ZOE Science & Nutrition - Recap: Tips to help prevent Alzheimer’s | Drs. Ayesha & Dean Sherzai

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Medical advances over the past century mean our bodies are living longer than ever. But our brains aren’t always keeping pace. Rates of Alzheimer’s are rising, and the big question is, why? Emerging science suggests that our brain health in later life is shaped decades earlier, through everyday choices around food, lifestyle, and stress. Today, I’m joined by neurologists Drs. Ayesha and Dean Sherzai, who will share their NEURO plan; a practical guide that you can use today to keep your brain strong tomorrow. 🌱 Try our new plant based wholefood supplement - Daily30+ *Naturally high in copper which contributes to normal energy yielding metabolism and the normal function of the immune system 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks  Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know hereListen to the full episode here

Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Medical advances over the past century mean our bodies are living longer than ever, but our brains aren't always keeping pace. Rates of Alzheimer's are rising, and the big question is why. Emerging science suggests that our brain health in later life is shaped decades earlier, through everyday choices around food, lifestyle. and stress. Today, I'm joined by neurologist, Dr. Aisha and Dean Cherzai, who will share their neuro plan, a practical guide that you can use today to keep your brain strong tomorrow. What's the lifestyle? What are people doing that are contributing to these different factors causing this risk? So in studies, especially the types of studies that look at large groups of people

over a long period of time have shown us that there are a number of factors that matter and especially their existence throughout the span of our lives can either increase or reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. The Lancet magazine,

so it's a well-known medical journal, and they come up with a consensus report every three to four years. And recently, just a few months ago, they created this beautiful picture of the risk factors during childhood, midlife, and late life, and they have listed a number of different factors. And Dean and I have kind of made it easy for our patients to remember these factors. So we've created this acronym called neuro and E-U-R-O self-serving because we're neurologists.

And stands for nutrition, E, exercise, U-unwind, or stress management, R is restorative sleep, and O is optimizing cognitive activities or building cognitive resilience. And under each of them, so for example, in nutrition we have lipid metabolism, LDL cholesterol that is contributed or affected by the kind of foods that we eat. Smoking comes under that as well, alcohol comes under that as well. So all of these factors play a very, very important role in either reduce or increasing our risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. And we talk a lot across this show, I think, about how modern

and Western lifestyles have had a lot of unintended negative consequences. And so we talk a lot, obviously, about nutrition here, impact on microbiome, impact on sort of the rest of our health. And I think everybody here listening to this show sort of knows, well, you know, if you eat the wrong sort of diet, then it increases your risk of a heart attack and or indeed getting diabetes. I think a lot of people will be more surprised that it's linked to something like Alzheimer's. If we just take this back to sort of simple aspects of lifestyle, like what are the aspects of lifestyle? If you were going to try and explain to my son or my daughter that actually matter for Alzheimer's, what do they need to worry about?

So the organ that's most affected is brain, this little three-pound organ, which is 2% of your body's weight, consumes 25% of your body's energy. 25%. It's amazing. At any moment. at any moment. And it also is the most vascular organ in the body. It has more arteries and veins than any other organ in the body. If you connect all the arteries and arterials and capularies end to end, it's 400 miles. There's a picture. People can actually search for this. They've denuded. They've gotten rid of all the other tissue and all they've left behind is a

vascular. And you look at it and you say, how come there's room for anything else? There's room for about 87 billion neurons, one quadrillion connections. So it's really well-compacted system. So anything that affects vascularure, you worry about a vascular. Well, guess what? Most vascular organ is the brain. Metabolic, 25% of your energy. Oxygenation, 50% of oxygen at times.

So it's the organ that's going to be most affected by all the metabolic things that affect everything else. Absolutely. So when you're thinking about your exercise or your nutrition or any of the rest of these things and your health, Anything you're thinking about that might affect your, you know, your heart or any of the rest of what you're saying it's also directly affecting your brain, maybe even more so. Much more so. Yeah. People always think that the brain, you know, just the organ that's above your neck is somehow disconnected from the rest of your body.

And it's not. If we think of everything that affects our gut, our heart, our kidney, our skin affects our brain as well, I think it will make more sense. And we, Dean and I, you say that it actually, your brain gets affected most by anything. you do. So the kind of foods that you eat, the kind of people that you surround yourself with, the kind of activities, movements that you choose to partake in, all of these impact your brain health significantly. We don't really optimally do all those things, which is optimally eat, optimally exercise, optimally stress manage, and we'll talk about stress and it's a fact, it's a profound effect. Optimally sleep, the only cleanse is sleep and water.

We will describe the process of what happens during sleep. It's literally the most efficient city cleaning mechanism you could ever imagine. And then mental activity, challenging your brain to keep these billions and trillions of connections connected and making more connections in your 60, 70s, and beyond. And Aisha did a study in California teacher study, the largest population, 133,000 people. She won the youngest researcher award for this. The studies show that it's not all or none. Every positive move you make incrementally helps the brain, whether it's small changes in nutrition,

small changes in movement, small changes in stress management, small changes in sleep where you get those four to five cycles of sleep, deep restorative sleep, you will make profound changes. So this is an empowering message and it doesn't rely on some givics. Isha, earlier you mentioned the neuro plan, but can you remind us what is it and who should follow it? It stands for nutrition, exercise, unwind or stress management, restorative sleep, and optimizing cognitive activity. And these are based on evidence-based lifestyle intervention and lifestyle factors that improve brain health and prevent cognitive decline on Alzheimer's disease. Amazing. And who should be following them? Everyone, whether you're 9 or 99.

So, N. Nutrition. Very important. And I think you know this more than anybody else, and you do such a fantastic job in this podcast, empowering people about nutrition. So in the realm of neurology and neuroscience, we have a tremendous body of evidence showing that the types of food that people choose directly impacts their brain health. And it can prevent devastating diseases like stroke and Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia, particularly vascular dementia. And when you look at the different dietary patterns, it's essentially a variation of the same theme. Diets that are high in plant-based foods, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids, they tend to do very well.

So that could be a mind diet, a Mediterranean diet, a dash diet. It could be any cultural diet that highlights the importance of foods that are high in polyphenols that are high in fiber, good fats, which is polyunsaturated fatty acids, and they're low in processed foods, in refined carbohydrates, in sources of saturated fats, which are the type of fats that can increase your LDL cholesterol and can potentially harm the brain. And the numbers are incredible. For example, there was a study that was conducted

in Russia University in Chicago here in the United States. Dr. Martha Morris, she was the lead researcher, the late Dr. Martha Morris, and she looked at adherence to the mind diets. The mind diet is a hybrid diet. It stands for Mediterranean dash intervention for neurodegenerative delay. Thank goodness for the acronym mind. The Mediterranean dash combination. And when you look at the diet, it's not a, you know, it's not a cultural diet per se. It's essentially a scoring system. When people adhere to the mind diet, they get a high score for consuming green leafy vegetables, crucifers vegetables, other vegetables, fruits, specifically strawberries and blueberries that are high in polyphenols and flavonols, when they

consume whole grains, when they have less refined carbohydrates such as white bread or added sugar to foods, when they consume nuts, seeds, which are great sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids and omega fats, when they consume extraversion olive oil, which could potentially have high polyphenols and mono and polyunsaturated fatty acids. They get a high score and sources of omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in fatty fish or flaxseats, chia seeds, hemp seeds. And they get a low score when they consume a lot of red meat,

a lot of high-fat dairy products, which may be higher insaturated fats, and if they consume too much alcohol. So that is essentially the concept that you find in all of these dietary patterns. And in this population, when they adhere to the mind diet, they reduced their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease by 53%. And even moderate adherence reduced the risk by 37%.

And in my study, in the California teacher study, same thing. We looked at the Mediterranean diet and we looked at the scoring system. And the beautiful thing was it was not an all or none phenomenon. Every small incremental change towards that positive outcome, say, for example, adding a cup of green leafy vegetables or switching a donut for some fruits, it actually made a huge difference. And I think that's pretty empowering for people to know that you don't have to jump into it wholeheartedly. You can start by simply changing few things moving forward. I'd love to ask a question that I think quite a lot of our listeners will have

right now. So a lot of listeners to this podcast are also Zoe members. And so that means that they're using our app. They've used a test kit to then get this personalized advice. And that advice was built really to optimize overall health. And so it's very much focused on gut health. It's very similar to a lot of the advice you're talking about with a Mediterranean diet. It doesn't have a particular focus on trying to be like a brain-specific diet. It's reducing inflammation, all of these sorts of things. And I think what they're going to be interesting to listen to this is, is there anything different and specific that you would be recommending for somebody who's worrying about dementia or given what you were saying about how sort of the brain is just even

more affected by what's happening everywhere else. Is this sort of like the best brain diet is like the same as the best overall health diet? Yeah, I mean, just for transparency, we're a whole food plant base ourselves. We don't push that aggressively on others because we think that you can achieve brain health in many other ways. In most cases, it's the same. It's the same diet whether it's for heart, for everything else. A couple of things to be aware of at this point.

I mean, as I said earlier, I love the concept of to the best of our knowledge today. the three elements that are important for brain b12 make sure that you be 12 levels are normal or on the higher side vitamin d and omega 3 we just did two reviews two comprehensive reviews one on omega 3 and the developing brain and omega 3 on the aging brain and in both of them there seems to be trends towards needing omega 3 being extra aware of omega 3 because omega 3 has that much effect it's the only fat that the body doesn't make well omega 6 as well, but in the Western diet, you don't have to worry about omega-6. In fact, we have excess of omega-6. So omega-3 is very, very important. DHA for the brain in particular

makes up more than 50% of brains volume, so it's critically important, and we don't make it, so we have to kind of be aware of it. So that's basically, whether you get it from fish or in our cases and other people's cases, they can get for chia, flaxseed, or supplements, and that's basically it. The acronym is smash, salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines and a herring, the fatty fish. But it's not the fish. The fish gets it from the algae. So it's the omega-3 particular.

There's no uniqueness beyond that. So that's important to kind of know where are you going to get your omega-3 and be aware of it and get it. And we just did a conversation with a world-renowned lipidologist and omega-3 expert who said that even people who are just taking it from chia and flaxseed, If they're extra aware of it, they should be fine. Yes, if they have healthy livers and if they're eating a healthier diet, that we should be able to convert ALA into EPA and DHA, which is important for brain health. And also being aware of omega-6 because there seems to be a competition with enzymes,

so lowering your omega-6, which is processed foods, right, and making sure that alcohol does not affect the liver to the extent that it's going to affect the transition. So that's basically it. I'll end this recap with something I think you'll like, a free gut health guide. created by our team of scientists here at Zoe. Many of us aren't sure how to best support our gut,

so we developed an easy-to-follow guide, complete with tips, recipes and shopping lists, designed to help you look after your gut. The guide is delivered straight to your inbox, along with ongoing nutrition insights from Zoe, the Science and Nutrition Company on a mission to transform their health of millions. To get your free gut health guide, just visit zoe.com slash gut guide.

Thanks for listening. You know,