The Jordan Harbinger Show - Bonus: Dr. Dale Bredesen | How to Make Alzheimer's Just a Bad Memory

Episode Date: August 5, 2018

Dr. Dale Bredesen (@dr_bredesen) is an internationally recognized expert in the mechanisms of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease and is the author of The End of Alzheimer's: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline. What We Discuss with Dr. Dale Bredesen: What actually causes cognitive decline? Alzheimer's Disease is actually three different syndromes with over 40 different contributors. Symptoms of cognitive decline and when you should be most worried about them. How you can slow and even reverse cognitive decline right now. Why genetic disposition for Alzheimer's risk isn't an automatic death sentence. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DePhilippo. In today's conversation, we're talking with Dr. Dale Bredesen. He's an expert in the mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease. We cannot escape the news about this disease.

I have aging parents. Every time they forget something, I'm like, oh my gosh, right? This is the only disease in the top 10 causes of death here at America with no real treatment whatsoever. ever. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we spend a lot of time teaching you how to improve your brain, your cognition, the way you think, making you smarter, more efficient. Today we're talking about cognitive decline. We'll discover what causes cognitive decline. It's not what you think, and Alzheimer's is actually three different syndromes with 40 plus different contributors, some of which you're exposing yourself to right now. It's not audio, relax. We'll also uncover

some of the symptoms of cognitive decline. Why and when you should be worried about them, especially if you're pushing 40, listen up to this part of the show, and we'll explore how cognitive decline can be slowed and even reversed. And no, it doesn't require some magic pill or supplement. In fact, you might be surprised to find out what the best means to attack this set of contributors to cognitive decline actually is or are. There's a lot here on the show. It may sound a bit complicated.

At first, we'll do our best to make it digestible here. And don't forget, we have worksheets for today's episode, so you can make sure that you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Dr. Breedison here. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, here's Dr. Dale Bretteson. I don't think there's anyone that hasn't been touched by Alzheimer's in some way. You can't escape the news about this disease. I have aging parents. Every time they forget anything now, I'm like, oh no, oh my gosh. You know, and my mom will say, oh, this is how it begins, and she's kind of not joking, and it's a little scary. And

And there's further, you mentioned in the book as well, there's no new Alzheimer's drug since 2003, and this is the only disease in the top 10 causes of death with no real treatment whatsoever. And that's terrifying for people like me, 38, push in 40, this disease takes down the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, no one's immune, no one's privileged. This is like, this is one of those terrible equalizers. That's exactly right. And the thing is, it is something that concerns us as we age. And as you know, it is now the number one cause of aging Americans. It has passed cancer as the concern.

So everybody's concerned what's going to happen to my cognition. And the reality is we have a situation where everything needs to change. Number one, we should be checking, get a quote, what I call a cognoscopy. Everybody knows you get a colonoscopy when you're 50. You know, if you're 45 or older, or if you've got parents who have dementia, you should think seriously about a cognoscopy. a difficult thing to do. You get some blood and urine tests. You get an online cognitive assessment, and you can determine where you stand and what your risk factors. No different than 40 years ago. People said, oh, I need to check my cholesterol. Oh, okay. So same idea. And so, you know, this is important to have. And then the second thing is you need to be working on it actively. So yeah, if your parents are concerned or if you are concerned, do some brain training, get on the right

diet, exercise, sleep, stress. That's why we generated this computer program that looks at what is a subtype or subtypes that you are at risk for are already beginning to show. And then here are the things that you can do optimally to address this. I mean, it's amazing how many of these things have kind of elephants in the room. One of the big ones is you go into see a physician and you say, I'm having some problems with cognition. He or she doesn't ask what's causing it. You say, well, they say, oh, you have early Alzheimer's.

Okay, what's causing it? Well, it's early Alzheimer's. Well, wait a minute. You know, I need to know what are all the things. This is very much like taking your car in. The mechanic says to you, oh, yeah, we recognize this. This is car not working syndrome. And you say, well, wait a minute.

I mean, what's causing it? Well, car not working syndrome. We don't know what causes it. And there's no cure. And older cars tend to get it. And you say, well, wait a minute, aren't you going to check some, you know, check the gas, the oil, et cetera. They're going to say, no, those aren't reimbursed.

And that's exactly what's happening right now. We go in and we're told it's early Alzheimer's, nothing to do. Well, in fact, if you look at larger data sets, which is part of 21st century medicine, you can ask, what is the status? Do I have insulin resistance? Do I have the chronic activation of my innate immune system? If so, what's causing it? And so the whole idea here is you need to look at all of the contributors.

and we described in the book that there were 36 we initially identified, it's going to end up being closer to 50, but it's not thousands. You know, there's a finite, there's dozens of things that contribute to cognitive decline, and you can measure them, and you can address them, and you can prevent the problem, and you can reverse it. The earlier, the better. The later, you can still get sometimes, and sometimes you don't. But looking at the critical causes, all of the root cause contributors,

is absolutely crucial and not being done at the major centers. When you say not reimbursed, is that what you're talking about is doctors and hospitals won't necessarily check for cognitive impairment because early Alzheimer's is considered kind of the end of the story. And then they say, look, I could run a bunch of tests, but insurance isn't going to pay for it. And since we have collectively kind of given up on treating this with drugs, we're not going to look for alternative ways to deal with this.

you're just going to have to suffer and live with this for the next 30, 20 years, whatever, until you die this sort of sad Alzheimer's death. And that seems terrible, especially because if we know that cognitive decline can be reversed and that not all is lost. And later on in the show, we'll discuss some steps we can take now if we see that. It seems kind of unfair. And what I took from the book was, if you are dealing with some cognitive decline, you shouldn't go, Well, this is what it means getting older.

No problem there. It's kind of like you get a wound on your leg and it's bleeding. You don't go, yeah, guess that's just going to bleed forever until I'm dead, right? You put a bandage on it. You try to figure it out. And there's other things you can do. But with Alzheimer's, it's just like, oh, well, I guess that's in your brain. And unless they come up with a brand new drug, which, again, they haven't for the last 15 years now.

You're screwed. And that's not good news for anybody. And this is exactly the issue. the very tests that you need to determine what is causing your cognitive decline are the very tests that are not reimbursed. How ridiculous is that? So, for example, you can get a reimbursed MRI and that can tell you, oh, yeah, you've got some atrophy in your hippocampus. Okay, but that doesn't tell you what's causing it. You say, look, I want to know if I have insulin resistance. I want to know if there are various pathogens that are causing this response. And as I mentioned in the book, there's a big surprise is, Alzheimer's disease is actually a protective response to multiple different insults.

That's the big surprise. So getting rid of the protection is not the right way to go. You want to understand what caused the problem. And then, yeah, it's fine to get rid of the amyloid after you've gotten rid of what's causing you to make it. Amyloid is a little bit like napalm. You're putting it down because you have been invaded. So you want to know what pathogens are there.

You want to know if your innate immune system is activated. You want to know specific toxins, organic toxins, metallotoxins, biotoxins. You want to know about specific nutrient deficiencies and responses to those. Methalation defects. These things are all contributors to this thing that ultimately ends up as Alzheimer's. And as you know, by the time you get a diagnosis of full-blown Alzheimer's, the underlying process has been going on typically for 20 years or so. And so, yes, you need to know what's causing.

And preferably you look at it when you're in your 40s, or early 50s, for example, and say, okay, here are the things that are putting me at high risk for Alzheimer's. I can address them now, literally, and this is not a joke, this disease should be a rare disease. It should mostly end with this generation. If everybody looks, if everybody gets on the appropriate prevention and early reversal program, this should be a rare, rare disease. That's really good news. The other good news, or I guess news might just be general here,

but that everyone over 40, you'd said in the book, is starting to hit some cognitive decline. So everyone 40 and up or close like me, especially in their 50s, needs to be paying attention to this. And I guess the good news part of this is that it can be addressed now and that we can slow and reverse it. And we found some ways to do that. I had no hand in this.

you and other doctors and researchers have found ways to deal with this. First, though, let's talk about what is and what is not Alzheimer's, because I think, first of all, most of us, including myself, had no idea and have no idea what this actually is. It's not like a cancer where cells aren't doing what they're supposed to do. This is something completely different, right? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, so there is a molecule in your brain, you know, it's one of your, It comes from one of your 20,000 genes, which is called amyloid precursor protein. And we've discovered that this thing actually works like a molecular switch. So this thing sits in your membranes, and it can be cleaved, it can be cut by molecular scissors in two different ways.

And that depends on where you stand, whether you need the protection or not. So it's a little bit like a CEO. If everything's good, you've got the appropriate support. And, you know, think about a CEO sitting in the company saying, you know, do we have the support of the board? Do we have the support of the community? Do we have enough cash flowing in? Do we want to build another building? Do we have new products?

On and on and on. It's looking at all those things and saying, can we go forward? If that's the case in your brain, you have the appropriate nutrients, you don't have any major pathogens, you don't have ongoing inflammation, you have appropriate trophic. factors and sex hormones and all these things, then this molecule, APP, is cleaved, is cut at a single site, which is essentially like the CEO sending out two memos. So you get cut at one site, you've got two peptides. One memo is for public consumption, and one of them is for internal consumption. It's telling itself, and it's also telling the community. Times are good. We're going to be able to grow forth, make new synapses, make new.

new memories, all is good. That's called the alpha site. AppyP is cleaved at the alpha site. That doesn't produce any of the amyloid. Now, on the other hand, if things are bad, you have ongoing inflammation, you're low on your vitamin D, your testosterone, you have pathogens about, you have toxins you've been exposed to, then it's like the CEO saying, hey, wait a minute, times are bad, I've got a, I've got a downsize. So it's then cleaved at three alternative sites. which are the beta site, the gamma site, and the caspacite site. Now, you can imagine if you cleave something at three sites, you end up with four pieces, you know, the head, the tail, and the two in between.

Those four pieces are four memos, two of them that go out to the public, and two of them that come into the cell. And they are saying, things are not good. We need to downsize. And by the way, one of those four memos is, guess what? Amyloid beta. It's the stuff that is made in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. So when we see someone with Alzheimer's, we're talking about someone who's been on the bad side of that integration.

In other words, the CEO has been saying downsize, downsize, downsize, downsize. So our job is to say, okay, why is this downsizing signal coming? From what are you protecting yourself? And then you have to look at a larger data dive, right? you need to know your homocysteine and your insulin, your fasting insulin, and your mercury level, and your copper zinc ratio, and on and on and on. You need to look at the things that are driving this system in the direction of making the amyloid. Now, one of the interesting things, as I said, making the amyloid is a protective mechanism. You're literally, it's like bringing out the napalm.

If you have your borders breached, then you say, okay, I've got to kill the invaders. and in fact some beautiful work by Professor Rudy Tansy and Robert Moyer from Harvard showed that the amyloid beta is an antimicrobial. So you're trying to kill the microbes, which are present in the brains of so many patients with Alzheimer's disease. But again, that's not the only contributor. So you make this stuff, you put down the napalm, you kill the invaders, but guess what? You're now living in a smaller country.

So you are literally downsizing your arable soil. you're living in a smaller country, literally living with a downsized neural network. And the remarkable success of this as a protection is shown that this goes on for 20 years before you have full-blown Alzheimer's. It shows how well you can do. You can still drive a car for many of those years. You can still play tennis, interact with your friends, read, write, calculate. It's amazing how much you.

can do. And somebody asked me one time, well, why does memory go so early? And that's such a bad thing. Well, yes, it's a bad thing. But if I asked you, okay, Jordan, you want to wake up tomorrow morning, you either want to forget how to read, how to write, how to do your job, how to calculate, how to interact with other people, or you forget the friends rerun from tonight. Which would you choose? Yeah. And that's an exactly. That's an easy choice. So in fact, you can do a tremendous amount with what you've learned so far. Your brain has kept only the most important things throughout your life. And so this is telling you, this is the canary in the mind when you're having trouble learning new things. And that's why you want to jump on this, get yourself checked out,

get on an appropriate program. One of the common things we hear is, you know, wow, I can remember phone numbers again. I can remember, you know, my appointments again. And one of the other common things is the spouses will often tell me, oh, yeah, they're so much more engaged. You know, I interact with them, and they're just so much more present than they were before. So, yeah, they're hitting on all cylinders again. So, again, this isn't like a cancer where cells are going completely off the rails and they're doing something crazy. Alzheimer's sounds like a normal, quote unquote, brain housekeeping slash defense process. That's natural, but just very advanced.

So like you said, it's better for the brain to go, hey, you can't, remember where you put your car keys, but you do have all of the things you need to do to survive. You kind of remember how to do basic things in your life. And then, of course, as years and years and years go by where you become less and less functional, but in fact, that's actually amazing that the brain can go, look, we've been downsizing for 20 years. There's not much left to cut that isn't completely integral to survival. Then you've got, oh, well, look, your grandfather has Alzheimer's. Well, no kidding. But this process that's defending the brain against, like you said, inflammation, nutritional issues, toxic exposure, et cetera, this stuff all started years and years

ago attacking the brain, and it just shows up later on. And the idea that this is a protective response to inflammation or low nutrition and toxic exposure and leads to these three different types of Alzheimer's. So Alzheimer's isn't just, this is this thing that causes this and you get this one disease. This is a process in the brain that's caused by multiple contributors. Are there different types of Alzheimer's itself? Yeah, and of course that hadn't been said previously. And what we found is then we published this back in 2015, what we found is that when we started looking at people and we looked at the things that were actually causing their amyloid precursor protein to go in the, quote, wrong direction. And of course, things like phosphorylation of tau. And we talk

about the importance of tau in the downsizing. That's critical, absolutely, and that's downstream from the production of the amyloid. So when we started to look at that and ask, why do these people have this? What is ongoing here? Then we found that, yes, these people actually will fragment. So you can look at the different subsets. We can look at people and say, oh, okay, here's a person who has what we call subtype 1, or type 1 Alzheimer's, which is in full.

inflammatory or hot Alzheimer's. And that's people who have chronic activation of NF Kappa B, for example, which is one of the inflammatory mediators. So, you know, again, you expose yourself to things, whether it's pathogens or whether, in fact, you have a terrible diet, too much, you know, things like trans fats and things like that, you cause this chronic inflammation. If you have metabolic syndrome, which is very common, has, you know, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and inflammation and abnormalities in insulin resistance,

you have a chronic inflammatory state. So that's type one. Then there's type two. It's very different. It's cold. It is atrophic. It is due to a reduction. So if you think about it,

think about it like a seesaw. You can be on the wrong side, either because someone's pushing down on the wrong side or someone's pushing up on the other side. either one of those will get you to the same place on the teeter-totter. Same idea here. You can have it because you've got too much inflammation. You're pushing out this amyloid because you're trying to fight something.

Or you can do it because you just don't have the support to build new synapses. You don't have the support to push yourself. So you've got a downsize not because someone's invading you. You're downsizing because you have no soup and bread for everybody. So you've got a downside because you literally cannot support your system. And that includes everything from estradiol to vitamin D to testosterone, pregneedalone, thyroid, nerve growth factor, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, on and on and on. The trophic molecules that support your synapses are in too short of supply.

Well, guess what? We can measure those. We can improve their supply so that you can now tip the balance in the right direction. So that is type 2 or cold Alzheimer's. And then there's actually a type 1.5, which has some of both. And that is glycoxic or sweet. And this is when you've got too much sugar over years. And in fact, yes, that does contribute to cognitive decline.

And that's certainly been shown repeatedly. So you have the combination of the inflammation or the type 1 from the fact that you've got glycated proteins. Of course, we measure it as hemoglobin A1C, but of course, this glucose will stick on to many other proteins, just like Ramora's on a shark. So you stick on there, and your body then recognizes, hey, wait, this protein is not quite normal. You get inflammation, so you get some type 1. But you also get some type 2 because you now have insulin resistance. You've had to ramp up your insulin for so long that, in fact, you've turned down your response to. insulin. And insulin doesn't just deal with glucose. It's also a very important trophic factor for your

brain cells. So now you're not responding to insulin as well. And so you are again downsizing. So you have both hot and cold. You have glycoxic or type 1.5 or sweet Alzheimer's. And then type three, the other major type, is a toxic type. So if you are exposed to mercury, mercury or high doses of copper or biotoxins like mycotoxins that are produced by molds. You in fact make this goo that sticks to them. Ameloid actually is a very good binder for divalant metals like copper or like iron, for example, or mercury. And so if you've got very high levels, you will make some of this amyloid, again, as a protective

measure. So for all of these reasons, you can make the amyloid and undergo this downsizing event. So we need to determine what subtype you have, and no surprise, a lot of people will have subtypes, you know, one and two or one and three, for example. And that's why we wrote the program. This will show you, for example, you have 70% type 1 and 20% type 2 and 10% type 3 and 0% type 1.5. As an example, many people will have some. combinations. So amyloid plaque, this binder gets between the synapses and does the downsizing.

We know that the symptoms are invisible for 15 to 20 years. Explain it like I've never heard of this before. What do those symptoms start to look like? Because I think a lot of people go, oh, well, you know, the symptoms don't show up till you're 75. And it's like, well, not really, though, right? Right. Exactly. Well, first of all, I should I should clarify, it's not the amyloid plaque. that's the problem. The problem is when you make this stuff, you make oligomers. So imagine this you've got, it's a little bit like Legos. You can have one Lego by itself. You can have two or three or four. You can have six or 12, et cetera, stuck together. In general, what's been found, and each of these has a different function. When you look at a plaque, you're looking at millions stuck together. That's not so much

toxic problem. Now it's got its own issues. You essentially now have a little lake there, and you will bring in inflammatory cells to begin to get rid of that. But here's the problem. The problem is when you have what's called the oligomers. So small groups together, those are the fighting units. Those are the ones that are antibacterial, and those are the ones that are also synaptotoxic. Single ones by themselves, not so much of a problem. Huge lakes. not so much of a problem. We've come to think of these big lakes as essentially forts. Imagine that you've got soldiers and they're really damaging when they're in their units. You've got groups of six or eight or ten. They're the ones that are going out and doing the damage. You know, one by himself who's

off and doesn't have his rifle with them, is walking around in town, you know, getting a drink or something, not a problem. A big fort full of them not damaging the community around. When you open the fort, when you let them out, when you let the oligomers out to fight. the bacteria, the fungi, the viruses, the spirochetes, all those things. That's when they are active, and that's when they are doing this damage. And unfortunately, it's not a perfect war. Yes, just like if you have a war in your town, there are going to be some innocence who are going to be killed. And so again, the idea of looking at it and seeing the killing and saying, okay, get rid of all the fighters, you know, that might sound good. But in fact, what you

really want to get rid of is why the war broke out to begin with. Right. Of course, addressing the cause always makes sense. What symptoms are we going to see initially, the earliest ones to the ones that happened later on, right? Yeah, great point. Because of course, when we see advanced, we look at like, oh, well, this person can't remember anything, they don't remember how to drive, they can't sleep, you know. Yeah, it's exactly right. What else are we looking at? Yeah, that's exactly right. So as a very general rule, there are two kinds of present

amnestic and non-amnestic. In other words, memory losing and non-memory losing. The more common one is the memory losing amnestic. That's the typical person we think of. And so people will notice early on things like, you know, I just can't remember phone numbers the way I used to or, you know, I'm forgetting my keys. Now again, here's where everything has been so backwards. In the past, because there's nothing you can do about that. You just say, oh, it's probably not Alzheimer's. Well, Yeah, it probably isn't for some people, but it could be the earliest manifestations. So get on it now. So in the past, everything was about delay, delay, delay, because there's nothing we can do

about it anyway. And I can't tell you how many people that have come in. It's like they've been told by their doctors, yeah, you're not that bad. Come in in a year. It's not Alzheimer's yet. Come in in a year. And then, oh, it's Alzheimer's. Yeah, now there's nothing we can do about it.

You know, that doesn't help. We want to be proactive. So the earliest changes are either memory issues. and one of the common ones, by the way, is memory for space. So commonly people will say, you know, I was driving down the street. I pulled up to a stop sign, you know, totally my neighborhood, a place where I feel very comfortable. And suddenly, I had no idea which way to turn. So spatial memory is a common one.

People will say, oh, my spouse asked me the same question three times at dinner. Declarative memory, very common problem. Or they can have memory for, you know, other things. well, you know, facial recognition, another common one. So they'll say, oh, you know, I went to my reunion. I knew I knew this person, but I just didn't remember the name. I didn't remember much about how I had interacted. Did I really know them for sure? These are all very common presentations. And I go over, you know, each of these things in the book. On the other hand, there is a different approach, a different presentation, which is non-amnestic.

And these are people who typically have problems with so-called executive function, people who have problems with, for example, the putting things together. I often remember, I often ask people, hey, if you have to get out of town in an hour, can you really throw everything together. Oh, you know, I can't do that anymore. I just can't organize. We interacted with one woman, for example, who said, you know, I was the person in the office who organized everything.

And then I got to the point I just could not organize these things anymore. So organization, that's a common non-amnestic presentation. And then calculations. One person came in. First thing that happened, she could not figure out how to calculate a tip. And that's a relatively common thing to do. And then visual perception problems. And this comes up commonly, what's what the,

with what's called PCA or posterior cortical atrophy. So things that are typically biparital. So you know you have your parietal lobes that are in between your occipital lobes and your frontal lobes. And also between occipital and temporal. So they're essentially the gateway. And these things are important for dressing. They're important for things called agnosias, so knowing how to do things. knowing specific not only tasks, but also specific knowledge, recognition, things like this.

And so you can think of it in a simple way. The ones who present with amnestic problems, this is largely a temporal lobe problem, and the ones that present with difficulties with facial recognition and calculation and things like that, this is typically more of a parietal problem. ultimately, as you indicated, you know, you get to both of those, but typically people will present with one or other. But here's the interesting thing. Virtually everybody who presents with the non-amnestic presentations turns out to have toxin exposures. So we need to know what are the toxin exposures, what's actually driving this?

And we see it again and again. And interestingly, this is this kind of Alzheimer's, which we call type 3 or toxic Alzheimer's. is unusual, and it's actually more closely related to Lewy body disease than it is related to the other kinds of Alzheimer's. And in fact, in Louis body disease, you also have toxin exposures. These people tend to look different from the amnestic ones. They tend to start earlier. Often these people will start in their 40s and come in with significant Alzheimer's by the time they're in their late 40s or up to mid-50s. And we do see some. people who are older, but often it's in the late 40s and early to mid-50s. They will often have

some depression. So they often have some so-called HPA axis dysfunction, hypothalamus, you know, pituitary and adrenal axis dysfunction. They will often have this non-amnestic presentation. They'll often be exquisitely sensitive to stress. So, you know, they stay up all night, one night and they get much worse. They'll often be very sensitive to hormones. So if you give them bioidentical hormone replacement, they tend to improve. So these people tend to look different than the amnestic presenters. So you can imagine early on you begin to get some of these things.

And yes, it should make you think, hey, I should get on it now. Let's check my cognition now. Let's get a cognoscopy. and let's make sure that I don't get Alzheimer's disease in the future. I know a lot of this is genetic, and I know that you had said that cognitive decline is possible when it comes to this. What if we have, you know, the two or four copies of the APOE4 gene, is reversal of cognitive decline still possible with these people? Oh, absolutely. And in fact, so first of all, APOE4, you get one from your mother and one from

your father. So you either have zero, one, or two copies. For example, I checked myself, I am an APOE-3-3, which is the most common one. That's kind of generic. And APOE4 is incredibly interesting. So this is APO-Lipoprotein E, which carries around lipid. It is a fat carrier. It's kind of like your butcher. It carries the fat around.

And in fact, when we were Simians, you know, between 5 and 7 million years ago, as you know, what happened is that the appearance of hominids occurred. And in fact, at that time, with the appearance of hominids, came the appearance of ApoE4. So it was the primordial one. And in fact, this comes in three flavors, three alleles, two, three, and four. Each person has one copy of one, either a two or a three or a four from the mother and a two or a three or a four from the father. Now, about 25 percent of the population, about 75 million Americans have a single copy of APOE4, and about 7 million Americans have two copies of APOE4. If you have zero copies, your chance of getting Alzheimer's during your lifetime is about 9%. One in 11. If you have one copy, it's about 30%. If you have two copies,

it's over 50%, so most likely you will get it during your lifetime. The program that we've developed actually works quite well. In fact, if anything, it works a little better for people who have APOE4 and for people who don't have APOE4. And we believe that that's because the people have APOE4 tend to have more inflammation, and that ones who have APOE3 tend to do more poorly with toxins. And the toxin type, the type 3, is more difficult to treat.

So what happened when the hominids appeared between five and seven million years ago, there was a small number of changes that occurred in our genome, as you indicated. And surprisingly, a large number of these changes turned out to be related to pro-inflammatory changes, among them, APOE4. So how does this work that's something that's your butcher that's carrying around the fat actually has something to do with your inflammation? And, you know, Professor Tuck Finch from USC had suggested years ago that when you come down out of the trees, what are you doing? You're walking along the savannah. You're stepping on dung.

You're puncturing your feet. You're fighting with your brethren from food. You're fighting with your food as well. You're getting punctured. You're eating meat that is uncooked and you're getting pathogens in your gut. For all of these things, APOE4 is an advantage because, it produces a pro-inflammatory state that helps you. And in fact, if you are living under squalid third world conditions, you will survive better as an APOE4 that is an APOE3. Now, just

4% of the time we've lived on Earth as hominids, we've had APOE3. So only 220,000 years ago, APOE3 appeared and then 80,000 years ago, APOE2 appeared. But APOE3 is now, the dominant one, it's the most common one. So, you know, as I told my wife, you know, if you look at my entire genome, it's actually more similar to a male chimp genome than it is to yours. And she said, well, duh, you know, you like ESPN, the chimp likes ESPN, that sort of thing. So in fact, there aren't that many differences between a chimp genome and a human genome. And one of the critical ones is this APOE. So what we found in the lab over the years, is that when you look at what APOE does, it actually enters the cell and goes into the nucleus,

which hadn't been appreciated before. It interacts with 1,700 different promoters. For example, the Surte1, which is so important for longevity and so important for Alzheimer's, actually. And when it interacts with these things, it literally changes the programs in your cell. So the surprise was, not only is APOE your butcher, it is also your senator. It is also participating in changing the laws of the land. And so when you're reprogramming yourselves, one of the things that occurs is a more pro-inflammatory state. And if you look at the list of these 1700 genes that are impacted by APOE4, the list includes all the things

that you would imagine for Alzheimer's. It includes things related to inflammation. It includes things related to glucose toxicity and glucose handling and insulin resistance. It includes things related to response to hormones. So the surprise is this thing has a widespread effect, and in fact it makes perfect sense why having one or two copies of APOE4 would put you at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. Interesting to see that the gene, like everything in our body, actually serves a purpose.

Because one of my questions for you was, well, thanks a lot. You know, we have this gene that gives us this stinking disorder. What is it good for? There's always an answer to that if we look hard enough, right? Absolutely. I find that pretty fascinating from just an evolutionary psychology or biology standpoint that, yeah, if you grow up and you're not drinking clean water and you're eating animals that eat other things because you don't have a choice and you can't cook things very well because of where you live,

this is helping you out. And yeah, in 30, 40 years you pay the price, but you're not going to live that long anyway. Look where you live in a dump. You're going to die before this catches up to you. But now we live a long time, but we still eat crap. So explain to me like I'm five here. How does my brain get Alzheimer's? How do I give myself Alzheimer's? How does half of the Western world end up giving ourselves Alzheimer's? Right. So this is the important, important point here, as you indicated. People keep saying, well, it's about genetics. So look, if I, you know, my genetics, I'm going to get Alzheimer's. I have APOE4. No, that's absolutely wrong. What APOE4 does is give you risk. You give yourself Alzheimer's by what you're exposed to,

by the way you live. And in chapter four, I went into all these issues. Here's how you can give yourself Alzheimer's. And I wrote that specifically so that people could see how many of the things that are pro Alzheimer's that they do. So the bottom line is, yes, we have a major ability to impact our likelihood of getting it and to impact whether we can actually reverse the cognitive decline. So look, Jordan, you want to wake up tomorrow and say, look, my goal for the rest of my life, I'm giving myself Alzheimer's. Here's what you do. You stay up all night. You don't get any sleep. You don't allow your brain to clear out the damaged proteins. You don't allow it to get rid of the amyloid. you damage the synapses, you increase the reactive oxygen species, so forth and so on.

You don't induce autophagy. You get under constant and chronic stress. You know, we were made to handle short bursts of stress, as of course Professor Robert Sapolsky has shown so beautifully with his studies over the years. That's what we were made for, short bursts of stress and then periods of non-stress. The way we live is the opposite. We have chronic, mild stress and sometimes more than mild. That damages your hippocampus, that increases your cortisol, which in and of itself decreases the volume of your hippocampus, the area that's so critical in Alzheimer's, so critical for storing memories. You have a horrible diet, so you go out, get a bunch of trans fats, eat plenty of sugar, make sure that you have a fasting insulin that's off the charts. You should have a fasting insulin

that's five or lower, and we see people who have fasting insulins of, you know, 20, 30, 40. This is insulin resistance. You go out and you run up your lipids. You know, you get your high LDL particle number, a low HDL. You make sure that you don't exercise. You make sure that you have a leaky gut. As you know, leaky gut was something not even recognized when I was in medical school. And it turns out to be very common and very important, important for Alzheimer's, important for Parkinson's, important for IBS, me on and on. This is a critical contributor. You damage your microbiome. You take a bunch of sodas and things like that. You expose yourself to toxins.

We've all got, already got copper in our pipes, so you don't worry about that. You don't eat green leafy vegetables, which turn out again to be, that is helpful to do that. You avoid those. You get exposed to mycotoxins, and these are toxins that are produced by molds. Who knew? Molds can actually contribute to cognitive decline. They absolutely do. Others have reported this as well. We first reported this back in 2016, and we see it all the time. You have poor dentition. So what happens is you get exposed to

things like Pigein-Javallis, which is a bacterium from poor dentition, fusobacterium nucleotum, another one. Poor dentition, meaning like you don't brush your teeth. Yeah. And so, by the way, a lot of people like now to do, you know, to do the, the oil pulling, which is actually helpful as well. What is oil pulling? Oil pulling is something that was actually done by the Ayurvedics thousands of years ago. And the idea, you take some coconut oil

and you swish it into your teeth for about five minutes. And again, many people do this. It actually improves dentition. And so again, the idea of having bad teeth turns out to be a bad thing for systemic inflammation. So whether your systemic inflammation, is because of a horrible diet, because of pathogen exposure, because of a leaky gut, because of poor dentition, because of chronic wounds that are poorly healed. Whatever it is, this is

contributing to your requirement to protect yourself, in which case you will produce some of the amyloid and you will begin the downsizing process. So all of those things are critical. And yes, diet, exercise, sleep, stress, and brain training, all of those are critical. If you fail on those, you are contributing. So in fact, again, just as we monitor ourselves over the years for our cholesterol, we monitor ourselves for obesity and for our weight, those are things we think about every day. We should do the same for our cognition, and we can have a huge impact if we do so. Okay. So leaky gut, we've been hearing about this for a while. I don't want to get into that. it does, I will note, sound disgusting, but it's caused, I know, by a lot of things like gluten,

et cetera. I didn't realize the human body isn't designed to process over 15 grams of sugar a day. And that doesn't just count sugary foods, but simple carbs like white bread and things like that, that causes insulin resistance. I mean, there are things that people drink that I certainly drank as a kid that had three times that in one glass. Absolutely. And I drank them as a kid, too.

And, you know, and I certainly drank him as an intern, tried to stay up all night. So absolutely. And here's the problem. You know, our bodies, and this is a lot about complex chronic illness. As you know, in the 20th century, many people died from simple acute illnesses, especially the first half of the 20th century. Numerococcal pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, things like that. And of course, the great success of 20th century medicine was to combine public health policy with antibiotics to make these. diseases, an uncommon cause of death. Now the problem is we are dying of 21st century illnesses because we are still practicing 20th century medicine, which is you wait for symptoms, you write a prescription, you send them home. That's not the way these diseases work. 21st century diseases, Alzheimer's, cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, on and on. These are complex chronic illnesses that have many different things that contribute

to them. And therefore, you need to look at these. The good news is you can see them coming for years ahead of time. And so, yes, you need to include all these different things, and the things we just talked about in things like your gut leak. And by the way, as you pointed out, you know, 15 grams of sugar, more than that, here's the issue. We weren't made.

So we are living in a way that our bodies were not. produced to live. So here's an example. If you said, hey, Dale, let's go out, you know, we decided there's a new fun thing we're all going to do, and that's jumping out of third floor windows. Well, you know, some people are going to survive that, and some people are not. It's like, yeah, but it's fun. This is what we do every day. Well, our bodies weren't made to do that. So a lot of 21st century illness is actually because we are living in a way that is evolutionarily inappropriate. We were not designed evolutionarily to eat a lot of sugar. We were not designed evolutionarily to stay up all night. The reality is we really weren't designed to have lights on

at night. We were designed to have light, dark cycles that are with the sun. And so we're already pushing the envelope when we're sitting there at night. And I'm absolutely guilty of this myself. So we have to be careful. And so in fact, I'm dealing with some people who have macular degeneration. We need to look at how much blue light exposure. The diseases that we are talking about, these complex chronic, and especially the neurodegenerative diseases, of which there are many, as you know, in Parkinson's and Louis body, macular degeneration, frontotemporal dementia, progressive supernuclear paralysis, cortical basal degeneration, on and on. These things are essentially mismatches between our supply and demand, and they occur because we are

not living in the way we are designed to live and we are not exposed to the appropriate environment. And now, many of us get away with it. But as you indicated, genetics will play a role. So these things are all written onto our genome. And when we have a sensitive genome to one thing or another, we have an increased risk to go down the Alzheimer's pathway or the Parkinson's pathway. So that's why the genetics are important, but they confer risk. And they, in the vast majority of cases, do not confer absolute determinism. It is simply risk. So we want to know what we're at risk for, and we want to get on it. As you know, when the first genome was sequenced from James Watson, he did not want to know one gene, which was APOE, because he said there's nothing you can do about it.

Well, now there's a lot you can do about it. And so there's a wonderful website. started by a woman named Julie G who started a website called APOE4.Info. There are over 3,000 people on that website who are actively looking at their own status and what they can do. In fact, the vast majority of them are on some version of the protocol that I described in the book, and they are actively preventing their own cognitive decline. So, Dr. Bredesen, we need to address as many holes or as many contributors to Alzheimer's as we can. There's 36. You said now there's going to be like 50, which isn't a thousand,

which is good news. So we address the root causes, like the cause of inflammation, not just the inflammation itself, the leaky gut, not just the leaky gut itself, the cause of the leaky gut. So what we're trying to do from the sound of it is reach a tipping point where synapse creation eclipses synapse destruction by the protective mechanisms in the brain. And I know people are going, but what about medication? And it sounds like, yes, will you? medication, but it's not even the first line of defense. It's kind of like buttering the bread. You don't just start housing the butter. You've got to have something, and by the way, don't eat any bread. But if you were, to use bread in an analogy for Alzheimer's, we need that.

Right. So we don't want to have just a time where we're going, all right, well, they're going to figure out some pill to get rid of this, because the pill will just get rid of the protective mechanism, but it's not going to get rid of the mold in your house. It's not going to get rid of the stuff that you're eating that's causing the inflammation. It's not going to get rid of. of the other problems that are causing your brain to react. Because we don't want to turn off our defense mechanism. It's kind of like saying, well, I'm so sick of getting cuts, I should just take all my skin off, and then I want to worry about it anymore.

You'd never do that to your body, but we do it to our brain. It's a really good point, actually. And so we tell people that, look, there are 36 holes in your roof. And if you've got certain things like a leaky gut or if you've got low vitamin D or you've got high homocysteine, those particular holes are open wide. On the other hand, let's say you have an optimum B12 and you have an optimum vitamin D or an optimum testosterone or you have no pathogens that you're dealing with. Then those holes are pretty much closed. So here's the thing.

A drug is a very good patch, a tight, a wonderful patch for one hole. So my argument is, look, the drugs are going to be very, very important. But we've been asking them to do too much. We've been asking the drugs to do about a hundred different things. That's too many things. So what we need to do is to combine. And think about even with something as simple as HIV, a little retrovirus, it took three drugs to have a big impact.

And that really changed the world. So with Alzheimer's, we need to have an entire program. So this is programatics, not monotherapeutics. We need to know which holes are open the widest, and we need to know that we can cover all of them. So, yes, it's relatively straightforward to get tested, to get a cognoscopy. You want to find out where you stand, and we can break it down into the groups that go along with the subtypes. You want to know, do I have ongoing chronic systemic inflammation?

So what's my HSCRP? You might want to check your IL-6 or TNF alpha, but HSCRP is a good one to start with. Do I have pathogens? Do I have chronic herpetic family viruses? Do I have chronic spirochetes? Do I have chronic fungi? Do I have chronic bacterial infections? Those are all important to know.

So those are all related to type one. And in fact, do I have ongoing activation of my innate immune system? These are all things you can look at with blood and simple urine tests. Then type two, do I have? suboptimal levels of specific trophic factors, hormones, nutrients, all the things that you need to support your synapses. So if you're walking around with a, as so many people are, with a vitamin D of 19 or 20 or 21, you want it to be more up in the 50 to 80 range. You want it to be optimal. And so you want to know what that is. And similarly, testosterone, estradial, pregninolone,

progesterone, thyroid hormone, your cortisol, DHEA, all of these things are critical to know. What's your B-12? What's your homocysteine level? What's your B-6? What's your folate? These are all important as supports. And yes, you know, if you're living a perfect life, if you're doing things right, then you may not need to worry about these. But for most of us who are living in Western societies, we need to know whether we have

optimal levels of those things. Professor Clayton, by the way, from the UK has pointed out, in fact, that our soils are so bad now that our typical nutrition that we get from our meals is worse than it was during King Henry the 8th's time. So in fact, we, you know, a lot of us are malnourished and simply don't know it. That does contribute to multiple things, such as suboptimal cognition. All right, let's go to type 1.5. So you want to know what your fasting insulin is. You want to know what your hemoglobin A1C is. So you want to know if you have insulin resistance.

Critical, absolutely critical. By the way, the higher those are, the more you have an association with shrinkage of your hippocampus. And you can literally put that on a line. Similarly, the higher your homocysteine, on average, the smaller your hippocampus. The more rapidly it will begin to atrophy. with age. Then you want to know for type three, do I have exposure to toxins? And this has been the tough one because toxins are ubiquitous as we know. So you want to know about metallotoxins. What about mercury? What about your copper zinc ratio? What's your level of ferretin? These

sorts of things. Now, you know, again, it's tricky. These metals are important things like copper and zinc and iron are important for your life as well. So no big surprise. You need some. You need not too much. And like everything else in biology. So now, what about organic toxins? Dr. Joseph Pizorno from Seattle has shown that, in fact, people with Alzheimer's do tend to have more exposure to things like DDE. So there are organic toxins. Again, you are responding to these toxins. And then you need to know, what about biotoxins? These are things made by organisms. So things like trichococines, and you can measure these easily in the urine, for example. If you're exposed to molds, and there are specific ones, things like stachybatrus and penicillium and aspergillus and ketomium,

these are specific molds that produce specific toxins, which can be neurodialis and ketomium. These are specific molds. which can be neurotoxic and immunotoxic and otherwise toxic, genotoxic as well. So these things can contribute to cognitive decline. And as I said, these are the tough ones to treat because they often have multiple biotoxins. And you've literally got to get rid of these things. And I should note, as I mentioned earlier, these things tend to give you presentation around the time of your 50s, menopause, basically. And what's happening is you store these toxins, you sequester them in your bones, among other places, when you are younger. And as you get to menopause, you are beginning to release them.

Things like mercury go back up again. And so that's probably why you tend to get these problems at that time. So you want to know all those toxins. And then from that, you want to know what subtype am I at risk for? And then what is my optimal program that I can work on with my doctor and my health. coach to prevent my cognitive decline. Or if it's already started to reverse it. And by the way, we see this all the time. Had a woman, for example, who came in, she said, I want to prevent. She took the mocha. Her mocha was 23. She already was well into MCI. And then, of course,

when she got on the program, her mocha score went to 30, which is perfect. And she said, you know, I didn't realize how much I'd lost until I got better. And we hear this sort of thing all the time. So it's never too early to test for Alzheimer's and, of course, the genetic markers. We can link to 23 and me on the show notes, but where do I get the other tests that you'd mentioned? If I go to my doctor and I ask for all these, isn't they, aren't they just going to go, wait a minute, I'm not writing all these for you? You might have to pay out of pocket for these, right? If it's from the sound of it. You can go to the website, Dr. Brutison.com. You can take a look at the book. There's a list, check chapters 7 and 8. We go through the whole list. And now we are actually just bringing out.

So within the next few weeks, you'll be able to get a direct-to-consumer, just like a 23-and-me sort of thing, where you'll be able to get all the tests. and a report. Great. Dr. Bredison, thank you so much. This is a little scary, but also enlightening and good to know that we can start to prevent what was previously thought inevitable if we just do the right things and pay attention. Actually, that's so true. So, you know, let's all work together to reduce the global burden of dementia.

It's something that's absolutely within our reach now. Great big thank you to Dr. Dale Bredesen. The book title is The End of Alzheimer's. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Dr. Bredesen on Twitter, tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Dr. Bredison. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Dr. Bredison, make sure you go grab the worksheets, also in the show notes on our website at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFilippo.

Show notes by Robert Fogarty, booking back office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you should. share it with friends when you find something useful, which should hopefully be in every episode. So please, share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got a lot more like this in the pipeline. We are very excited to bring it to you. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time.

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