The Dr. Hyman Show - Longevity Roadmap: The Functional Medicine Approach To Optimal Brain Health

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 5 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In this episode, we explore brain health by looking at how to prevent cognitive decline and optimize brain function. Learn more and sign up to watch the Longevity Roadmap docu-series at longevityfilm.com In the Longevity Roadmap docuseries, we will walk you through the latest research on longevity, healthspan, and how to live better, longer. We also dive into the science behind preventing the most prevalent diseases of aging, and we’ll talk about what it means to build a resilient body. Each episode will take on a specific focus to help you understand the diseases of aging and what Functional Medicine teaches us about prevention, testing, nutrition, and more. 

Hi everyone, my name is Kea and I'm the director of Dr. Mark Hyman's brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. I'm so excited to give you a sneak peek of episode 5 today on The Doctor's Pharmacy. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman and his team at the Ultra Wellness Center dive deep into brain health and preventing Alzheimer's and dementia. They also dive into the world of brain optimization and nootropics. Folks in your 20s, 30s, and 40s, listen up. This stuff is important as studies are showing that changes in the brain happen 20 to 30 years before a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or dementia. Here are the first 15 minutes of episode five. Today, we're going to discuss one of my favorite topics, brain health. Now, when you ask most people what they fear when it comes to aging, pretty much everyone

says the same. They're scared of losing their executive function, their ability to think and remember, their ability to focus and stay energized. In short, they're afraid of losing their minds. We can get a new knee, even a new heart or kidney, but we cannot get a new brain, at least not yet. When we talk about healthy aging, we have to discuss brain health.

Currently, one in three seniors dies with Alzheimer's or dementia. Over five million Americans are struggling with Alzheimer's, and changes can be found in your brain sometimes 20, 30, or 40 years before a diagnosis of dementia occurs. This means that we have a lot of time to heal our brains before we get into trouble. Now, most of us know we can prevent heart disease by living a healthier lifestyle, but are you aware that the same is true of our brains? Not many people are talking about how to live a brain healthy life. Now remember that unified theory of aging? The problem of insulin resistance caused by too much starch and

sugar? Well, it applies to the brain too. In fact, scientists now refer to Alzheimer's as type 3 diabetes or diabetes of the brain. We know that diabetics have four times the risk of getting dementia and that even pre-diabetes can lead to pre-dimension. Researchers are exploring, and I have seen in my own patients, the benefits of diet change and dementia, especially very low-carbohydrate ketogenic diets. That's mostly fat and very low carbs. Amazing new studies show that aggressive lifestyle treatment and addressing underlying chronic issues like diabetes, high blood pressure, and nutritional deficiencies can actually slow and even reverse memory loss in people who already have early dementia. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

So starting early is really key. My youngest brain patient is nine years old. She's fine now, but has a high risk of dementia, which I'm sure we can prevent by starting early to optimize her health and her brain. Now, memory loss is just one of the many challenges we see when it comes to declining brain health. Others include anxiety, depression, personality disorders, eating disorders, addictions, obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, and lots more.

Now I believe that our brain is our most important and powerful organ. It's a three poundpound universe sitting at the top of our body that dictates our choices, that gives you personality, that allows you to fully engage in life. In my last docuseries, Broken Brain, I discussed a key insight that most people still don't seem to understand. And that insight is that your brain is an organ that's connected to everything else happening in your body. Fixing your brain starts with fixing your body. You have to optimize all the inputs and take out all the bad influences or bad information going into the system.

I truly believe that the brain is resilient. It can recover and it can heal when given the right conditions. I've seen it over and over in thousands of my patients and the brain science backs this up. Brain health is a really important topic. It comes up in almost every conversation with my patients and dementia seems to be the fear. Most of all my patients, somewhere in their list of complaints, is going to mention something about memory loss or forgetfulness. And they start to worry, is this the beginning of Alzheimer's dementia? Quite honestly, they should worry, but not because they're having some lapses in memory or forgetfulness, but because science is showing us that you can begin the process of developing

Alzheimer's dementia 20 to 30 years before you wake up one morning forgetting your wife's name. It's important when you're young to start thinking about your brain health. You might not want to, and you might not think you have to, because you're young. But as I said before, you need to start thinking about brain health before it's too late and changes begin. But what is happening in your brain when you're 30 and 40? You're maturing. You're probably starting to feel mature and really getting a good grasp of who you are. Well, that's because the brain is still developing, believe it or not. And there are different parts of the brain that are now becoming interconnected.

And as those connections occur, you're getting more self-regulation, more self-control, and more awareness of your emotions. At the same time, your brain is still putting down myelin on your neurons. Myelin is an insulation that allows those neurons to fire and move information very fast. And the more myelin you have on your neurons, the faster you're going to be able to think. And it's still happening at quite a rapid clip. It starts to level off by the time you're in your 40s or middle age. But in your 30s and 40s, you're still laying down a lot of myelin. Interestingly enough, in my practice, I do have a lot of 30 and 40-year-olds beginning to complain of slower cognition, some brain fog,

and even some memory lapses that they hadn't had before. And I think it has a lot to do with stress. Greater college debt, waiting to get married in your 30s, maybe even starting a family while you're trying to get a foothold on your career, are a confluence of events that just didn't exist a generation ago. The first place to start in building brain power and avoiding early cognitive decline is building stress resilience. We all have stress. It's everywhere. But it's not meant to be chronic. It's really meant to last for seconds. The bear or the lion jumps out of the weeds. All of a sudden, you start to run. Your adrenal glands have pumped out cortisol, followed by norepinephrine. Now your vision narrows, your heart's pumping faster, your muscles are stronger

than they were seconds before. Now you either get eaten or you get an opportunity to pass your genes on to the next generation, but it happens in seconds. When we're under chronic stress with marriages and work and kids and illness and it's constant, our cortisol levels are going to be elevated. And that elevation in cortisol leads to problems that will result in early cognitive decline. High levels of cortisol actually have a huge impact on the hippocampus. It will cause dysfunction and shrinking of the hippocampus. And that's where you retain and form memories. Elevated levels of cortisol also impact the prefrontal cortex, and that's where you do your executive function, organization,

and critical thinking. When the cortisol is too high, you're going to see difficulties in those areas of your brain function. High levels of cortisol will decrease a hormone called Clotho. Clotho regulates the aging process. It also provides your brain with resilience against toxins, many of which can lead to Alzheimer's dementia. A really important study done at UCLA in 2015 looked at long-term meditators, comparing them to those that didn't meditate at all. And they found that long-term meditators comparing them to those that didn't meditate at all. And they found that long-term meditators, people that had been meditating at least 20 years, had far greater volume of gray matter in their brain. Other studies have shown with just three months of meditation, you see

structural changes in the brain that impact function. The corpus callosum, which is the band of neurons that connect the right to left brain, actually gets thicker. That allows for the right and left brain to communicate and enhance your creativity. You also see an increase in the size of the hippocampus, that part of the brain that's responsible for retaining memory, consolidating it, and maintaining it. And you also will see a shrinking in the size of the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for regulating fear, anger, and anxiety. So meditation has these great benefits that you can see in a very short period of time. We do tests at the Ultra Wellness Center that look at the risk factors for people with neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's, people with mood conditions, and people with addiction issues.

And what you see in this particular genetic analysis, which we use, called DNA Mind, it looks at these markers related to oxidative stress, inflammation, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. When you have imbalances there and you've inherited these tendencies, it pushes your risk level up for developing neurodegenerative conditions. So it helps you to sort of preempt it. Again, just because you have the genes does not mean you're going to get it. But you may find that you are at much higher risk than your brother or your sister or your friend,

and that's really where you get preemptive medicine. The earlier you catch neurodegenerative conditions, the better. It's a little bit sad because sometimes I will see patients here who have been having their either Parkinson's symptoms or their Alzheimer's symptoms for 10 plus years. And then finally they find us here. And it's a lot harder to treat those conditions once they're more advanced because you have more destruction. Sort of like if a building's on fire and it's been on fire for, you know, five hours versus five minutes, you know, you can put out the fire a lot earlier. So, you know, I have seen a lot of patients who have come to me and they're having problems with cognition. You can call it

brain fog or forgetting. And when you clean up their diet, get them off of inflammatory foods, sugar, gluten, dairy are the big ones. Any of the artificial foods, specifically one of the things I always like to emphasize to my patients is artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners are ubiquitous. They're everywhere. And the artificial sweeteners are supposed to help you lose weight. And I've always told my patients that I've never seen a person lose weight with diet soda, but I've seen a lot of patients gain weight with diet soda. And these also disrupt the gut microbiome. And then also food additives like food emulsifiers can lead to leaky gut,

which in turn can affect the brain. So there's definite things that you can do just, you know, nutritional-wise and dietary-wise that can improve a person's cognitive function. And I've had some patients who have come into me. One in particular comes to mind. It was a woman who I saw, she came in with her husband, and she was told by her doctor that, you know, you've got Alzheimer's and get your affairs in order. And when we did a full workup on the patient, you know, she had a whole host of things. It's like Dr. Bredesen was talking,

it's like a, you know, Alzheimer's is like a roof with 32 holes in it. And there's all different, you know, things where the water can leak in. So you wanna look at all of those things. So we look at, you know, heavy metals. We look at the oral microbiome. We look at the oral, the gut microbiome.

We look at the genes that the person has. We look at their oxidative stress levels. We look at their glucose levels. We look at their insulin levels. We look at the whole big picture. And when she came in, she was having problems with conversation. She was having sort of a flat mood. And when we addressed all of those conditions, and it took some time, it was like the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams. It was like she awakened. It was like she awoke, you know, the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams. It was like she awakened. It was like her brain woke up. That inflammation, that oxidative stress that was happening in her got turned off, like the gene processes got turned off.

And she was back to being her normal self. She was then able to have conversation. She was able to drive her car. She was able to be independent. It was really quite remarkable. And that was all without medication. We always focus first on those lifestyle factors because they have a huge impact on your memory. We make sure they're getting good, restful sleep and getting enough sleep, making sure they're getting those seven to nine hours a day. We make sure they're moving every day. We know exercise is critical

for brain health. We know exercise is a great way to build BDNF, the brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So we make sure they're getting some exercise every day and getting some good strength training too to improve insulin levels. We focus on diet, of course, because food is medicine. We make sure that they're not getting high levels of sugar, we make sure we're balancing blood sugar, we make sure that they have insulin, good insulin sensitivity, and we make sure that their diet is rich in phytonutrients. We work to manage stress. We know that when we're under stress, our memory doesn't work as well. When our cortisol levels are high, we're not going to remember the answer to that question or that person's name. So having some really good stress management techniques is

critical for a well-working memory. And then we make sure they've got good relationships and networks. Make sure that they have good family and friends and interactions in their day. That can have a huge impact on how well somebody's memory works. We then go up into the matrix and look at how all the systems in the body are interrelated. We focus on any sources of inflammation. Sources of inflammation could be anything from your belly fat, too much visceral adiposity that's creating inflammation in the body and hampering memory. And we know that insulin resistance is tied to dementia and increased risk of Alzheimer's disease. And it's one of the major things we can do to reverse memory loss.

We can lower and improve insulin sensitivity, and that can help improve everybody's memory. So we look for sources of inflammation, like coming from the belly fat. We look for sources of inflammation, which could come from underlying underlying infections like chronic infections in the body. Does somebody have chronic Lyme or a chronic viral infection? Or do they have a chronic infection which is an imbalance in the good and bad bacteria in their digestive system? Or are they getting inflammation because of a chronic infection in their mouth. Really important to pay attention to. We always look at the mitochondria and say, what can we do to support the mitochondria? Is somebody taking a statin medication that is damaging their mitochondria's ability to turn

their food into energy? So sometimes we look for medications that may be causing damage to the mitochondria or damage to some of the cells in the body. that may be causing damage to the mitochondria or damage to some of the cells in the body. And we also work to support the mitochondria, sometimes with things like CoQ10 or other B vitamins. We, of course, focus on toxins. Toxins are unfortunately a major driver of memory problems. Anything from mercury to lead to plastics and other environmental toxins. And so we work to see, are there toxins in somebody's body? And what can we do to lower them or help the body's detoxification system? You just heard the first 15 minutes of episode five of Dr. Hyman's

brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com and sign up for this free event. Between January 13th and the 24th, we'll be airing all episodes of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries for free. We're also going to be airing the entire docuseries the weekend of the 22nd. Again, to sign up for this free event, visit longevityfilm.com so you can take back your health today. Until next time.