first looked for can you learn and remember then can you reason things out and solve problems they also look for what's called visual spatial ability can you recognize shapes if I ask you to draw a clock you get the numbers in order and that kind of thing then they also look at language and then they look at personality if all five of those things are goofing up then doctors say I think this could be Alzheimer's disease alright you go to the doctor you say I don't want that at my parents had Alzheimer's disease my father had I don't want this and the doctor sits you down and they say well it's genetic should pick different parents that's what you can do well here are the numbers if one parent gives you this gene called the apoE epsilon for allele if you get that from one parent you have three times the risk of Alzheimer's disease compared to not having it and if you got it from both parents you've got between ten and fifteen times the risk and that's the end of the story for most people nothing you can do just wait and see what happens wait a minute turns out there's a lot you can do anybody know what this is that is Chicago exactly the reason I'm showing in Chicago is back in 1993 an important study began called the Chicago Health and Ageing project and they brought in a group of a large group thousands of healthy people and they carefully tracked what they were eating and then as one year and another year and another year and another year went by they looked at links between what they had been eating and who stayed mentally clear and who did not and the first thing that they tracked was something that I knew about when I was a kid when I was growing up in Fargo North Dakota I'd run down to the kitchen my mom would be cooking bacon and her five kids would gather around and she would take a fork and carefully pull the bacon strips out of a pan and put them on a paper towel to drain and when all the bacon was out of the pan she had a pan filled with hot grease that she was not going to throw away right so she would take that hot bacon grease and carefully pour it into a jar to save it now the bacon jar did the bacon grease jar did not go in the refrigerator she just put it on the shelf because she knew that as bacon grease cools down what happens to it it solidifies right it turns into this waxy solid and the next day she would spoon it back into the frying pan and fry eggs in it it's amazing that any of her kids live to adulthood but that's what we did the fact that bacon grease is solid at room temperature is a sign that it's very high in what is called saturated fat you've heard of saturated fat right this is the kind that raises your cholesterol well it's in bacon it's also in butter and other dairy products and it's in meat and these were things that we ate every day in growing up in Fargo and maybe you grew up with the same kind of pattern and that was the first thing that the researchers at Chicago started keying in on some people ate relatively little saturated fat 13 grams a day others got about twice that amount 25 grams a day and they looked at who got Alzheimer's disease and who didn't and here are the numbers the people who got the 25 grams a day had more than three times the Alzheimer's risk compared to the others so that's our first clue and it's rarely relatively easy to get up to that 25 grams a day if I take a couple eggs that's 3 grams of saturated fat let me add a strip of bacon that's another gram let me take a chicken thigh even without the skin it's about 5 grams of statue can has a substantial amount of fat about 5 grams of chicken thighs with no skin glass of milk another five grams oh yeah pizza okay so one pizza pizza for one is about 12 and you add that up I'm in the high-risk group do you know anybody who eats that way everybody's that way this is the way Americans eat okay but it's not just Alzheimer's disease researchers in Finland said what about this mild cognitive impairment you remember me talking about this condition where you're still yourself but your memory is starting to be bad they brought in a group of people and they there were 50 years old when they brought them in they tracked them up into their 70s and they looked at who got out who got mild cognitive dementia who didn't and they track their saturated fats some were low some were high in saturated fat and here are the numbers the people who got this bad fat had a lot more of a mild cognitive impairment also so there's something about bacon grease and dairy fat and so forth that is harming the brain now what about people who have that gene remember that apoE epsilon for allele the one that condemns you well they looked at those folks some people who had that gene avoided bad fat some people who had the gene didn't avoid them and they had a high fat intake here are the numbers dramatic difference so in other words the people who had the gene but they were avoiding the bad fats tended to keep their memory the people who had the gene and ate the bacon grease and so forth their memories went this making sense okay so oh but oh yeah what about that what about that well you go into a typical donut shop and the donuts are frying interent you know about trans fats right partially hydrogenated oil this is the shortening they put in there it's and when they put it in it heats up and it liquefies and it has that mouthfeel that people like it's in a lot of snack foods and in Chicago some people ate relatively little some people ate a lot of it and here are the numbers dramatic difference okay so about five times the risk if you eat if you indulge a lot of these trans fats versus not indulging it now when doctors saw those numbers when the research community saw those numbers they were horrified because they thought how many Americans are eating these bad fats not just well I mean every day a few times a day these are routine we feed them to kids when I saw those numbers I was thrilled because it means we can choose what we're going to eat starting right this minute and we could start pushing the odds in our own favor alright so there are three steps for using power foods for the brain the first is to skip the bad fat the second is to knock out free radicals in a minute I'm going to tell you what they are and the third thing is to exercise your brain we're going to cover all of them okay first let's start with skipping the bad fats all right so I'm in Chicago and I'm eating all these bad things can I make some changes although I better because my risk of Alzheimer's is high so what can I do let me get rid of that glass of milk how about that we'll get rid of that and we'll have how many have have tasted almond milk it's fine right very tasty has no saturated fat so if the numbers in Chicago apply to me I just cut my risk of Alzheimer's disease because I got away from the saturated fat can I do better than that can I get rid of more foods easily sure let's get rid of that bacon how about having veggie bacon instead let's get rid of the eggs how about a big bowl of oatmeal with blueberries and strawberries let's get rid of that chicken thigh I'll have a big submarine sandwich filled with all the veggies I and how am I going to do well if the research numbers apply to me my Alzheimer's risk just fell even more is there something else that I can change oh yeah what about that pizza could I get a vegan pizza you know pizza is a delivery vehicle for cheese and so you know it's true so we're going to get rid of that we're going to bring in the vegan pizza and now how am i doing well I can't tell you because nobody in Chicago eats that well but however there are some people who eat that well in Loma Linda California diets vary dramatically and people at Loma Linda University tract a group of what they called heavy meat eaters and over a six-year period they looked at who was gradually losing their brain function and they compared them with a group of vegetarians through the vegetarians did a whole lot better okay all right so but by the way you do need some fat right this is not this is not a zero fat diet and the brain actually does need some good fats so which fat is best for the brain is it a corn oil be peanut oil C sunflower oil or D olive oil the answer is broccoli I bet you didn't realize this broccoli has a kind not just broccoli broccoli has a kind of fat called alpha linolenic acid which is essential for the body now there's not a lot of fat in broccoli but what there is is tends to be fairly high in alpha linolenic acid if you compare the animal products they are loaded with fat broccoli is about eight percent fat as a percentage of its calories but a lot of that fat is in this essential form of alpha linolenic acid they gradually lengthens to the kind the brain will thank you for and it has virtually none of the bad fat it doesn't have the saturated fat doesn't have the trans fat so you'll find it in not only in broccoli but you'll find it in all the green the dark green vegetables and so this is a commercial to have lots of them you don't have to have oil slathering all over your foods to get good fats but there's more of it in walnuts and flax seeds if you got a thing of canola oil it's absolutely bursting with alpha linolenic acid and you'll even see omega-3 supplements at the store I'm not saying you need them but there are vegan ala DHA supplements and so forth that you can have if you wish my main commercial is put the green leafy vegetables front and center in your diet all right by the way let's say I get away from Bad fans I cut my Alzheimer's risk are there some other benefits of making that diet change of course all kinds of things first of all a gram of fat has nine calories you already know this already right and a gram of carbohydrate has only four so if I'm getting away from all those fatty foods what's going to happen to my waistline I want to show you a picture this is a Frenchman who moved to Canada and he sent me these pictures he sent me these pictures because he had weighed over 300 pounds went to the doctor the doctor said I've got some not such good news for you you've got pre-diabetes and if you keep this up I know exactly where you're headed as fate would have it his wife had a copy of a book that I wrote about diabetes she gave it to him and it not say don't eat bread you know the usual kind of diabetic thing in a don't eat carbohydrate it didn't say that my book says get away from the foods that are loaded with with bad fat don't eat meat dairy products eggs keep the oils to a bare minimum choose the healthy carbs vegan plant-based diet by the time he got to chapter four he sent me this picture and the other thing when you lose a lot of weight not only his his the pre-diabetes was history and it was completely reversed and when you lose all that weight something else happens your energy starts to go up and people who never felt like exercising suddenly you feel alive and you feel like doing things you couldn't do before this is Jenna same story she really didn't feel like herself and she made a diet change not counting calories but changing the type of food that she ate plant-based diet lost you know lost the weight got her waistline back got her confidence back got her health back and that's what really count so you might be doing it for your brain but your waistline is going to change too arteries will open up again you know the work of dr. Dean Ornish who showed twenty years ago that a plant-based diet along with other healthy lifestyle changes will open up those arteries again cancer risk drops about maybe 40 percent of they're about diabetes gets better in some cases it absolutely flat out goes away I got to tell you I got an email about two weeks ago there was a man in London who was diagnosed with diabetes and he heard about the vegan approach and he tried it out and he was very good he filed a diet got rid of all the animal products was eating his vegetables and beans and things went to the doctor got some blood tests and was on his way home soon as he got there the phone rang the doctor needs to see you back in the office is there something on your blood test the doctor needs to talk with you right away so he gets back in his car and he's driving back thinking oh what did they find what catastrophe isn't you know is in my future goes down down to the doctor's office the doctor sits him down and says tell me what you've been doing with your diet all traces of diabetes are gone it's he had never seen this before what he's told this patient who then related to me as every doctor has taught once a diabetic you're always a diabetic it's a one-way street that's it he had never ever seen it reversed the guy didn't needed no medication all the blood tests were totally normal and the doctor was convinced it was a fluke brought him back two months later gone it's gone this this is very much a two-way street the sooner we get to this the sooner we can make it go away all right joint pain for a lot of people their arthritis just improves blood pressure goes down medications the need for medication is much much less but the most important thing is is that we had thought week we can now do what we had thought was impossible which is that we can prevent we believe or reduce the odds of alzheimerís disease so what are these bad fats doing what are they doing to the brain what is it that they're doing to destroy our memories well first of all you know bad fats raise cholesterol right so if you're eating a lot of bacon grease your cholesterol will be higher could it be something about cholesterol well researchers at Kaiser Permanente tracked cholesterol levels in a group of people and look to see who got Alzheimer's and there's a direct correlation so the higher your cholesterol the higher your risk so that's part of it and that makes sense because cholesterol can block the arteries in your heart but your brain is the heart's favorite organ 20 percent of the blood flow coming out of the heart goes straight up to the brain and if I can't get blood and oxygen and nutrients into the brain and if I don't get blood flow up there to carry the wastes away is my brain function going to be normal you need those arteries wide open and if you have a if you eat the bad fat you have a high cholesterol and you block the carotid arteries or the vertebral arteries you don't have good blood flow but there's more to it than that if I look into the brain in between the brain cells in between the neurons are these little balls yarn or sort of like meatballs in a person who's got Alzheimer's disease those are called beta amyloid plaques and they are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease how do they get there well what they're made of is protein little protein strands come out of the brain cells it's sort of like a sausage maker the little protein strands come out and then they clump together in these little balls of yarn or little meatballs that we call beta amyloid plaques and they start destroying the connections from one cell to the next so what's what's in them well there's protein that's my sausage maker there's also cholesterol in those plaques but there's something else there's iron in them and there is copper and there are other metals and that's you know this is something you wouldn't think of there's copper iron building up in my brain how could that be I've never heard of that well here's what's going on you need iron normally right you know you know you have to have iron certain amount of iron in your diet why because your body takes the iron makes hemoglobin out of it that's what makes red blood cells red and it carries oxygen from place to place including to your brain so you need a certain amount of iron to do that but if you have too much iron it's toxic so researchers in Chicago looked at people who had low hemoglobin levels and high hemoglobin levels looking at hemoglobin as an index of iron and it turned out that if you were either too low or too high your brain function started to be compromised the perfect hemoglobin level was 13.7 and if you were right around there you did well well why would a person be low why would a person be low in iron well one reason is milk did you know that milk blocks iron absorption it cuts it by about half if you have a glass of milk with a meal it cuts iron absorption by about half why would a person be high well because they grew up like I did with steak or roast beef or pork chops and so you get a lot you get too much highly absorbable iron the foods that give you the amount of iron you need without the excess the ones your body really was designed for our beans and greens the beans and greens have a form of iron called non heme iron that's more absorbable if you're low it's less absorbable if you're high it tries to keep you right in the middle add dairy products you're going to run low add meat you're going to tend to run high okay now copper nobody thinks about copper but you need copper in your diet for to make certain enzymes that run your body that are essential to metabolism but the research team that I mentioned earlier looked at copper intake the people who got the most copper in a minute I'm going to show you which foods had it the people who got the most lost brain function much more aggressively so where is it coming from how many people have a cast iron pan if I take a cast iron pan and I cook foods in it to some of the iron get into the foods yeah it does that's an advantage if you're low in iron two disadvantage if you're high how many people have copper pipes okay so the water is sitting in the my copper pipes and then in the morning I feel my coffeemaker it's copper getting into the water absolutely so you can use a stainless steel pan yuqian you can use bottled water or a water filter if you're eating meat if you're eating liver you get a boatload of copper and iron how many people take a one-a-day vitamin or some kind of daily multiple vitamin if you look at the label it'll surprise you they almost all of them have iron and copper added to it because they made the assumption that you're not getting these in any foods that you're eating all day long they are driving you into excess in fact one of the biggest sources of unnecessary copper that we see in thinking people's diets well educated people's diets is they're dutifully taking their multiple vitamins so go to the store get a multiple vitamin but read the label get the ones without the added minerals or you can get individual vitamins you only need basically you need b12 you might need D but you don't need a lots and lots of different vitamins okay alright so iron and copper are bad why what are they doing in my brain well you could see what they do take your cast iron pan go out on your picnic table leave the pan there and two or three days later come back after it's rain what's happened to the to the iron its rusting its that's oxidation that's a sign that iron happens to be very unstable and it oxidizes very very easily the iron in your body oxidizes too and when it does it produces what are called free radicals you've heard of free radicals free radicals are innocent molecules like oxygen molecules but in your body they lose an electron or they get electrons in unstable orbits because of the oxidation process and then they're like little piranhas or sparks they're just knocking out whatever they come in contact with okay so free radicals are normal oxygen molecules or other molecules that have gone through this process of becoming destabilized then iron facilitates that just copper oxidize well take nice shiny new penny and what's that penny going to look like in 20 years well it gets darker that's oxidation so copper and iron are very similar they oxidize very regularly very readily and when they do that they release these free radicals that destroy your brain the point I'm making is in the brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease are those little meatballs those amyloid plaques and in them are iron and copper that are showering sparks into their brain destroying the connections and destroying their ability to recognize their loved ones that's what's going on so a way it goes that's what I need to stop so can I knock out the free radicals is there something I can do to defend myself sure you've heard of antioxidants antioxidants there's many many of them but take vitamin E it's in green vegetables it's in mangoes it's in lots of foods and in huge amounts in nuts and seeds as well and the chicago researchers looked at people who got low levels of vitamin E and those who got a high amount of vitamin E and they did the same test who's going to get Alzheimer's who's not and the difference was huge the people who neglected their vitamin E had double the risk or more of Alzheimer's compared to people who got a lot of vitamin E so it's working you eat the antioxidants in your food they knock out the free radicals and they protect it so where do you find it it's in lots of vegetables lots of fruits and much more in various nuts and seeds but I have a couple caveats the first is food not pills if you go to the store and get a vitamin E supplement it does not have all of the vitamin E forms that nature made it has the ones that the manufacturer was able to synthesize or gather and they stuck them in there but Nature has a whole balanced array of them that you want to take advantage of the second thing is you don't have to overdo it one ounce of nuts or seeds has about five milligrams of vitamin E so an ounce of nuts or seeds if I put them in the palm of my hand that's about an ounce once it hits your fingers it's more than an ounce so a lot of folks they wildly overdo it with these things and they end up getting a lot of problems that you've heard about already okay so what's a healthy diet it's vegetables and fruits and whole grains and legumes those are the foods that give you the iron and copper you need without the excess those are the foods that don't have saturated fat those are the foods that don't have trans fats those are the foods that don't have any cholesterol these are the foods that protect the brain okay who eats that way does anybody eat that way well have you heard of you've heard of the blues you know the Blue Zones you heard of that these are areas where people live to be a hundred sardinia parts of Costa Rica there are many people who have very long life and the granddaddy of them all is Okinawa Okinawa is at the bottom of Japan and anybody know what the dietary staple of Okinawa is you very good it's not fish it's not rice it's sweet potatoes huge amounts of sweet potatoes and this is masu in the middle this picture could have been taken anywhere except it was taken in a country where people eat lots of sweet potatoes and as time went on here's masu at 88 here she is at 100 by the way in Okinawa when you when you're 100 it's not that remarkable you do get a party and you have to share your party with everyone else has turned 100 there's lots of people this is Ellsworth Wareham he is a physician but he in World War two was sailing by on a destroyer right by Okinawa he didn't know masu but if you looked at what they were eating it was almost identical the reason is he grew up on a farm in Alberta and he saw he had to milk the cows and take the eggs from the chickens and he said you know it's not very hygienic and so when the milk was in a glass next to him he sort of tried to push it away a little bit and then when they would kill one of the calves it was invariably like his favorite path so he developed a taste for green beans and he became vegetarian early in life well when he got out of the military he became quite a well-known physician and cardiovascular surgeon and made quite a reputation for himself he did a tour of duty in Vietnam he was decorated by that's him right next to Lyndon Johnson and again that's him to the left of Richard Nixon so he was big stuff he was a very famous thoracic surgeon cardiothoracic surgeon but what was most remarkable about dr. Ellsworth Wareham was when he reached 65 and the other doctors were reaching their mid-60s and they were all talking about retirement he was better than ever and when he reached 70 and 72 and 75 the other doctors were all retired but he was still going strong and he reached 80 and he finally said you know I can't do this forever if I hit 95 I'm retiring for sure and that's what he did when he reached 95 he retired and the other doctor said wait wait wait wait you can't leave you've got more experience than anybody will pay your insurance you got to stay with us they had never had such an experienced doctor in this whole Hospital he said boys I'm leaving I'm going home so I actually had lunch with dr. ware him a couple months ago and he's doing great but he told me a secret he's still operating on the bushes outside his house so the point being this why not stay physically strong mentally clear you're not going to live forever but for as long as your heart is beating let's keep that brain working so you can be sharp so that you can really fully invest in what you're doing now let me take you on the edge of science a little bit there are a couple of other culprits that I want you to be aware of have you heard about aluminum being a possible problem the evidence is like this it 88 county districts in Britain some of them had water with relatively low levels of aluminum some of them had a lot of aluminum in their water and that they looked at Alzheimer's risk and it was about 50% higher in the high aluminum counties same thing in France exactly the same kind of tests people who had a lot of aluminum in their water had more Alzheimers and researchers also found when you look in the brain of a person who has died with Alzheimer's in those plaques you find not only beta amyloid protein iron copper but also aluminum and a fair amount of it but other researchers say forget it it's just a coincidence it doesn't really matter go ahead and have it my suggestion is let them fight it out you avoid the aluminum because aluminum unlike iron has zero biological role in the body your body does nothing whatsoever good with aluminum you don't need it so where am I getting it it's in water and by the way it's not in water bubbling down a mountain stream it's added at your local water treatment plant they added they add aluminum to try to precipitate out sediment in the water but traces of the aluminum are there when you turn on your faucet and now a water filter will remove if it's a reverse osmosis filter the cheapo filters tend not to to remove it unfortunately so a good reason for bottled water or a reverse osmosis filter aluminum pots and pans if it's coated fine but if the aluminum is in touch with the food the aluminum will get into the food if you go to the store and get baking powder you will see two kinds one kind has aluminum the other is aluminum free and it says so right on the label simple you picked the aluminum free if you get a pizza this frozen pizza I hope you don't but many frozen pizzas for some reason have aluminum in the crust or in the cheese the little salt and sugar packets that are single serve they often have aluminum added to keep it from kicking up when it's humid my dad who had an acid stomach he always had a bottle of maalox there and Maalox is an antacid that neutralize it neutralizes acid and one day I read the label and you know what Maalox stands for magnesium and aluminum hydroxide you're just drinking a little bit day after day in phenomenal quantities if instead you bought tums or some other non aluminum antacid you're not getting any exposure to it at all very easy if you take a deodorant that doesn't it does not have aluminum if you use an antiperspirant it does have aluminum it goes through the skin hits the brain so the point being you can choose once you're aware of the choices to make so a little extra power here folate folate is a B vitamin vitamin b6 in beans also in bananas and vitamin b12 you're all aware of researchers tried this trio of vitamins working together to see what they would do for people's brain health this is at the University of Oxford and they used them not as foods in this case they use them as supplements as a test and what they showed is that a group of people they looked at their brain atrophy as time went on a little hard to see the atrophy in the brain it's it this whole is normal that's totally normal that's the ventricles where the cerebral spinal fluid is what's abnormal is there's a little blue edge there and that's the part that's atrophy and people who went into the study and they got a placebo pill with no vitamins they were losing about two-and-a-half percent of their brain the people who were getting the B vitamins again the size of the ventricle is not the issue the fact is they're just not you don't see that blue there so the atrophy was virtually arrested now what are these vitamins doing what they're doing is they're in knocking out a toxic chemical in your brain it's called homocysteine every doctor knows about it homocysteine is sort of factory exhaust cells make it and if it builds up to a high level it's toxic to your heart it's toxic to your brain it's easy to measure when it's high the doctor says here's your treatment you take your B vitamins in a way it goes but you can eat foliage which has the folate beans bananas which have the b6 and b12 supplement very very easy your home assistant comes way way down and the toxic effect you just dodged the bullet very easy memory got better in this group by the way you hear people talk about the Mediterranean diet because it's it is vegetable rich and instead of lots and lots of meat there's more of a more of an emphasis on plant-based foods and also some people talk about the alcohol part of it when I was in college I think a lot of my roommates felt that they were following the Mediterranean diet it's true when people drink a little bit their risk of Alzheimer's is slightly less than if if they don't drink it all or they drink a lot they do worse than people who drink just a little bit but researchers said women what if it's not the alcohol what if it's the great what if that's what's doing it so they brought in a group of people and they asked them to drink grape juice this was the University of Cincinnati they asked a group of people they were 78 years old everybody already had this mild cognitive impairment they were starting to lose their memory what they asked him to do was have grape juice very simple how much one pint today that's 2 cups cup in the morning cup at night very easy they showed that their ability to learn was much better their ability to recall was better very rapidly within a couple weeks it starts improving why well if you think about it a grape is sitting in the Sun it sits on a vine that's sitting in the Sun all day every day getting assaulted by the elements why doesn't it just wither up and turn into a raisin instantly the reason it's it can survive is it has anthocyanins that's what makes it dark that's the dark color it not there to make it look pretty it's there to protect it in the same way as when you walk into the produce counter oh those orange carrots are so beautiful there may be beautiful but that orange is beta-carotene there to protect the carrot the tomatoes are so beautifully red that's like a pain to protect the tomato and that dark anthocyanin color protects the grape if when you eat it it does pass into your bloodstream it does go to the brain it's a powerful antioxidant that protects the grape is it's growing a protects your brain wait a minute are there other little round fruits that are dark-colored that I could add to my diet well sure but let's say blueberries okay same story back into the laboratory the researchers brought in a group of people gave them a pint of blueberry blueberry juice every day and the same story they're learning was better their recall was better so these plants that have been with us for thousands and thousands of years and our biology is designed to take advantage of it the antioxidants get into your body your body knows what to do modern life takes us away wheat a hamburger or wheat french fries or wheat onion rings are we to cheese pizza there aren't any anthocyanins in that all these things that we have depended on to protect us are not part of our culture anymore as soon as they are you get protected okay so we've talked about skipping the bad fats we've talked about the free radicals the last thing I want to talk about exercising your brain very important you know that exercise is good for your heart well what is it what's good about it it gets your heart beating so that gets oxygen into the tissues that gets the waste out researchers at the University of Illinois brought in 120 people they asked them to do something really simple exercise three times a week just walking stay started out at ten minutes three times a week and they worked their way up to 40 and what they showed is that the brain shrinkage that we've kind of gotten used to happening in older people it was it was it was not just arrested it was reversed it was like pumping the brain back up with physical activity and their memory got noticeably better and especially the hippocampus which is for seahorse which is very important for deciding what's worth remembering the hippocampus actually recovers to a degree as well okay that's what exercise will do so now Jeff asked me to give you my exercise EPS and some of you might have heard me say something like I run about three miles three times a week nonsense I want to show you my real exercise tips go to the court as late as possible before your flight Carrie massively heavy luggage and run like hell and I do that about three times a week now when you get there don't do this do not do this don't go through this you know don't go through that thing why I'm not saying it's dangerous what I'm saying is you're missing an opportunity ask for the pat down and then when you get the pat down the guys look at you can put like DVDs and books and recipes and things that they find and they pull out in the confiscate so you with me I've got TSA people who are vegan every every Airport I go through ok and I want you to do that too if you have a shirt that says go vegan they're all going to say tell me about tell me about that vegan diet you just you know you got time put up your PowerPoint give them a little brief lecture leave this leave on a bumper sticker ok all right so how do I begin the way I begin is you see your doctor make sure your heart is up to it if you got any concern make sure your heart is okay make sure your joints are ok if you've got any history of those problems start with a 10-minute brisk walk who can't do that real easy then you work up the next day you work up to 15 20 25 do not focus on distance what we focus on is our pulse I want my pulse to go higher because if the pulse is higher I'm oxygenating my brain as long as that's happening I don't care where you go I don't care what you're doing you're getting good good aerobic exercise so 10 minutes it's week 3 times 15 minutes next week once you're up to 40 that's what has been shown to work in research studies to get the brain pumped up can you do more than that absolutely the more fit you get you'll discover it just becomes self-fulfilling and you can go and go and go and go and you're going to absolute love it okay now it's not just physical activity mental activity as well so intellectual things watching documentaries reading newspapers what these are doing is they're solidifying our the the connections within our brains so the more newspapers you read well be selective doing crosswords are doing the Sudoku or doing anagrams playing with words those are the things that exercise our connections between cells I was sitting in a lecture dr. Dean Ornish who I think is just a genius he was talking about his work to help people to reverse heart disease and then his wonderful work with men with prostate cancer and so forth and he showed this slide and he made this point that if you focus on me if I focus on I I'm likely to be ill if I focus on the group if I focus on the we I can be well and he was making a good point that you want to invoke the group's support but while he was making that important point I was in the back of the room thinking that's cool there's words stuck in other words and I got really preoccupied with it and so my brain started firing with all the different things that you can turn words into it's really amazing you can do it with almost any kind of word so you know have fun with it so the whole idea is to keep those connections alive and exercise them a little bit okay oh by the way if you have two words for everything if you're bilingual you're going to do better research studies have shown that that can delay cognitive decline by about five years if you are if you have three languages even better now your high school French will not help you I'm sorry to say unless you're using it now what counts is using and it doesn't matter how old you are you can pick up linguistic things and that just keeps the neurons firing and it keeps them resilient there's a study called the active study and they set out to actually train people in an organized way to protect their brains large group of people about 3,000 they trained them in memory they train them in reasoning like problem-solving and also processing speed and they tested them five years later and they showed that this kind of training countered between seven and fourteen years of aging so it really does I'll show you what it is in a minute it really works a bad thing is the only thing that benefits is the area you were trained in so if you train in memory your memory is good if you train in problem solving your problem solving is improved if you train in processing speed your reaction time stays fast but you've got a cross train so here's what they do this is a company in San Francisco called Lumosity and you can go online and try this it's I'm working in a beachside eatery and David comes up and he places an order then a few minutes later he comes back if I remember his name if I remember what he ordered I get a tip and it's just a little game that specifically is intended intended to promote those brain areas that we need to protect I feed the fish you dot you click on each one but then the fish move so you have to try to keep track of them or how many words begin with di G these are games that are designed to build up certain parts of brain function and you can do this for free very very simple and then eventually they'll ask you to pay for it but but you could try you you could try it out for nothing this is the most a good company so the most important thing the most important thing about physical activity or intellectual activity is to stop to stop to rest you have to stop it so your your brain can't handle it if you just keep going when I was in medical school the third year of third year of medical school is when you go in the hospital and you see patients for the first time and the schedule starts Monday morning at 8 o'clock and you work Monday morning Monday afternoon Monday night Tuesday morning Tuesday afternoon you go home Tuesday night and you collapse and Wednesday is a normal day 8:00 to 6:00 Thursday you work Thursday Thursday night Friday in the front afternoon and then you go home and collapse Saturday is a normal day 8:00 to 6:00 Sunday you work Sunday morning Sunday night Monday and it's all year long and you might be horrified that your medical care is in the hands of someone who is massively sleep-deprived but what I noticed was all of the interns all the medical students carried clipboards because they could not remember anything they couldn't remember anything they had to write down every single thing when you go to sleep your brain says great every word every fact every interaction is like a new file folder getting thrown down on your desk it's piled high when you go to sleep and you stop the brain files it away so that you can retrieve it later if you never sleep all your experiences in learning is in a big jumble and you can't find it so here's the way it works at the beginning of the night the first half of the night if I hooked you up to an EEG an electroencephalogram it's slow wave sleep relatively slow waves are shown that's when your variant brain is integrating words integrating facts the second half of the night you know about REM sleep rapid eye movement sleep okay you you're dreaming dreams are especially accentuated then and have you noticed how dreams often have sort of an odd emotional content and your brain is integrating emotions your brain is also integrating physical things that you have done this is like riding a bicycle or any any physical activity is integrated in the second half of the night so a person who stayed up really late till 1:30 in the morning and missed all their slow-wave sleep their memory is not so hot the next day a person who stayed up all night their emotional control is shot and you know this is true when a person it has not slept their memory is bad they are irritable or sometimes giddy or all kinds of goofy stuff that all goes away when they finally get some good rest okay by the way remember my sausage maker putting out the the protein strands that starts to turn way down when you go to sleep amyloid production turns down when you go to sleep so 10 o'clock I don't care how good your book is I don't care how great the TV show is turn the light off go to sleep when you get into a groove with it you might wake up early but you're going to find that your brain is really working for you is the way it should be okay wait there's more this is Dwayne Gravlin this is the last thing I want to tell you about Dwayne Gravlin was a physician he also is a physician also is an astronaut working for NASA and he was in his astronaut training got in his car drove home got home got out of his car and there was a woman there at his house want to know what she was doing there and she looked at Dwayne and said Dwayne I'm your wife his memory had been completely wiped out he didn't know his own wife she sticks him in the car they race to the emergency room they say what has happened and eventually the cloud sort of part and he's thinking what happened to me I didn't know my own wife the only thing he could think of is he had started taking a pill called lipitor to control his cholesterol one of the most popular drugs ever marketed and it's supposed to be totally safe it did lower his cholesterol but he thought maybe it's toying with my memory he stopped it memory was fine but as time went on his cholesterol went back up so he started the lipitor again at half the dose six weeks later his memory banks were wiped out again for everything after junior high he stopped he stopped the drug again his memory gradually returned and his lipitor now in the trash he his memory is fine well at first this was thought to be just a weird fluke and many people said it couldn't be you know lipitor is fine I mean it does have some side effects it can be harmful to your liver and your muscles and increase the risk of diabetes but aside from that no I mean I don't I don't I don't mean just for many people it really does bring their cholesterol down without a lot of problem but the FDA did have to issue a report there have now been hundreds of cases of people who had memory problems from not just lipitor but other statins including people who were in nursing homes diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease that went away when they stopped the medication now I don't mean to say that everybody who's on statins is being treated treated in a bad way I don't mean to say that at all a low cholesterol level is good but I do mean to say we should start with diet and whenever anybody's got any brain problem the first place I go is to their medicine cabinet I open it up and I see what's there and there's a few other things if you ever had a colonoscopy you go in the hospital and they're there they're checking for colon cancer and other things and then then you that you put on your clothes and you walk out of the hospital your loved one picks you up in the car and they say how was it I hope it didn't hurt too much and you say you say I don't I don't actually remember the procedure in fact I don't remember anything after I walked into the hospital so funniest thing the reason you don't remember is when you were on the on the the table totally awake they started an IV and they put a drug in your vein called midazolam versed which happens to have the effect of wiping out your memory for anything that happened while you were there they could have stood on the exam table and sung auld lang syne and broken out the beers and had a cigarette and whatever you wouldn't remember any of it and now for some people that's an advantage but other people might say wait a minute I think it should be up to me if you're going to wipe out my May this is used in every hospital in America they use it because it's a good induction agent it's calming and they feel that if you don't remember what happened you're more likely to come back my see I'm not saying don't use it what I'm saying is you're in charge it's your brain your body talked to the anesthesiologist in advance and they have an obligation to tell you what they're doing could they all know that this is going to happen they just never talked to you about it cholesterol-lowering drugs we talked about sleeping medications ambien very popular sleeping pill it makes you sleep but if you happen to wake up maybe an hour or later be very very careful because while you're taking ambien you will not remember anything and you'll be in sort of a party mood many people on ambien find their car keys and they go to the 7-eleven and they come back with barbecued potato chips and donuts and things and in the morning they wake up and they say what happened here they have no memory of what they did whatsoever happens all the time manufacturers denied it initially now we know it's absolutely routine antidepressants antihistamine anxiety drugs blood pressure medicines acid blockers they all have a role medicines are sometimes essential but be aware that they often affect the brain and so do physical conditions depression thyroid disease infections migrants chemo brain so many people say I had chemotherapy I am NOT myself it is not your imagination happens all the time where your your memory is not as good as it was and it's one of the side effects gluten intolerance is not super common maybe seven percent of people have intolerance to the protein in wheat barley and rye but it manifests as digestive problems and brain fog and I don't mean to say you should avoid gluten for most people but if you're having brain fog you could try and just see how you do seize and and if if it doesn't make any difference then you can bring gluten back into your diet ok so I'm going back home now and I'm looking at my family and I'm making my own scorecard for myself did we eat a lot of bad fat did my grandparents eat bad did my father did I and the answer is a course we're a know the family business was to raise cattle did we get too much iron yes did we get copper we took multiple vitamins every day that had the full day's supply of copper my dad got a lot of aluminum in his mail locks did we miss micronutrients we frankly we didn't think that we didn't know what vegetables had we weren't thinking about them we didn't realize that they were there to protect us my dad was sedentary we were all pretty pretty sedentary now lack of mental stimulation that wasn't really my family my father read the New England Journal and all the other medical journals all the time but I am convinced that you can have the most intense program of intellectual activity and as good as that is it cannot resist the tsunami of bad fats and heavy metals and things like that didn't come into your diet so you need all of these things working together my father didn't sleep very well and he took lots of medications and so those are things that maybe we could think differently about so the power plate those are the foods that really do protect us and that's what's really most important is to eat in a healthful way and I want to give you a little bit of good news back in 1909 the USDA started tracking Americans meat intake and it was already pretty high 120 3 point 9 pounds back then and it gradually went up but in 2004 it peaked two hundred one point five pounds of meat per person per year here in the United States and it started to slide yes our population is in rotten shape yes we've got a lot of problems but the coroner is starting to turn and we've now have athletes celebrities and ex-president people who are saying you know what forget me I don't really need it anymore and meat intake has actually dropped about 6 percent since 2004 our job is to keep that whole thing going and going and going and I think we can do it same with chicken Americans eat a million chickens per hour 9 billion per year but it started to fall as well and that's a good thing if we can keep it going we can really change things I have a new book called power foods for the brain coming out next March that I'm really well I I really want families like mine and like yours to know that there's something that you can do we can always make these choices but you can't make a choice unless you have information about it and there are lots of others if you're interested and there are many many other great books out there so many people from dr. Esselstyn and dr. Klapper and dr. McDougall and others have great resources this isn't the way it was 60 years ago where there weren't a lot of resources are there they are there now as some of some of you done our kickstart program online it's free you just go to PCRM org and register and everyday you'll get an email from Alicia Silverstone or an athlete or a doctor who says here's a cooking video here are some menus here are some recipes for you and you get to participate in a in a whole usually have about 20 or 30 thousand people doing it all at the same time so they talk together on a message board so somebody will say Thanksgivings coming up what do I do and inside of an hour you'll have 50 suggestions for how to get through it how do how do you know how to make a Thanksgiving feast others will enjoy I need a healthy chocolate cake what can I you know you get these responses really quickly the reason we do it is if you're trying to make a change alone it's hard but if you're together with it with a whole bunch of people going in the same direction it's invigorating and you're going to succeed with it okay by the way well we have an app also for smartphone mute smartphone users we just launched the Spanish program this month we have a Mandarin program and we have a program that is in English but it's for people of Indian extraction with with all recipes and an information that would be suitable for people in India and the reason we've done that is China is the biggest country in the world meat intake in China has doubled in the past couple decades India is the second biggest and the vegetarian diet that was traditional there is now considered by many people to be the quaint thing their parents do that we no longer do so we need to get this word out and I think we can do it in ways that are fun they take advantage of things that people like to do so the last thing that I just want to say is I hope this is it this is useful and I hope that you're able to use this information to protect yourself and and yet I think there's something more important than that and that is if you go into any school or any playground and you look at the kids kids are in the worst shape they've ever been in at a time when we know more about nutrition that we ever have at a time when we have adequate resources so that every single school should be able to serve healthful food we have kids eating in a way that nobody has ever eaten on this planet before they're eating more cheese more meat more junk more sugar and less of the things their bodies were designed for so their heart gets no protection their brain gets no protection they are going to live all you've all heard it said they're going to live shorter than their parents that's not the worst of it the worst is they start to die early in life they start gaining weight and feel uncomfortable that robs them of their ability to be says physically active as they were before they start to get on medications for the diabetes in the blood pressure they don't feel like themselves anymore you start racking up healthcare costs in side effects and little by little by little they are giving up what's more important and at the end if the trends that are forecast bear out everything that is most important with them everything that's most important in their life will be taken away from them their hearts beating but they are going to be in the corner of a room soaking up money with everything that ever mattered lost that should never happen every every city every town every government body is worried about their health care costs they're all adding up the money that's important but what really matters is that families like mine and families like yours are torn up they should be together they should be together lifelong we're not going to live forever but let's be together let's protect what matters most protect our brain protect our memory our health and our loved ones I'm convinced we can do it thanks very much thank you thank you

Channel: VegSource

Views: 259,023

Keywords: vegan, vegsource, neal barnard, Alzheimer's Disease (Disease Or Medical Condition), cure, prevention, diet, lifestyle, Aluminium (Chemical Element), heavy metals, pcrm, Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine (Nonprofit Organization)

Id: nm-I5CcccIw

Length: 64min 24sec (3864 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 07 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Hilarious_Haplogroup]

There are things that "may help", but if you have the DNA to get Alzheimer's, and you live long enough, you will suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. The diet that helps you forstall dementia is the same diet that is heart healthy. If you spend 24 seconds on this page, you'll save 64 minutes, as opposed to watching the video above. http://www.alz.org/we_can_help_adopt_a_brain_healthy_diet.asp

[u/chagmed]

Opinions on health/nutrition have become like religion. If you don’t belong to the vegetarian/vegan, “fat is bad” camp, you may want to skip this one.

[u/[deleted]]

Piperazine and curcumin.