SHOCKING SCIENCE On Preventing Alzheimer’s With YOUR FORK! | David Perlmutter

[Music] welcome to the doctors pharmacy I'm dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an F F a RM Acy a place for conversations that matter and today's conversation will matter all of you because it's with my friend and colleague and groundbreaking neurologist David Perlmutter who you may know from the grain brain he is a board-certified neurologist four-time New York Times bestselling author he's got his MD from universe from Miami he's had many awards he has been on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Alzheimer's disease he's published extensively in peer-reviewed journals including archives of Neurology and a lot of other great journals he lectures all over the world including the World Bank Columbia University script NYU Harvard few second-rate institutions there and he has published some amazing books in fact they guided me in my early practice as a functioning medicine doctor one that was called better brain that was I think might have been the first one I don't know if it was self-published but it was a great book and then grain brain just hit the world by storm it's the surprising truth about wheat carbs and sugar with over a million copies in print and he wrote another book about the gut and the brain called brain makers which is also very fascinating book he is really an extraordinary guy and is coming up with a new book called brainwash written with his son Austin Perlmutter who's also a doctor about the role of social media and the constant stresses on our brain and what they're doing to our brain in our world so I am so thrilled to have you here David thank you for joining us on the doctors pharmacy well I'm delighted to be here and you know the book was brain maker but brain makers actually makes me think about the gut bacteria more that they're building the brain so that was a I appreciate that sir my wife's a stand-up comedian has one of her many skills and she was recently going to do a skit on how her depression was caused by her gut microbes and how it wasn't that she was depressed because of some psychological reason it was because there were these bugs in her gut that were causing depression in fact we had a very interesting experience recently just to talk about that for a minute where she was with our friend Alberto Ville Aldo who's a shaman in Chile and he taught her how to make Saccharomyces using raspberries cook up the raspberries you put the probiotic on there and then you eat it well we did it down there it was great but when she came back she took it and she got severely depressed like unusually physically depressed and it was because she was eating a cocktail that she made that didn't turn out right it was something wrong with it and it had a huge effect on her mood so yes actually your brain maker's is what yeah dr. M and Mayer actually wrote a book about it and really brought to our attention the role that our gut bacteria are playing in mood in how well our brains are working and how well our immune systems are working so it's a bit of a revelation it's pretty amazing now David you and I go back a long time do 25 years maybe even and I was earlier but I was so impressed by you and you were so smart and I was so nervous even good that's in the past ten she doesn't leave me my are smart but I was so impressed by your thinking and your radical view of the brain that was so different than anything I heard and that can partly inspired me to write my book ultra mind solution ten years ago because I was so impressed that you framed a brain is something that is not fixed that we can actually influence our brain we talked about caring for our heart but I want talk about caring for our brain and you've mapped out a strategy that not only makes sense but actually works clinically and I've used it on literally hundreds of patients with brain disorders I've gone to almost every lecture you've ever given because kind of an acolyte and a fan and I and I really find that using these principles of functional medicine for the brain it's one of the most amazing breakthroughs that we've ever seen in medicine in fact the head of neurology at Cleveland Clinic said mark if you're right and he was dubious that I was right he's if you're right this is the greatest breakthrough in neuroscience in 50 years so how did you end up going from a traditional board-certified neurologist to being the guy you are and breaking all the taboos about what we think and what's true in medicine and telling telling a very different story about the brain in a word I'd say dissatisfaction so here I'd like the Rolling Stones can't get me I was gonna say how did it have it a lot of drugs you know but I was very dissatisfied as a mainstream neurologist working in a practice with two other neurologists doing what neurologists do basically diagnosed and adios you know making rounds at the hospital seeing 40 50 patients a day and then going to the clinic and writing thoughts diagnosed and adios means you diagnose the patient and then there's nothing you can do for ya and I'll just you say goodbye that's right and I felt impotent by that I mean I that wasn't why I wanted to become a physician I wanted to turn things around I'm by nature a fixer no matter what it is I like to fix things and we don't do that as neurologists to this day you're really treating symptoms you're not treating the underlying problem much less preventing the underlying problem which is a place that I think you and I will go to during this interview but it's really as I've said many times focusing on the smoke but not the fire what's really going on and it turns out that the brain is no different in comparison to the heart in comparison to immune related issues the liver and that is it is a reflection of things that aren't right primarily as it relates to the brain and the heart etc the pancreas and diabetes through the process of inflammation inflammation is as detrimental to the brain as it is to the rest of the body our current popular lifestyle choices are Fanning the flames of inflammation which is actually redundant because inflammation comes from the word inflamed basically who knew so that is become the the focus of the work is to go upstream not looking at a downstream treatment for weed ridding the brain of his toxic beta amyloid or helping the brain make more chemical acetylcholine which doesn't work but rather which of the drugs that had been tried for Alzheimer's exactly a mess and we're gonna get into that too I am certain but realizing that yes Alzheimer's is by and large a preventable disease that's a disease affecting 5.4 million Americans right now which is largely preventable what is it like for families to go through that I'm a neurologist I've gone through that with many many families and clearly wrote da their dad their mother or their husband their wife and my father died of the disease too I mean it's how do you put a value on the emotional content of that experience you cannot especially when you know that it is largely preventable so these are you know the lemons from which we make a lemonade we're gonna move forward we're gonna light the candle we do have to curse the darkness a little bit and I'm certain that's that will come up today but we've got to do our very best to let people know there's another side of the story that they have not heard yeah and the one side of the story that they're that it's being continually looked at is live your life however you choose and then when you are suddenly suffering from a problem cognitively impaired we've got a pill for you I mean that's been a narrative you write that is was on the Alzheimer's awareness the Alzheimer's Association website that I looked at yesterday that said these are the drugs for Alzheimer's that will slow the disease and what does that mean so you don't get in the nursing home three months faster right so it delays the admission well that's what it says therefore therefore you should take these drugs well it turns out that in the Journal of the American Medical Association online in November of 2018 was a meta-analysis study published by a dr. Richard Kennedy and that's a study of all the studies that have been done it is and what he found was that not only are the currently two the two largest classes of drugs that are prescribed for Alzheimer's memantine and then what are called cholinesterase inhibitors not only accepting namenda which are the drugs exactly right done episode being the generic form but not only do they not work but they actually speed people's cognitive decline and and I'm gonna take a pause with that think about it the drugs that are being prescribed to the tune of close to a billion dollars a year here in America that families put their faith into that this might help mom or dad are actually worsening the decline in their cognitive function it's like marketing a drug for blood pressure that's gonna raise the blood pressure yeah so when we think as doctors feel like they have to do something and there's nothing to do and I say great here's what we should do we should prevent that disease in the first place and we know that we can do it despite you know the idea is that what we're talking about are termed pseudoscience fallacious let's back up a little bit you you talked about inflammation being a huge issue in Alzheimer's but it's also an issue in depression in ADHD in autism in Parkinson's disease in cancer in diabetes coronary arteries about it's pretty much every chronic illness actly particularly the brain and I don't think people realize that so the question is what is driving all this inflammation right in a word our diets and we can start there and then work through the whole mechanistic pathway what that ultimately leads to people losing their cognitive function so our diets being higher in simple carbohydrates with reduction in healthy fat reduction in dietary fiber paves the way through multiple mechanisms for our blood sugars to rise our insulin activity to reduce and ultimately that leads to inflammation they call Alzheimer's know type 3 diabetes that's right diabetes of the brain exactly right so it puts the ball back in the court of you the consumer not you Markheim and the doctor but you the consumer to do something and do it right now and that is simply change your diet other things are really important restorative sleep aerobic exercise meditation we could talk about a lot of things that's anti-inflammatory to meditation that but if we can simply focus on the fact that the global diet is becoming westernized that is increasing inflammation globally and we're seeing incredible increased rates of things like Alzheimer's globally those are important dots to connect and important dots to leverage because we could turn this thing around yeah it's both it's both the diet and how the diet affects our microbiome exactly right which is influencing our brain all the time through creating inflammatory molecules that get to the brain and how does how does your poop get to your brain that doesn't even make sense could you break that down for us sure it'd break down the poop and as you've written about and you know and you coined the term diabesity the relationship between diabetes higher blood sugar obesity creation of inflammatory chemicals damaging the brain heart etc we now know that what what sets the what we call the set point of inflammation in the body is a one cell layer thick that as you've said in the past separates the garbage dump those are your words from right I think from the rest of the body chemicals in the gut roommate and by and large dangerous damaging chemicals we call them antigens need to stay there when they transgress the gut lining gets through the gut lining they stimulate immune cells to create the very mediators of inflammation chemicals that we call site up cytokines that then initiate these damaging activities for cells throughout the body the downstream effect of inflammation is an a turning on of the production of chemicals called free radicals damaging chemicals that damage our protein our fat and even our DNA and even our energy producers called mitochondria so it all starts with diet diet nurtures are a hundred trillion microbial friends that live in the gut and want me to be healthy yeah they want you to be healthy but we have to feed them right you know like a rainforest it's you know it got so many inputs of light and water and nutrients whereas a mono crop exact corn field what you're getting at is in a word is diversity yeah and just as we depend upon the the diversity of in the Amazon forest which is being destroyed it's an ecosystem and you're right it's an ecosystem in the gut and it's this relationship between our gut friends in our gut and also on our skin in the brain who knew in the placenta who knew this relationship that we have to reconnect to so in a very real sense that's one aspect of what our son Austin Perlmutter and I are talking about moving forward that is disconnection syndrome yeah all of the manifestations of disconnection whether it's disconnecting from our the messages of our gut microbiome disconnecting from our DNA that is doing everything it can to keep us healthy but that we are sending to it the wrong signals by virtue of the process of epigenetics in other words our food choices influence the expression of our DNA who knew the disconnection that we have from the good parts of our brain we'll talk about that later the parts of our brain that want us to be empathetic and compassionate and planning for the future the disconnection that we have from each other as people because we're spending too much time down here looking at a screen as opposed to sharing and the life of another individual the disconnection that we have from our communities from other countries on this connection that we have from the health and vitality of the planet and that's where we take this that the survival of our planet is really predicated on reconnecting all these lovable innocence what you're talking about David is the role that your brain plays in allowing you to be connected or causing you to be disconnected and that the way we care for our brains has a profound impact on our behavior attitude connection that's a very radical idea that what you eat controls your ability to be present to be focused to be connected and here's what completes the circuit what you eat leveraged by looked at through the lens of your microbes does affect your behavior and your choices and at the same time those choices that you make affect the health and vitality of your gut microbes so what you set up is what we call a vicious cycle where by eating the wrong foods changes the microbiome it changes your brain and makes you less able moving forward to make the right choices so you make further bad choices further damaging your bacteria further changing your brain and let me say that it's not just moment to moment changes in your brain that happens you know that you make the wrong decisions but ultimately as you continue to make these wrong decisions you rewire your brain through a process called neuroplasticity say you compromise your ability to tap into that part of your brain that lets you make good and appropriate decisions and you connect more aggressively to the part of your brain that is much more impulsive and much more fear-based and much more narcissistic so basically we move from the place of love and connection to a place of fear and reactivity that's right and you mentioned Alberto be old oh we wrote a book about this years ago called the neuroscience of enlightenment power up your brain power up your brain and it dealt with what can we do first in terms of our lifestyle choices to enhance this process of neuroplasticity to enhance the brain's ability to make stronger connections okay once we've got that put to bed in other words higher levels of omega-3s less inflammation aerobic exercise being very important then let's do the right things let's make the best choices and that will then set the stage for hardwiring the brain to those good parts it's pretty amazing how you know you you've been the pioneer in saying this but the brain is is plastic it can actually change and reverse some of the insults that happen so not only is it about prevention but it's about treatment or slowing down of these conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and I had mercury poisoning years ago and early on I had a brain scan called a spec scan which looks at the blood flow in the brain and I had all these areas of my brain that had no blood flow that were dysfunctional it look like hole not a good thing they looked like holes like Swiss cheese in my brain and as I used functional medicine as I repaired my brain as a repair my body to fix my brain essentially my gut and my also the mercury affected my gut and terrible ways I actually repeated the scan no more than a decade later and all those holes had filled in my brain had recovered no not it's not something that you learn as a typical neurologist right well even gosh when I was 19 I was doing research on micro what's called micro neuro surgery we had the operating room just got a microscope and so neurosurgeons didn't have a roadmap to use the microscope because the anatomy of the brain had never been really teased apart microscopically so our job was to create this roadmap for doing aneurysm surgery so as part of what I did my research on we were exploring how we can bring blood supply from outside the brain into the brain yeah so I became really kind of handy at tying small blood vessels together and I was invited to go teach in Madrid Spain at what's called the CIN throat our Monique aha and there you know this is an institution named after at Harmonia cahal maybe the father of neurophysiology and I walked into the lab and there was a statue of him with his statement saying that the brain is immutable and it never changes it never regenerates that's it and you know as well as I do that we were taught that in medicals you know that the brain will never grow new brain cells that your brain cells in college too bad yeah if you drink too much or whatever but we know now that the brain a can regenerate itself and B can rewire or reroute pathways how does a stroke patient recover well he or she recovers because they bring online different alternative pathways they reroute the signal ultimately and that's how they can improve so we take advantage of that process called neuroplasticity and turn it on by turning on the body's production of a chemical growth factor for the brain called BDNF but at the same time we have to capitalize then on the brain wanting to rewire itself by behaving in ways remove the insults when you provide the right implement change in our behavior the Dalai Lama said that if you want to be happy practice compassion and if you want others to be happy practice compassion yeah so it really you know it's it's you can be happier if you can wire into the happy part of your brain by doing things outwardly that are and demonstrate empathy that demonstrate planning for the future 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 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 you know indirect attacks against me and and our colleague Phil Bredesen who's really pioneered the idea that we could actually stop or reverse Alzheimer's which you actually were talking about decades ago 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 fat should we not do we sugar really that bad or not because the sugar Association says sugars fine so why wouldn't we believe that so I would say to your viewers Google Perlmutter and CBS and watch a recent interview and as this morning yeah but just put CBS and Perlmutter it'll come up and be as they they show the book doctor promos written a new book about carbohydrates in the brain but before they cut to me they said but we reached out to the sugar industry and 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 but the reality is the the question that I was supposed to answer about a diverted because I wanted to really hit the sugar thing was 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 avoid them as you know there's plenty of research in terms of what gluten specifically a subpart of gluten alpha gliadin does in terms of threatening what we talked about earlier and that is the gut lining so that at 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 gliadin that said 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 III don't think that's necessarily the worst idea having said that again because you know there's business to back up on the carb thing no there's been some recent studies published by Walter Willett and others at Harvard looking at thousands and thousands of people showing the people who eat very low carbohydrate diets don't do how they died earlier people even very very high carbohydrate but somewhere in the middle about 50% which you and I seems like a lot of carbohydrate yeah do better can you kind of address that because it's well I think people should eat tons of car behind us you should be eating carbohydrates and my I just did a blog with somebody and it was said why we need more carbs David Perlmutter emptying people I think the hashtag was why that's fantastic WTF right yeah so yeah we need lots of carbs because we need lots of fiber in our diets by definition basically as a car you bet it's different so that's right and there's something magic when you take you make a bagel or a claw song I mean it's no longer a carbohydrate or simple carbohydrate it's a castle 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 digest and polyphenols and antioxidant Evette and fuel for the microbiome feel for your gut bacteria so yeah I've seen my book called from when 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 they say yeah he's not he's not paleo he's not keto so I think that you know the biggest faults then with the MA 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 that the China study said that you eat meat you're gonna 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 I prefer actually not even meat it's actually processed meat which it's processed meat into lion you know there's 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 and literally garbage yeah they spread them skittles and you bet that are Aspire so so I think there is a place on the table if you choose to eat meat for grass-fed organically raised for forms of meat of of animal product and similarly do I think that dr. Ornish 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 would be an oil consuming sunflower that dramatically increase the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body get back to war you and I start our conversation today and what's really interesting to think about you know we've wondered the mechanism for that over the years we've said well and this is a little technical for your viewers but they'll love it the omega-6 is produced 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 availability of CBD and the use of medical marijuana mmm that the omega sixes helped to increase the production of two important cannabinoid chemicals that are produced within the body we call them endocannabinoids because they're produced in the body to AG and another one called Ananda mine which bind to a receptor called the cb1 receptor that absolutely explodes the production of these inflammatory molecules and interestingly Omega threes at down if so was eating vegetable oil activates these receptors it creates inflammation yeah and and this is yet another way to understand the beauty of the Omega threes because similarly the Omega threes 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-6 is 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 1 in favor of the omega sixes these are new I mean we didn't have these a thousand years ago a hundred years ago you're right we've increased our intake of soybean oil which is not 10 percent of our calories 1,000 fold see how 1,900 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 rapeseed oil yeah that's a good thing and now it's highly GMO contaminated yeah it's an issue so you mentioned omega-3s and makes it the other issue people concern about a saturated fat I'm particularly the context of Alzheimer's in a bowi four gene which is a gene that may increase your risk of Alzheimer's well it does depending on I'm coppy should have and so forth is this is something we should be worried about I mean bulletproof coffee and everybody yeah let's let's out cover of Time magazine says heat butter like what's the deal here butter is back and let's take that apart look and unpack that just for your viewers to be really clear but there are some genes that help increase a person's risk for Alzheimer's and one of them is this so-called apoe4 allele and you can learn about it by having an at-home genetic as test that anybody can do and twenty percent of Americans will carry the apoe4 allele copy one copy and a sum carry two copies which is clearly associated with as much as a twelve fold increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease the apoE genes are involved in the production of a Poe lipoproteins and that's a big term but it has to do with proteins in the body that carry fat deliver fat to wear that to where those fats might be needed there is some indication that the benefits of saturated fat for the brain we'll talk about 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 we okay I mean a little long here we might have to add another memory card but that are those things are less beneficial in the apoE for 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 having errors or harm doesn't look like there's harm 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 mc2 el coconut oil the saturated fat that's found in eggs for example the benefits are 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 in various venues for lectures etc in what is called the ketogenic diet the number one diet books you bet and with good reason and it's it's a brand new phenomenon not for humans it's only the type of diet we've been on for a couple million years so we are at an offer 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 mm-hmm and 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 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 mmm so I think that the ability of the coconut oil in the MCT oil to make that happen really is very very powerful there's data showing that those actually help improve outcomes in Alzheimer's patients there's actually a data that indicates interventional II that 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 Erin 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 impressive I just I just reviewed a book by the new head of the Lula Center in 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 saying they're saying yes we can use food as medicine we're seeing this trend who it is medicine who knew and yet there's this incredible backlash about this we're gonna get into that in a minute 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 you and I would be considering the pseudo medicine quack category I think III for me it's a personal badge of honor that I'm on quack Watchi to along with most of our best friends but the saturated fat thing I just want to come back to and the the founder of quack watch commented on this article in JAMA yeah I need to see I'm sure I'm sure I feel like I'm doing a good job when I get more people attacking me from from you know certain categories of like Monsanto and the farm a story and but the saturated fat thing is fascinating cuz I want to be able to hear that Saturday fact 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 the saturated fat I believe causes and I want to hear your opinion on this causes problems in the research which can correlate sad 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 they're 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 would say 75% 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 unpack as further and it doesn't even have to be in the in relationship to eating carbohydrates 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 that this person eats you know a bunch of beef they eat a bunch of bacon instead of their you know 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 modifies or um 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 study right it doesn't relate to telling a person to take a tablespoon of organic coconut oil no relationship whatsoever look 50 percent of the fat in human breast milk is saturated fat yes saturated wait a minute so basically breast milk is almost as months at refined as pure body you bet and why is it there because it helps for brain development helps your immune system development it helps prime as it was 25% to 50% it's of the fat it helps the client 5% of the calories in breast milk is from saturated fat yeah we're now they get less than 5% by the American Heart Association so according 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 this I'm not heart out yeah avoid this I mean you know it wasn't long ago when we were told not to eat avocado avocados are 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 ended up on the front page of the New York Times yeah and you know doctors bought into that we bought in to what our journals were telling us and it was patently wrong it's now you bring up a journal article from the Journal of the American Medical Association that is cast our approaches to dealing with brain health calling it pseudoscience we began our medicine sudo medicine we began our conversation today with a discussion of the publication in the same journal I'll have you know in November of this year we're in it was revealed that the so-called Alzheimer's drugs that this article is a proponent of yes don't work but actually make people worse 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 I think our friend Dale talks about not medicine maybe there's 36 different problems or 54 or 12 and if you don't deal with all of them you're not gonna 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 entertaining on to taking one tack that doesn't make you for tougher isn't better right so if you have mercury poisoning and gluten sensitivity and you 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 are 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 and 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 and some resistance and therein lies the processes yes but therein lies the criticism because the notion of leveraging multiple inputs into a system and looking for an outcome is 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 foreword for that book and I talked about how this is unprecedented that he is not looking at what we call mono therapy 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 mono therapy and that can be the homerun billion-dollar product that makes the investors very happy 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 and instead of calling it pseudo mess and Connick the future of medicine which is really what it is so I have to say that as I get older I'm less offended by these yeah and I really find it to be almost complimentary complic it's sort of like complementary medicine because to be the outlier and to be 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 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 maybe we shouldn't you know 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 then in February of 2018 one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies Pfizer gave up gave up yeah a lot of gonna chase down the magic bullet for Alzheimers anymore because it's not it doesn't have a good enough ROI yes hundreds of studies billions of dollars spent going down this rabbit hole that is the wrong strategy for identifying the risk 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 have a slide that I'll show you a conference you narrowly attending that in a couple days and it's really quite interesting because it shows it measures a group of people 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 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 so like sticky toffee that comes right right 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 that might cure Alzheimer's it doesn't but the point is that 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 implements 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 and in fact in a book we have coming out there's a title I mean a chapter dedicated that from doctor Tansy's group Harvard yes so it is really a quite incredible to realize another slide series of slides looks at the degree of brain shrinkage if you carry the Alzheimer's gene in comparison to the degree of a shrinkage in one year plotted against your hemoglobin a1c or your average blood sugar mm-hm and it turns out that the rate of shrinkage of your brain is greater but with a higher a1c than it is carrying the Alzheimer's gene you can't change pretty frightening you can't change the owl Sammer'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 change yeah low sugar you know that more carbohydrates in the form of fiber and more good furniture in your gut bacteria at 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 another 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 yeah here and here's how to do it now 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 under 8 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 lymphatic system to triage our lymph system of the brain David talked about exactly system and which has to work at night it works at night and you got a night garbage out of your brain so 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 so under under it underrated I want to come back something we're talking about before because I think it we kind of glossed over it which is this the 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 doing a low starch sugar diet when I looked at that study and I actually am giving a talk at this conference called the failure of nutrition science tomorrow tomorrow yeah at 10:15 oh definitely which will not be when this podcast is airing no this is evergreen but the the extraordinary thing is when you start to dig a little bit the headlines were low carbohydrates kill people they're not safe and everybody means the headline go okay it's science it's published in a major journal it stopped Harvard scientists it must be true but when you actually look at the data first if it's a 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 Mark mark doesn't wake up the sun's not gonna cut it so they're correlated a hundred percent but there's no correlation I know this cause and effect that well that whenever it's people its windshield wipers are going 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 percent confidence which is not low carbohydrate and second when they did the study it was thousands of people tens of thousands of people over 25 years they gave him two questionnaires separated by six years of what did G last week and people actually don't tell the truth it's well documented in fact in this study the average caloric intake was 1,500 calories now the average person is about 2,000 2,200 calories where are the other 700 calories could have been all sheet cake and we don't know yeah 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 caught up in the headlines and don't really look at critically at the studies and that's part of the problem I had a similar experience recently when a study came out in 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 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 to have much less dietary fiber they don't know what's good and what isn't gluten so they're eating less their library cake and cookie exactly and and what the author is commented on in the and their conclusion was that they fully recognize 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 and it was it was I mean going gluten-free was somehow toxic right and that and you wonder how could a voiding something make it a toxin in the first place it's like very confusing yeah but the headlines gets fun you know case in point what you have here there's sudo 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 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 ad spectrum which is like a fasting state when we don't eat we get ketogenic and we eat a high fat low starch diet we get ketogenic so um what does he utilities what do you think about these things is this really where we should be going and one of the differences first 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 a story plays into why researchers like dr. vulture lungo 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 heart disease and even dementia or the treating the root causes of all of them yes well you're and you're harvesting pathways that lead to good gene expression you're tinkering with the expression of the life coat in a positive way and off-loading some of the negative expression of DNA would have otherwise happened based upon how people were otherwise eating so there are first of all there's a term intermittent fasting which i think is a is clearly a bit nebulous it does that mean fasting for a couple days every every month or does it mean just deciding not to have breakfast I am restricted eating yeah it's well it's actually that's a little bit different what we'll get to that in this moment but it 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 middle of night and hit the refrigerator but that time Baloo and kleine-levin syndrome is one don't don't ask me but people go to sleep the wake of 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 1 or 2 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 it's I think it may well be the I thought it's gonna be the only meal I was gonna have today but turns out that that's not the case mmm but typically what I if you want it what I do at home is I don't eat until about 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 the fasting mimicking diet that you will obviously learn more about when you interview the the person credited with inventing that doctor Valter 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 tolerable and available too so it's like eating a 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 let me just say that the other thing that fasting does that I think is underrated but nonetheless really important is that it it 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 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 powerful so I part of the theory of the fasted mimicking diner I want to give into that for a little bit cuz 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 and the theory is that your saturated fats inflammatory and promotes aging and he's found this in mouse mouse mouse models 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 approaching that that that actually can caught the protein actually causes activations pathway that seems to lead to accelerated aging so he's saying no animal protein and it we should be a low protein diet 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 evens even suggest it as we get older we need more protein so I'd say first of all that we have to always keep it 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 emptor in terms of building muscle mass yeah so activates when you exercise exactly know is a great thing so I would say that we have to keep an open mind and these are still some unanswered questions that we are gonna leave on the table we're not going to be 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'd 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 very very fundamental the other lifestyle issues that we talked about earlier I think are important as well but you know we have to really respect a researcher like dr. Longo and then a caution 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 but you know for example the glymphatic system was demonstrated we talked about 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 on my right side usually but they don't maybe there's some knowledge there but again so we will follow the work 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 he deserves a lot of attention yeah it's extraordinary to look at the work is it the question is always compared to what right things can we 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 creating better outcomes than it than a diet that's a typical American diet even the 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 it's low-fat to a for example a paleo diet that's very high in starch from carbohydrates that are good like 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. along though and I'm going to chat with him about this is that he says yes even a low carbohydrate diet will lose will you'll lose weight you'll change all the biomarkers of diabetes and then some resistance but that doesn't matter because it promotes aging it activates all the aging mechanisms in a great conversation to have yeah I thought that comes to mind that maybe we'll bring this up with him and that is you know in a in a sense his fasting mimicking diet program kind of is resembles dr. Bredesen approach in that he's incorporating this program into cancer therapy where people are receiving chemotherapy for example yeah much as dr. Thomas Seyfried and wrote the metabolic basis of cancer talked about using a ketogenic diet in correlation I mean in in a long rhythm 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. savory describes the end-all but could be looked upon as adjuncts to amplify the effectiveness in a more comprehensive way of more standardized approaches much as dr. Bredesen talks about leveraging multiple interests 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 Berta health looking at ketogenic diets reversing diabetes in 60% of patients and giving them off medications or doubt on the medications and ninety-eight percent of patients reversing all the biomarkers of aging we see this and we also see guys like Siddhartha Mukherjee looking at ketogenic diets in cancer at animal models they've been able to reverse stage 4 pancreatic cancer stage 4 melanoma and now they're looking at doing this in human trial so we're going to be getting more and more information tell us since you published grain brain 5 years ago almost 6 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 sorted 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 I was criticized when the first edition came out by an unnamed individual at unnamed Ivy League medical school and he will not be named anyone will not be named but it's in New Haven Connecticut we'll leave it at that and that this was nonsense that my ideas about 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 who 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 Kido Paleo any of that stuff 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 yeah and just the notion because I went for the brain what would you expect just the notion that our lifestyle choices can rewrite your brains destiny it was really the central theme of the book and and reduce your risk for untreatable diseases was really very discomforting for very much for people who wanted to believe in the mono therapy give me a pill mentality so that's changed quite a bit there's been incredible studies 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 alone insulin so it's it's good a lot it's what we need insulin in the brain yeah we compromise the ability of insulin to get into the brain when we become insulin resistant yeah by having a high sugar diet that the the blood that keeps things in or out of the rain 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 Verta 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 brains inability to use blood sugar as a harbinger of Alzheimer's 20 and 30 years later the litter if your brain can't properly handle sugar you can tell 30 years in advance whether you're at risk rousing 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're 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% of these women are overweight and have insulin resistance that they are set up for Alzheimer's risk what is really quite exciting is the work of a dr. Stephen Cunnane who I was on a panel with just a week ago in Los Angeles who has done the 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 Alzheimers mm-hmm 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 he tones as a fuel these brain cells are fine yeah they're ready to go they just need a different fuel so it's such a different paradigm 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 you're a hunter-gatherer and you three or four days into trying to track down the wildebeest or whatever it is you you think is gonna be your source of calories and you're not it's not working out for you the first thing you've gotta 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. Veatch has called a super fuel hmm so that's the the type of validation that grain bran 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 regime but you know we had thought in looking at these brain scans that show that there areas of the brain that are not utilizing glucose in the Alzheimer's patient that that was an indication that those areas where were where there were neurons that were damaged not working anymore mm-hmm and that's flawed yeah because when you supply ketones they most neurons come back online and say oh gosh I've been away for as long as clinically oh absolutely I mean that's the fundamental for why we now see interventional trials using MCT oil you know increasing ketones why dr. Bredesen and 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 and she would typically been in a nursing home yeah and she had a big stress which was her her husband died and she declined so I said why don't we try a ketogenic diet let's just be a little more aggressive I in her son said it was like a miracle it was literally she was not coherent really memory was really bad could navigate her life and boom was actually came back online when she went on 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 were quote and votes which are highly desire you there there ends of one I mean look dr. Mary Newport wrote about her husband and end of one she put him on a ketogenic diet has a new book coming out and I recall one elderly Italian woman who couldn't they didn't want her driving writing checks anymore they very worried about her and they brought her to see me and she came to us with her three sons who were very big and they were very they wanted mom to be fixed and I know the pressure was I didn't want to mess this one up so you know put it on a ketogenic diet she returned to driving a car and and you know was able to manage your finances and them glad I got that one right yeah but they're doing this across the spectrum and you bet and I would say you know there's great value to the ends of one yeah well there's a whole new research program at the National Institutes of Health called nm one research which uses individuals as their own control and measures what happens within their biology as a way of validating the science so we're getting away from this reductionist model of drug designed studies essentially looking at one drug for one disease with a single outcome that's great for drug companies but it doesn't help the average person and doesn't actually test the science of what we know to be true it exactly he's connected and you know the the validation and giving us the ability to use medications is really based on at most three to five percent of people once it's out in the market using a drug some ninety five percent of people have never been exposed to a drug that then they do get as then they become an end of one they become a trial and I think there's you know there's a big push these days for what is called personalized medicine when we learn as much as we can about an individual his or her genome microbiome etc lifestyle choices and then try to cultivate specific protocols that are best suited for that individual and I think that's great but I think that we can extrapolate as we learn about specific gene modifications or gene expression we call these polymorphisms gene variances let's say of individuals the teach us lessons that we can then use for the the population at large - we see when a certain pathways is not working appropriately in an individual how it manifests we can generalize that in terms of understanding that pathway to a larger audience as opposed to looking at a large audience and trying to make that data work for you as an individual yeah so David you've been a real leader in helping us understand these things and helping us make this complex science understandable readable and actionable so people can change their lives because this isn't just a theoretical book grain brain is a practical book that if you implement will literally change your brain and change your life and you have been working on some very cool stuff recently you've been working on this Alzheimer's documentary which is a 12 part online documentary that's coming out when it'll be out in the about summer of 2009 19 great so this is fantastic and everybody should keep an eye out for that they should check out his work at dr. Perlmutter calm and you'll learn all about the new grain brain Edition as well as the documentary right correct and you also should pay attention to this new book called brain wash which is authoring with his son Austin and it's it's an exciting diversion for me for you because you're talking about the science of human relationships of connection of meaning a purpose of the disconnection between our brains and who we really are by feeding them the wrong stuff it's really a fascinating sort of diversion for you but it's also really relevant today because people are are not functioning well I mean I I just read a paper and in the I think was New England Journal or JAMA about ADHD and kids who are using more screentime have more developmental issues have less ability to function have more cognitive issues as they grow older so this is a huge problem in our society and we're not really addressing in this book brainwash I think it's gonna be enlightening in that well I I would say I'm and I wouldn't call a diversion and maybe we'll call it a progression okay in the neck right at once it's not a deep academic biochemistry science book absolutely it is but it's through the lens of human behavior yeah through well it I think that what goes on around us really was really motivated this book to be written and it is an exploration of and their 400 peer-reviewed references so it is a scientific exploration of what is the effect of our modern lifestyle of arts and time spent on looking at screens of our lack of adequate restorative sleep of the westernization of the global diet what is the effect on the hard wiring of the brain and what is happening is we're seeing that we are becoming more wired into the fear center at the center of impulsivity of lack of compassion - as opposed to being wired into our gift which is this prefrontal cortex that allows us to make decisions by thinking about well what are the future consequences of that decision the part of the brain that allows us to be empathetic that allows us to be compassionate individuals and we've realized now as we are preparing the manuscript that to a significant degree what we are talking about is basically existential as it relates to humanity because these changes in the wiring of the human brain away from the areas that let us be forward-thinking and compassionate to the areas of sudden emeriti connected and caring about each other and caring about the planet it this is happening globally and it's in lockstep with the westernization of global Nutrition trends and in lockstep with the amount of screen time and the influence of screen time on the wiring of your brain oh this is a radical idea david be that you can extrapolate to what's happening in the world today with the rise of autocratic societies and and the polarization of countries in terms of either fascist or more socialist ideas you see that happened in our country with this extreme polarization and even Congress is just an epitome of what is happening to the rest of us and you know I remember being a lecturer years ago where they showed the voting pattern in the Senate and Congress you know in the 50s and 60s and 70s compared to the voting pattern now and there was tremendous crossover collaboration and now they're completely separate it's all the Democrats for Democrat all the Republicans but Republican there's there's no crossover and there's extreme polarization and it's happening everywhere around the world and I wonder if what you're saying is that our diet and our addiction to screens is driving these behaviors of polarization and disconnection it's exactly what I'm saying and and it is a feed-forward cycle because the more our diets are the way that they are and the more screentime we spend the more we distance ourselves from the areas of a brain that can help us break out that can help us make better decisions make better resolve and stick to that resolve so it becomes a feed-forward cycle and you know this is the broad scope that we've just really embraced Austin and I and is a pretty important thing because people don't connect what's happening in our culture and politics in the United States and globally to what we're eating that's a major paradigm shift you know you and I have been talking about all the things that are connected to diet well insulin resistance inflammation coronary arteries you name it and that's a big story and of itself but when you ask yourselves what are the major threats to our survival certainly those diseases are the number one cause of death on planet Earth but just how we are behaving yeah take a step back that is a view that is extremely compelling yeah and challenging to write a book about I will tell you're a nutrition that is a that is a great topic and that's really what we've been both writing about for a long time you've mentioned earlier today in our time together the relationship between our gut microbes I think you mentioned the context of your wife yeah the relationship have got microbes to how we perceive the world to our mood and then we just have to connect the dot between our food and the health of our gut microbes now we've the circle is complete it's pretty amazing so David thank you so much for joining us I am the doctor's pharmacy a place for conversations that matter if you want to learn more about dr. promoters work so that dr. Perlmutter comments dr p RL m UT ter calm he's one of the most thoughtful compassionate kind smartest docs i've met he's been my mentor and my friend for decades and I'm not just saying his cool cuz he's my friend but he really is cool that's a great compliment and if you've enjoyed this podcast please share with your friends and family on Facebook leave a comment we'd love to hear from you and sign up wherever you get your podcasts to subscribe to the doctors pharmacy and we'll see you next time on the doctors pharmacy [Music]

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 447,946

Keywords: Alzheimer’s, Brain Health, Diet, Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Mark Hyman, Functional Medicine, Gluten, Grains, Nutrition, The Doctor’s Farmacy, alzheimer's disease, brain health, carbohydrates, carbs, china study, cognition, cognitive decline, dean ornish, dementia, gut health, health theory, how to live longer, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, neurology, personal development, saturated fat, self development, self help, the doctor’s farmacy

Id: SXKd5-Nr108

Length: 75min 29sec (4529 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2019