EAT THESE FOODS To Prevent ALZHEIMER'S & DEMENTIA | David Perlmutter & Mark Hyman

there's data that shows that a nutritional intervention is effective in turning dementia around so literally if your brain can't properly handle sugar you can tell 30 years in advance whether you're at risk for alzheimer's that's right okay so let's get into some of the details here because you've written a lot about for example grains grain brain this is a new edition of grain brain everybody needs to get a copy uh it's completely revised and updated it's pretty awesome and i think this guy has really nailed it now a lot of people are not too happy with these ideas you've been attacked on television you've been attacked in the media you've been attacked in medical journals including uh you know indirect attacks against me and and our colleague dale bredesen who's really pioneered uh the idea that we could actually stop or reverse alzheimer's which you actually were talking about decades ago um what what are the things they're challenging you're talking about changing your diet so let's talk about the food part because there's such controversy we should we eat saturated fats should we not do we is sugar really that bad or not because the sugar association says sugar's fine so why wouldn't we believe that right so i i would say to your viewers google pearl mutter and cbs and watch a recent interview and as you said this morning yeah but just put cbs and pearl motor it'll come up and uh as they they show the book dr promo has written new book about carbohydrates in the brain but before they cut to me they said but we reached out to the sugar industry the sugar industry told us that we should eat sugar decades of research it's all good have at it what would you expect them to say and how why would you ask the sugar industry and my response was yeah because you know it wasn't that long ago that the tobacco industry was telling us we should be smoking cigarettes that's a good thing uh but the reality is the the question that i was supposed to answer but i diverted because i wanted to really hit the sugar thing was uh dr perlmutter what you're saying is that all grains are bad and i've never said that i've you know despite the name of the book i believe that when we look at gluten-containing grains we should avoid them as you know there's plenty of research in terms of what gluten specifically a subpart of gluten alpha glyden does uh in terms of threatening what we talked about earlier and that is the gut lining so that in everybody or just people who are sensitive to it it's difficult to say i think we know that probably most people have some degree of increased gut permeability or leakiness of the gut when they consume gluten or specifically glyden that said uh the non-gluten containing grains grains meaning seeds of grass things like rice and corn can be consumed in a quantity that doesn't present a lot of carbohydrate so if you're watching your daily consumption of carbohydrate and you want to have a little bit of wild rice have at it or some non-gmo corn good luck trying to find that but i think that if you're counting your carbs as you should be looking at net carbs that i i don't think that's necessarily the worst idea having said that uh again because you know there's a bit just to back up on the carb thing now there's been some recent studies published by walter willett and others at harvard looking at thousands and thousands of people showing that people who eat very low carbohydrate diets uh don't do well they die earlier people eating very very high carbohydrate but somewhere in the middle about 50 which to you and i seems like a lot of carbohydrates yeah do better can you kind of address that because it's well i think people should eat tons of carbohydrates yes you should be eating carbohydrates and i i just did a blog with somebody and it was said why we need more carbs david perlmutter emptying people uh i think the hashtag was why that's fantastic wtf right yeah um so uh yeah we need lots of carbs because we need lots of fiber in our diets by definition broccoli is a carb you bet it's the carbohydrates so that's right and there's something magic when you take uh you make a bagel or a croissant i mean it's no longer a carbohydrate or simple carbohydrate it's a croissant or whatever it is yeah but you're right so broccoli kale i mean these are good sources of dietary fiber which is by definition a carbohydrate though it's non-digestive and polyphenols and antioxidants you bet and fuel for the microbiome fuel for your gut bacteria so yeah i see in my book culture metabolism i wrote carbohydrates are the single most important food for health and longevity and what i was referring to was vegetable but then people take it out of context i say yeah he's not he's not paleo he's not keto uh so i think that you know the biggest faults then with the well with that type of research is you've got to qualify the other area that needs great qualification is you know i'm often challenged by people saying well you know the china study said that you eat meat you're going to die and dr dean ornish says we need a very very low fat diet and people ask me what do you think about that and i would say you know i agree with both of them why do i agree with other well i think by and large the type of meat that people eat that goes into these studies where they come up with the relationships to colon cancer for example you bet those are very very threatening forms of meat but there's actually not even meat it's it's actually processed meat which is it's processed meat and you know there is a sense of alchemy that somehow you can feed a cow or other animal that you're gonna eat garbage and it'll magically turn into gold literally garbage yeah they find them skittles and you bet that are expired so uh so i think there is uh a place on the table if you choose to eat meat for grass-fed uh organically raised forms of meat of of animal product and similarly uh do i think that dr ornish uh has some merit in his discussion of a low-fat diet yes because the type of fat that is eaten in western cultures is awful yeah it's highly processed omega-6 oils that soybean oil soybean sunflower that dramatically increase uh the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body and get back to where you and i start our conversation today and what's really interesting uh to think about you know we've wondered the mechanism for that over the years we've said well and it's a little technical for your viewers but they'll love it the omega-6s produce chemicals called prostaglandins and leukotrienes that can be pro-inflammatory we kind of glammed onto that for many years like the hormones of your immune system they create inflammation right but now we know with all the interest in what's called the endocannabinoid system which is what everyone's interested in now because of the the availability of cbd and the use of medical marijuana that the omega-6s help to increase the production of two important uh cannabinoid chemicals that are produced within the body we call them endocannabinoids because they're produced in the body two ag and another one called anandamide which bind to a receptor called the cb1 receptor that absolutely explodes the production of these inflammatory molecules and interestingly sat down what you said was eating vegetable oil activates these receptors it creates inflammation yeah and uh and this is yet another way to understand the beauty of the omega-3s because similarly the omega-3s create cannabinoid-like chemicals in the body that block that activity and that's another important pathway by which the omega-3s are so good for us so when when people like dr ornish say we should be on a low-fat diet pretty much based upon the type of fat that people consume in america i'd say he's right but you can get even more bang for the buck if you not only cut those oils out and fats out but add to the equation the omega-3 so we improve this ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s which is so high now in america down to a level of three to one or two to one whereas typically in most people's diets it's about 20 to one in favor of the omega-6s these are new i mean we didn't have these oils a thousand years ago 100 years ago you're right we we've increased our intake of soybean oil which is now 10 of our calories 1 000 fold so yeah it's 1900 and canola oil that health advocates still talk about which was it developed at the turn of the century as an industrial oil to lubricate machinery yeah grape seed oil yeah that's a good thing and now it's highly gmo contaminated yeah that's an issue so you mentioned omega-3 is amazing the other issue people concerned about is saturated fat and particularly the context of alzheimer's an apoe4 gene which is a gene that may increase your risk of alzheimer's well it does depending on how many copies you have and so forth is is this something we should be worried about i mean bulletproof coffee and everybody yeah let's let's cover up time magazine says eat butter like what what's the deal here butter is back and let's uh take that apart a little bit unpack that just for your viewers to be really clear that there are some genes that help increase a person's risk for alzheimer's and one of them is the so-called apoe4 allele and you can learn about it by having an at-home genetic test that anybody can do and 20 percent of americans will carry the apoe for allele copy one copy and some carry two copies which is uh clearly associated with as much as a twelve-fold increased risk for developing alzheimer's disease the apo e genes are involved in the production of apolipoproteins and that's a a big term but it has to do with proteins in the body that carry fat deliver fat uh to where to where those fats might be needed there is some indication that the benefits of saturated fat for the brain we'll talk about that in just a moment and even the benefits of a ketogenic diet and we'll talk about that as well i guess i'm putting a lot of things on the plate here okay we got it okay might be a little long here we might have to add another memory card um but that are those things are less beneficial in the apoe4 carriers meaning that they're not going to gain as much benefit directly from ketogenic diet or a diet that's higher in saturated fat is there harm doesn't look like there's harm uh and that said i think that there are benefits that everybody gains that i believe if there is some sense of harm would offset those potential issues which are very minimal to begin with and that is what the benefits are from consuming saturated fat is the types that we recommend mc2l coconut oil the saturated fat that's found in eggs for example the benefits uh one are that we enhance our body's ability to produce these important chemicals that are called ketones there's this huge interest these days all over the internet and certainly uh in various venues for lectures et cetera in what is called the ketogenic diet the number one diet books you bet and with good reasons and it's it's a brand new phenomenon for humans it's only the type of diet we've been on for a couple million years so we'll call it on and off of it right but we've been in and out of ketosis for a long long time so it's got a heck of a track record and we we can talk about that but basically it's a diet that counters inflammation that enhances energy production that activates this bdnf gene pathway to create more of that growth hormone to grow new brain cells that helps uh reduce the production of free radicals that helps get rid of damaged energy producers called mitochondria that helps us with our ability to rid our bodies of cells for example that are damaged so in multiple arenas being on a ketogenic diet is really a good thing so i think that the ability of the coconut oil and the mct oil to make that happen really is very very powerful and there's data that's showing that those actually help improve out outcomes in alzheimer's patients there's actually a data that indicates interventionally that's simply using mct oil improves cognitive function in established alzheimer's patients and what did i just say there's data that shows that a nutritional intervention is effective in turning dementia around yeah there's also data from iran that demonstrates that probiotic intervention demonstrates improvement on the mini-mental status test which is a standardized test doctors use in the office to determine how well a person's brain is functioning it's impressive i just i just reviewed a book uh by the new head of the lou rouel center cleveland clinic which is the alzheimer's research program there and i was shocked to read he talked about using ketogenic diets in patients with alzheimer's as a way of treating the problem which is pretty radical you've got the head of a major academic medical center saying yes we can use food as medicine we're seeing this trend food as medicine who knew and yet there's this incredible backlash um about this we're gonna get into that in a minute uh there was an article in the journal of the american medical association called the rise of pseudo-medicine for dementia and brain health and the uni would be considered the pseudo-medicine quack category i think i i for me it's a personal badge of honor that i'm on quack watch me too along with most of our best friends but the saturated fat thing i just want to come back and the the founder of quack watch commented on this article in jamaica you need to see that i'm sure i'm sure i feel like i'm doing a good job when i get more people attacking me uh from from you know certain categories of like monsanto and the pharmacy history and but the saturated fat thing is fascinating because i want to be able to hear that saturated fat is not necessarily bad that it is something that can be helpful in many conditions but that's with one big caution is to avoid what i call sweet fat and the reason that saturated fat i believe causes and i want to hear your opinion on this causes problems in the research which can correlate saturated fat with disease like heart disease and other problems is that when those studies were done they're done in the context of people eating saturated fat in a high starch sugar diet i call that sweet fat think of donuts french fries ice cream cookies these are high fat high sugar combos that are deadly so the caution is if you're going to eat saturated fat you can't eat a diet high in starch and sugar yes high in carbohydrates right plant foods i always say 75 of your diet should be plant foods in terms of starch not in terms of starch in terms of vegetables in fact most your diet should be plant foods by volume but they very little calories and most of your calories should be fat but it's not much volume can you comment on that yeah sure and i would say let's even take this unpracticed further and uh it doesn't even have to be in the in relationship to eating carbohydrates uh simple carbohydrates because the data comes from these studies that look at calculating the amount of saturated fat in somebody's diet based upon the foods that they eat and they calculate well this person eats uh you know a bunch of beef they eat a bunch of bacon etc they get a lot of saturated fat well as we talked about earlier those are the wrong kinds of foods for many many reasons so this is a calculated determination of saturated fat it's not a biochemical demonstration that saturated fat does something in the body it's people who ate a diet higher in saturated fat which delivers lots of toxins because these the mod these are foods from animals that have been fed as we said earlier garbage that's where those saturated fats how they're delivered to the human body so it's not a clean type of study right it doesn't relate to telling a person to take a tablespoon of organic coconut oil no relationship whatsoever look fifty percent of the fat in human breast milk is saturated fat yeah saturated fat wait a minute so basically breast milk is almost as much saturated fat as pure butter you bet and why is it there because it helps for brain development helps your immune system development it helps prime it was 25 percent 50 it's of the fat it helps but of the calories in breast milk is from saturated fat yeah we're able to get less than five percent by the american heart association so according to the american heart association we should ban breastfeeding i think it needs a label they need to go around and stamp breasts all around the world saying uh this is not heart healthy yeah avoid this i mean you know it wasn't long ago when we were told not to eat avocado avocados or nuts yes because they had high levels of the dreaded fat that was about the worst and we know where that came from now we know how medical literature in the late 1960s was tainted by industry by sugar who wanted who influenced what was published in the new england journal of medicine as recently revealed in the journal the american medical association and uh ended up on the front page of the new york times yeah and you know doctors bought into that we bought into what our journals were telling us and it was patently wrong now you bring up a journal article from the journal of the american medical association that is castigating uh our approaches to dealing with brain health calling it pseudoscience we began pseudomedicine we begin our conversation today with a discussion of the uh publication in the same journal i'll have you know in november of this year where in it was revealed that the so-called alzheimer's drugs that this article is a proponent of yes uh don't work but actually make people worse which is the pseudo medicine exactly well i think you know part of the problem is that you know our type of medicine has not had the funding to study these interventions nobody's funding dietary interventions because they're expensive they take a long time nobody's looking at these complex systems approaches to treating dementia which you and i have done for decades it's not just treating one thing like our friend dale talks about medicine maybe there's 36 different problems or 54 or 12 and if you don't deal with all of them you're not going to get better and our colleague and mentor sid baker says if you're standing on attack takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better and if you're standing on two taking one tack out doesn't make you 50 percent better right so if you have mercury poisoning and gluten sensitivity and just deal with the gluten the mercury still might be a problem and you don't get better and i think that's a really important lesson i think this this article is very disturbing to me because it didn't really analyze the data behind it and there's so much data behind the kinds of things we're doing whether it's optimizing our diet or exercise or restoring sleep or meditation or using nutritional support which is you know the b vitamins and methylation or getting rid of mercury or fixing the microbiome or balancing hormones these are the things that we use in constellation to help optimize brain function and and what we know is that these things work i mean the only study that's ever been shown at a scale to reverse or slow cognitive decline is called the finger study which was basically using multiple interventions diet exercise stress reduction addressing risk factors for the heart for example in some resistance and there in life yes but therein lies the criticism because the notion of leveraging multiple inputs into a system and looking for an outcome is uh absolutely at odds with the current model of how science as it relates to medicine is carried out you mentioned dr bredesen has a new book coming out where he actually reviews case studies of reversing alzheimer's disease and i had the opportunity to write the forward for that book and i talked about how this is unprecedented uh that he is not looking at what we call monotherapy to find the golden single drug that can be monetized you know and yet he's looking at using multiple but getting a great result so why would we argue with that but you know it is an inconvenient truth for people who want to believe otherwise that we need to create single approaches with monotherapy and that can be the home run billion dollar product that makes the investors very happy well it's exciting maybe excited to hear that i'm working with some of the top scientists at cleveland clinic talking about how do we study these systems approaches how do we break the paradigm how do we actually design a trial where we can test this theory instead of calling it pseudomedicine conic the future of medicine which is really what it is so i have to say that uh as i get older i'm less offended by these yeah and i i really uh find it to be almost compl complimentary comp it's sort of like complementary medicine because uh to be uh the outlier and to be um you know disruptive i think is really a good thing these days because the status quo is not where we want it to be and uh we need to challenge the status quo and it's why people call us out it's why you know you appear on the various videos and so do i and some people put a thumbs down and comment well you know i read the china study and it said we should all we shouldn't yeah it's great people want to believe yeah because it's an inconvenient truth to tell somebody you need to stop drinking diet drinks you need to stop eating as much sugar as you're eating because it's going to compromise your health most people don't want to hear that message they'd rather as i mentioned earlier hope for the magic bullet as it relates to alzheimer's it's interesting that in february of 2018 one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies pfizer gave up gave up yeah a lot of we're not gonna chase down the magic bullet for alzheimer's anymore because it's not it doesn't have a good enough roi hundreds of studies billions of dollars spent going down this rabbit hole that is the wrong strategy for identifying the risks the causes and the treatments for cognitive decline or alzheimer's it's pretty stunning and everybody's failing and now people are starting to pay attention to what we're doing i i have a slide that i'll show you uh a conference you know i'll be attending in a couple days and it's really quite interesting because it shows it measures a group of people uh in in terms of insulin resistance whether they have insulin resistance which is the consequence of diet or not over time who collects the most beta amyloid this pro sticky protein in the brain that is associated with alzheimer's risk who collects more beta amyloid and it's dramatic how much more amyloid is in the brains of people who are insulin resistant the reason i mentioned in the context of our discussion right now is because the amyloid in the brain has really been the focus of the pharmaceutical industry trying to create an alzheimer's drug amyloid does or doesn't play a role whatever but sort of like sticky toffee that comes out right but but developing drugs to get rid of amyloid or to keep it from forming in the first place has been the focus of billions of dollars of research because if you could get rid of that protein you'd that might cure alzheimer's it doesn't but the point is that uh we can determine on the front end how to lower our risk for developing amyloid in the brain in the first place it's a reaction to something it's it's it is i mean it's driving inflammation that's right it's an overreaction it's an overreaction to infection for example to herpes simplex virus to chlamydia to various organisms that do in fact colonize the microbiome of the brain there is a microbiome on the brain of the brain in fact in a book we have coming out there's a title uh i mean a chapter dedicated that from dr tansy's group to harvard yes so it is really uh quite incredible to realize uh another uh slide uh series of slides looks at the degree of brain shrinkage if you carry the alzheimer's gene in comparison to the degree of brain shrinkage in one year plotted against your hemoglobin a1c or your average blood sugar and it turns out that the rate of shrinkage of your brain is greater with a higher a1c than it is carrying the alzheimer's gene and you can't change pretty frightening you can't change the alzheimer's gene if you got it you've got it you can change the expression of the gene you can but you can sure as heck lower your a1c by simply making some dietary changes yeah low sugar you bet more uh carbohydrates in the form of fiber and more good nurturing your gut bacteria reducing inflammation but again that is the inconvenient truth people don't want to embrace the ball is very much on your side of the net it's not up to me on the other side of the doctor to fix this yeah it's up to you to hit that ball appropriately with some topspin so that i can't return it you know give it a good shot here and here's how to do it how lower your consumption of simple carbohydrates yeah eat more healthful fat eat more dietary fiber exercise make sure that your sleep is restorative really important very much underrate we spend a third of our lives sleeping or trying to sleep and we recognize that so much is going on during that activity which we used to think is simply passive but that we understand that this is hugely involved in reducing inflammation in enhancing the brain's ability to take the garbage out through the activity of the glymphatic system to triage our daily lymph system of the brain david talked about the exact system which has to work at night and it works at night it's got the nightshade garbage out of your brain so that you're ready to go the next day and to triage our day-to-day experiences and put them where they will be meaningful for us to rely upon in terms of leveraging new information to make decisions so so under under underrated i want to come back something we were talking about before because i think it we kind of glossed over it which is this study on the low carbohydrate versus high carbohydrate diets and what that showed and what it didn't show and and challenging the very notion of grain brain which is that we should be eating a low star sugar diet when i looked at that study and i actually am giving a talk at this conference called the failure of nutrition science and tomorrow you are tomorrow yeah at 10 15 at 10 15 which will not be when this podcast is airing no this is evergreen but the the uh extraordinary thing is when you start to dig a little bit the headlines were low carbohydrates kill people they're not safe and everybody reads the headline and go okay it's science it's published in a major journal it's top harvard scientist it must be true but when you actually look at the data first of its population study which doesn't prove anything it just shows a correlation yes or no you know i wake up every morning and the sun comes up 100 of the time that means that if if mark mark doesn't wake up the sun's not going to come that's right so they're correlated a hundred percent but there's no correlation i noticed cause and effect that whenever it's people's windshield wipers are gone it's raining yeah obviously the windshield wipers make it rain absolutely absolutely but what was fascinating about the studies when you look a little bit deeper first it wasn't really low carbohydrate the low carbohydrate group was 38 carbs which is not low carbohydrate and second when they did the the study it was thousands of people tens of thousands of people over 25 years they gave them two questionnaires separated by six years of what did you eat last week and people actually don't tell the truth it's well documented in fact in this study the average caloric intake was 1500 calories now the average person needs about two thousand twenty two hundred calories where are the other seven hundred calories it could have been all sheet cake and we don't know what they were eating so the study you know may be suggestive of certain things but it's really not proving anything and people get all cut up in the headlines and don't really look at critically at the studies and that's part of the problem i i had a similar experience recently when a study came out the headlines were a gluten-free diet increases risk of heart attack all you gluten-free people you're all gonna die of a heart attack yeah and again harvard researchers and uh i had to respond to this and the answer is read the study yeah and what the study showed was that people who adopt a gluten-free diet by and large have much less dietary fiber they don't know what's gluten and what isn't gluten so they're eating less they're dieting free cake and cookies exactly and what the authors commented on in the in their conclusion was that they fully recognized that there was less fiber consumption in the gluten-free group it had nothing to do with but the way they spun the article was that gluten was a toxin yeah you know uh and uh it was it was i mean going gluten-free was somehow toxic right and that and you wonder how could avoiding something make it a toxin yeah in the first place it's not very confusing but the headlines get spun you know case in point what you have here the pseudo-medicine my goodness yeah so it's it's pretty exciting where we're at in terms of the brain and i think that you've clearly been out ahead of this for decades um in in terms of the the newer ideas around fasting and intermittent fasting and fasting mimicking diets there's a lot of noise about this and ketogenic diets are part of that spectrum which is like a fasting state when we don't eat we get ketogenic and when we eat a high fat low starch diet we get ketogenic so what is the utility of these what do you think about these things is this really where we should be going and what are the differences first i'll i'll say that you know the beauty of this coming into the forefront which it really is right now at least we think so because we're seeing a day in and day out is that these are approaches that emulate our ancestors meaning that our ancestors had times of caloric scarcity and that would do things to their physiology that would allow them to survive and that's a very important fundamental premise because it plays into the gene activation part of that story plays into why researchers like dr valter longo i know you're going to interview him why they're getting really incredible results across a huge spectrum of our modern day maladies being cancer uh heart disease and even dementia they're treating the root causes of all of them yes well you're and you're harvesting uh pathways that lead to good gene expression you're tinkering with uh the expression of the life code in a positive way and off loading some of the negative expression of dna that would have otherwise happened based upon how people were otherwise eating so there are first of all there's a term uh um intermittent fasting which i think is is clearly a bit nebulous does that mean fasting for a couple days every every month or does it mean just deciding not to have breakfast time restricted eating yeah it's well it's actually uh that's a little bit different we'll get to that in just a moment but you know when we have our last meal in the evening there's a period of time that we don't eat generally unless we're getting up in the middle of night in the refrigerator but that time people do and klein levin syndrome is one don't don't ask me um uh but people go to sleep they wake up in the morning and then that first meal is called the break fast you break your fast and if you can protract the time till you do that then your body will indeed produce more and more of these chemicals we talked about earlier that are good for us called ketones so protracting that i find until maybe noon one or two o'clock i think is a good thing i knew you were coming today so i didn't eat breakfast well i did because i don't think i think it may well be the uh i thought it was gonna be the only meal i was gonna have today but turns out that that's not the case uh but uh typically what i if you once did what i do at home is i don't eat until about uh about one o'clock or sometimes two o'clock or sometimes not at all or sometimes just the evening meal and people wonder well how do you function i function really well as a matter of fact i mean i may add to that a little bit of mct oil just to get my ketones a little bit higher yeah so um the uh fasting mimicking diet that you will obviously learn more about when you uh interview the the person credited with inventing that dr walter longo is a technique to gain the activation of the genes the positive aspects of this approach while at the same time making it more tolerable and available so it's like eating uh 800 to 1100 calories a day which puts your body into a semi-starvation state that activates all these anti-aging which is imperative mechanisms and and let me just say uh that the other thing that fasting does that i think is underrated but nonetheless really important is that it it uh enhances a sense of gratitude which i think is hugely important when you realize suddenly that you've taken food for granted in our society we all do that because it's plentiful but when you're not eating and for a day or two and you suddenly realize that wow we live in a time when i can eat when i want to it it raises your sense of gratitude and that through what we talked about earlier the rewiring of the brain the more gratitude that you experience in your life the more it wires your brain into the gratitude center yeah it's powerful so i part of the theory of the fast mimicking diagnostic i want to get into that for a little bit because it is confusing even for me someone who's been studying this forever the different opinions you know he's no saturated fat he's very low protein no animal protein um and the theory is that saturated fat's inflammatory and promotes aging uh and he's found this in mouse model yes which may be certain kind of mice and does it apply to humans and what do we mean and then he also talks about the role of protein activating a particular pathway it's called mtor which is an in a protein that um that that actually can cause the protein actually causes activations pathway that seems to lead to accelerated aging so he's saying no animal protein and that we should eat a low protein diet uh and that the fasting mimicking diet is extremely low protein how do you reconcile that with the rest of sort of the science of what we know around protein and aging in fact even even suggest that as we get older we need more protein so i'd say first of all that we have to always keep an open mind that my position on animal protein has changed over the years and will likely continue to change i eat less and less of it i eat more of a plant-based diet for many reasons not just with respect to my health but beyond that there are two sides to the mtor story as you well know i mean when you rhonda patrick i think has done a terrific job in talking about the upsides of mtor in terms of building muscle mass yeah so um activates when you exercise exactly you know is a great thing so i would say that uh we have to keep an open mind and these are still some unanswered questions that we are going to leave on the table we're not going to be a dogmatic and say it's this way and a story but rather we will need to study it further yeah the broad strokes are more dietary fiber less simple carbohydrates and changing the quality of the fat that we eat i think those are nothing's indelible but i think you know those are important bullet points that if we could just get that message across that's really uh very very fundamental the other lifestyle issues that we talked about earlier uh i think are important as well but you know we have to really respect a researcher like dr longo uh and then a caution uh would be to recognize that we cannot always extrapolate from the mouse model to humans yeah directly though we do it a lot i do it a lot uh but you know for example the glymphatic system was demonstrated we talked about it earlier the clearing of the brain during sleep if they were able to get the rodents to sleep on their left side does that mean people should sleep on their left side i don't think so my left side i sleep on my right side usually but you know maybe there's some knowledge there but uh again so we will follow the work of of a terrific researcher like dr longo and and watch what he comes up with i mean you know with a person as dedicated as he is yeah uh he deserves uh a lot of attention yeah it's extraordinary to look at you know the work is it the question is always compared to what right things can be looked at in isolation and seem to be good or bad but when you actually look at comparing things to other things what do you find i mean you can find for example that a plant based diet is much better in creating better outcomes than than a diet that's a typical american diet even a low-fat vegan diet is far better than a typical processed american diet right that is not a surprise but what about comparing a vegan diet that's low fat to a for example a paleo diet that's very high in starch from carbohydrates that are good like the the the vegetables right and higher in fat and a little more animal protein and see what happens comparing the biology of these things how do they affect the aging process it's very fascinating one of the things that i found challenging with dr longo and i'm going to chat with him about this is that he says yes even a low carbohydrate diet will lose will you lose weight you'll change all the bar markers of diabetes and then some resistance but that doesn't matter because it promotes aging and activates all the aging mechanisms and a great conversation to have a thought that comes to mind that maybe you'll bring this up with him and that is you know in a in a sense uh his fasting mimicking uh diet program uh kind of uh is uh resembles dr bredesen's approach in that he's incorporating this program into cancer therapy where people are receiving chemotherapy for example yeah much as dr thomas seyfried wrote the metabolic basis of cancer talked about using a ketogenic diet in correlation uh i mean in in a long way with chemo conjunction with chemotherapy radiation therapy and even surgery but doing your best to avoid steroids if possible so not that the fasting mimicking diet is the end-all nor is ketogenic diet dr seyfried describes the end-all but could be looked upon as adjuncts to amplify the effectiveness in a more comprehensive way of more standardized uh approaches much as dr bredesen talks about leveraging multiple inputs essentially you know the doctor i mean there's a lot of people using it for many problems right we see studies for example from the group virta health looking at ketogenic diets reversing diabetes and 60 of patients and getting them off medications or down on the medications in 98 of patients uh reversing all the biomarkers of aging we see this and we also see guys like siddhartha mukherjee looking at ketogenic diets and cancer animal models they've been able to reverse stage four pancreatic cancer stage four melanomas and now they're looking at doing this in human trials so we're going to be getting more and more information tell us since you published brain brain five years ago almost six years ago what is changing the science what do we know and why did you revise the book because you know it was such a great book i read it so did a million other people apparently what is different and what can you tell us about the emerging science the playing field is really different now so you know uh i was criticized when the first edition came out by a an unnamed uh individual at uh an unnamed ivy league uh medical school one who will not be named one will not be named but it's in new haven connecticut uh we'll leave it at that and uh that this was nonsense that my ideas about uh carbohydrates etc really made no sense at all and believe me he wasn't the only one as you would have expected that to criticize what same folks that don't like me yeah and what has really happened over the past five years has been this incredible degree of validation there was no keto paleo any of that stuff uh that's really new stuff yeah and it's really focused on the notion of getting rid of these simple carbohydrates there was no real recognition about gluten except for what dr william davis had talked about in wheat belly which really i think opened the door to the whole gluten discussion and just the notion because i went for the brain what would you expect just the notion that our lifestyle choices can rewrite your brain's destiny is really the central theme of the book and and reduce your risk for untreatable diseases was really very um uh discomforting for for very for people who wanted to believe in the monotherapy give me a pill mentality so that's changed quite a bit there's been incredible uh studies uh that have supported the notion now about insulin resistance the importance of insulin beyond just its role in providing glucose to the brain in terms of being a trophic hormone for the brain allowing brain cells to be healthy beyond just powering them up and insulin insulin so it's it's good that a lot of insulin we need insulin in the brain yeah we compromise the ability of insulin to get into the brain when we become insulin resistant by having a high sugar diet that the the blood-brain barrier that keeps things in or out of the brain uh its ability to absorb insulin and therefore bring sugar into the brain is compromised when we become insulin resistant who knew and yet as you mentioned virta health dr sarah hallberg done incredible work showing that we can absolutely reverse that you've demonstrated it time and time again the other interesting a part of the story is now which we didn't have back then we we see brain scans that show the brain's inability to use blood sugar as a harbinger of alzheimer's 20 and 30 years later so literally if your brain can't properly handle sugar you can tell 30 years in advance whether you're at risk for alzheimer's that's right and we see that in children whose mothers had alzheimer's apoe4 carriers and importantly we see it in people with insulin resistance and in young women who have pcos that they already though they are young have these deficits in the way that their brains are able to utilize sugar we don't yet have the data in terms of their future risk for alzheimer's disease but i think because about 80 percent of these women are overweight and have insulin resistance that they're set up for alzheimer's risk what is really quite uh exciting is the work of a doctor stephen cunning who i was on a panel with just a week ago in los angeles um who has done these side-by-side brain imaging studies showing what we've we've known about that the brain can't utilize sugar as a harbinger of alzheimer's and even in alzheimer's the brain can't utilize glucose as a fuel but if you now use a new up-to-date type of study that shows the brain's ability to use fat specifically ketones as a fuel these brain cells are fine yeah they're ready to go they just need a different fuel source it's such a different paradigm that i learned in medical school right that the brain uses 25 of our glucose that glucose is the main fuel for the brain and yet you're saying there's this parallel pathway for energy for the brain that isn't sugar it's fat and it actually runs cleaner makes the brain work better can reverse if you're a hunter gatherer and you uh three four days into trying to track down the wildebeest to whatever it is you you think is going to be your source of calories and you're not it's not working out for you the first thing you've got to power is your brain because you've got to be clever enough to get food or you'll die so we evolved this incredible alternative pathway that allows the brain to burn body fat and use it as a very powerful what dr vic has called a super fuel so that's the uh the type of validation that grain brand has received the type of research that has been done over the past five years that connects some dots for me that we're missing because we didn't have that research but you know we had thought in looking at these brain scans that show that there are areas of the brain that are not utilizing glucose in the alzheimer's patient that that was an indication that those areas were where there were neurons that were dead yeah not working anymore and that's flawed yeah because when you supply ketones those neurons come back online and say oh gosh i've been away for so long clinically oh absolutely i mean that's the fundamental for why we now see interventional trials using uh mct oil increasing ketones why dr bredesen in his protocol uses a diet that increases ketones i've seen this true it's striking in a patient who had diagnosed with early alzheimer's we addressed a whole bunch of issues that she had including mercury gut issues inflammation nutritional deficiencies hormonal issues like thyroid she did great for years she would typically been in a nursing home yeah and she had a big stress which was her husband died and she declined um so i said why don't we try a ketogenic diet let's just be a little more aggressive uh and her son said it was like a miracle it was literally she was not coherent really memory was really bad couldn't navigate her life and boom it was like she came back online when she wanted a ketogenic diet and was aware of her surroundings her memory was dramatically improved she was able to function in her life and be active and do things i mean these are quote anecdotes which are highly different i hear you they're ends of one i mean look dr mary newport wrote about her husband and n of one she put him on a ketogenic diet has a new book coming out and i recall one um elderly italian woman who couldn't uh they didn't her family didn't want her driving writing checks anymore they're very worried about her and they brought her to see me and she came to elvis with her three sons who were very big and they were very uh they wanted mom to be fixed and i you know the pressure was i didn't want to mess this one up so you know put on a ketogenic diet she returned to driving a car and uh and you know was able to manage her finances and i'm glad i got that one right yeah but they're doing this across the spectrum and i would say you know there's great value uh to the ends of one hey it's dr hyman if you enjoyed this video you're going to want to check out this next video coming up not only you have a leaky gut but you have a leaky brain look bacteria not to scare people bacteria love the brain why 25 of the body's glucose is used by the brain they're they're they're they know where to eat they're going to you know le pen

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 56,065

Keywords: David perlmutter intrview, david perlmutter gut health, david perlmutter disease, mark hyman, mark hyman interview, mark hyman diet, mark hyman foods to eat, live longer, prevent disease, health, health tips, nutrition tips, health theory

Id: 9l4vfdrwh_o

Length: 47min 16sec (2836 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021