This Neurologist Shows You How You Can Avoid Cognitive Decline | Dr. Dale Bredesen on Health Theory

and unfortunately so many of us are literally giving ourselves cognitive decline or simply sub-optimal cognition because we are not doing the right thing hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by our sponsors at peak tea go to peaktee.com impact and you'll get five percent off your first order enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to another episode of health theory i am here with dr dale bredesen who is a world-renowned brain health researcher and the best-selling author of the end of alzheimer's dale welcome to the show thanks so much tom great to be here so i want to dive into something that is extraordinarily important to me which is cognitive optimization it's something that i think a lot about and um there are few people that i've seen take the approach that you take most people have said for ever basically that there is no cure for um cognitive decline and once you're sort of on the backslide that's just it there's not a lot that you can do um you were so bold as to write a book called the end of alzheimer's so what is it that you know that everybody else doesn't yeah and i should say you know that that cognitive optimization now goes very well with prevention of alzheimer's in the future so what we used to think of as hey you don't have to worry about this until you're in your 60s no we should be doing in our teens 20s 30s 40s we will get better outcomes we'll get you know we will get better brain health we'll get better performance so the the goal of my laboratory over the years was to look at what are the molecular mechanisms that drive the degenerative state people say alzheimer's is because of free radicals it's because of metal binding problems it's because of misfolded proteins it's because of prions it's because you know what what have you and the reality is that people don't understand what it is so that's what we set out to look at 30 years ago and what we found was really surprising what we found is that at the heart of alzheimer's is an insufficiency you literally have a plasticity network in your brain that responds and again this is not surprising if you think about what it takes to make a country work or to make your business work you have a supply you have a demand so what happens in alzheimer's you have a chronic mismatch between the demand and the supply and there are four big things that affect those number one anything that drives ongoing inflammation and that can be dentition so changes in your oral microbiome changes in your sinus microbiome gut microbiome systemic inflammation metabolic syndrome uh p gingivalis herpes simplex one on and on and on anything that drives inflammation anything that adds toxicity to your brain and unfortunately as you know we are all exposed to toxins like never before from the california fires to the you know the air pollution that we live with to the processed foods that we are exposed to you know on and on and on to you know the water supply and on and on so those are two of the big ones the third one is trophic support so this was actually discovered years ago by rita levy montgomery who won the nobel prize for her work she discovered the first one which she called the nerve growth factor these are typically proteins that bind to specific receptors in your brain and essentially say things are good so what happens with alzheimer's is you have this set of things that are sub-optimal and as i said that can be inflammatory things it could be toxic things can be reduced growth factor and trophic support including nutrients and hormones and then energetics and that's a misunderstood one many people here's a simple example of many you go to sleep at night you drop your oxygenation for many people they don't realize this is happening sometimes in their 20s 30s 40s now you can check this easily check it with your apple watch check it you know with a better whatever you like or get out or get a sleep study you should be sitting at 96 to 98 percent oxygen what drops people's levels so when i started researching you i literally immediately i just i paused my research and went and bought two oximeters one for myself and one for my wife and then i started thinking well wait a second what would cause my oxygen levels to drop would it be um just sleep apnea or are there other things yeah the most common is sleep apnea um and by the way that happens more in males more as we get a little older more as we are a little overweight which again a big problem in our country uh in the western world more as we have inflammation so systemic inflammation associated with sleep apnea a lot of people will actually improve their sleep apnea just as they improve their inflammatory status but there are also other conditions uh there's ones for example something called uars upper airway resistance syndrome where you don't actually have apnea episodes but you are essentially struggling to get enough air through there while you're sleeping so it's a resistance syndrome and by because of that you're now repeatedly making a little bit of adrenaline boom so you're waking up again and again and again so again good to know that you're sleeping that you're getting enough rem sleep you're getting enough slow wave sleep you're getting enough deep sleep and you're getting enough overall sleep these are all critical features again these are things that we take for granted and unfortunately so many of us are literally giving ourselves cognitive decline or simply sub-optimal cognition because we are not doing the right thing so i'm gonna i'm gonna put a mile marker for people and as soon as i heard you say it i thought oh my god of course this is the answer that it's diet it's lifestyle it's uh exposure to toxins it's like a whole bunch of things i've heard you say before there's no silver bullet but there's potentially silver buckshot that if if we deal with all of these different assaults on the brain that are causing the the um insults the injuries then you're not going to have the cognitive decline that it isn't the amyloid plaque to use an analogy um so many people and that this is the part that literally until two days ago when i started researching for this um i hadn't heard anybody say i had only ever heard amyloid plaque amyloid plaque emily plaque and if you think of amyloid plaque as the water that's on the house after a house fire your to blame the water would be to fundamentally misunderstand the problem and you talk like a functional medicine practitioner so can you walk us through like just the basic things that people encounter on a daily basis so you you threw out processed food already but things like mold and you talked about air pollution like what are some of the the just everyday insults people are taking yeah so let me just quickly walk through what this disease actually is because that's the whole that's the whole point of this that when you're stuck back in the idea that the amyloid is causing the id the disease itself it makes no fundamental sense then you say well wait a minute amyloid turned out to be an anti-microbial peptide so no surprise it is part of your defense so again your brain is deciding are things good and i'm going to grow and maintain synapses or am i under assault from any of these various things that we'll talk about and therefore i have to go into protection mode i'm going to pull back and say okay i won't have quite as many synapses but i'll survive and that's what's happening as we get a little older we begin before you know 20 years before alzheimer's we begin to downsize unfortunately let's get into the mechanism of that really fast so um i like that it's very clear and i know hippocampal density is one of the things you look at to judge whether somebody is having this problem or not so what's going on is the brain is permanently staying in the mode of protect downsize and even in old age should it be alternating between protect and grow yes you should yeah you should be able as long as you don't have a lot of inflammation a lot of toxicity you got the support from trophic factors hormones and nutrients and you've got support for energetics your brain should be able to make and maintain centers that's why we people say oh this person's 95 years old but she's sharp as a tap or he's sharp as attack you see this all the time and this is because they've got that appropriate balance and so as they're shrinking is so obviously if you don't remove the insult the injury um and you said that you know trying to treat the symptoms of alzheimer's would be like trying to repair your house as it's on fire and it it doesn't make sense i that conjured such a powerful image but why does it keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking right so when we said this about the house and fire for stem cells so the idea was if you're only giving a monotherapy so you're just taking a situation where you don't know what these things are that are causing you to be in that pullback mode you're just gonna throw some stem cells in there yeah they're going to help transiently but you're still the house is still burning down and you're trying to now do something you're trying to rebuild it as it's burning down so here's the thing we have this set of things and so chronically we are shrinking shrinking as we're on the wrong side of this balance the supply is being exceeded by the demand well you'll keep downsizing until these until you can meet the demand so that's why you need to remove those insults and as you indicated there are several common ones so let's start with you know what are the common things for people that to be insulted by as we are as we are living well we found subtypes of alzheimer's that tell you is yours mostly inflammatory atrophic glycotoxic etc and we can see markers for that in the blood yeah you can see markers for those in the blood so you can say this person is mostly an inflammatory alzheimer patient or inflammatory pre-alzheimer's and again pre-diabetes we recognize more and more pre-alzheimer's incredibly important if we're going to make alzheimer's a rare condition which is exactly what it should be so anything that's inflammatory so we should know how we're doing with our oral microbiome do you have a lot of pathogens do you have poor dentition you are increased risk for cognitive decline if you do and then do you have leaky gut so again leaky gut is something that i wasn't taught about in medical school but turns out to be quite common for many of us and when you have that it will contribute to systemic inflammation and therefore increase your risk for cognitive decline so these are all parts of type 1 or inflammatory cognitive decline and then type 2 is atrophic and so that's on the supply side where you have reductions and a typical thing people will have poor thyroid hormone or reduced testosterone or reduced estradiol or reduced vitamin d or increased homocysteine on and on so there's a whole set of things again required to make your brain function well and i think everybody has that feeling i have a day where you get up and wow i'm really on today things are going great and on the other hand everyone's had days where like wait a minute things are just not right today so that's another big a big one there then glycotoxic so one of the most common contributors in the united states to cognitive decline is insulin resistance there are about 80 million americans who have insulin resistance many of them go on to have type 2 diabetes but you don't have to have type 2 diabetes insulin is not only the thing that deals with glucose of course it's an energy related hormone but it's also quite an important growth factor for brain cells and so when we used to grow brain cells in a dish all the time we would always have to include insulin in their medium to keep them alive and to keep them interacting unfortunately what happens to us is we are exposed to high carb diets low fiber diets high glycemic loads and so we put out all this insulin for years and therefore we end up developing you can actually follow the biochemistry of it irs1 the signaling molecule downstream from the insulin receptor has specific phosphorylation sites multiple when it is on signaling the tyrosine phosphorylation is high and the serine threonine phosphorylation is low when you have insulin resistance that changes you have specific sites that that are phosphorylated on syrians and threonines which is literally saying to you we're turning down the volume here and so this is now not giving its appropriate signaling you have insulin resistance and you can check everyone should know their homa ir this is a simple calculation to tell you whether you have insulin resistance if you do you are at increased risk for cognitive decline and you're probably not as sharp as you should be so that's what we call type 1.5 because it's both an atrophic one and an inflammatory one of course the glycation of your proteins everyone's familiar with hemoglobin a1c which is what we measure for glycation of these proteins but there are hundreds of proteins that are non-enzymatically glycated when you have high glucose levels so i've heard i've heard um alzheimer's referred to as type 3 diabetes um but researching you that seems like even that while probably a pretty big breakthrough compared to people talking just about amyloid plaques still feels like a simplification so how many total types are there um if i remember right there's five or six and um can you just for anybody that's taking notes can you just walk through with like a really simple type one is this type 1.5 type 2 so on that'd be great absolutely type 1 is inflammatory as i mentioned type 2 is atrophic type 1.5 is glycotoxic and so and then type 3 is toxic and there are three types of toxins the you're talking about the metallotoxins and inorganics the uh organics and the biotoxins things like mycotoxins so that's type three toxic type four is vascular again hugely important to get appropriate energy you need the oxygen you need the ketosis you need the blood flow you need the mitochondrial support and then type 5 is traumatic so you've got a history of head injury especially recurrent head trauma not only are you at increased risk for cte but also for alzheimer's disease okay so let's sort of flip the script here um we're now thinking like a functional medicine practitioner we're looking at the holistic approach like this i think identifying what causes alzheimer's cognitive decline figuring out how to begin to reverse that also tells us how to stay optimal or even you know a little beyond to get to my obsession um what does that protocol look like what are we eating what are we doing are we in the sauna are we exercising we're getting sunlight like what are what are the things people can do great point so i have a book coming out actually in august which is called the first survivors of alzheimer's and fantastic seven wonderful stories from seven people who actually developed alzheimer's we're told you're going to die you've got alzheimer's all of you deep into were these people uh most of them had relatively early stage we have had some people very late stage who have improved but what happens is they tend to improve but they don't get all the way back to normal so we that's one of the things we're working on right now how do we take someone with late stage alzheimer's and get them all the way back to normal what we can do is we can get them improved somewhat for for people with early stage or especially pre-alzheimer's we see tremendous improvements we see people go from moca scores of you know 19 which is very impaired it goes from zero mocha's montreal cognitive assessment so it's a kind of standard test that's used and uh everyone should be scoring in the 28 to 30 30 is a perfect score and so we had people down in 19 which is you know alzheimer's disease who came back to 30 so very very striking uh and and so yeah very enthusiastic about that but you brought up a good point in this book we have a chapter specifically on enhancing normal cognition so what are all the things that you can do to get best outcomes and yes there's a whole program very much like what we're using to bring people from sub-optimal cognition to optimal cognition you can start with normal and improve on your cognition and yes it has to do with a whole set of things you're right detox is part of it we all have a some degree of exposure to toxicity by the air we're breathing by the water we're drinking by the food we're eating you know just if you're eating mercury filled seafood if you're not eating grass-fed beef if you've got a high carb diet if you're eating simple carbs all of these things are contributing to a lesser than optimal outcome so you're absolutely right just getting in that sauna getting a sweat going and then using a non-toxic soap like castile together i want to go slow through this this this is something that i've heard you say a lot and i've never heard of these soaps um so is castile a brand no it's it's a type of soap and the whole idea of this is that they are they help you to get rid of the toxins uh without adding more toxin you don't want a lot of phrases in the sauna the soap's not helping you get rid of toxins i would assume well no what happens is the sauna is driving them out okay so just through sweat right and if you don't then wash them away they will slowly reabsorb so you think about it you know you want to get rid of toxins by imbibing less obviously less exposure less of the eating less of the breathing less of the drink all that stuff and by the way all of us who are in the california fires you know had a setback because of that that's an issue and we've had patients who were in for example the world trade center cloud if you look at everyone in the world trade center cloud just by 2015 13 of them already had cognitive decline these are people yeah relatively young scary as hell it really is um this being in that trade center cloud increased your risk not only for what we've heard about lung disease and cancers but also for cognitive decline okay so just by way of example sorry to i want to keep going slow so that i make sure people can really take this into their lives okay so i'm in the world trade center the problem is forgetting cancer for a second and lung disease which are maybe more obvious but i'm taking something in it's getting into my bloodstream it's crossing the blood-brain barrier and some mechanism is happening in my brain i'm guessing the amyloid plaques are actually glomming onto these toxic particles that have made their way into my brain my brain goes into survival mode so i'm not in growth and repair i'm just trying to survive i'm shrinking shrinking so okay to one to try to minimize it i can hepa filter the life out of my space yep number two i've taken in some toxins i recognize that so now i'm doing something to make me sweat does is a sauna and exercise identical or does the sauna have certain benefits that exercise doesn't or vice versa they both have their own benefits but they both do have sweating as one of their benefits um yes with with exercise you're also improving blood flow to your brain the sauna doesn't do that as much on the other hand sun is dropping your blood pressure i'm actually kind of relaxing the arterial stiffness for a period of time some people unfortunately will pass out in saunas as you know so be careful about that but yes you also want to increase your glutathione you want also one supplementing or diet there are a couple ways to go and for many of these things you can do it with diet so an example you want to take some sulforaphane very helpful and you can get this with broccoli sprouts as an example and is this for everybody or only if we're in a big environmental toxin moment yeah so that's the that's exactly the point we are all living in a toxic world that's the problem human beings are complicated organisms and we are all exposed to some degree of toxicity and so we realize that detoxification is not just for sick people it's also for people who want to be healthier who want to enjoy a better future with a lower risk of cognitive decline a lower risk of cancer a lower risk of chronic illness i think this is something that you know we've thought about medicine as we do fine and then we get sick and then we take a pill and we're going to be better again but that's not the way it works and then when i was on the national aging council there was an epidemiologist who did a very interesting study looking at when on average do u.s citizens develop their first chronic illness and the answer was in our 40s when do citizens of the uk develop their first chronic illness in their 50s so we're almost 10 years worse than the uk we don't think of the uk as being being a tremendously healthy group but they are healthier than united states citizens on average again we so we've got that combination of diet poor exercise uh high stress poor sleep and without a lot of brain training that is a recipe i wrote in the first book uh the the end of alzheimer's a chapter specifically on how to give yourself alzheimer's you want to give yourself alzheimer's i can help you do that it's actually pretty easy you do all these things the opposite of what we're recommending and even though you won't have alzheimer's on day one you'll have the biochemistry that leads to it down the road so you can you know you can impact yourself a lot by looking at that you know that whole set of things all right let me give myself alzheimer's real quick and tell me if i got it right or if i'm missing anything um i'm gonna totally disrupt my sleep um i'm going to avoid sunlight so no vitamin d right i'm going to take in as much breathable toxin as humanly possible i'm definitely going to be doing things like smoking or sitting in traffic um i am going to i'm going to do pro-inflammatory stuff so i'm going to be lots of carbohydrates very low fat i'm going to eat a lot of big seafood so things that live for a long time and eat a lot of smaller fish they're trying to think about the other six they're well i've gotten several of them yeah cheeseburgers fries and a coke so lots of sugar lots of saturated fat and no fiber that is what we call the berfuda triad so it's kind of like the bermuda tri triangle this is the berfuda triangle and so it's giving you this combination so you want to have a leaky gut you want to have a very high stressful job and the bottom line for the chapter was you want to do what so many of us are doing all the time that is why 15 of us are dying of alzheimer's disease because we live in a society and live in such a way and eat in such a way and sleep in such a way and have stress in such a way that we are doing all the things that are pro alzheimer's by the way before we ever get alzheimer's many of us will avoid alzheimer's but we're still going to have sub-optimal cognition so we're not going to do and you know many of us face that oh my god it's the afternoon i can barely keep my eyes open i can barely focus i can barely get my job done i can't work fast enough those sorts of things those are all critical okay so i want to stay on toxicity for a second is fiber tied to toxicity or does that have a absolutely so how do you get rid of these toxins so what's happening is you have a dynamic balance you're exposed to toxins all the time and you are metabolizing them inactivating them excreting them all the time so what's happening if you're on the wrong side of that balance you have a bad future if you're on the right side you're just getting better all the time so as you said you want to absolutely reduce your exposure find out what your home army score is that's from the epa if it's high get rid of you remediate and get rid of that exposure avoid the california fires avoid being on the 405 you know at rush hour and that sort of thing as you mentioned hepa filters very important i think you know everybody should think about hepa filters in their home cleaner air no question very very good and then the appropriate urination so yeah filtered water so many of us are exposed to really low quality water um so that's a you know that's a huge issue um and you know appropriate you know urination every day very very helpful high fiber diets you're literally moving out these things so you've got a couple of ways to do it right and then you can you're also sweating them out and it's different toxins that are being removed by these different mechanisms and then of course you're also breathing them out so you want to optimize those things and then in your blood flow you want to have high glutathione levels high vitamin c levels so you want to have the appropriate detoxicants to bind these things up now you mentioned metals so many of us are exposed to heavy metals and and dr joe cazorno has made a wonderful career as a as a toxicologically oriented physician at looking at how many of us are exposed to too much mercury too much lead too much arsenic too much on the persistent organic pollutants and we don't realize it as he points out it's one of the major players in this increase in type 2 diabetes that has affected so many people in the united states yes part of it is obesity part of it is poor diet but part of it also is exposure to arsenic as it turns out so where are we taking arsenic in yeah you're taking arsenic in from several sources you get it from groundwater that's one of the most important things so you can look up what is the water in my area in terms of arsenic where does it stand there's certain areas of utah for example very high in arsenic and groundwater and then interestingly a lot of chicken so for people who eat a ton of non-organic chicken beware check your arsenic level rice another big one for people who eat a ton of rice check to see what your arsenic level is because again it's something you can detox from and so you don't want to be keeping that stuff around it can be damaged it also increases your risk for cancer by the way and as a group these things all increase your risk for cognitive decline so again you can do so yes you want to give yourself alzheimer's toxicity is part of it and i can i can help you so that you can give yourself alzheimer's fairly quickly it's it's very kind i'm glad that you can also do the reverse and help me unwind some of this stuff so let's talk about um there's a mechanism in the brain that i found very interesting basically a mechanism by which we're metabolizing and flushing out the um amyloid plaques that this is part of a process another one of your balance things what can we do to promote where it's like okay cool i had um something across the blood-brain barrier whether it's a virus fungi whatever and amyloid plaques wouldn't got it and now what can i do to make sure that that gets flushed out i'm excited to tell you all about peak tea listen up my friends if you're looking for ways to support healthy immune function right now you need to hear all about peak tea peak is a brand our team here at impact theory has loved four years and they just released a game changer in vitamin c supplementation it's an elderberry liposomal c called daily immune that one of our impact theory members is happy to be adding to his daily routine what makes daily immune so effective is that it is maximized for absorption most vitamin c supplements absorption decreases to less than fifty percent when taking amounts greater than a thousand milligrams so you actually end up peeing most of it out peak has solved this problem however by encapsulating their vitamin c in liposomes liposomes are made from the same material as your cells they can bypass absorption barriers to deliver vitamin c where you need it dailymun is also the only triple power vitamin c formula around in every packet you get a whopping 1900 milligrams of elderberry superfood complex that's the equivalent of up to 13 grams of fresh black european elderberries plus you get a thousand milligrams of sodium acorbate which is a buffered form of vitamin c that's gentler on your stomach but wait there's more daily immune is made with just seven clean ingredients no preservatives no refined sugars no additives and unlike most liposomal supplements daily immune tastes amazing thanks to the pure elderberry apple and lemon fruit concentrates it's so easy to take too the packet fits right in your pocket when you're ready to take it just squeeze it right in your mouth no glass no water no spoon needed you can stash them anywhere and take them on the go peek is a brand our team at impact theory has loved for years and if you want the powerful antioxidant benefits of vitamin c from peak we have a special offer just for our audience if you go to peakte.com impact right now you'll get five percent off your first order most people are ordering two or more so stock up before they sell out once again that's five percent off at peakt.com impact and peak t is spelled p i q u e t e a dot com slash impact take care and be legendary so one of my colleagues at ucla a guy named milan theo professor milan fiala really interesting character and what this guy showed is that you're you have this natural thing where you actually your macrophages and your circulating macrophages which are your monocytes you can you can isolate take a little your blood take your monocytes and then feed them the amyloid and see how good how good are they at eating the amyloid and for a normal person you eat the animal you're taking it up and get rid of getting rid of it pretty quickly for people who have cognitive decline they're very slow and it's because they don't it goes right back to the balance that we talked about before if you have ongoing inflammation what your body is saying to you is hey tom you've got you've got an insult from these various organisms so the last thing you want to do is eat up and get rid of your amyloid because your amyloid has an antimicrobial effect it is part of your innate immune system by the way so we want to leave that amyloid there so that it can continue to kill the bugs so if you want to get rid of your amyloid and flush it out you want to start by having a pristine system in which there isn't systemic inflammation because then your body because you're you're working against yourself as long as you're saying hey i'm inflamed i've got these various things from my oral microbiome or sinusitis or what have you in my brain you're not going to get rid of amyloid you're going to make more because you're trying to fight those things so the first thing to do is shut off the reason for making it the insults second thing to do is to bind it up and by the way curcumin binds it up very nicely so this is why again many people will actually shave a little turmeric on their food people from india do this for years and years and it keeps that amyloid low it helps to remove it it binds it and helps to remove it now again you don't want to remove it if you've got systemic inflammation going on but if you have an anti-inflammatory state you can slowly remove it guess how else you remove it getting a good night's sleep very good to help remove it and again other things like on excellent exercise you're getting that blood flow you're essentially ex you're doing more exchange than you would otherwise be doing supporting it with appropriate oxygenation okay so um let's go real deep on diet here so uh i don't know what percentage of the issue you would prescribe to diet um but my sort of knee-jerk reaction if somebody's like my flight was delayed i'm like it's your diet like i just to me everything comes back i know i'm oversimplifying but so much comes back to diet so um you said something that i found really interesting which was think of me so i go hard on meat uh grass-fed but still i like my meat um and you said to treat meat like a condiment so i found that very interesting so what should my diet be and assume i'm willing to do whatever you tell me is optimal yeah and again you are relatively young that's great so when you're young great have a high protein diet no problem you want to get clean protein of course so you want to put things in that that are cleaner that don't have all the pesticides don't have all the hormones don't have all the heavy stress you know many of these animals dying from bacterial infections so you got that now so that you want to avoid that so you already mentioned you're doing uh you know you're you're eating things that are grass-fed beef fantastic the key here is you want to stay away from high simple carb diets that is bad for everybody and again it's an important part of being able to give yourself alzheimer's optimally if you really want to give yourself alzheimer's have plenty of simple carbs so what you want to have is a high good fats polyunsaturates and monounsaturates so olive oil so uh eating avocados uh you know eating uh any sorts of oils even some small amount of saturated fats coconut oil uh not not even so bad you don't want to have a ton of linoleic acid be careful about the omega-6s you want to for for most of us the average american diet has about 15 to one omega-6 to omega-3 it's unbelievable so we're basically saying let's give ourselves as much inflammation as we can and as little anti-inflammatory if we can get it closer to one to one two to one three to one even four to one that's where where are the big um omega-6s coming in so grain-fed beef would have a ton of omega-6 yeah you're getting it from you're basically getting it from seed oils things like that so you want to be careful about these seed oils that can have you know that can have also known as vegetable oil yeah vegetable oil stuff like that you know palm oil things like that stick with the avocado oil and that sort of thing and the extra virgin olive oil on the positive side and to be fair you do get a lot of omega-6s from nuts so you want to have some nuts because they do give you good oils but you don't want to be going crazy on the nuts because they can give you too much on the inflammatory side do i need raw nuts can i have roasted salted raw and minimally roasted don't roast them to death because you're damaging the oils then you can you know you can oxidize the oils remember when saturated fats are hard to oxidize because they don't have double bonds but the unsaturated fats have those double bonds that make them quite susceptible to oxidation they can go rancid that's the idea and so be careful of rancidity okay so um now let's talk about the meat in that so i've heard you say plant rich so i want to have what percentage like if you were going to ballpark me calories what what percentage of my calories do i want from plants yeah so here's the thing let's work from the biochemistry side here's what then we'll talk about if you want to end up with perfect brain function here's what you need to do to do that okay so for good brain function you want to be able to have some ketosis so you want to have a mildly ketonic diet do you check your ketones and are you driving yourself into mild ketosis i i checked my ketones so ferociously for so many years even though i don't check them now i can feel it right explain to me though why why do i want to be in ketosis at some periods and you should probably tell people about your keto 12 3 just so that they get sort of your overall philosophy and then i promise i mentioned seafood we will come back to that uh but yeah walk us through the the why of ketosis right so the thing is that your brain functions it's got to have it's got to have energy and you get two types you can either metabolize glucose or you can metabolize ketones that's what your mitochondria use in your brain and good brain function is a lot about energetics as we talked about before and by the way alzheimer's is a lot about poor energetics poor mitochondria poor evaluation so what happens is so many of us we should be metabolically flexible you should be able to go back and forth you have some carbs you metabolize that the next meal you have a lot of fats you can metabolize ketones which come from the metabolism of the fats and you go back and forth that's where you want to be for so many of us though we're purely on the carbs and so even beginning in your late 20s if you are at risk and if you if our apoe4 positive and let's digress for one moment to talk about apoe do you know your apoe status i don't but after listening to you i i am desperate to get tested yeah so three quarters of people in the country are apoe4 negative which means your lifetime risk for alzheimer's about nine percent or so about 75 million americans have one copy of 804 so they got it from either their mother or their father but not both and they are their risk goes from 9 for their life to 30 for their life and then 7 million americans have two copies they got one from their mother and one from their father and they are well over fifty percent more likely that they will get alzheimer's than that they will avoid it well good now we can make sure that nobody gets it again by doing the right things by checking these things before you get it unfortunately most people don't know so when you have apoe then you have an increased risk for cognitive decline you have an increased risk for inflammation and so you you want to know that in terms of what you're going to be doing optimally and by the way it's uh it's one of the key issues for uh for seafood so improving and one of the reasons to to get your appropriate fats on board so those people are specifically should be staying away from a lot of saturated fats so all we're trying to do is drive people get you into ketosis if you take someone who's apoe4 positive as an example by the late 20s you can see a decreased glucose utilization in the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe that's the signature of alzheimer's and many years later but you're beginning to see the first changes in the late twenties and early thirties so again why we so i know enough about apoe4 to ask maybe the right question so apoe4 you put in a historical context really amazing that it actually would have been very beneficial to our long long ago ancestors who were just coming down out of the trees they needed a pro-inflammatory state to deal with punctures in their feet infections eating raw food all that i thought that was a brilliant take that it's actually disappearing because of the changes in lifestyle but it actually served a purpose that i don't know that made me feel better about it but that the reason that i begin to get the decrease in uptake of um insulin is because uh i'm in a pro-inflammatory state is that what's causing that yes because you have this beginning of loss of utilization and it is related to insulin resistance pro-inflammatory state you can bridge that gap and some beautiful work from dr stephen kunin show that you can bridge that energy gap with ketones so that's why we want to get you into a mildly ketotic state and for anyone with cognitive decline we definitely want to get you into a mildly ketotic state and that means a low carb diet now there's nothing again nothing wrong with appropriate meats and especially you know think about uh you know fish especially the smash fish but the little guys salmon mackerel anchovies sardines and herring those are the good guys you don't want the high mercury guys because they can they can hurt you and you want wild caught fish grass-fed beef nothing wrong with that if you want to be a vegetarian fine if you want to have grass-fed beef no problem and it does it'll help you obviously with uh avoiding uh uh you know avoiding sarcopenia as you get a little older uh you know loss of muscle mass so you can get protein you know you can get your protein through meat you can get it through vegetables and other things as well beans you know all sorts of other ways to get it so that's so this this keto flex 12-3 is that you're getting into ketosis you're having a high fiber diet you're having fasting for a minimum of 12 hours if you're able before positive 14 to 16 hours is better if you're april before negative 12 to 14 is fine you need that time overnight to get some autophagy to get your glymphatic system you're now cleaning things up and to improve your ketosis so all these things work together to give you the best synaptic maintenance and synaptogenesis so that's why keto flex 12-3 and then three hours is before bed so you wanna if you don't wanna stop eating five minutes before you go to bed because your insulin will still be high and by the way have you checked your cgm yet so continuous glucose monitoring another quantified self is changing the world so for i think all your viewers uh there's so much you can do now that you wasn't available 10 years ago between apple watch and aura ring and omron for blood pressure and ketos you know ketone checks things like biosense you can do breathalyzers now you can check your your sleep at night you can check your microbiome you can check your genome i mean it's it's incredible so you really can can fine-tune yourself and improve your health and improve your long-term cognition with all the things that are currently available yeah continuous glucose monitoring is fascinating i did that probably for about six months and i loved it it turned eating into sort of a game of you know what's going to spike my glucose what can i do activity wise to drive it back down that was really fascinating i once ate a bowl of ice cream and did about 300 uh body weight squats and actually drove my insulin down lower than before when i ate the ice cream so that was really interesting it was not worth it 300 air squats is a lot of air squats um so i didn't do that anymore but um it was that was very very interesting and yeah beginning to understand some of these in fact i would love to know um what are the tests that somebody should be doing with frequency to keep a real handle on their health so you've obviously mentioned several already we talked about oximeter glucose monitoring what are some of the the things that people can do i won't say where price just doesn't matter but that are you know it doesn't have to be free but is reasonable and let me ask when you did the cgm did you drop into hypoglycemia at all because that's equally damaging to your brain you don't want to be spiking too high but we find that a number of people will wake up in the middle of the night not realizing they have gone into hypoglycemia and that is damaging to your brain so you know that's again why a high good fats and protein with low carbs will give you that nice smooth curve and you don't get these big spikes and you don't get the big troughs so here are the things you want to know as you were asking what do you want to know here well again you want to go back to what are the things that are putting you at risk and what are the things that are taking away from your best performance and so you want to know first of all do i have any systemic inflammation and you can check your hscrp simple test easy to do any doctor can do it and draw blood you can by the way now do we have a cognoscopy and i made up that word just because everybody realizes when they turn 50 they should have a colonoscopy well for anyone i recommend this for people for their 40th birthday get a cognoscope check and see where you stand and get up here where do we actually get that mycognoscopy.com easy to do you can do a direct cognoscopy and it's just three things it's some simple blood tests it's a simple online cognitive assessment and then the third part is actually uh is actually optional if you've got symptoms of cognitive decline you want to include an mri with volumetrics but if you don't have any symptoms you're doing well don't worry about you don't need to do that third part so it's quite simple some blood testing and a quick online cognitive assessment and then what you want to know is you want to know the very parameters that are going to help giving you best function of your brain so as i said systemic inflammation you want to know do you have good dentition if you want to check you could there's a test called oral dna easy it'll tell you whether you have a high amount of the pathogens like p gingivalis those are the guys that end up in your brain and that are causing you to make that amyloid over the years that is affecting your cognition um and then you want to know uh for example do you have you mentioned leaky gut that's a huge issue very common and a common contributor to sub-optimal cognition and a sub-optimal metabolism so you want to know that and then you want to know your glucose numbers and you don't necessarily have to do cgm although i think it's helpful but if you just know your homa ir so what that means is it's checking your fasting glucose and you're fasting insulin so some people will have a normal fasting glucose but they're only able to do that because they're fasting insulin is working overtime to keep that glucose in the normal range is there a home test for that yeah there's not a home test for fasting insulin yet unfortunately so that's a blood test again you can get it you can get it online but there isn't a simple quantified self sort of things a biohacking sort of thing that you can do for that and then you want to know are you low in specific hormones nutrients and growth factors and so you want to know your vitamin d as an example so we actually created for people in interested in prevention we created something called pre-code so if you look up pre-code p-r-e-c-o-d-e it'll give you the ability to get a report and a simple test that will do the critical things to know if you are at risk things like your vitamin d and your thyroid status you want to know your homocysteine homocysteine is an indicator of your ability to methylate which is important for a number of things one of them being your detox and then you want to know your toxicity status now if you want to look at just the things you can do by yourself at home okay again you can order these tests and then people you can literally have a someone come to your home and draw these for you or you can go to a local center either way but if you just want to do it by quantified itself then i recommend that people get either an apple watch an aura ring uh something like this and again there are so many things you can do you can look at your uh you can look at your microbiome on your own send that literally send that in you can look at your blood pressure check it easily there's a thing called omron which will which will allow you to follow it with your apple toolkit i mean we have we actually have an app now that looks at all these various things and helps you to follow them along uh you can look at your uh you can look at your oxygenation as i mentioned earlier with apple watch and things like that then you can also look at your uh at your vascular elasticity uh with something that's called i heart so you can look you take that and look at your vascular elasticity and then your heart rate variability um and you can see uh you know how you're doing for your age and again you'll you'll notice when you're under a lot of stress when when things are tough you're going to have a much lower heart rate variability when you're doing well and again you know as a scientist i never thought the idea of things like you know things like meditation i thought these things were you know worthless and i have to say i can't ignore the data the data show you that these things are actually helpful getting that heart rate variability up getting that stress down actually turns out to be to be surprisingly helpful and interestingly as we were developing drugs for alzheimer's one of the targets turns out to be cr f1 so it's basically your the thing that's causing you to release cortisol of course cortisol releasing factor has receptors in your brain and those receptors are when they're binding you're getting a pro alzheimer's effect so again you're affecting cognition by running up your cortisol levels so no question things like meditation and good sleep getting your heart rate variability up turn out all to be very helpful and then do you assume that you check your vo2 max as well okay your apple watch has that so you can see where your vo2 max is yours is probably very high because if you're in good shape it should be quite high and of course it's age related but again keeping yourself in good shape that's another thing it's basically telling you are you able to metabolize the oxygen and get yourself appropriate blood flow and so again all these things are critical for again for giving yourself best outcomes and best cognition by the way and then i think it's helpful to check glutathione some people argue that that's one that uh you know most people are going to have a decent level of glutathione but for people who have toxicity you have to have some way to determine you know do i have a lot of ongoing exposure to toxins so i think it's a very helpful thing to do check your glutathione level and also check to see if you've got toxins if you've got heavy metals that's an easy one to check that's a blood test or you can do it as a urine test some people like to do it as a provoked urine test that's fine but one way or another screening for those metals see where you stand and then organics if you've got you know very high load of uh you know of persistent organic pollutants um that's that's important to know if you've got a you know if you've got high exposure to benzene toluene and here's an example we had a person come in a few years ago who was 47 years old with clear cognitive decline and it turned out that what had happened is she had been exposed for years and years to paraffin candle burning and these things give off high levels of benzene toluene even some mercury and so she had extremely high levels unfortunately of those things from this constant exposure so again helpful to do that and then look at your look at your mycotoxins and again there's a separate test for those there's a couple groups real time does this and also gpl both do these urinary mycotoxins if you're low hallelujah don't think about it for a few years but if you're if you're not realizing that you're exposed to these things they can give you all sorts of problems including cognitive decline where you go in and the doctor says i don't know why you've got this your cognition is just not very good well that's something that's important to look into so all these very very helpful matt all of this has been extraordinarily helpful i have really enjoyed not only our time together but researching you going through your book um very very hopeful the way that you're showing people that you know we really may be living through the last generation that gets um alzheimer's without understanding how to avoid it and so that is extraordinary and then being able to use this stuff for cognitive optimizations incredible where can people find out more about you so that they know when the book is coming out which i believe is later in 2021 what's the best way yeah good point so the book's kind of the next book the first survivors of alzheimer's coming out in august thanks for asking about that and you can get more information at drredison.com uh or you can go to mycognoscopy.com uh or you can go to apollo helpful so we set up a a software company that just that does software for looking at all these different variables because again the future of medicine is for physicians to work with software engineers so your generation is going to have much better cognition than my generation because we didn't know about this and you don't have to worry about alzheimer's it really should be a rare disease and i'm convinced it will be by the time you get to my age i think this will be a very rare condition amazing thank you so much and guys be sure to go check out everything that he has to offer it will change your life quite literally at the cellular level so my friends get after it and speaking of things you should get after if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 131,986

Rating: 4.9051347 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dr. Dale Bredesen, Health Theory, Alzheimer’s disease, Alzheimer’s, cognitive, cognition, optimization, optimal health, sleep apnea, amyloid plaques, leaky gut, insulin, toxins, toxic inflammation, glutathione, inflammation, fiber, arsenic, heavy metal detox, carbs, healthy diet, ketones, Apollo Health, keto diet

Id: eAbdQnCb9cc

Length: 55min 52sec (3352 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021