How to prevent & reverse cognitive decline: Neurologist Dale Bredesen, M.D. | mbg Podcast

knowing your vitamin D level is surprisingly common to see people come in with cognitive decline and their vitamin D level is 19 or 20. and we're saying wait what are you doing here well what they're doing is they're living indoors they're not getting out enough they're not taking vitamin D or they're not absorbing the vitamin D they're taking so they're just not thinking about this [Music] Dell welcome thanks so much Jason great to be here so we were just chatting before we got started I asked you if you were still at UCLA and because we were talking about the exciting time we live in and how more and more people are embracing lifestyle as a powerful tool to prevent whatever it is you're looking to prevent whether it's cardiovascular disease or in this case Alzheimer's and we said it's so exciting and then he said well it's really not in terms of medical school so let's just start there quickly well you know it's it is exciting in terms of the new testing available and the new Therapeutics available and the larger Arsenal available but it's also very frustrating and as we were talking about before medical schools are not embracing the new medicine and you know one of the vice chancellors of one of the major medical schools in the country told me several years ago we'd like to teach this new kind of medicine but we can't do that until all doctors accept it well of course all doctors won't accept it until you teach it so here we have a very backward you know kind of very typical medical approach stuck in the previous century and here we've got people who are dying needlessly with cognitive decline left and right and of course the area of neurodegenerative disease has been the area of greatest biomedical therapeutic failure if someone tells you today you've got Alzheimer's or you've got Lou gehrigs or you've got Lewy Body or you've got frontotemporal dementia you're going to die because they don't have anything to offer you and at the same time we just published a trial in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease freely available online and you can see 84 percent of the people in the trial actually improved didn't just slow their decline they actually improve their scores we have people now on observational trials that are now 10 years in and still doing very very well so long-term improvements so you know this is a strange time because we've got two different medicines we have kind of standard of care medicine and then we have integrative Precision personalized functional medicine and these two unfortunately need to merge they need to come together we need to use the best of both and we need to teach both but only one of these standard of care is being taught in medical school wow and just to frame this up for people you know in terms of your work and Alzheimer's today Alzheimer's disease is the fifth most common cause of death for Americans 65 and older and almost two-thirds suffering from Alzheimer's or women and it gets worse because Alzheimer's projected to double by 2060. and you know as we all know lots of pharmaceutical companies working on a vaccine and what's so exciting about your work is you have a protocol that isn't going to require a job or a pharmaceutical drug and look those things save lives but I think most people would agree I would prefer not to do that if that were even an option because right now they're working on it but to your point earlier there is no solution so let's start there at the highest level let's talk about your protocol and what you've seen if you could summarize that for folks yeah great point and you know you mentioned the the key Point here which is that uh there's so many people dying of Alzheimer's so we've had over a million people die in the U.S in the pandemic Alzheimer's will kill almost 50 times that many of the currently living Americans about 15 percent of the population dies from Alzheimer's it's horrible and as you mentioned it's getting worse so if you look at what we did we spent 30 years in the lab looking at what is the fundamental nature of the neurodegenerative process why do you have this brain degenerative process and people have gone after all sorts of things you know one one group says it's herpes of the brain another group says it's prions it's amyloid it's Tau it's uh you know it's epigenetic problem it's on and on and on none of these approaches has ever led to a successful therapeutic and so what we realized after years in the lab is that this is fundamentally a network insufficiency and what I mean by that is you have a whole network of things that will signal to the brain whether you're going to grow make new synapses and maintain those synapses things are good you know your inflammation is low your toxicity is low you've got good energetics good trophic activity you you signal to your brain okay time to to build on the other hand when things are bad you go into a a protective downsizing mode just like what happened with covid-19 we were all told to shelter in place and socially distance don't go to work we went into a recession that's just what your brain does with Alzheimer's you have insults and the problem has been there are dozens of insults that do this so when we treat the disease the idea here is your supply to this network your neuroplasticity network is chronically outstripped by your demand so we measure all those things insulin resistance your gut leak your ongoing inflammation your methylation on and on and on and then we're going to Target those things that are sub-optimal we're dropping the demand we're increasing the supply so we're dropping the demand by improving the inflammatory status and in improving the toxicity status and we're increasing the supply by improving things like spo2 cerebral blood flow mitochondrial function trophic support things like that all of those things and what's amazing is people get better and in a trial that we published even their MRIs got better so it was striking not only did their cognitive scores get better but their MRIs showed it so before we dive into some of the the markers and tests that want to do I'm going to start with you know DNA and genetics and the the apoe for Gene I think a lot of people now can put you at risk which approximately 25 percent of the population has this Gene and so how do you think about that Gene specifically as a as a risk factor and other risk factors for example lifestyle factors like nutrition exercise sleep environment could you walk us through your thinking how you view genetics and lifestyle and our ability to turn off or turn on this Gene yeah that's a great point so what we do is we think of these various players the various signaling the various insults that happen because really this is disease is a response to insults and unfortunately insults that begin at birth that's the surprise things like how our Airway is formed whether we get addicted to Sugar from formula things like that unfortunately so they're starting very early and we're looking at these and then as you mentioned we look at these are all playing on a genetic background so just as you indicated there are people who are highly susceptible intermediate susceptible and low susceptibility to developing Alzheimer's disease and these have to do with things like inflammation now there are dozens of genes but as you mentioned the most important and most common is apoe the Epsilon 4 allele also referred to as apoe4 so as you said for three quarters of us we're able E4 negative like I checked myself I'm a three three which is the most common that means my lifetime risk is about nine percent for Alzheimer's it's not zero but it's not huge if you have a single copy of apoe4 and that is 75 million Americans your lifetime risk is 30 percent everybody should find out where they are you can absolutely prevent this problem literally Alzheimer's is becoming optional there's a wonderful website apoe4.info started by an apoe44 homozygote who's done very very well and is now 10 years on the approach that we developed and continuing to do very well actually wrote part of the second book with me so 30 for the heterozygotes the homozygotes there are so two copies of apoe4 they are seven million Americans and of course the vast majority don't know it until they start to develop Alzheimer's and their risk is well over 50 percent in some studies up to 90 percent so in all likelihood they will develop Alzheimer's disease unless they get on active prevention so we encourage everyone who's 45 or over please get a cognoscopy just like we know we should get a colonoscopy when we turn 50 please get a cognoscopy if you're 45 or over get on active prevention to make sure you don't develop Alzheimer's so what is a cognoscopy where can one go get one yeah so you can just go to mycognoscopy.com it's easy to do and it consists of three things and I have to say it's much more pleasant than a colonoscopy so a good thing to know about so number one you want to have some some blood tests that will indicate and unfortunately not being done by many Physicians we've now trained over 2 000 physicians in the protocol we developed in 10 countries and all around the U.S so it's pretty easy to to get in um but you can actually do a cognoscopy without seeing a physician so you can get blood drawn Etc and simply get a report so you can actually see this number one so we're looking at what is your Homa IR what do you have apoe4 just as you mentioned um what's your methylation status do you have toxicity all the things that drive cognitive decline number two a simple online cognitive assessment it takes 25 or 30 minutes so you can see where you are because as you can imagine this sneaks up on many people we had a woman who came in a few years ago said you know it's in my family and I want to make sure that I'm not getting I think I'm okay I think I'm here for prevention well she scored a 23 out of 30 on the mocha which means she was already well into the third stage which is called mild cognitive impairment and that's another issue here these stages of Alzheimer's people wait way too late to intervene and now after treatment she's a perfect 30 and she's doing great so it does sneak up up on you and people say oh you're just getting a little older that sort of thing then the third part of the cognoscopy is only necessary if you're having symptoms and that is to get an MRI with volumetrics so you see your hippocampal volume and you see your gray matter volume but if you're there for just for prevention just the first two easy to do and you can see where you stand and get an idea how to prevent the development of Alzheimer's so in the book you go into great detail you list the number of markers Labs that one should get tested for if they're concerned if you had to summarize you know what are what are maybe the top five that non-negotiables if someone's concerned they should go to their doctor and say hey I I want these five Labs immediately yes so we have a something called pre-code which is prevention of cognitive decline and which gets a smaller number of labs so you can do that and absolutely what so the the simple way to think about this is to summarize it as four major groups and then within those you want to know something about each of those so group number one is energetics and so you want to know your mitochondrial function your spo2 are you dropping your oxygenation at night so common and an important contributor to cognitive decline and then your your blood flow and then your Ketone level so you want to get a general idea about energetics and you can get that in part just by getting a lipid panel because that'll tell you are your vessels in good shape or are your vessels in poor shape and by getting an hscrp so second big issue is inflammation and so just getting an hscrp simple thing to do and if you're at you know if your hscrp is sitting at 0.3 or 0.4 you don't have a lot of systemic inflammation as you know but if it's sitting up at three or five or ten which we see all the time you've got ongoing inflammation even if it's sitting up at you know 1.2 you've got too much ongoing systemic inflammation and then the third piece is toxicity and toxicity is coming from three different types of toxins it's coming from inorganics things like air pollution and this has been shown repeatedly over the last several years increase in air pollution increases risk for Alzheimer's and some uh inorganic toxins like Mercury so yeah you'd like to know your Mercury level that's another good one to know second group is the Organics and then the third group is the biotoxins so it'd be helpful to know a TGF beta1 will tell you a lot about whether you are exposed to biotoxins or tick-borne illnesses things like that that also increase your risk and then finally trophic support and so you need to support your brain and things like knowing if your homocysteine is okay which is involved with with inflammation as well and and detox both of these knowing your vitamin D level is surprisingly common to see people come in with cognitive decline and their vitamin D level is 19 or 20. and we're saying wait what what are you doing here well what they're doing is they're living indoors they're not getting out enough they're not taking vitamin D or they're not absorbing the vitamin D they're taking so they're just not thinking about this and then of course Omega-3s another great thing so I would advise people please have either your omega-3 index we'd like to see it at 10 percent or higher or at least get your omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio and as you know average Americans it's up in the 1520 to even 25 I talked to someone the other day checked that it was 23 they went on appropriate treatment it's now three to one and three to one is good you want to be in the kind of one to one to three to one range you don't want to be below 0.5 to 1 but you want to be in that one to three or even four range not up at 15 to 1. so those are the the kind of General things that you want to look at things like hscrp homocysteine vitamin D omega-3 things like that are critical I'm a huge believer in Omega-3s and just in a personal note our listeners are probably sick of me saying this but I am a I have a methylation story to share so what's the highest homocysteine you've seen that's a great point you so um the highest homocysteine I've seen is 32. I have not seen hundreds the ones up in the hundred you know I've not seen those but I've read about them so this is about four or five years ago um cardiovascular disease runs in my family and Dr Frank Lipman is a dear friend and I started to see him in my 40s because I said you know what I need to get a little bit more sophisticated here around you know blood testing so do all the do all the labs I'm pretty good across the board with the exception of publicisteine comes back as 63. wow yeah Frank says it's a mistake take it again I take it again it's still high and so he messengered me over a cocktail essentially it's your cocktails the BBB methyl folate B vitamins betaine very similar to what you describe in the book and actually led to us formulating a product around this and I was like he was I was like Frank what do I what do I what do I do you know my diet is pretty good and he was like you know what you need to I had the Deep the the c670 double Gene so like I'm MTHFR which most significant part of the population has I went from just with supplementation 63 to now I'm between 12 and 15. I can't get it lower I can't get it and I'm just like I'm at peace with it I realize look everyone's got everything else is fine and you know I'm still always looking for you know can I get it to seven or eight but you know I I sort of come to conclude if I don't I'm pretty okay uh but but wow I've got a methylation problem yeah and it's a good point and it's great that you found this is the thing that that you know we Physicians were taught to respond to symptoms and now of course virtually all of us are dying of complex chronic illnesses where the symptoms don't come until late in the process so therefore it's really changed the way we think about these things just what you did is the right thing you go in and you find out what am i instead of saying what do I have you say what am I headed for and you want to look at all these different pieces and we need a lot more Silicon Valley in our medicine we need to have larger data sets we need to have more computer-based algorithms it's so interesting to me that you know Google knows where you shop they know what you're doing every day why aren't we using these same sorts of approaches to understand who's headed not just for what shopping center but who's headed for what disease and this needs to be done much more in medicine 100 agreed and with regards to COG who have declined and the same with with methylation and homocysteine there's no symptom I had no symptoms people always says how did you feel I felt fine I felt great I didn't feel anything and with cognitive decline to your earlier point when you start to notice problems with recall memory issues it's often too late exactly and you know that that you know you bring up a really important point which is that when you develop Alzheimer's it's the end stage of something that takes at least 20 years so the first stage of this illness you're asymptomatic just what you were saying about having a high homocysteine you have no symptoms and yet you can already begin to pick it up often in your 30s on pet scan changes and on spinal fluid changes but of course most of us are not having routine spinal taps for obvious reasons and we're not going in for routine pet scans so then you go into stage two which is called subjective cognitive impairment and it's so interesting for me so many Physicians say oh that's just normal aging everyone has trouble with their brain with aging no they don't in fact we all know some people who are in their 80s 90s or even 100 who are sharp as attack so in fact this is Sci subjective cognitive impairment by definition you know there's a problem you know that something's wrong and yet you're still able to score normally on standard neurocognitive testing now interestingly that phase lasts on average according to the epidemiologists 10 years so we have a tremendous window of opportunity to prevent dementia the third stage is called unfortunately mild cognitive impairment MCI this is like telling someone don't worry you only have mildly metastatic cancer it is a late stage of a terminal illness and yet we still turn these people around all the time and then the trial we just published 84 percent of them got better and then fourth and final stage is when you actually have dementia and by definition what that means is you've now begun to lose your activities of daily living you may have trouble balancing your checkbook you may have trouble showering taking care of yourself whatever it is that is the end stage and unfortunately it's when most people are going in to see a physician about the problem so if we can just convince people to come in for active prevention or during that 10 years of Sci there would be very very little Alzheimer's disease so let's segulate a prevention because Alzheimer's and all forms of cognitive decline are horrifying and I do think it's very encouraging that we have an audience that's younger and interested in taking proactive steps you know the great work of Maria Shrivers on Patrick you know you're getting this on the radar Patrick Schwarzenegger's you know young Hollywood star he's talking about cognitive decline so I think there's a lot of energy around it which is very positive and so with that said I want to walk through prevention in terms of lifestyle and I always like to start with the big one nutrition and so how would you describe your nutritional Philosophy for those looking to take those preventative steps today yeah great point and as you indicated nutrition really comes first there are seven Basics nutrition exercise sleep stress reduction or Stress Management brain training targeted uh supplements and detox those are the seven and as you said nutrition comes first it's amazing how much that contributes something I was never taught as a neurologist being trained how important nutrition is in cognitive decline line and so we use something called keto Flex 12-3 and the idea is if you look at all the studies published if you look at all the biochemistry and we're really coming from what does it take to make and keep synapses that's what we want and that's what Alzheimer's takes away what does it take biochemically to do that it turns out that the best from the nutrition side is a plant Rich so high phytonutrients high fiber multi-colored Etc all these wonderful phytonutrients coming from the plant so plant Rich mildly ketogenic we're talking 1.0 to 4.0 millimolar beta hydroxybutyrate or if you prefer acetone 10 to 40 Aces On a breathalyzer for example then that that's the range you want so so a plant-rich mildly ketogenic diet with appropriate fasting periods now you have to be careful if you're frail to begin with you don't want to have long fasting periods so that's the Paradox on the nutrition for Alzheimer's on the one hand you need to be insulin sensitive and you help that by by doing some fasting on the other hand you need to be able to get into ketosis which off often is helped by doing some fasting so what that means is you don't want to hurt yourself because this is a network insufficiency if you just go to a long fasting period you can get worse so what we suggest is start out with some exogenous ketones Dr Stephen canane from Canada beautiful studies showing that just exogenous ketones actually improve MCI so start with those and then ease into you get your weight appropriate get your BMI appropriate and then ease into endogenous ketosis over a couple of months because again you want to become metabolically flexible that's the goal you want to have the ability to use glucose and the ability to use to use ketones and you know insulin is an important trophic Factor when we used to grow brain cells in in a dish all the time in the lab of course we always had to include insulin transferrin and selenium these are critical factors for these neurons to survive so when you develop insulin resistance and by the way the amyloid itself binds to the insulin receptor and inhibits its signaling so another problem there in addition to our endogenous insulin resistance then in fact you want to get rid of that insulin resistance become insulin sensitive again and you want to be able to go back and forth and unfortunately most people with cognitive decline have neither they're neither insulin sensitive nor are they keto adapted so in terms of fasting window what does that look like is that 14 to 18 hours is how do you quantify that for people yeah great point so we want enough time to un to induce autophagy we want enough time for brain cleaning uh and the you know the the whole glymphatic system which is by the way inhibited by noradrenergic activity so if you're if you've got sleep apnea and you're you've got upper Airway resistance and you're being activated all night you're not cleaning your brain the way you should so you take typically 12 to 14 hours if your apoe4 negative 14 to 16 hours if your apoe4 positive because apoe4 positive you tend to do better with absorbing fat if you starve a bunch of people the apoe4 positives live the ones who are April before negative have died so that's you know that is a key difference in fact you know apoe4 again it's not that it's worse it's just different it is it has been argued it's the thing that allowed us to become hominids the simeons don't have it and it's the thing that allowed us it is a pro-inflammatory gene it is a gene that allows us to eat and live longer on one meal so it's the thing that allowed us as Professor tuck Finch from USC suggested years ago allowed us to come down out of the trees walk on the Savannah puncture our feet eat food that is raw filled with microbes and we were resistant to all these things and still if you live in a third world country you do better better cognitively better with respect to Longevity if you are able E4 positive interesting and so you mentioned a plant-based keto diet what does that look like what should be on our plant-based keto grocery list yeah that's such a good point because people automatically think oh keto give me some bacon give me some ham stuff like that and that turns out not to be helpful for cognitive decline as you know uh so the what this means is you want to have as the as has been said by so many people you know Mark Hyman David Perlmutter on and on and on have the biggest part of your plate is a salad and you want to look and and then of course you want to include lots of extra virgin olive oil and again I realize you know you know olive oil is in some way a sense a processed food but this is giving you wonderful Omega-3s and then you want to have with it some protein so you want to have a high good fats intermediate protein low carbs and hopefully zero simple carbs and especially fructose which is a big player in cognitive decline so yeah get yourself a big salad have some wild caught fish um a preferably some smash fish so you'll want the low mercury fish the wild caught fish things like salmon Mac mackerel not king mackerel anchovies sardines and Herring as being the smash fish the ones that are going to give you the good Omega-3s without giving you the Mercury that you don't need or have some pastured eggs and pastured chicken or or some grass-fed beef any of those things great keep that good omega-3 and check your Omega 6 to Omega-3 ratio then you want to keep low on you want to stay away from grains you want to stay away from inflammatory dairy uh you know those sorts of things that are going to be giving you a problem and things that are going to potentially damage uh your your intestinal lining so you don't want to have a leaky gut and it's as you know it's incredibly common to have a leaky gut you want to optimize our microbiome there as you know there's a lot that's not known about what to do to get the best organisms into your microbiome people are so you got to have acromancy them you send a fella because that's the key you don't want to have this or well okay we don't know everything yet but we do know that diversity is critical for the microbiome and so in terms of diversity how do you think about uh you know you mentioned Dairy is a no so do you mean excluding Dairy altogether or if you've got a problem with dairy avoid it or do you avoid uh Dairy with casein or not just in general is it Dairy as a whole is there some Dairy okay for some people or for others if you know they've got a bloating issue just I just want to be clear on Dairy specifically you know you brought up which is a really important concept that again most Physicians don't utilize and that is that this isn't this is a dynamic process so it's ongoing so when someone comes in to see us with cognitive decline in any of the Physicians who worked with me on the trial wonderful functional medicine medicine physicians Dr Anne Hathaway Dr Kat tubes Dr Deborah Gordon they will start with no Dairy but as you indicated see how it goes so this again this is a dynamic process you have to remember when people come to see us with cognitive decline one of two things will happen will make them better or they will die so we pull out all the stops at the beginning this is a terminal illness and if you go to any of the standard memory centers around the country they'll just tell you you're going to die and we're going to give you some drug that doesn't work very well and you're going to die anyway it's a horrible horrible situation so we want to do everything possible to change that ratio so that we've got a good synaptoglastic side and a low synaptoclastic side now what you can then do as you get better sure reintroduce a little bit of dairy but check to make sure it's not giving you problems as you indicated some people get bloating for some people it is truly pro-inflammatory there are people who are lactose intolerant have a problem of course there are people where this especially along with gluten containing foods will give you a leaky gut so you the good news is we can now look at these systems very nicely and you can tell and there's a a huge future for wearables now wearables don't tell you about gut leak but they tell you about so many other issues from heart rate variability we can now as biohackers check our telomere length and our microbiomes and our in our leaky gut and our heart rate variability and our sleep status and you know whether we're getting enough slow wave sleep whether we're getting enough uh REM sleep what are oxygenation statuses while we're sleeping all these critical things so that we can actually help ourselves to live you know healthy to a hundred without getting any cognitive decline and that again that should be the goal for everyone let's get to 100 with no cognitive decline so you know again we start without the dairy but you can try something yeah I would try A2 if you're going to now reintroduce it so that you don't have you know the the casein issue that you alluded to food obviously a Powerhouse and in my opinion and I'm not alone here next to food is exercise so in terms of exercise specifically for prevention how do you think about types of exercise frequency and duration if you were to prescribe to someone this is what you need if you're concerned you're young you're fine maybe it runs in your family maybe it doesn't but if you're concerned this is how you should think about exercise yeah great point and you know for all of these things we're getting a much better understanding we're linking the molecular biology of the app signaling and of the synaptic signaling in your brain to the actual intervention and so one of the interesting papers from several years ago was showing that when you exercise your Ketone levels go up and interestingly the ketones find their way into your brain and they actually interact with specific histones to reduce the inhibition of producing brain derived neurotrophic factor and we've always known that somehow exercise increases bdnf we just didn't know how it did it now we're understanding how these things link up and we're having better and better tools so I really like two things that have come up recently one is called katsu these are these restriction bands that you put on improves flow it improves it gives you more bang for your buck in terms of strength training these were used by some of the Olympic athletes and has been used by very elderly people with very good results because you don't have to exercise as long katsu how do you how do you spell that I haven't heard of that yeah k-a-a-t-s-u check it out katsu bands you put them on your arms and legs and then you get basically more bang for your buck and then the second thing is uh is ewat exercise with oxygen therapy there is more and more work showing that as we begin to get a little older we're not perfusing the brain we're not getting quite enough oxygen and so again it's another signal to the brain start downsizing living with a smaller brain well no as you were just saying we're how do we tell young people we can pretty much guarantee that you can get to a hundred without cognitive decline well it does start with this you know the things we're talking about right now and so I would recommend to anybody please get both strength training strength training really helps your insulin resistance and aerobics which really helps the Ketone side the blood flow side the oxygenation side so these are very much synergistic in the way they work and I would recommend get 45 minutes of good exercise at least five times a week make sure you really get out there and I unfortunately I run into people who say well I do walk well okay but you want to get your heart rate up um you know you want to you want to get that rate up and keep it up for 15-20 minutes uh and you know whether you like to do you know 70 of your maximum heart rate whatever you're you're looking for in there now obviously you don't want to give yourself a myocardial infarction so don't jump on this you know by I always say biological systems were not meant to function in square waves you don't go from zero running to a marathon the next day so work up to it and you'll do much much better well I think that's an important note because everyone can walk but if you think about the 60 to 70 percent you can get there walking if you're walking at a fast pace or taking the stairs I wear an r and a whip and I track everything and I can get there very easily if I just walk really fast it's not that difficult essentially to summarize it's it's walking fast where you could hold a conversation but maybe it's a little bit uncomfortable you're slightly out of breath yes remember that change requires some stress that's what hormesis is all about so you want to do a little more than you did before so that you're now slightly improving each day if you're just walking and you're getting your heart rate to 90. probably not going to do nearly as much for you as if as you said you're walking and you're walking fast or you're walking uphill or you're doing you know stairs up and down whatever it is get that heart rate going and it will pay dividends in the long run you know you mentioned harmesis and my version of that you know we recently moved to Miami and so I'll go for a very quick walk in the middle of the day when it is extraordinarily hot and humid that's uh on that note I do want to spend time on hormesis you know how do you think about hot cold therapy everything from cold showers to plunges to hot baths and saunas these are wonderful and of course I really do like the sauna you know you can add sauna with a plunge great uh but sauna I like because it is so good with detox and there was of course very famous study out of Finland a few years ago showing that as people increase their saunas per week from one or two to six they decreased their rate of their risk for developing dementia and it was a quite striking effect actually so again detox something that as a when I was being trained as a neurologist we were never taught that these various toxin exposures were actually critical for cognitive decline it was just people get Alzheimer's we don't know why it is we don't have a good treatment for it and people are going to die so now that we understand that in fact toxins are one of the critical things that contributes to risk for cognitive decline saunas are coming up as very important and again same thing with exercise sweating using some you know some detoxing soap like a Castile soap to get rid of of these toxins very helpful and all the ways to get rid of them very very helpful so yes I think horses you're absolutely right so more specifically to me though and for those who live in uh warm climates is it as effective to go for a very brisk walk or run when it's like 105 110 degrees does that have the same effect as the sauna or or somewhat similar well that's a great point so if you can you know first of all working up a sweat um and you know and second of all again you know getting that getting that heart rate up so absolutely that's if you're going to get a good sweat that's why now you're right you you do you get the same sort of infrared effect given the fact that you know the sun has an entire spectrum and that includes infrared especially late in the day um then you you probably will get uh you know as has been pointed out anything that gets you sweating and then removing that sweat can be very helpful as a part of your detox regimen so let's talk about this done for a moment here to some degrees the sun's gotten a bad rap you know we we you know look I I don't think the messages go out there in the middle of the day and and throw on the the tanning lotion and just bask in the Sun for hours and and you know become a leather-like human that you know with another like skin I don't think that's the message that the sun can do damage but I do want to take a step back and think about the sun in terms of the morning and the evening when the UV rays are less powerful so how do you think about the relationship between our health and the sun specifically in the morning and evening it's a good point and what's been pointed out by others and I think it's a very nice point the morning sun is telling your body you're getting more of that UV and it's telling your body it's daytime your circadians are reset and it's a good idea and in fact by the way if you're traveling uh you know west to east or east to west you want to get out and get that sunlight at a time when it is dark for your where you came from so if you're going east you want to get out early in the day to get that to tell you reset my circadians please if you're going west you want to go late in the day again to say reset my circadians please and as you indicated late in the day it's a different Sun as you're setting you're really getting more of the infrared that's telling you okay late in the day please start winding down so your circadians no question are helping you know what I say one of the big themes that we realize going through all this molecular signaling is that we we really spend way too much time indoors we are living you know all of us we are living in what is often mold food what is a relatively toxic environment what is often a relatively high carbon dioxide environment and a relatively low oxygenated environment there's just so many things about being outdoors that actually helpful now I get it if you're living on a freeway and Outdoors is full of air pollution you got to be careful but especially hey as I said I grew up in Lauderdale you've got the the trade winds there all the time it's a beautiful place the air is clean the beach is a great place for exercise so you can be you know it's a tremendous place to be healthy I agree I couldn't I love love Miami um so you know as I think about our conversation a lot of what we've discussed so far is obvious you know eat a lot of plants have you know make sure you're getting Omega-3s avoid the sixes you want to get that ratio right you got to move you got to get your heart rate up poor mesis is good what are some of the less obvious things we should be aware of in terms of things we should avoid that we're probably not thinking of or things we should be doing that aren't as obvious as you know eating lots of uh polyphenol Rich vegetables yeah great point so the things we've talked about are the basics and then unfortunately the things that you don't know about often that will get you number one people who have chronic undiagnosed infections and so we see it all the time people come in with cognitive decline and they have undiagnosed babesia or they have recurrent herpes simplex which is actually which gets into the brain so unfortunately the neuropathologists have shown us when you look at the amyloid plaques in the brain what are they doing it is your brain's innate immune system covering pathogens and toxins with this preventive stuff so you're literally protecting your brain now unfortunately it's also downsizing the brain so it's literally saying okay we can't live the way we are we got an ongoing insult we've got to divert our resources to dealing with these toxins and with these pathogens so changes in oral microbiome so I recommend everyone check out your oral microbiome you can do that very easily with oral DNA and I have no relationship with a company companies that make oral DNA like you know my periopath this is good to know do you have high P gingivalis t-dentacola prevotella intermedia F nucleotum these as you know these organisms are being found in the brain they're being found in the plaques of coronary arteries they're being found in cancers so these things are impacting us systemically babisha another one tick-borne illnesses when people get borrelia the Lyme organism in more than 50 of cases they also get co-infections babesia Bartonella erlikia anaplasma things like that so important to find out if you have those check out your gut microbiome so those are the kind of the additions those are the specific things that you need to know for each person and the things that will drive even though you might be having enough polyphenols Etc which you know again which are helpful to you but if you're not getting over the hump you may have a chronic infection comes up all the time and then toxins you need to check all three inorganics what's your Mercury status do you have a lot of exposure to uh to air pollution what are your what are the rest of your Metals Organics things like glyphosate toluene formaldehyde Benzene and then mycotoxins and other biotoxins things like trichotheses and this is again something we see all the time trichothesine related cognitive decline gliotoxin okra toxin a all of these mycotoxins so those are the ones that are missed by classical medicine and go beyond just what you were saying go beyond the typical you know eat good vegetables and have some periods of fasting so that's where the people who are getting the best outcomes are doing the basics but then looking in for the specifics as and addressing those as well and in terms of environment we spoke about Sun how do you think about light artificial light being indoors different types of lighting Windows just light light in general in an indoor environment yeah this is such a good point because you know as a simple rule basically you want to get as much outdoor light as you can while at the you know period of the sun being up and you want to minimize especially the blue light but you want to minimize the light in the evening you know when the Sun goes down we're are now we're now tricking mother nature which is never a good idea and especially for those of us and I'm guilty of this myself working away at 2AM on a computer that's the wrong thing to be doing it's actually hurting your sleep it's hurting your circadians um and it unfortunately is often associated with poor cardiovascular outcome as well so to the extent possible we want to wind things down and I should mention we have been doing a project now looking at macular degeneration we're taking what we've done in Alzheimer's and adapting this for all of the other major neurodegenerative conditions Lewy Body frontal dementia ALS macular degeneration Etc and what we're seeing is that you know exposure to light no surprise you've got that long-term blue light exposure it exceeds what your macula was meant to handle your macula as long as the light is on is like a Ferrari going 260 miles an hour you are really zipping through the in these these things are firing you're you're photoreceptor cells are firing firing firing firing so you've got to give them a rest and this is why some people like the idea of a little bit of red light therapy getting down using the blue blockers at least do that at least minimize the blue because that's the high energy light that is damaging to these things and they've got to be literally what what happens each day they lose their heads um because they've got they've essentially taken out the garbage and picked up by your rpes your retinal pigment epithelium cells and those are the ones that fail first in macular degeneration by the way twice as much macular degeneration in the US as there is Alzheimer's it's incredibly common and there's no treatment for early onset for for the initial part the so-called dry and by the way they've done really well on the program we developed just the first couple patients so we're very excited about that so as you indicated you don't want blue light you know it's great to have light in the home during the day but when the Sun goes down you want to get as little blue light exposure and as as much as possible obey the circadians your own circadians and the circadians of the earth and so in closing I want to bring it back to the title of the book the end of Alzheimer's program and so when will we see the end of Alzheimer's and in terms of what you're seeing to some degree we we have a zero percent success rate pharmaceutically at least with intervention when can we get to a place where we're 50 maybe 70 well when how do you see that curve in the future to lead people with some hope with everything we know today from the research Alzheimer's is now becoming optional and so if everybody would get on active prevention or earliest reversals don't wait if you've got a problem if you've got SCI get in there then we could see dramatically less now it'll take some time for the current Alzheimer's patients to move through the system but we will see much less and I do believe there should be a global program just as we had Global programs for vaccination against smallpox for example uh and against polio we need to have Global programs to reduce the burden of dementia and I believe we could reduce we could certainly reduce the incidence so the new case is coming by 50 within the next five years if people would just do the right things the problem is everyone's still stuck in this idea of pharmaceuticals monotherapies but Pharmaceuticals are going to work the best when they're on the backbone of a personalized Precision medicine protocol 100 agree Dale thank you so much thanks so much Jason great talking to you

Channel: the mindbodygreen podcast

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Length: 49min 27sec (2967 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022