The SHOCKING ROOT CAUSE Of Alzheimer's & The DAILY HACKS To Prevent it | Lisa Mosconi

and on top of all these women are twice as likely as men are almost twice as likely as men to develop alzheimer's disease which is the most common form of dementia on the planet which means that for every man with alzheimer's disease there are two women and no one talks about it but the bottom line is that a woman in her 60s is almost twice as likely to develop alzheimer's disease in her life than she is to develop breast cancer women who are physically active after the age of 35 have a 30 percent lower risk of dementia in old age the women who are sedentary [Music] welcome to the show lisa moscone neuroscientist and author of the xx brain welcome to women of impact thank you for having me i'm so happy to be here and to see you in person i'm so excited and where i want to start i want to just jump right into something that you call bikini medicine and i have a quote of yours um that describes bikini medicine um and it's assuming that women are essentially men with breasts and tubes yet women are for far more likely than men to suffer from anxiety depression migraines brain injuries and strokes they are also twice as likely to end their lives suffering from alzheimer's disease even when their longer lifespans are taken into account talk to me about bikini medicine yes bikini medicine has been a big issue for me as a scientist and bikini medicine is is saying that from a medical perspective what makes a woman a woman is literally just those parts of the body that we can fit under a bikini that are covered by a bikinis or breasts or tubes or ovaries and that has meant that historically medical professionals would diagnose and treat both genders the same exact way thinking that if i'm testing a medicine for the brain i can just test it in a bunch of men and whatever i find is going to apply to women as well and the same for the heart right if i have a heart medication that works for men it is just assumed that it would work the same for women and that is completely not the case it's just not the truth and we know that i mean if you take a bunch of basic scientists or biologists they will tell you metabolism is different women absorb nutrients and drugs very differently than men do and the same drug may have completely different effects in men and women and then you just go to discovery science which is what i do for the most part and there's a complete disregard for women's brains as a whole for a very long time women were not even included in research and now that we do include them we never look at women as being different from men which is lump men and women together and then actually we've removed the effects of sex using statistical manipulations which is really saying once again even now in 2021 is really saying that women are broadly indistinguishable from men except there's some ovaries in there that's so powerful and that's really why i wanted to start because really shining the light of how important this is and everything like i've known up until this date um like your book really made me rethink things and i think that's so incredible for us to just give the awareness to people first and that's really where i wanted it why i wanted to start there because i think it begins with awareness and then like you get so tactical in your book about what you can do and how you can eat and how you can optimize your brain as a female which we're definitely gonna get into but just to really give people the actual like hard truth about what you're saying about how medicine up until this point hasn't treated men and women differently um can you talk us through the ambien and what happened there because i think that really highlights how a study can lead us women astray yes so ambien is the most popular sleep medication at least in the united states but i think there are similar formulations all over the world and the drug was mostly developed in clinical trials that included mostly men even the pre-clinical studies because usually drugs are tested in animal first in animals first usually is mice or rodents in the vast majority of pre-clinical studies are really focused on male animals female animals are not included because scientists will say that hormonal fluctuations make them too variable to study and so they just look at the male animals and then assume that the drug that works for a male mouse would work for an actual woman which is not the case but long story short women used to be given very high doses of ambien because the doses were based on men on men's bodies ability to metabolize the drug and obtain a certain amount of efficacy right and then what happened which is really bizarre is that insurance companies started asking what is going on with women why are all these women getting into car crashes and the answer was ambien there were women who were taking many derived doses of sleep medications and literally overdosed and sleepwalk throughout the day and then getting into car accidents not because they can't drive but because they were effectively over medicated and so a number of scientists really knocked on the daughter of the fda and said we have to cut down the dose which was eventually cut in half and now it is safe to take that just think about all the million women who were injured or or literally got in trouble for simply following guidelines that completely disregarded the woman's physiology right and the knowledge that their bodies just don't work the same way yeah that's it when i heard you tell that story that it's so powerful because it just gives people a perspective of how what we've been taught up to this point um and now how do we shift that thinking and shift um the the studies that we're doing and the way that we approach it as women and so if you can take me deeper now on the the xx brain as we like to refer to as the female brain xx brain and why it's very important to understand the xx brain that is different to the xy brain i think it is really important to realize that their brains are just not the same and and the most important factor in myopia community is that women's brains don't age the same way the men's brains age and when i say age i'm not thinking 80s or 90s i mean from from the beginning of your life from the moment you're born actually even before a baby is born our brains are wired a little bit differently to respond to stimulation differently whether the stimulation be hormones or enzymes or stress or just life and the reason that this is important is that men's brains and women's brains are not different in the sense that one is better than the other i i really want to be clear about that we're not supporting gender stereotypes i'm not saying that you know pink and blue is a thing that girls should play with dolls and boys should be even trained that's not the point the point is that the way that the brain is built or the way the brain functions really dictates different strengths and different vulnerabilities and that is very important we all know that women have a better verbal memory than men for example there are people who debate that there are people who don't believe it but on average across studies women have an edge when it comes to remembering verbal information that's a strength that is hardly ever celebrated right but at the same time there is also risks that impact women's brains more and we never talk about this but for context you mentioned those risks before but they really want to clarify the magnitude of the problem yeah right so women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression there are millions of people with anxiety or depression we are three times more likely to develop an autoimmune condition including those that attack the brain like multiple sclerosis we're four times more likely to suffer from migraines and headaches as any woman knows and we're also more likely to die of a stroke or to develop certain forms of brain tumors of readiness 3ds and 40s and on top of all these women are twice as likely as men are almost twice as likely as men to develop alzheimer's disease which is the most common form of dementia on the planet which means that for every man with alzheimer's disease there are two women and no one talks about it right when you talk about women's health or women's health issues without thinking about breast cancer that's the thing that comes to mind right has the pink ribbon as it should but the bottom line is that a woman in her 60s is almost twice as likely to develop alzheimer's disease in her life than she is to develop breast cancer that is so insane incredible it's frightening it's scary and we don't talk about it right why do you think that is like why do you think if it's that dramatic that it hasn't become in the norm discussion because it has not been started that way so i have a family history of alzheimer's disease that really affects the women in my family and i always wanted to study the brain so as soon as i was able to i started asking questions like is it just my family is it everybody and back then people would say to me well you know after aging itself being a woman is the most significant risk factor for developing alzheimer's disease however it doesn't really matter because women live longer than men and alzheimer's is a disease of old age so it's really just the women live longer ever okay but then you look at the numbers and women don't live that much longer than men like in the united states the difference is four years not 20. in england the difference is two and a half years and alzheimer's is easy to mention is the number one cause of death only for women and not for men so there's something more clearly right and we started looking into that years ago and long story short we showed that number one not just us but scientists showed that alzheimer's disease is not a disease of old age but starts in mid-life with negative changes to the brain that then eventually lead to the symptoms of alzheimer's disease the memory loss the confusion all those kind of issues and midlife is any age from 35 to 65. and so it's not midlife and some fuzzy 60 year old thing he's like 35 40 years old you're middle aged just for kind of just frightening yeah yeah but then that changed the question my question then was okay if alzheimer's disease starts in midlife what is it that happens only to women and not to men in midlife they could potentially trigger alzheimer's disease in a woman's brain yeah and we'll show that the answer is menopause and losing your hormones which really was very very unexpected and changed the way that we work that we think about prevention so i think it's really about women's brains not just alzheimer's or menopause that is more about getting a sense of the full picture ladies ladies ladies i know sometimes you worry that you're not good enough trust me nobody knows that better than me i spend almost a freaking decade having my soul sucked out of my body doing something that i didn't love finally even though i was scared too freaking dead i decided i was going to go for it and i've ended up building the life of my dreams a life i couldn't have imagined because i realized that radical confidence is being afraid and doing it anyway i wrote this book for you with 10 no bs lessons that you need to go from feeling stuck and frustrated to doing anything that you set your mind to yeah and look to me i'm always how do i get the full picture the accurate information so that i can then adjust accordingly right it's it's like what life do i want and then how do i act in my current life in order to set me up for future successes and so when i think about how cognitively aware i want to be for my entire life and then what are the things that i'm doing now and not just showing up now to have clarity of mind and you know to have a good memory but also for the long term you talk about the three ps so you've got puberty pregnancy and then pre-menopausal perimenopausal perimenopause um so can you actually take us through so let's say you're going through puberty what is happening to the brain there and so that we can kind of break it down and then yeah then we'll talk about the pregnancy part yes so during puberty puberty is like an explosion of hormonal power because this is really when your ovaries basically turn on and they start producing hormones that give you a menstrual cycle and those allow you to get pregnant and that's been happening earlier earlier on in life at this point some some girls go through puberty when they're 11 the average age is 12 and that is a huge change not just for the body but also inside the brain and you would think that all these hormones would have a certain boosting effect on the brain right but when you actually do brain scans and you look at the brain of adolescents the brain is shrinking as you get older as you get older your brain is shrinking even though your body is growing at that stage and a lot of connections between neurons are discarded with a process that is called pruning because what happens when you're born is that your brain just shoots out neurons the whole time and all these neurons form connections with other neurons that are called synapses but many of these connections at some point are no longer useful because your brain can go on autopilot right by the time you're 12 you know how to ride a bike you know how to tie your shoes you know how to make your own lunch so all those connections can go and make room for new connections so they're mostly related to social cognition and really becoming a member of society so you need to grow brain region so some brain regions shrink because they're no longer needed those notices are not needed anymore but other brain visions actually grow like the memory center of the brain grows the emotional center of the brain is called the amygdala that also grows the frontal cortex which is in charge of judgment planning and reasoning in controlling instincts and impulses also grows a lot during adolescence does that grow in a different way to then the xy brain the male brain yes so these connections are stronger in girls in teenage girls they develop earlier on in life relative to boy's brains and that has been interpreted as girls reaching maturity intellectual community a little bit earlier on demand but also mostly about being more on top of things and like being better at judging the situation and also being able to manage risks a little bit more effectively and at that point your verbal abilities are also better as a girl language is more developed and a few other things and again these differences are subtle and there's no need to overemphasize them but it is interesting to see that the trajectory of development it is a little bit different between so does that have the knock-on effect depending on then when you get as a female when you get your period so like if you've got your period later would your brain develop later partially so what happens with the menstrual cycle is that as the hormones change and fluctuate throughout the month so does your brain and so do your brain connections so when estrogen levels are highest which is right before ovulation that's literally when you can see which is incredible you can see the synapses firing up and dendrites growing then threads so neurons look like trees a little bit and the branches are called dendrites you can see this branch is literally growing and expanding right before ovulation and then withdraw when your estrogen goes down before menstruation so even throughout the menstrual cycle the brain changes on a weekly if not daily basis and granted they're not huge changes but they are significant enough for some women to feel the change right so many women are intuitively aware that their mood changes throughout the menstrual cycle that their focus is different their energy is different and that's in part hormonal and in part is literally that your brain is changing along with your reproductive organs and it's wonderful and that is pretty much stable throughout a warm and reproductive life until you get pregnant i think what we're missing in general is the fact that people are organisms because western medicine is always about specialties you either understand the brain or you understand right yes right you it like i i'm a brain person and i never thought i would be talking about hormones or ovaries and if i talk to my ob gyn colleagues which i do daily at this point they don't really know what to do with their brains you know they don't manage brain health they don't manage brain they don't know how to read the brain scan but in reality this is a system that the works as a system and changes at the same time and whatever happens to your ovaries has an impact in your brain lisa this is why this discussion is so important and your book is so amazing um so i've had a lot of health issues in my gut and i've been battling them for now probably over over six years and when it first started happening i had gut issues i couldn't eat i hadn't had a period um i was always tired always brain fog and every time i would go to a doctor if i went to you know the gut specialist oh i've got a tablet for that but then over here if i'd go to my you know gynecologist it was something else and i'm like guys there seems like there's a connection here you know and it's just like but no one is like they're like oh no one was talking to each other and so i think it is so freaking important what you're saying because i'm all about empowerment how do i empower myself with knowledge so that i can approach any situation i'm looking for with the knowledge and then i can adjust right so if it's i want to feel extremely confident today i know that my hormones have to do with it and i know that by looking at the cycle or where i am in my cycle i can determine whether this is a good time for me to step up and be confident or actually it's a time to self-soothe and relax and take it more easy and we don't talk enough about that because i never even heard you say it's like a freaking superpower yes yeah i think it's a superpower i think if we were just educated and we had the information and the knowledge we could really use it to an advantage because it's important even just just exactly what you were saying when you said no how much coffee are you going to drink today doesn't it rather did you notice that there's if you drink the same amount of coffee before ovulation and after ovulation the effect is going to be completely different do you mind if we dive deep in that because that's the sort of stuff so thank you for bringing that up so you've spoken about um so when it comes to optimization there's diet there's supplements exercise stress and sleep so i'd love to go deep on into those um and then we definitely will talk about the pregnancy because that is so important that i definitely want to make sure that we touch there um but you so let's talk about diet for starters i i love talking about diet in part because it's a very powerful tool that we have because everybody eats every day right so we're all as a society we're comfortable with the idea that we feed our bodies and that our diet will reflect into what kind of clothing we will you would wear or you know a certain body weight or body time but the truth is that the same exact foods that change your body also really impact the functionality of the brain so the way that we resp that the body responds to stimulants changes throughout the cycle okay in that when your estradiol levels are high which is the week before ovulation in the few days afterwards then the stimulants would really have a good positive effect so if your estrogen is high you have a lot of energy you don't need as much coffee and you feel the effects more strongly okay but in the second part of the cycle you'll need three times more coffee to achieve the same level of alert whoa three times is it this ballpark i just mean still though i mean that's it yeah it's still a law guys you'll need more you'll need more caffeine to have the same kind of response and that's why many women will drink too much coffee and then you get the jitter so you don't feel so good that you actually feel tired because you have exceeded your threshold so i think this is important to to keep in mind and something i like to do personally during the second half of the cycle is that i switch to cacao tea i love coffee yes let me tell you so much important to me but sometimes if i feel like tired and there's no reason for me to be tired then i'd be like oh maybe you know it's a specific kind moment or the month and maybe i want to switch to something more gentle actually just recently i was like why do we want the cacao so much and i think important thing is the fact that it gives you more energy for longer periods of time especially if you mix it so caffeine and theobromine which is the antioxidant that's found in cacao powder they're both vasodilated nutrients so they improve blood flow to the brain the difference is that the action the half-life of caffeine is shorter so the fat goes away a little bit faster and also it impacts heart rate whereas the theobromine in raw cacao has a gentler effect that is more sustained over time a little bit like tea if you drink black tea you don't get the rush of energy but you'll be up at night if you're drinking so kind of like that and also if you mix it with something that contains a little bit of fat like either milk if you drink milk or oatmeal because you know whatever you like that contains a bit of fat they will slow down the release of the caffeine or the theobromine to the brain giving you more ability over time yeah which is wonderful the bulletproof coffee works so well so for women we need to be a little bit more careful or just a little bit more aware especially those who do have sensitivity to stimulants the same goes for alcohol that's fascinating um are there any foods so you mentioned like antioxidants so is it a better time to eat like more blueberries in your cycles well yeah i think you want to eat even more antioxidants and iron compound you know foods can contain iron and minerals is towards the end of your cycle as you prepare your stomach menstruation well yeah but you know it's very depleting to have a menstrual cycle so it's really important i think to replenish all the nutrients and and be sure to support your body because there's also an inflammatory component right so the antioxidants the double down is anti-inflammatory nutrients are very helpful in that respect see there's so much more to food than just food food is information and food is function and one of the functionalities of food is that very specific nutrients can literally speak to our cells so for example omega-3 fatty acids and everybody's aware that omega-3 fatty acids are good for you they're good for your body they're good for your brain good for your heart they mostly have anti-inflammatory capacities and one way they do so is that they literally speak to your dna in your cells and tell them and they would be like okay i'm here you don't have to produce that many anti-inflammatory compounds because i'm in the circulation whereas if it's not present then your dna will know that it needs to make more anti-inflammatory enzymes to to balance it out so there's always a relationship between the foods that we eat and the way that their body needs to respond and either upgrade the production of certain things or down regulate it i find it fascinating and it's the same in the brain yeah i find that fascinating too and there's just something different though about the body it speaks to you know like oh my shoulder aches right and you're like what did i do and you like think about what you did and you know it's so very specific in the moment but like the brain even just like reading a book and understanding what we're doing now has like 30 year effect you know effects on you 30 years later like that really becomes um very enlightening and to make sure that i'm trying to eat the right things right now so you've said about the diet during the cycle you mentioned omega-3 um would you suggest an mh omega-6 is that right or just three yeah so usually we recommend a balance between omega-3s and omega-6 um the point is that the western diet the typical western diet contains a ton of omega-6 fatty acids and very little of the omega-3s so i think it's helpful to focus on foods that contain more omega-3s and trying to eat less of those that are very high in omega-6 compounds you want a two-to-one ratio whereas the typical western diet is a 20-1 ratio in favor of the omega-6 or even higher than that because of all the oils and all the refined oils and all the peanuts and meat and whatnot so fish is a good source of omega-3 fatty acids fish shellfish you don't have to necessarily eat fish a lot of people don't like it some people don't want to eat it because of environmental concerns and whatnot so there are plant-based sources of omega-3s they're really great i had switched from my beloved extra virgin olive oil to flax oil so one tablespoon of flax oil contains almost all the omega-3s you need for wow so you actually should have a little bit more for your brain because alas are the plant-based omega-3s but they need to be converted into dha and epa and about 70 of the fat is lost in the conversion so you actually have to eat more so then you'll go for hemp seeds or flax seeds or chickpeas or legumes or something like that some nuts and seeds and then back to the olive oil for again yeah i'll do a bit of a blend um so okay so that's fascinating and so if you're unable to get it from natural foods um i assume supplements is the next best thing yes i would say so if you're concerned that your diet might be too low in these nutrients then supplements are definitely recommended what i would say is then supplements should not replace a healthy diet and i find that sometimes people would much rather get the supplements than eat healthily and that kind of defeats the purpose right so it's best to really focus on having a healthy diet and a diverse diet with those sorts of foods and nutrients and supplements as a backup i would say that would be my backup plan lots of patients who come to us and say give me something you know whether it's a supplement or something and say really well let's do some tests first and see if your levels are actually low because otherwise supplements don't work they only work if they're supplementing which means that you have to be low in the nutrients first in order for the supplement to have a benefit for you so i think it's important to know yourself know your numbers thinking medicine will switch into a precision medicine approach where instead of treating the average person or to treat a person as a point in a regression line you know we actually want to understand the person in front of us and and do all the tests that we can do and understand your physiology and then interact with your physiology in a way that is helpful to you i think that's so important yeah because that's the thing especially so i've been married to my husband now for almost 20 years and you know when he's when he's taking no vitamin d and he's taking all these supplements and it you know originally i was just copying whatever he was doing so everything that you're talking about is being very catered to you i think is so spot on um so i love that um but now let's talk about exercise because i heard you say and it's so true where you have let's say like the woman wants to like lose weight right and so she's like changes her diet and she goes on like these sprints and does all these exercises and like loses half a pound and then you've got the guy that just quit soda and doesn't change his exercise routine at all and then ends up losing 20 pounds so that obviously can be very frustrating but i think it's actually important to discuss what is happening to a female and what exercises can we do that is good for our brains um so yeah if you can take us down now that would be great i think that is really important exercise is the same as diet there is no one size that fits all and it's very personal and it depends it depends on what your goals are if we're thinking about the brain then what's really important is not intensity as much as consistency this is what the research on exercise and brain health shows then the key is really obviously if you if you can go higher intensity and it's enjoyable to you and you can do it good absolutely nobody's going to stop development but the problem especially in the united states is that people don't exercise that much to start with and especially for women there's a very sharp decline in the amount of time that is devoted to exercise or even just moving just being physically active as soon as we're past college right because of whatever reasons in societies and demands and growing a family and just holding a job women just don't make as much time for exercise as they do for other things what is important is to make exercise a routine part of your wellness plan right so to speak and it's very hard to do that it's honestly very hard but what the brain wants at the minimum it's a moderate intensity exercise and the need for frequency ranges between three and five times a week most experts recommend at least 45 minutes of moderate intensity exercise three to five times a week if you can do five it's better than three if you can do three it's better than none so i think it's important to be gentle with yourself and really understand whether or not a specific routine fits into your everyday life and make it sustainable women who are physically active after the age of 35 have a 30 percent lower risk of dementia in old age the women who are sedentary and 30 is insane one in three that is very important if we had drugs the lowered you risk dementia in old age by 30 it would be fda approved tomorrow and everybody would take it right instead we don't have it because we don't have that drive but we can exercise so we always recommend this to our patient just find the exercise routine that works for you that you like you need to have your you need to get your heart beating faster that that is key you know yes walking is lovely but then walk faster you have to challenge your cardiovascular system so that the brain can experience an increase in blood flow more oxygen more nutrients more resilience because the brain contains a huge amount of veins basically the vasculature of the brain is incredible you need to support it and you do it by keeping your heart strong in your entire system strong so brisk walk five times a week three times a week great if you can do something more a clinical trials of exercise has shown that some parts of your brain can actually regrow oh my god yeah like the memory center of the brain the hippocampus actually did not show any decline if people were walking fast these were elderly people were just walking fast very often like throughout the week and actually in some cases showed a bit of a rebound i mean that's so beautiful like valuable information so i am always looking at how do i show up tomorrow morning right how do i shop today in the best way that i possibly can um if i have to look at my hormones and amazing if i have to look at like what are the things i need to look at in order to protect my brain so i can show up being able to make business decisions being able to be um emotionally like sober i like to call it so i can have um maybe some conflicts in the day that it doesn't spill me over emotionally like how do i show up to be strong and confident like everything we're talking about um is about the now but then also what are the things that i can do for to help my the future lisa in me that's going to get there right like the hope is that i do live long enough to be 95 years old so what are you know what are the things so exercise is fantastic diet supplement let's talk about stress stress is we all know that you know especially now these days stress isn't good for you it gets you know it's actually causing you know early heart attacks and strokes and things like that but i've actually heard you say that stress is actually harder on females than it is on males can you talk to me about that because that was fascinating yes what happens in reality is that stress works in balance with their sex hormones so the way that the body reacts to stress is by increasing the production of a hormone called cortisone which is the main stress hormone and the way that the brain is the body and the brain is able to do that is by sinking or reducing the production of your sex hormones because they all come from the same precursor for your brain and your body to be able to increase the production of cortisol that means suppressing the production of sex hormones like estradiol and progesterone when that happens as a woman you don't feel great because your brain is literally wired to be activated in part by the estrogen especially the estrogen but also the progesterone because estrogen is an activator for the brain it's a neutral protective hormone that has a very boosting effect of brain energy levels so when your cortisol goes up your estradiol goes down and your brain suffers and then new studies with brain scans that use brain scans to look at this relationship has shown that chronic stress so not just acute occasional stress but chronic stress increases cortisol levels in a way this is quite persistent and that really has deleterious effect on memory performance already emit lights so starting at age 35 especially in women and that gets worse after women go through menopause because then the high cortisol actually correlates with brain shrinkage only in women wow yes that is bad news that is very bad news because any woman who's not under stress most likely chronic stress like you turn 35 and you're stressed out and that is unlikely to get better unless you really put an effort and come up with strategies to reduce stress so reducing stress doesn't just save your day it also really saves your brain for the long term so i think it's really important for all of us to just take a collective diet you know and just acknowledge the fact that we're all under stress and that we need to we really need to prioritize reducing stress is a very important brain protective strategy and we i think we're all aware that well-being is a skill right we know that cultivating well-being is really a skill and it's a very much an urgent public health need but we're not given the tools to do that we have a million different tools to take care of our hair to take care of ourselves right for the bodies to look a certain way you go to the gym there oh there's all sorts of contraptions available but very little has been done for people to really have the tools to cultivate mental health and well-being and we live in a society that consistently prioritizes productivity and just soldering on and and just toughen it up instead but distressing and taking time for yourself and i think especially as women we need to do that because a woman has no time for herself and men could say well we don't have either yeah but but we might have less right and it just starts as soon as you leave school and you find a job that you literally sandwich between responsibilities and there's so many expectations saying you have to work so hard just to keep your role in society and just to keep your job you have to fight for equal rights and equal pay and you're under stress so we need to find solutions against stress i i really i'm not good at it by the way so that's the thing okay so let's say everything you're saying right completely agree with you agree with too but we both know we're not great at it so what are the things because everyone listening i'm sure is thinking the same right it's like oh my god i get it yes it's really detrimental way worse than i think we ever thought it was um and so now it's like but how do we actually monitor that and live a life right where we live a life where we can get on with our lives that we're not you know like for instance running a business and doing a show like women of impact it's freaking stressful but i love it right but it's it's it's filling my heart it's my mission it's my purpose so i go i'm not going to stop it but i recognize that stress is very detrimental to my health and how i show up and how i'm going to be at 90 years old so what are the things that we can do just to keep an eye on it doesn't become an entire life change because i wish it could be everyone could do life changes we all magically change the way that we live and we're all good and now we're managing our stress we all know that's not a reality so what are the things in reality knowing all the things you have to go through knowing all the things i have to go through that we can do maybe on a day-to-day basis that can help alleviate that so that we don't blink and in five ten years we're a big ball of stress and we can't unwind it yeah and we have no brains left yes yeah i think the best answers are exercise sleep meditation these are really the most effective things that one can do diet is also effective i think but exercise is a must exercise it boosts your endorphins reduces inflammation and blinds your response to stress and makes you better at responding to stress so exercise is a big deal i think actually in that case yoga or that kind of mind-body techniques would also be really helpful if it's your thing for me it really helps i i'm i have a hard time sitting still and i have to sit a lot so when when i'm able to move i'd rather do something fast like running or i actually invested in a small elliptical machine that i can keep literally next door so whenever i'm in a meeting that i don't have to have video on for i'll just be on the elliptical or going through walks if you can being in nature actually being in nature has been shown to have wonderful effects on stress levels my daughter is very outdoorsy and so on weekends we try to go for walks and we have a little forest nearby that is very nice and another thing is really meditation and i i do encourage meditation for kids as well like my daughter meditates with me tonight we have these little meditations for children as an app that i really like that she loves and little stories but that really has changed my life so as you know i would just recommend jack cornfield i don't know if you're familiar with it yeah yeah fantastic and meditations for beginners they're guided meditations and just his voice is just so soothing and so real like he really walks his talk that i really enjoy that and then he wrote books and you know there are other people who do this kind of organs very very helpful and meditation is like exercise you need to find the kind of meditation that really works for you yeah so for me is insight meditation mindfulness meditation but there's so many other options and there are people who like to do that with apps i personally don't except for my child but there are a ton of apps that can really help it's the same as sleep you know sleep kind of got the bad rap in the sense of like oh that's the thing you can skip that's the thing you don't have to focus on um talk to me about actually this the impact of sleep on our brains and sleep is really like one of the last frontiers in a way because we now understand the importance of sleep for brain health there are many different things that happen during sleep one that is very important is that the brain is able to reduce inflammation when we're sleeping and the other one is that it's really it's literally the only chance that the brain has to take care of itself so sleep is me time for the brain and sleep goes in cycles right there are different phases of sleep that start with you know when you're just falling asleep there's sleepiness you start having dreams but then you go through a phase where you have no dreams so your body is completely still and that is the slow wave sleep phase or the deep sleep phase that is followed by iem sleep when we have dreams but that phase when we're completely still in the brain is not dreaming is actually the crucial component of sleep in terms of health and well-being because that is really when the brain activates it's like the brain is your mom and says okay the kids are down for the night i can take a shower i just can't take care of myself and literally the brain is like oh everybody's quiet how's the sky i'm going to turn on this new system the glymphatic system that is like a dishwasher it this literally jets a water fluid they open up in the brain and remove it's like power wash your brain so that all the toxins all the impurities all the waste products even alzheimer's plaques are removed then we're awake and we're moving we're doing stuff there are these these um microglial cells in the brain that just pick up all these bits and pieces they need to be getting rid of and if you're not getting that phase of your sleep then you're going to miss out on a huge opportunity for the brain to really heal itself that's amazing have you noticed then a correlation between um a cognitive decline and people getting less and less rest yes yes actually there's there's a strong evidence that sleep deprivation or even just fragmented sleep when you keep waking up multiple times at night is associated with the development of alzheimer's disease in the brain reading in the 50s and it's not just alzheimer's there's also inflammation basically i think that when it comes to lifestyle i think what we're understanding is that if you don't have a healthy lifestyle you're enabling all your risks to become actual medical issues in a way whereas if you have a strong healthy lifestyle you're effectively reducing this risk and keeping the risks under control almost on a daily basis so it's a preventative in that respect that you're really avoiding issues and you're keeping your genes at bay you know what i love that okay i'm gonna ask you a really hard question right now it may be easy for you though i don't know um so i live my health issues but i have lived a very healthy lifestyle with the health issues i've definitely changed my life i've changed the way that i eat i change my lifestyle like everything the way i sleep everything but i've chosen to not have children and i've heard you say in your book when you break down so you know going back to the subject we were saying earlier about how pregnancy like these the three ps right the the puberty and the pregnancy and that the pregnancy um whether you've had a baby or whether you've gone through those hormonal changes or not actually has an effect on your future brain and alzheimer's and things like that so i literally as i was reading your book i was like i really wanted to know the answer and you can be very honest with me but was is not having children a possible detriment to my brain health as i age no our research and other people's research have shown that women who have children have a little bit more protection against alzheimer's disease as compared to women who don't have children women have who have more than five but it's not universal whether but i want to clarify this is observational this is just the coolest question you know it's not that you need to have a kid tomorrow no absolutely there are challenges you know i haven't i totally get it they you'd rather not but what is happening then in your brain that a lot that that makes a difference i think it increases plasticity having children so what the research shows is that as women go through pregnancy and especially postpartum that's really when your brain changes the most in your entire life and the fastest and it changes in ways they're very complicated and we're just starting to really understand but just so far when i was done your brain shrinks when you're pregnant and perhaps shrinks even more right after the baby is born but in a way that is very similar to puberty so it's considered an optimization in that i like to talk about pregnancy as as a as a system of brain as if the brain is a computer and you had an upgrade during puberty and now you're having another upgrade during pregnancy because once your baby is born that's it you know if you were the most important person in the room you can forget about it everything you basically your job as mother nature intended it is to make sure that human being survives and that means that a lot of connections in your brain are going to have to be rewired to stimulate your maternal instincts and stimulate your ability to really respond to the requests of a creature who can't speak or can't move for a long time so what people say is that what scientists have shown is that you basically do loose connections in some parts of the brain you lose neurons but your connectivity gets stronger in certain parts of the brain that are preparing you for motherhood so your brain is going through every wiring and the remodeling that seems to be helpful in that plasticity is stimulated so your brain becomes more plastic and that seems to give an advantage for the long term as well now if you don't get pregnant your brain is fine you know actually avoiding this turmoil that needs to happen so i think this is just one factor that is so specifically unique to women obviously men can't have children right so this is a mechanism as a biological mechanism that has evolved to support motherhood and the vast majority of people see that as being adaptive even though you have the mommy brain even though you have brain fog even though like i found myself literally knocking on the door of the fridge before opening it i'm very polite you know i wouldn't just open the door so it's just knocking and waiting and waiting and then my husband's like so that's the thing though but that's what i process right is that i'm not going to have a child just so that i can create brain plasticity but i do look i do look at this stuff and i actually i don't think that that's a bad thing like if you were like yes lisa you know they do have the edge which you said right they do have the edge so then i go to now how do i create brain plasticity myself without having a child because i just go to if they're facts there are facts and now just being aware of it allows me to think outside the box so for instance with something like is there something i can do like a test or anything that i could do to help me gain um brain plasticity without actually having to have a child having having kids is just one factor there there's a million factors women who develop would go through puberty earlier on in life and go through menopause later in life so those with the longest reproductive span they also have an edge right their brains also have more plasticity because you've had more of this hormones in your body for a longer period of time so that's that's another factor or whether or not you took hormones throughout your life whether or not you took like birth control whether or not you're going to have to take estrodiol for symptoms of menopause those also are factors then that are just as important uh your diet is important your fitness is important how much sleep you get per night is important your happiness is important your positive outlook on life is important you don't have to have children to protect your brain it's just one component to brain health and the reason we were looking into it is is because we're interested in hormones and how hormones impact the brain yeah like i said i wouldn't have a baby for that reason but it's i just i i'm such a person that like i want to have the knowledge no matter what that means so when i heard your you say about um the benefits of brain plasticis plasticity when you have kids the first thing that came to mind was oh am i am i now a step behind and i don't mind that if i am it's kind of like i just want to know the truth so that i can then plan for like all right what else can i do um to mitigate this so right i i don't think you you should worry at all these studies are descriptive and i think they're important because hopefully they will stimulate more research why right because there's very little research done on pregnancy and the long-term effects of pregnancy on the brain all we know is what happens basically when you're pregnant and like within two years interestingly there's very little work done to associate that with anything else later in life so i think it's just the process of better understanding our brains and how to keep them healthy and i think lifestyle is incredibly important we see that at the clinic all the time that when people really comply with the guidelines the recommendations that they're given their memory improves their attention improves their overall health really improves and for some women taking hormones may be helpful so there are many different strategies and they think that the approach should be individualized well i feel like we've definitely touched a lot of subjects in this episode you've given so many nuggets of gold where can people find you and the book and everything that you're doing because i believe you're writing a new book so where can people follow you to find out more i think instagram dr dr underscore which i don't really like but moscone m-o-s-c-o-n-i and that's the best way or my website which is easier is lisamastonia.com [Music] ah lisa thank you so much guys guys you got to check out her book i am freaking obsessed i'm obsessed with the brain and i'm obsessed with very specifically the xx female brain because i want to understand myself and i want to understand why i show up and do the things that i do as well as protect myself for the future because you trust me trust me guys i want to live till i'm at least 100 and i can only do that if i have absolute bla brain clarity so go check her out check out her book if you're not following me follow me at lisa billy if you're not subscribed click that subscribe button and until next time guys be the hero of your own life peace out i i think this is so important because there's a lot of messages out there let's be happy let me show you how to just be happy all the time and i say that is just not realistic i say we are human we have this whole array you

Channel: Lisa Bilyeu

Views: 24,323

Keywords: quest nutrition, motivation, inspiration, Lisa Mosconi, neuroscientist, The XX Brain, Lisa Bilyeu, Women of Impact, women, women empowerment, interview, q&a, business advice, advice for women, tips for women, podcasts, bikini medicine, discovery science, women’s health, women’s health issues, female brain, Alzheimer’s disease, Ambien, differences between men and women, menopause, menstrual cycle, Omega 3, dementia, stress management, meditation, sleep, pregnancy brain, mom brain

Id: C2QtgsVuxH0

Length: 58min 52sec (3532 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2022