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

and unfortunately, many of us are literally causing

cognitive

decline

or simply suboptimal cognition because we are not doing the right thing. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of

health

theory

. I'm here with Dr. Dale Bredesen, a world-renowned brain

health

expert. Researcher and author of the best-selling The End of Alzheimer's Valley, welcome to the program. Thank you very much, Tom. It's great to be here, so I want to delve into something that's extraordinarily important to me, which is

cognitive

optimization, it's something I think about a lot. and there are few people that I have seen take the approach that you take, most people have always basically said that there is no cure for cognitive

decline

and once you are in relapse, that's it, there is not much to do.

You can do it, you were bold enough to write a book called The End of Alzheimer's. So what do you know that everyone else doesn't know? Yes, and I must say that you know that cognitive optimization now goes very well with the prevention of Alzheimer's. in the future, so what we used to consider like hey, you don't have to worry about

this

until you're 60, no, we should do it in our teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, we'll get better results, we'll get you. We know that we will get better brain health, we will get better performance, so the goal of my lab over the years was to look at what are the molecular mechanisms that drive the degenerative state.

People say that Alzheimer's is due to free radicals, it is due to the binding of metals. The problems are due to misfolded proteins. It is due to prions. It's because you know what you have and the reality is that people don't understand what it is. That's what we set out to look at 30 years ago and what we found was truly surprising. What we discovered is that at the heart of Alzheimer's is an insufficiency: you literally have a network of plasticity 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. works. a supply, you have a demand, so what happens in Alzheimer's is you have a chronic mismatch between demand and supply and there are four major things that affect those things, number one, anything that drives ongoing inflammation and which can be teething, so changes in your oral microbiome changes. in your sinus microbiome gut microbiome um systemic inflammation metabolic syndrome uh p gingivalis herpes simplex over and over and over and over, anything that causes inflammation, anything that adds toxicity to your brain and unfortunately, as you know, we're all exposed to toxins. like never before in California. fires, you know, the air pollution that we live with, the processed foods that we are exposed to, you know, over and over again, and on, you know the water supply, and so on, so those are two Of the largest, the third is trophic support, so this was discovered years ago by Rita Levy Montgomery, who won the Nobel Prize for her work.

She discovered the first, which she called nerve growth factor. These are typically proteins that bind to specific receptors in the brain and essentially say that things are Well, what happens with Alzheimer's is that you have this set of things that are not optimal and, like I said, they can be inflammatory things, they could be be toxic things, you can reduce growth factor and trophic support, including nutrients and hormones and then energy, and that is a misunderstanding, many people, here is a simple example of many, you go to sleep for at night, you lower your oxygenation, many people don't realize that this happens sometimes when they are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Now you can easily verify this. Check it with your Apple Watch. You know, with anything better you want, or going out or doing a sleep study, you would be sitting at 96 to 98 percent oxygen, which lowers people's levels, so when I started researching you, literally, I immediately paused my research and went shopping. two oximeters, one for me and one for my wife, and then I started thinking, well, wait a second, what would cause my oxygen levels to drop? Would it just be sleep apnea or are there other things? Yes, the most common one is sleep apnea and, by the way, that happens more in men as we get older because we are a little overweight, which again is a big problem in our country, in the Western world, more because we have inflammation, so the systemic inflammation associated with sleep apnea, a lot of people will actually do it.

They improve your sleep apnea just as they improve your inflammatory state, but there are other conditions as well, there's one, for example, something called upper airway resistance syndrome, where you don't actually have apnea episodes, but essentially you're struggling to get enough air through there while you're sleeping, so it's a resistance syndrome and because of that you're now repeatedly generating some adrenaline, so you wake up again and again, so it's good to know that you're sleeping. you're getting enough sleep, you're getting enough sleep, you're getting enough sleep, you're getting enough sleep, you're getting enough sleep, and you're getting enough sleep overall, these are critical characteristics again, these are things that we take for granted and, unfortunately, many of us literally are. causing us cognitive decline or just suboptimal cognition because we're not doing the right thing so I'm going to put a mile marker up for people and as soon as I heard you say it I thought, oh my gosh, of course this is the answer which is the diet, lifestyle, exposure to toxins, it's like a lot of things I've heard you say before, there's no silver bullet, but there are potentially silver bullets, if we deal with all these different attacks on the brain. that's causing um insult the lesions so you're not going to have the cognitive impairment that's not the amyloid plaque to use an analogy um so many people and this is the part that literally until two days ago when I started doing research for this um, I hadn't heard. let no one say that they had only heard amyloid plaque amyloid plaque emily plaque and if you think of amyloid plaque as the water that is in the house after a fire, to blame the water would be to fundamentally misunderstand the problem and you speak as a functional medicine practitioner , so can you explain to us the basic things that people encounter on a daily basis?

You already ruled out processed foods, but things like mold and you talked about air pollution, like what are some of the everyday insults that people are getting, yeah, so let me quickly explain to you what this disease really is because that's the central point of this, that when you're caught up in the idea that amyloid is causing the id, the disease itself. It doesn't make any fundamental sense, so you say, wait a minute, amyloid turned out to be an antimicrobial peptide, so it's no surprise that it's part of your defense, so again your brain is deciding if things are okay and I'm going to grow and maintain synapse o I am under attack by any of these things we will talk about and therefore I have to go into protection mode.

I'm going to step back and say, "Okay, I won't have as many synapses but I'll survive and that's it." what happens as we get older we start before you know it 20 years before alzheimer's we start to shrink in size unfortunately let's get into the mechanism of that real quick so I like that it's very clear and I know that the density of the hippocampus is one of the things you observe. To judge whether someone has this problem or not, what is happening is that the brain remains permanently in the mode of protecting and shrinking and even in old age it should alternate between protecting and growing.

Yes you should, yes you should be able to do it. As long as you don't have a lot of inflammation, a lot of toxicity, you'll have support from trophic factors, hormones and nutrients, and you'll have support for energy, your brain should be able to generate and maintain senate, which is why people say oh this. The person is 95 years old, but she is as sharp as a blow or he is as sharp as a seizure. You see this all the time and this is because they have the right balance and as they shrink it is so obvious if the insult is not removed. the injury um and you said you know trying to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer's would be like trying to repair your house while it's on fire and it's pointless.

That conjured up such a powerful image, but why does it keep shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, so when we said this about the house and the fire to get stem cells, the idea was that you're just giving monotherapy, so you're taking a situation where that you don't know what these things are that are causing you to be in that regress mode, you're just going to throw some stem cells in there, yes, they will help you temporarily, but still, the house is still burning and you're trying to do something that you're trying to rebuild it while it's burning so this is what we have this set of things and we're chronically shrinking we're on the wrong side of this balance supply is being outstripped by demand well you're going to keep shrinking until these until that you can meet the demand, that's why you need to eliminate those insults and as you indicated there are several common ones so let's start by knowing what are the common things for people who should be insulted just as we are and how we live.

Well, we find subtypes of Alzheimer's that tell you it's yours, mostly inflammatory, atrophic, glycotoxic, etc. and we can see markers of that in the blood. Yes, you can see markers of those in the blood, so you can say that this person is primarily an inflammatory Alzheimer's patient or inflammatory pre-Alzheimer's and again prediabetes we recognize that increasingly pre-Alzheimer's is incredibly important if we are going to make Alzheimer's is a rare condition, which is exactly what it should be, so anything that is inflammatory we must know how we are. What happens to our oral microbiome? Do you have many pathogens?

Do you have poor teeth? If you have it, you have a higher risk of cognitive decline and then you have leaky gut. Again, leaky gut is something I wasn't taught in medical school. but it turns out to be quite common for many of us and when you have it, it contributes to systemic inflammation and therefore increases the risk of cognitive impairment, so these are all parts of type 1 or inflammatory cognitive impairment and then the type 2 is atrophic, so that's on the supply side, where there are reductions and typically people have low thyroid hormone levels, low testosterone levels, low estradiol levels, low vitamin D levels or increase in homocysteine, over and over again, so again it takes a whole host of things for your brain to function well. and I think everyone has that feeling.

I have a day where you wake up and, wow, I'm really active. Things are going great today and on the other hand, everyone's had days where, wait a minute, things just aren't right today, so that's another big one there is glycotoxic, so one of the Most common contributors to cognitive decline in the United States is insulin resistance. There are about 80 million Americans who have insulin resistance, many of them have type 2 diabetes, but it's not necessary. If I have type 2 diabetes, insulin is not just what takes care of glucose, of course, it's an energy-related hormone, but it's also a pretty important growth factor for brain cells, so when we used to growing brain cells in a dish all the time, we always did. we have to include insulin in their environment to keep them alive and interact unfortunately what happens to us is that we are exposed to high carbohydrate diets, low fiber diets, high glycemic loads, so we generate all this insulin for years and therefore , we end up in development, you can actually follow its biochemistry irs1 the signaling molecule downstream of the insulin receptor has multiple specific phosphorylation sites when in signaling, tyrosine phosphorylation is high and serine threonine phosphorylation is low when you have resistance to insulin, that changes you have specific sites that are phosphorylated on serines and threonines, which literally tells you that we are turning down the volume here and therefore this is now not giving the proper signaling, you have insulin resistance and you can check that everyone should know their homa ir, this is a simple calculation to tell you if you have insulin resistance, if you do, you are at higher risk for cognitive decline and it's probably not as acute as it should be, that's what we call type 1.5 because it is atrophic and inflammatory.

Of course, protein glycation, everyone is familiar with hemoglobin a1c, which is what we measure for the glycation of these proteins, but there are hundreds of proteins that are not enzymatically glycated when you have high glucose levels, so I've heard I've heard um. Alzheimer's is known astype 3 diabetes, um, but researching it seems like even that, although it's probably a pretty big advance compared to people who talk only about amyloid plaques, it still feels like a simplification, so how many types are there in total? If I remember correctly, there are five or six. and can you just for anyone who's taking notes, can you just explain with a really simple type one is this type 1.5 type 2 so that would be great absolutely type 1 is inflammatory like I mentioned type 2 is atrophic type 1.5 is glycotoxic and so type 3 is toxic and there are three types of toxins, you're talking metallotoxins and inorganic, organic and biotoxins, things like mycotoxins, so that's type 3 toxic, type 4 is vascular again, very important for getting adequate energy . you need the oxygen, you need the ketosis, you need the blood flow, you need the mitochondrial support and then type five is traumatic, so you have a history of head injury, especially recurrent head trauma, not only are you at higher risk for cte but also from suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Okay, so let's flip the script. Now we are thinking like a functional medicine practitioner. We are looking at a holistic approach like this. Think about identifying the causes of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's, discovering how to start reversing it, that also tells us how to stay optimal or you even know a little further to get to my obsession. What does that protocol look like? What are we eating? What are we doing? We're in the sauna, we're exercising, we're getting sunlight, what are the things that people can do? Great point, so I have a book coming out in August called The First Survivors of Alzheimer's and Seven Fantastic Wonder Stories from Seven People. who really developed Alzheimer's they told us that you are going to die you have Alzheimer's all of you had Alzheimer's were these people most of them had a relatively early stage we have had some people in a very late stage who have improved but what happens is they tend to get better, but they don't go completely back to normal, so that's one of the things we're working on right now, how can we take someone with late-stage Alzheimer's and get them completely back to normal? is that we can improve them a little bit for people with early stage or especially pre-Alzheimer's, we see tremendous improvements, we see people who go from mocha scores of, you know, 19, which is very impaired, go from zero to the cognitive evaluation of montreal of mocha, so it's kind of a standard test that's used and everyone should score 28 to 30. 30 is a perfect score, so we had people at 19, which is, you know, the disease of Alzheimer's, who came back at 30, very, very surprising, uh, and, yes, very enthusiastic. about that, but you brought up a good point in this book, we have a chapter specifically on how to improve normal cognition, so what are all the things you can do to get better results?

Yes, there is a whole program very similar to the one we are using to take people from suboptimal cognition to optimal cognition. You can start with normal and improve your cognition. Yes, it has to do with a whole set of things. You're right, detox is part of this. We all have some degree of exposure. toxicity from the air we breathe from the water we drink from the foods we eat uh, you know, if you eat seafood full of mercury if you don't eat grass-fed beef if you're on a high-carbohydrate diet, if you're eating simple carbs, All of these things contribute to a less than optimal result, so you're absolutely right, just get in that sauna, sweat it out, and then use a non-toxic soap like castile soap.

To go slow on this, this is something I've heard you say a lot and I've never heard of these soaps. So, Castilla is a brand, no, it's a type of soap and the general idea of ​​this is that they are. help you get rid of toxins without adding more toxins, you don't want a lot of sentences in the sun, soap doesn't help you get rid of toxins, I guess well, no, what's happening is that the sauna is expelling them, okay? through sweat and if you don't wash them, they will be slowly reabsorbed, so think about it, you know you want to get rid of toxins by drinking less, obviously, less exposure, less eating, less breathing, less drinking.

Those things and, by the way, all of us who are in the California fires, you know, we had a setback because of that, that's a problem and we've had patients who were, for example, in the cloud of the World Trade Center if you look to everyone in the world. mall cloud in 2015 alone, 13 of them already had cognitive impairment. These are people, yeah, relatively young, scary, it really is, um, being in that mall cloud increased their risk not only from what we've heard about lung diseases and cancers, but also. also for cognitive impairment. Well, just as an example.

I'm sorry. I want to keep going slow to make sure people can really incorporate this into their lives. Well, then I'm at the World Trade Center. The problem is forgetting cancer for a second. and lung disease, which may be more obvious, but I'm taking something, it's getting into my bloodstream, it's crossing the blood-brain barrier, and some mechanism is happening in my brain. I guess the amyloid plaques are actually building up. these toxic particles that have reached my brain my brain goes into survival mode so I'm not growing or repairing I'm just trying to survive I'm shrinking so it's okay for one to try to minimize it I can cure it. filter the life out of my space number two, I have absorbed some toxins, I admit it, so now I am doing something to make myself sweat, is a sauna an identical exercise or does the sauna have certain benefits that exercise does not have?

Vice versa, both have their own benefits, but both have sweating as one of their benefits. Yes, exercise also improves blood flow to the brain. The sauna is not so long, on the other hand, the sun is going down. your blood pressure, I'm actually relaxing arterial stiffness over a period of time, some people unfortunately will pass out in saunas, as you know, so be careful with that, but yes, you also want to increase your glutathione, you also want a supplement or diet there are a couple of ways to do it and for a lot of these things you can do it with diet, so for example you want to take some sulforaphane, which is very useful and you can get it with broccoli sprouts as an example, and is this for everyone or only if We are in a time of great environmental toxin, yes that is exactly the point: we all live in a toxic world, that is the problem.

Human beings are complicated organisms and we are all exposed to some degree of toxicity, so we realize that detoxification is not only for sick people, it is also for people who want to be healthier and enjoy a better future. with a lower risk of cognitive decline, a lower risk of cancer, a lower risk of chronic diseases. I think this is something we already know we've done. I thought about medicine, since we do well and then we get sick and then we take a pill and we'll be better again, but that's not the way it works and then when I was on the national council on aging, there was a epidemiologist that not a very interesting study that looks at when, on average, US citizens develop their first chronic disease and the answer was at age 40, when UK citizens develop their first chronic disease at age 50, so we are almost 10 years worse off than in the UK.

I don't think the UK is a tremendously healthy group, but on average they are healthier than US citizens, so we have that combination of diet, poor exercise, high stress, poor sleep and not much brain training. a recipe that I wrote in the first book, at the end of alzheimer's, a chapter specifically on how to get alzheimer's, you want to get alzheimer's, I can help you do that, it's actually pretty easy, you do all these things the opposite of what We do You're recommending it, and even though you won't have Alzheimer's on day one, you'll have the biochemistry that will lead to it in the future, so you can know that you can be very shocked to see that you know that whole set of things.

Okay, let me give myself Alzheimer's real quick and tell me if I did it right or if I'm missing something. I'm going to totally interrupt my sleep. I'm going to

avoid

sunlight, so no vitamin D, right? Absorb as much respirable toxin as humanly possible. I'm definitely going to do things like smoke or sit in traffic. I'm going to do pro-inflammatory things, so I'm going to eat a lot of carbs. low fat I'm going to eat a lot of big seafood, so things that live a long time and eat a lot of smaller fish are trying to think about the other six, okay, I've eaten several of them. yes, cheeseburgers, fries and coke, a lot of sugar, a lot of saturated fat and no fiber, that's what we call the bermuda triad, so it's like the tri bermuda triangle, this is the brafuda triangle and you gives this combination, so you want to have a leaky gut, you want to have a very stressful job and the conclusion of the chapter was that you want to do what a lot of us do all the time, that's why 15 of us are dying of Alzheimer's because we live in a society and we live in such a way and we eat in such a way and we sleep in such a way and we have stress in such a way that we are doing all the things that are pro-Alzheimer's by the way before we have Alzheimer's, many of us do it. we're going to

avoid

Alzheimer's but we're still going to have suboptimal cognition so we're not going to do it and you know, a lot of us are dealing with that, oh my gosh, it's the afternoon, I can barely keep my eyes open, I can barely concentrate, I can barely do my job I can't work fast enough those kinds of things are all critical okay so I want to stay in the toxicity for a second.

Is fiber linked to toxicity or does that have an absolute effect? So how do you get rid of these toxins? So what happens is you have a dynamic balance, you're exposed to toxins all the time and you're metabolizing them, inactivating them, excreting them all the time. What happens if you're on the wrong side of that balance? You have a bad future if you're on the right side, you're getting better all the time, so like you said you want to absolutely reduce your exposure, find out what your local military's score is, that's from the EPA, if it's high, get rid of you, remedy and get rid of it. from that exposure avoid the california fires avoid being on the 405, you know, rush hour and that kind of thing, like you mentioned, hepa filters are very important, I think you know everyone should think about hepa filters in their home, cleaner air, no doubt, very, very good and then, urinating properly, so yes, filtered water, many of us are exposed to very low quality water, so that's a big problem, and you know which is appropriate, urinating every day, very very helpful, high fiber diets, you are literally moving.

Get these things out so you have a couple of ways to do it right and then you can also sweat them out and it's different toxins that are removed by these different mechanisms and then of course you breathe them out as well. so you want to optimize those things and then in your bloodstream you want to have high levels of glutathione, high levels of vitamin C, so you want to have the appropriate detoxifiers to bring those things together. Now that you mentioned metals, many of us are exposed to heavy metals. and Dr. Joe Pizzorno has made a wonderful career as a toxicology-oriented physician watching how many of us are exposed to too much mercury, too much lead, too much arsenic, too much persistent organic pollutants and we don't realize it.

As he points out, he is one of the main players in this rise of 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 is also exposure to arsenic, as it turns out, where are we taking arsenic? Yes, you are taking arsenic from various sources, you get it from groundwater, that is one of the most important things, so you can look up what the water is in my area in terms of arsenic, where is it found? There are certain areas of Utah, for example, with very high levels of arsenic and groundwater and, interestingly, there is a lot of chicken, so for people who eat a ton of non-organic chicken, be careful about checking your arsenic level in the rice, another big one for people who eat a ton of rice check what your arsenic level is because again, it's something you can detoxify from and so you don't want to have that stuff around because it can harm you, so true, it also increases your risk of cancer and as a group, these All things increase the risk of cognitive decline, so again you can do it.

Yes, you want to get infected. Alzheimer's toxicity is part of it. I can help you so that you can catch Alzheimer's withquite quickly. He is very friendly. Glad to hear it. that you can also do the opposite and help me unravel some of these things, so let's talk about there's a mechanism in the brain that I found very interesting, basically a mechanism by which we metabolize and remove the amyloid plaques that this is a part of. of a process, another of your balance things, um, what can we do to promote where it's okay, great? I had something across the blood brain barrier, whether it was a virus, fungus, whatever and the amyloid plaques wouldn't get it and now what can I do? do to make sure that that gets eliminated, so one of my colleagues at ucla, a guy called milan ciao, professor milan fiala, a really interesting character and what this guy showed is that you have this natural thing where you really have your macrophages and your circulators. macrophages, which are your monocytes, you can, you can isolate them, take some blood, take your monocytes and then feed them amyloid and see how good they are at eating amyloid and for a normal person, you eat the animal that you're taking. get up and get rid of get rid of it pretty quickly for people who have cognitive impairment, they are very slow and it's because they don't have it, it goes right back to the balance that we talked about before, if you have ongoing inflammation, what is your body?

Telling you: Hey Tom, you've got an insult from these various organisms, so the last thing you want to do is eat and get rid of your amyloid because your amyloid has an antimicrobial effect, it's part of your innate nature. By the way, we want to leave that amyloid there so it can continue to kill the insects. If you want to get rid of your amyloid and eliminate it, you have to start by having a pristine system where there is no systemic inflammation because then your body is working against yourself as you say, hey, I'm inflamed, I have various things from my oral microbiome or sinusitis or what?

What do you have in my brain? You're not going to get rid of the amyloid. You're going to produce more because you're trying to fight those things, so the first thing you need to do is rule out the reason and turn it into insults. The second. What you have to do is bind it together, and by the way, curcumin binds it together very well, which is why, again, a lot of people add a little bit of turmeric to their food. People in India do this for years and years and it keeps the amyloid down. Aid. to delete it, joins it and helps delete it now again.

You don't want to eliminate it if you have systemic inflammation, but if you are in an anti-inflammatory state, you can eliminate it slowly. Guess how else you delete it? getting a good night's sleep is very good to help eliminate it and again other things like uh, great exercise, you're getting that blood flow, you're essentially ex, you're doing more exchange than you otherwise would, supporting it with proper oxygenation, right? OK? um let's get really deep into diet here, so I don't know what percentage of the problem you would prescribe for dieting, um, but my kind of knee-jerk reaction if someone says my flight was delayed, I'm like it's your diet, like me. just for me it all comes back I know I'm oversimplifying but a lot of things come back into the diet so you said something that I found really interesting and that was thinking about me so I feed a lot of meat uh grass fed but still That's how I like my meat. and you said to treat meat as a condiment, so I found that very interesting, so what should my diet be?

I assume I'm willing to do whatever you tell me is optimal. Yes, and I repeat, you are relatively young. That's great, when you're young. great, have a high protein diet, no problem, you want to get clean proteins, of course, so you want to put things that are cleaner, that don't have all the pesticides, that don't have all the hormones, that don't have all the intense stress. You know a lot of these animals die from bacterial infections so you have it now and you want to avoid it so you already mentioned you're doing it you know you're eating grass fed beef fantastic.

The key here is that you want to stay away from diets high in simple carbohydrates which are bad for everyone and again is an important part of being able to optimally manage your Alzheimer's, if you really want to control your Alzheimer's have plenty of simple carbohydrates as well. than what you want. have is high in good fats, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, so olive oil, so, eating avocados, you know, eating any type of oil, even a small amount of saturated fat, coconut oil, uh, not even It's so bad that you don't want to have a lot of linoleic acid be careful with the omega-6s you want it for.

For most of us, the average American diet has about 15 to one omega-6 to omega-3, it's incredible, so we're basically saying to give ourselves as much inflammation as we can. and so little anti-inflammatory if we can get it close to one to one, two to one, three to one, even four to one, that's where the big omega-6s come from, so grain-fed beef would have a ton of omega-6. 6 yeah, you get it basically from seed oils, things like that, um, so you have to be careful with these seed oils that can have, you know, which are also known as vegetable oil, yeah, vegetable oil, things like that. you know, things like palm oil go with avocado oil and that kind of stuff and extra virgin olive oil on the plus side and to be fair you get a lot of omega-6s from walnuts so you want Eat some nuts because they give you good oils, but you don't want to go crazy with nuts because they can give you too much on the inflammatory side.

Do I need raw nuts? Can I toast them, salted, raw and minimally toasted? death because you are damaging the oils, then you can know that you can oxidize the oils, remember when saturated fats are difficult to oxidize because they don't have double bonds, but unsaturated fats have those double bonds that make them quite susceptible to oxidation. it can go rancid that's the idea so watch out for rancidity okay now let's talk about the meat in that so I heard you say plant rich so I want to have what percentage if you were to calculate the calories.

What percentage of my calories do I want from plants? Yes, so this is what we need to do from the biochemistry side. This is what we will talk about later if you want to end up with perfect brain function. This is what you must do to achieve it. For good brain function you want to be able to have some ketosis, so you want to have a mildly ketogenic diet, are you checking your ketones and are you driving yourself into mild ketosis? I checked my ketones so fiercely for so many years even though I don't do it.

I don't check them now, I can feel that it's right, explain to me why I want to be in ketosis in some periods and you should probably tell people about your keto 12 3 just so they understand your general philosophy and then I promise you. I mentioned seafood, we'll come back to that, uh, but yeah, explain to us the why of ketosis, so the thing is, your brain functions have to have energy and you get two types: you can metabolize glucose or you can metabolize ketones, that's what your mitochondria use in your brain and good brain function has a lot to do with energy, as we talked about before and, by the way, Alzheimer's has a lot to do with bad energy, poor mitochondria, poor evaluation, so, what happens is that many of us should be metabolically flexible you should be able to come and go you have some carbohydrates that you metabolize that in the next meal you have a lot of fats you can metabolize the ketones that come from fat metabolism and you come and go that's where you want to be for many of us even though we only consume carbohydrates and even from the age of 20 if you are at risk and if our apoe4 is positive and let's say for a moment to talk about apoe, do you know your apoe status, I don't know, but after To hear you, I'm desperate to get tested, yeah, so three-quarters of people in the country are apoe4 negative, which means the lifetime risk of Alzheimer's is about nine percent, about 75 million.

Americans have a copy of Apoe4. so they got it from either their mother or their father, but not both, and their risk increases from 9 lifetime to 30 lifetime and then 7 million Americans have two copies, one from their mother and one from their father and They are more than fifty percent more likely to get Alzheimer's than to avoid it. Well, now we can make sure no one gets it again if we do the right thing and check these things before we get it. Unfortunately, most people don't. I know that when you have apoe, you have a higher risk of cognitive decline, you have a higher risk of inflammation, so you want to know that in terms of what you're going to do optimally and by the way, it's one. one of the key issues for seafood that is improving and one of the reasons to incorporate the right fats, so those people specifically need to stay away from a lot of saturated fats, so all we are trying to do is motivate people . going into ketosis, if we take as an example someone who is apoe4 positive in their late 20s, they may see a decrease in glucose utilization in the temporal lobe and the parietal lobe, which is the signature of Alzheimer's and many years later, but is starting to see the The first changes were in the late 1920s and early 1930s, so again, why can't we?

I know enough about apoe4 to ask maybe the right question. So apoe4 you put it in a really amazing historical context that would have actually been very beneficial for our long time. Back in the day, ancestors who were just coming down from the trees needed a pro-inflammatory state to deal with punctured feet, infections, eating raw food, all that I thought was a brilliant vision, which is actually disappearing due to lifestyle changes, but it actually served a purpose that I don't know, which made me feel better about it, but that the reason I'm starting to have a decrease in insulin absorption is because I'm in a pro-inflammatory state, that's what's causing it.

Of course, because you have this beginning of loss of utilization and it is related to insulin resistance, a pro-inflammatory state, you can close that gap and a beautiful work by Dr. Stephen Kunin

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that you can close that energy gap with ketones, for example. that's We want to get you into a mildly ketotic state and for anyone with cognitive impairment we definitely want to get you into a mildly ketotic state and that means a low carb diet. Now there's nothing wrong with proper meats and especially, you know, think about uh. know fish, especially smashed fish, but the small ones salmon mackerel anchovies sardines and herring those are the good ones, you don't want the high mercury types because they can hurt you and you want wild fish grass fed beef there's nothing wrong with it bad if you want to be a vegetarian that's fine, if you want to eat grass fed beef, no problem and it does, obviously it will help you avoid, you know, avoid sarcopenia as you get a little bit older, you know, the loss of muscle. mass so you can get protein, you know you can get protein through meat, you can get it through vegetables and other things as well as beans, you know all kinds of other ways to get it, so this keto flex 12-3 is for you. you are entering ketosis you are following a high fiber diet you are fasting for a minimum of 12 hours if you can before it is positive 14 to 16 hours it is better if you can before it is negative 12 to 14 it is okay You need that time during night to get some autophagy to improve your glymphatic system.

Now you're cleaning things up and improving your ketosis so all of these things are working together to give you the best synaptic maintenance and synaptogenesis, which is why Keto Flex 12-3 and then three hours is before bed, so if you don't want to, you should stop. to eat five minutes before bed because your insulin will still be high and by the way, have you checked your CGM yet? Continuous glucose monitoring, another quantified self is changing. the world, so I think all of your viewers, uh, there are so many things you can do now that weren't available 10 years ago, between the Apple Watch and the Aura Ring and the Omron for blood pressure and keto, you know, ketones check things. like biosense, you can make breathalyzers. now you can check your sleep at night, you can check your microbiome, you can check your genome, I mean, it's amazing, so you can really adjust and improve your health and improve your cognition long term with all the things that are currently available, Yes, continuous glucose monitoring is fascinating.

I did it for probably about six months and I loved it. It turned eating into a kind of game of you know what's going to raise my glucose. What can I do to reduce it? It was really fascinating. I once ate a bowl of ice cream and did about 300 bodyweight squats and I actually lowered my insulin more than before when I ate the ice cream, so it was really interesting, it wasn't worth it. 300 air squats is a lot. of squats withair, so I didn't do that anymore, but it was very, very interesting and yeah, I started to understand some of these.

In fact, I would love to know what are the tests that someone should do frequently to keep a real check on their health, so obviously you've mentioned several, we already talked about oximeter glucose monitoring, what are some of the things that people can do. I won't say where the price just doesn't matter, but you know it does. It doesn't have to be free, but it's reasonable and let me ask you when you did the CGM, did you have hypoglycemia at all because that is equally harmful to your brain? You don't want it to go too high, but we found that several people will.

You wake up in the middle of the night not realizing you've had hypoglycemia and that's bad for your brain, so you know that's why high in good fats and protein with low carbs will give you that smooth curve. and nice you don't get. These big peaks and you don't have big troughs, so here are the things you want to know while you were asking, what do you want to know here? Well, again you want to go back to what are the things that put you at risk. And what are the things that are taking away your best performance?

So first you want to know if I have any systemic inflammation and you can check your hscrp. A simple and easy test to perform. Any doctor can do it and draw blood. how now we have a cognoscope and I made up that word just because everyone realizes that when they turn 50 they should have a colonoscopy. Well, for anyone, I recommend this to people turning 40. Get a cogniscopic checkup and see where you are. Up here, where did we get that mycognoscopia.com? Easy to do, you can do a direct cogniscopy 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, it's optional if If you have symptoms of cognitive decline, you want include an MRI with volumetric, but if you don't have any symptoms, that's fine, don't worry, you don't need to do that third part, so it's pretty simple, some blood tests. and a quick online cognitive assessment and then what you want to know is what parameters are going to help you achieve the best functioning of your brain, so like I said, systemic inflammation, you want to know if you have good teeth now.

If you want to check it, could you ? There is a test called easy oral DNA that will tell you if you have a high number of pathogens like p gingivalis. Those are the types that end up in your brain and cause you to produce that amyloid. over the years that's affecting your cognition and then you want to know, for example, have you mentioned leaky gut, which is a very common big problem and a common contributor to suboptimal cognition and suboptimal 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 useful, but if you just know your homa, what that means is he's checking your fasting glucose and you're using fasting insulin, so that some people will have a normal fasting glucose, but they can only do this because they are fasting.

Insulin is working overtime to keep glucose in the normal range. Is there a home test for that? Yes, there is no home test for fasting insulin yet. unfortunately, it's a blood test again, you can get it, you can get it online, but there's not a simple, quantified, kind of biohacking kind of thing that you can do for that, and then you want to know if you're low. on specific hormones, nutrients and growth factors, so you want to know your vitamin D as an example, that's why we created for people interested in prevention, we created something called precode, so if you search precode p-r-e-c-o-d-e, it will 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, like your vitamin D and your thyroid status.

He wants to know his homocysteine. Homocysteine ​​is an indicator of your ability to methylate, which is important. for a number of things, one of them is your detox and then you want to know your toxicity status now, if you want to just look at the things that you can do yourself at home, that's fine, again, you can order these tests and then people with which you can literally have someone come to your house and draw them for you or you can go to a local center either way, but if you just want to do it yourself I recommend people get an Apple Watch or an aura ring , something like this. and again, there's so many things you can do, you can look at your, you can look at your microbiome on your own, literally send it, send it, you can look at your blood pressure, check it easily, there's a thing called Omron that will allow you to follow it with your tool kit from Apple, I mean, now we have an app that looks at all of these things and helps you track them, you can look at your oxygenation, like I mentioned before. with Apple Watch and things like that, you can also look at your vascular elasticity with something called heart, so you can look, you take that and you look at your vascular elasticity and then your heart rate variability and you can see you know how. you're doing it for your age and again you'll notice when you're under a lot of stress, when things get tough, you'll have much lower heart rate variability when you're doing well and again you know, as a scientist, I never thought about the idea of ​​things like , you know, things like meditation, I thought these things were, you know, useless and I have to say I can't ignore the data, the data

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you that these things are really useful in achieving that. increasing heart rate variability, reducing stress actually turns out to be surprisingly useful and interestingly, while we were developing drugs for Alzheimer's, one of the targets turns out to be cr f1, so basically you're causing it to release cortisol Of course, the cortisol-releasing factor has receptors in the brain and when those receptors bind, you get a pro-Alzheimer's effect, so cognition is again affected by increasing cortisol levels, so there is no doubt that things like meditation and sleeping well are obtained. heart rate variability turns out to be very useful and then you assume that you also check your VO2 max.

Well, your Apple Watch has that so you can see where your VO2 max is. Yours is probably very high because if you are in good shape it must be quite high and of course it is age related but staying in good shape is another thing, it basically tells you if you are able to metabolize oxygen and get proper blood flow, so again, all of these things are critical. By the way, for giving you the best results and the best cognition, and then I think it's helpful to check glutathione. Some people argue that that's one that you know most people will have a decent level of glutathione, but for people who have toxicity, you should do it.

I have some way of determining if I have a lot of ongoing exposure to toxins, so I think it's very helpful to check your glutathione level and also check if you have toxins, if you have heavy metals. an easy one to check, it's a blood test or you can do it like a urine test. Some people like to do it like a provoked urinalysis, that's fine, but one way or another, metal detection sees where you are standing and then the organics if you have a very high load of persistent organic pollutants. It is important to know if you have high exposure to benzene toluene.

Here you have an example. A person came a few years ago. who was 47 years old with clear cognitive impairment and it turned out that what had happened is that she had been exposed for years and years to burning paraffin candles and these things give off high levels of benzene toluene, even some mercury, so it had extremely high levels. unfortunately, of those things from this constant exposure, again it's helpful to do that and then look at your mycotoxins and again there's a separate test for those, there's a couple of real time groups that do this and also gpl, they both do these urinary mycotoxins if You're low, hallelujah, don't think about it for a few years, but if you don't realize that you're exposed to these things, they can cause all kinds of problems, including cognitive decline where you go into and the doctor says I don't know why. you have this, your cognition just isn't very good, that's something that's important to look at, so all of this is very, very helpful, all of this has been extraordinarily helpful, I've really enjoyed not only our time together, but researching how you read your book, very, very hopeful, the way you show people that you know we really may be living in the last generation to get Alzheimer's without understanding how to prevent it, and that's extraordinary and then being able to use these things for cognitive optimization is incredible.

Where can people find out more about you to find out when the book is coming out, which I think will be later in 2021? What is the best way? Yeah, good point, so the book is next. the first alzheimer's survivors will be out in august thanks for asking about that and you can get more information at dr

bredesen

.com uh or you can go to mycognoscopia.com or you can go to apolo useful for us to establish a software company that just that creates software for looking at all these different variables because, again, the future of medicine is for doctors to work with software engineers, so your generation is going to have much better cognition than mine because we didn't know about this and you don't.

I have to worry about Alzheimer's, it really should be a rare disease and I'm convinced it will be when you get to my age. I think it will be a very rare condition. Amazing, thank you so much and guys, make sure you check it out. everything he has to offer will literally change your life on a cellular level so my friends will be following him and speaking of things you should look up if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and until next time my friends will be legendary. Be careful, thank you all very much for watching and being part of this community.

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