In this episode of The Energy Blueprint, we’re looking back on some of the most potent ways to support your brain health and cognition.
This episode features Harvard-trained clinical research scientist and brain expert Dr. Datis Kharrazian, the foremost authority on holistic (and highly effective) care for dementia Dr. Dale Bredesen, and founder of Marama Memory Care facility Dr. Heather Sandison, whose mission is to reverse dementia and reintroduce residents to living independently!
This is a robust episode with many exceptional clinical pearls to keep your brain and nervous system young and resilient.
Table of Contents
After this podcast, you’ll understand:
- Specific ways to strengthen your cognitive function and keep your brain functioning optimally, including one factor studied by Harvard for over 80 years!
- The number one (passive!) practice you need to maintain for lightning-fast cognition
- Dr. Kharrazian’s top three tips to protect your brain health (including one tip that improves every aspect of your health and life!)
- Dr. Dale Bredesen’s 7-steps to reverse dementia and how he combines conventional medicine and personalized, precision medicine for incredible outcomes
- The shocking amount of money most families spend on Alzheimer’s disease before it kills their loved one…and what you can do to make dementia optional instead
- The massive impact of even minimal exercise on cognitive function…even a small amount goes a long way to support your brain!
- Is the ketogenic diet a good fit for someone with cognitive decline?
- Dr. Sandison breaks down the most exciting new research showing an improvement in Alzheimer’s disease and the big takeaways you can start implementing TODAY
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Transcript Dale Bredesen, MD
Precision medicine for dementia
Ari: Let me ask you this, in your protocol, what you would prescribe to someone with, let’s say MCI or early stages of dementia, or where you measure some of these biomarkers that you mentioned and you see that they’re elevated and you see that there’s APOE4 and there’s a risk of Alzheimer’s even if there isn’t a large presence of symptoms, and you prescribe a particular protocol for stopping the progression or reversing the progression into neurodegeneration and dementia. Are there, in your protocol, drugs that would be harmful to someone who doesn’t have any problems with neurodegeneration?
Meaning somebody who’s perfectly healthy, a 50-year-old person with no signs of dementia, if they followed your dementia protocol exactly as you outline it, would they suffer any ill effects or side effects from following your protocol, or would it be also healthy for them?
Dr. Bredesen: Great point, and I think it’s important for everyone to understand this. What we’re doing is called precision medicine. We are looking for each person, okay, do you have P. gingivalis? Do we need to help your oral microbiome? Do you have herpes simplex? In which case we should give you some Valaciclovir, which is a very benign drug and actually gets rid of herpes and dramatic reductions in risk for decline.
The answer is, no there are no problems except a couple of areas where you have to keep your eye on and say, “Okay, wait, is this the right thing for me?” Here’s what they are, first of all, when we treat this, we start with two pieces, so we’re going to do a core piece which is seven things for everybody. Just some of the things you mentioned, diet, exercise, sleep, stress, brain training, detox, and so many of us are exposed to toxins, it’s a huge issue, and then some targeted supplements.
These are all benign, so the main side effect of our protocol is better health. People are going to live longer, they’re going to have more energy, they’re going to have a better mitochondrial function, they’re going to have better sleep. They’re going to get rid of their sleep apnea, all these things. Then beyond the core, we’re looking at, what specifically? Okay, so for example, do you have exposure to trichothecenes? If so, we need to get rid of those. Do you have exposure to mercury? If so, we need to get rid of that.
Now here’s where we come into the things that could be borderline, people have to think a little bit. For some people, they have a hypercoagulable state, you can pick that up on genetics, and we treat them with nattokinase and or Pycnogenol, sometimes lumbrokinase. If you have a bleeding tendency, you don’t want to be on those things. You have to decide, am I more on the hypercoagulable side, or am I more on the bleeding tendency side? You wouldn’t want to take nattokinase if you’re on to that.
The other thing that, again, you have to decide is bioidentical hormone replacement. If your hormones are low, you’re going to do better with your cognition, because again, this is a network insufficiency, by having the appropriate levels of estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, pregnenolone, DHEA, all those neurosteroids. Again, for people who have breast cancer, for example, we have to be very careful about which ones and for how long.
I do think the future is going to be combining precision medicine, personalized protocols that we’ve been doing, with specific drugs. In fact, in the lab, I work with Dr. Vargas John, for years and years, we set up the Alzheimer’s drug discovery network way back in 2007. There are some very exciting new classes of drugs coming out from there that I expect will be part of the future. Again, you want to know, when you do something that is non-physiological, and any drug is non-physiological, you have to look very carefully, what are all the things I’m doing to this system? We want to do as much as we can physiologically. You talked about stress earlier, critical part of physiology. It’s important to have it when you need it. It’s important to not have it chronically, as you know.
For these drugs, you want to be very careful. As an example, inhibiting the cleavage of APP to go toward the side of downsizing, you can do that mildly and help to do better, but you don’t want to shut it down because it is there to respond to pathogens. Again, I think in the long run, we’re going to be able to do better and better and better with really addressing all of the things that are driving the cognitive decline, we’re already getting unprecedented improvements, that I think we’ll be able to do better and better and better.
For example, we’ve had people go from MoCA scores, MoCA’s go from 0 to 30, it’s Montreal Cognitive Assessment. We’ve seen people go from 18, which is the fourth stage, early dementia, all the way to 30, which is a perfect score. We’ve seen people go from 0, which is end-stage dementia to 9. We’ve never seen anyone go from 0 to 30, that’s the goal. We’d like to be able to take someone who’s in the end stages of dementia and make them normal again. Hasn’t happened yet, it’s probably going to take some stem cells, it’s probably going to take some intranasal trophic, peptide support, we don’t know yet but that’s the goal.
Making normal cognition better
Ari: Okay. As someone moves more and more, as you were just alluding to there, as someone moves more and more into the disease state, we see more and more layers of dysfunction in more and more physiological systems. More things are out of whack basically, and to the degree one tests for it, in somebody with severe Alzheimer’s, you could probably find almost as many layers of dysfunction as you’re capable of testing for. With the emergence of things like metabolomics technology, where we can test for thousands of metabolites instead of just the 50 or 100 or so that are commonly tested for, I suspect we’ll probably find hundreds or thousands of more layers of things, pattern, different biochemical and cellular mechanisms that are dysfunctional in the gut, in the brain, in the muscles, in the blood, wherever you test for it, I suspect you’d find it if you’re capable of testing for it.
I think you could probably go endlessly down that pathway of precision personalized medicine, especially in the context of somebody with severe disease, and come up with lots and lots of different specific ways of treating all the things that you find that are wrong in that person from, as you said, their oral microbiome, to their gut microbiome, to their leaky gut, to neurotransmitter imbalances, to nutrient deficiencies and lots and lots of layers to that story. But let me ask you this going back to my previous question, let’s say you applied your generic protocol, the non-precision, personalized one that you would apply to someone that you’re working with one-on-one and actually doing tests for. Let’s say you took, just as a thought experiment, all 40-year-olds on the planet, and they followed your generic protocol. Would that mostly eliminate the problem of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease?
Dr. Bredesen: You’ve hit on so many good questions there because this is about making normal cognition better. The beginning answer to your question is, number one, they would mostly get better cognition. All of us are operating with the vast majority of us, suboptimal cognition. We could do better if we did those basic things. If we had better metabolic flexibility, which so many of us are losing in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. So much better. If we found that we had mild hypoxia and a nocturnal SpO2 was decreasing, so that the beginning to answer is yes, just about every would be better.
Second piece, though, is you’re getting to what we have proposed, which is how does public– Let’s say that we decide. There’s a cancer moonshot from President Biden years ago when he was vice president. I’ve been surprised there hasn’t been an Alzheimer’s moonshot. It would be great. We can do so much better with Alzheimer’s than we could just 5, 10 years ago.
Let’s say that we set up an Alzheimer’s moonshot. We said, look, we’re going to make it so that as few people in the world develop Alzheimer’s as possible. We can’t do a million-dollar workup on every single person. What we’re going to do is just what you suggested. Everybody is going to do the basics. When you turn, let’s say, 40, you turn 40. You could start at 35, but let’s say you’re going to start at 40. You’re going to do the basic seven, you’re going to make sure you do the right things. The vast majority of those people will never develop Alzheimer’s, but a few of them will. Now, those people go to the next phase, and we catch them at the SCI phase. Now, they’ve taken that next.
By the way, their GFAP will be available soon, but you can now follow their pTau-181. I was fascinated by a woman who had a pTau level when it was just becoming available and actually tried to do some of our protocol and did pieces of it, not everything but pieces. She went back and got it tested it again, and it was lower. Fantastic. It’s showing, the signaling is now moving. You’re going in the right directions. The idea would be that this would be a multi-tiered public health approach, just as we think of with vaccinations, but here you don’t have to have a jab. You just go and you do the appropriate things. Then what you do is once a year, you test your cognition.
Most people are going to do great, but a few of those people are going to fall through the cracks. Something didn’t go right. They had exposure to something. They had the wrong genetics. They did the wrong things. They had undiagnosed sleep apnea. They had a leaky gut that they didn’t know about. Sensitivity to something, a chronic pathogen. Okay, they’re going to fall through the cracks. Now, those people have a more extensive evaluation, more extensive treatment. Most of those now are going to be fine. A couple of those people will still go the next stage, so we want to still catch them. They’re going to be continuing in their SCI. We catch them later. Now they have a more–
The goal then is nobody– and I’ve been saying to people recently, Alzheimer’s is now optional. If everybody were to get on appropriate prevention or earliest reversal, virtually nobody has to become demented. Think about that for a minute. We’re talking about dementia, which currently costs the US over $300 billion a year. The average person spends his or her own money, $350,000, before dying of Alzheimer’s. Of course, most of that is in nursing homes and nursing care and things like that. Spending much, much less than that, you can make sure that you never get it, and everybody should.
Ending the Alzheimer’s pandemic?
Ari: That’s really what I’m getting at is, to some extent, going back to the initial thing we were talking about, this is a matter of paradigm. Is the Alzheimer’s epidemic–? Should we treat it in the way we think about this problem? Should we treat it as a deficiency of drugs that we haven’t yet found and that the real problem is that we just haven’t synthesized the right chemical in a laboratory that will interfere and block these pathways in the brain that lead to this disease?
Alzheimer’s, are we thinking about it as a deficiency in a pharmaceutical, or are we thinking about it as a breakdown of health, a breakdown of the optimal physiological function of the various systems of the body, because that’s what your formula is really all about. You’re teaching people– You’re not saying, “Here’s the drug to fix your Alzheimer’s,” you’re saying, “Here’s the program to make your body and brain healthier,” which happens to result, and we can look at the mechanisms at the level of the brain as they relate to Alzheimer’s. One of the effects, one of the many, many physiological effects of that program is that it also happens to prevent dementia at the same time as it prevents dozens of other diseases. Is that correct?
Dr. Bredesen: Absolutely. You started this whole discussion by talking about paradigms, and I couldn’t have said it better. This is about paradigms. How do you look at health? How do you look at medicine? I came from the old-fashioned paradigm and was trained in the old-fashioned paradigm. What’s the drug we’re going to get that’s going to get rid of Alzheimer’s? That’s a tall order. Man, what do we start thinking? Now when you look under the hood and you start looking at what’s everything, how is it connected? I think of this as the medical internet. Back in the 1960s, DARPA said, “Hey, we can all connect up our computers. We can communicate,” so communication, information, recreation commercialization, this has all happened through the birth of the internet going way back to the 1960s.
Well, now what’s happened is we’re seeing the medical internet, which is that the many, many nodes of interaction between your gut and your brain and your pancreas and your liver and your bones, all these things are connected with this amazing, beautiful physiological internet. That now they’re all connected, and so what we’re saying is, what’s happening with these connections? Why? You have to ask why. In the medicine I learned in the 20th century, it was about what it is. We learned to make a diagnosis. It’s measles, it’s a broken leg, whatever, and then we try to fix it. The 21st-century medicine is about why, not what. Why is it? Yes, you have some drugs. If you want to use them at some point, fine, but remember that they’re going to mess up physiology, so be careful. Use them appropriately at the right amounts in the right ways.
The bottom line is you want to know why. It’s been so surprising to me. If you look up functional medicine on Wikipedia, it basically says this is hokey stuff that doesn’t work. Oh my gosh. Jeffrey Bland is a hero. He created a new way, a new paradigm of understanding medicine by saying, “Let’s look at what causes the problem, the root causes.” If you’ve got hypertension, don’t just take a calcium channel blocker, figure out why you have hypertension. Maybe you’ve got some unresolved stress issues. Maybe you’re eating too much sugar. We’re learning the molecular mechanisms of these.
I would add one more thing, which is so common. Professor Rick Johnson has done beautiful research over the years, and Dr. David Perl Mutter has published a nice book on this called Drop Acid. The point is that when you have fructose exposure, it fits exactly with our model, the fructose, as Rick showed, is telling your body, “Winter is coming, drop your ATP levels, drop your energetics by about 15%.” Well, when you’re developing Alzheimer’s, nothing could be worse than dropping the support to your brain, so you’re getting ready for hibernation, you’re dropping these things down. Strangely, fructose actually decreases your energetics and contributes to your likelihood of developing cognitive decline.
You’re absolutely right. You have to change the paradigm. You have to address what’s actually causing the problem.
Is ketosis good for brain health?
Ari: How much do you think ketosis is a necessary part of this eating a ketogenic diet, and is it specifically necessary in the demographic you just described, in insulin-resistant people more so than it is in the general healthy population, non-insulin-resistant people?
Dr. Bredesen: Yes, it is a good point. It depends on where you catch it. Again, when we see people, they’ve usually lost both, and you need to restore both. You need to be able to make ketones at the appropriate time. You need to be able to be insulin sensitive. Now Dr. Anne Hathaway gets her patients into ketosis very quickly. I worry if you push too hard because again, this is an insufficiency, but it’s an insufficiency born of excess sugar in many people’s cases and excess simple carbs.
I worry for frail people about going into fasting too quickly. This is why I like Professor Steven [unintelligible 00:52:00] approach of just start with some exogenous ketones. At least you’ve given them some energy. The answer to your question is for people who are asymptomatic, you don’t need to worry about that. You just need to optimize things for them. For people who are already struggling, any day that they have without those energetics is a bad day. They are going to continue to downsize.
That’s why I just say, just start with some exogenous ketone, get them some energy. Then it takes a few weeks, as you know, to get into it. By the way, exercise is an important part of this, getting those energetics back, becoming insulin sensitive again. Then you can ease them into endogenous ketosis. As long as you’re flexible, you’re in great shape, but again, when you’re having trouble, you’ve typically lost both of those avenues.
Heather Sandison Transcript
Dr. Bredesen’s and Sanderson’s research on reversing Alzheimer’s
Ari: Yes. Well said. You said in passing earlier, you were describing the study design that you did with 23 participants and Dale Bredesen’s research and this was in the context of speaking about kind of in pharmaceutical companies, they have much more funding to conduct much more massive-scale studies, and there’s an interesting sort of dynamic that emerges as a result of those, that financial picture, which is that we end up accumulating a much larger body of evidence on the drug interventions than on, let’s say, lifestyle interventions like you’re doing, what Dr. Bredesen is doing.
I’ve noticed sort of a funny dynamic that emerges from that, which is when you go and you have discussions with people who are in evidence-based circles, they’ll say, “Oh yes, but Dr. Bredesen’s research, or but Dr. Sandison’s research, oh, that was just a very small-scale study, it was a pilot study, it doesn’t have the statistical power, it doesn’t have the weight of the evidence, like this large body of research on the drugs, so therefore the drugs are the really ‘evidence-based thing,’ and these lifestyle interventions are still as of yet largely untested and unproven.”
They’re sort of like, they’re put in the category of like pseudoscience and unproven treatments as a result of basically just the financial dynamics creating a situation where there’s a much larger body of evidence on the pharmaceutical interventions, even though they’re actually much less effective.
Dr. Sandison: Yes, so the outcomes, there is power analysis that goes into these. We had to have a sample size large enough to create an effect, so there certainly are statistics that are meaningful that are here. Maybe I’ll just take you through the research that supports what’s in my book, and people can decide for themselves, right? I think I always go back to, this is common sense, it’s just not common practice. If you can hear the exasperation in my voice, it’s there, like I own it. Like we’re talking about diet and exercise and sleep and stress management.
How do you feel when you get the right food and the right company and the right stress management and you’re well rested and you get some exercise, right? We all feel better when we get that, and our parents suffering with dementia tend to do better too. This is not rocket surgery, and there is science. Dr. Bredesen’s group, we were all doing this– There’s three studies that I want to point out, and we were all doing this research around the same time, but they started a little bit before me.
They took 25 participants through a nine-month intervention, and it was a feasibility trial, so they took participants with MoCA scores down to 19. The MoCA is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. This is out of 30, it’s a one-page worksheet where you draw a clock, copy a cube, identify some zoo animals, and then you end up with a score out of 30. Perfect is 30, normal is 26 and above. They took participants with MoCA scores down to 19, so in that mild cognitive impairment stage, but they all had some sort of cognitive impairment. What they saw after this nine-month intervention in these 25 participants was that 84% of them improved their cognition.
They published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease in July of 2022, and Kat Toops is the lead author on that paper. A year later, in August of 2023, I published my trial, very similar, 23 participants, six-month intervention, so a quicker intervention, and we only took participants with MoCA scores between 12 and 23. Again, normal is 26 and above. Our participants had impairment, more impairment, they were further progressed along the disease state, and we only did six months, and we saw that 74% of our participants improved.
The most recent trial came out on just June 7th of 2024, and this is Dr. Dean Ornish’s trial, and this was a 49–, I think there were 51 participants total, but two dropped out, and they did a 20-week or a five-month intervention, and it was a randomized controlled trial. This is the first randomized controlled trial looking at lifestyle interventions alone. In the trials that we had done, Dr. Bredesen’s group [unintelligible 00:39:34], there’s three doctors who had sites in that initial trial, Dr. Bredesen’s group, and then mine, we did the combination of lifestyle medicine with functional medicine. We looked for toxins, and we looked for infections, and we looked for nutrient imbalances.
We did a lot of the testing, and in Dr. Ornish’s trial, they did mostly lifestyle interventions. They did use some supplements, and they listed all the supplements in the trial, 20 weeks, and they had a control group that did not get that intervention and then an intervention group that got that intervention. The conclusions they drew, I got chills. It was just so exciting because when you have a randomized controlled trial, you can make that connection between the intervention. It’s much more clear. You can draw the conclusions that the intervention is having the effect.
The conclusion that they drew was that comprehensive lifestyle changes may significantly improve cognition and function after five months in many patients with mild cognitive impairment or early dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. This trial– Yes, we will always need more research, we will always want to learn more, we need more randomized controlled trials, and Dr. Bredesen’s group is in one right now. I think they’ve completed recruitment for that.
I’m looking forward to seeing those results, preliminary results look good. This randomized controlled trial is the first. This is the first really stating that lifestyle interventions can have an impact on dementia. When we look at any of the drugs that have ever been tried, they don’t improve cognitive function.
Ari: That’s what I was going to say, I just want you to point out this distinction between what you were talking about before with the drugs, which was a 30% slowing of the rate of decline versus an improvement, because I think those two things might be conflated in people’s minds.
Dr. Sandison: Right. What’s going on here is if you take someone on their way towards Alzheimer’s or dementia, the average is that they’re going to drop that MoCA score by two to three points per year. If you start with a MoCA of 20, a year later you’ll be at a 17 or an 18, and then so on. Each year you may drop. Now, there’s variables, things happen, and sometimes it will be a little bit better, sometimes it will be a little bit worse, sometimes it will stabilize, but what happens with the medications is that on average, instead of dropping from a 20 to an 18 or 17, you’ll drop from a 20 to an 18 or a 19.
You’ll drop by two points instead of three points, or by one and a half points instead of two or three points, something in there. You basically get a slowing of that disease process. What we see with Dr. Bredesen’s approach is that you get an improvement of about three points on average. We have some patients that get an improvement of 10 points. They go from a MoCA of 20 to a MoCA of 30. We have patients, some of them get five or six points and some get one or two points and they kind of stabilize, but the average is about a three-point improvement. Compared to no treatment at all, this is about a six-point difference. You’re not declining.
With the medications that are available today, there is a decline in cognitive function. You don’t change how someone interacts measurably. They’re not getting that one last Christmas or that last anniversary or that last summer. What you’re having is potentially there’s less care that they need as they progress down this disease state. With these interventions, you see actual improvement. What we see at Marama is that, our goal there with our– We have this immersive experience, in a senior living environment, people can move in, and instead of memory care, our goal is memory recovery so that they can return to independent living.
We had our first resident, she moved home with a MoCA of 30. She came in with a MoCA of 24, she didn’t wait until it was really progressed, but she had measurable impairment, moved in with a MoCA of 24, and six months later, she moved home with a MoCA of 30.
Ari: Wow. Beautiful. I think all of that– I was thinking, this morning I was listening to a podcast and somebody was–, actually it happened to be on Alzheimer’s and dementia. He mentioned that a lot of the descriptions that you read of these diseases online, like on WebMD or Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic or whatever, describe them as “incurable diseases.”
This label of incurable disease implies in our minds that once you get this disease, oh, it’s like this binary state, first of all, you’re either healthy without the disease or you have the disease. Once you have the disease, it’s an incurable progressive condition. You’re just going to go downhill, worse and worse until you die. I think what you’re really getting at here that I want to emphasize, and maybe you can add to what I’ll say here, is that this whole picture is way more malleable than that. It’s way less binary.
It’s much more of a spectrum, first of all, and you can move in different directions on that spectrum. You can move– The word cure I think is problematic in and of itself, as you were speaking to earlier, because we all have this idea that’s like, you have this disease or you don’t, this binary on and off thing. Then the cure is something that you take for a short period of time, that fixes you, you no longer have the disease, you can go back to the way you were living, disease-free now.
It just– The picture isn’t really that. This whole idea of finding the cure that we’ve all been indoctrinated with since the time we were children is itself problematic. The key point here is, as you just explained with your patient, that, okay, there was some decline, there was some movement towards dementia, and we reversed that. We effectively made it, so there isn’t dementia anymore. If we understand that dynamism, that malleability of these processes, I think that’s a really empowering thing for people to realize, “It’s not a binary on and off, and I can do stuff about it to actually reverse this direction.”
Dr. Sandison: Yes, it’s a very hopeful place where I sit, and we see patients even– It’s much easier to reverse the disease process when it’s earlier on, when people are younger, when the disease has not created as much structural damage in the brain. As it gets more progressed, it’s harder, but the good news is that there’s hope. I have seen people even with severe cognitive decline in diagnosed Alzheimer’s improve their cognition. They’re not necessarily going back to work. I will repeat what you’ve said again, this is not a cure, it’s a lifestyle.
The good news is that there’s hope. The bad news is it takes work. You have to do it. It’s not going to be for everyone. If you’re the type of person that’s waiting for a medication, a pill to swallow or an IV to take to cure you, that is not what I have to offer, but if people are willing to make the changes, if they’re willing to significantly change their diet, and you do not have to do all of this. In our clinical trial, not one person who improved did everything, but they did make significant changes to their diet, to their exercise habits, to their sleep, to their stress management practices.
They took supplements, they looked at their testing, they looked at their labs. In the Ornish paper, one of the big differences in their lifestyle approach compared to ours is that we suggested an organic ketogenic diet, and they suggested a vegan diet. I think that you can do either, but I do think you need to commit to one or the other and significantly reduce or eliminate altogether processed foods in the diet. In an ideal world, probably be switching back and forth between plant-based and a ketogenic diet so you get that metabolic flexibility and the benefits of that.
I think that there’s choice in this. You can make it fit for you. Do fun things. We find that fun is a really important consideration. It’s for brain exercise. First, we have to want to do it. We have to continue to do it. This can’t be the thing that we do once a week. This has to be the thing that we do six to seven days a week. This has to be the lifestyle that we choose to adopt long term. That’s when we see the benefits. It takes work, but don’t let anyone tell you there’s nothing you can do for Alzheimer’s. That is just factually inaccurate at this stage. We know better.
Ari: Yes. Heather, are you okay on time? Are you able to go 10 minutes longer or do you have a hard cutoff in five minutes?
Dr. Sandison: I do.
Dr. Sandison’s top brain health tips
Ari: Okay. Let’s finish with a few of the top brain health tips that you can recommend to people. What do you think are the biggest needle-movers for, let’s say, people with early signs of cognitive decline to start to reverse that and get themselves back to full brain health or in the situation of understanding that these are long-term disease processes that often take decades of actual decline in the structure and function of your brain before you actually even notice symptoms or get a diagnosis, what are the things that people can do, the biggest needle-movers to ensure that people don’t end up with dementia?
Dr. Sandison: In the book, the first chapter talks through, if you can only do one thing in each of these categories of brain health, what it would be. I think that I’m going to skip those for your audience, but many of you who are listening, you are super well-educated. You’ve already heard these things. I’m going to give you some things that you probably haven’t heard of, but I want you to know that in the book there are very accessible, quick, easy things to impart on somebody who maybe has never been introduced to functional medicine or isn’t even aware that there’s something you can do for cognitive function.
What we want to do is make this accessible. You can have all the information in the world, but if you don’t put it into action, it doesn’t have an impact on your health. What I want to share with your audience today is if you were to take it a little bit further, because I know that everybody here is super well-educated. Organic ketogenic diet, which we could spend an entire week talking about what that means, but I know that all of you who are here are familiar with that. You kind of know what that looks like. Adding coconut oil for the MCTs, getting the beta-hydroxybutyrate and the ketones available for your brain.
Your brain prefers ketones to sugar for fuel, and so the more that we can be in ketosis, typically the better our cognition is. That has kind of a brain rescue benefit. Then two, exercise. What I recommend for exercise is something called dual-task exercise. D-U-A-L. Two things at the same time where you’re exercising cognitively at the same time as physically. Super simple would be walking and talking.
More advanced, learning a new sport like playing pickleball where you’re engaged physically, you’re engaging intellectually because there’s strategy involved, you’ve got hand-eye coordination, there’s social engagement, you’re outside, you’re getting vitamin D. You’re checking multiple boxes at the same time. Even just going to a challenging dance class. Even just going to anything where you’re cued by an instructor and you have to cognitively keep up with that, or you can get into, if you get really fancy with this, you can do some sort of brain training while you’re exercising, whether it’s math problems or memorizing a poem or something like that while you’re exercising, getting physical activity.
You want to be about 75% of capacity, both physically and cognitively. Not so hard that you give up, but not so easy that you’re checking out. Diet, organic ketogenic. Exercise, dual task. Sleep, you want a minimum of seven hours of sleep. Aiming for, I always hesitate here because I don’t want people to be so fixated on these numbers that they end up not sleeping, but just to use as general guidelines, minimum seven hours of sleep, an hour and a half of REM, an hour of deep sleep. I wear an Oura Ring. I track it. Don’t get too fixated on the numbers, but prioritize your sleep. If there is any sign of cognitive decline, get a sleep study.
Do not wait to find out you have sleep apnea in five years because each night of sleep deprivation and hypoxia is damaging to your brain. It’s like a traumatic brain injury each night, so make sure that you get that treated, and mouth tape. Mouth tape is one of my favorite things. It treats mild sleep apnea, helps with anxiety, helps with cognition, helps with sinuses. I mean the litany of things that helps with is long. Consider mouth tape if you have any issues. Organic ketogenic diet, dual-task exercises, prioritize your sleep, understand if you have sleep apnea right away and treat it. Then stress management.
There is an exercise, a meditation called Kirtan Kriya, it’s a 12-minute–, the Sa Ta Na Ma. That one has a huge amount of literature, review articles published on why it’s so beneficial for cognitive function and for many other things, for blood sugar regulation, for many of the things that are causal level when it comes to Alzheimer’s and dementia. Blood sugar regulation, inflammation, for stress management, adrenal balancing, spiritual fitness, telomere length, like all of these things that are associated with aging. Totally free. Only takes 12 minutes. There’s no reason not to do it.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian Transcript
Why isn’t my brain working – how circulation plays a role in brain fog and fatigue
Ari Whitten: Sure. Got you. So one of the other factors that you mentioned is a big factor in brain health is circulation and oxygen delivery to the brain. So what are some of the underlying causes that might impair that aspect of things?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Well, we know… well some people do have subtle anemia so we’d want to look at a CBC. And then one of the key factors is poor circulation. So you know, a lot of times people complain of cold hands, cold feet, so you can just palpate it, you can see it. And you know, one of the key things, people that have poor circulation is they’ll notice their best brain function if they exercise and move and their blood flow and circulation comeback and then the energy’s there.
So typical thing you see with patients that gots like chronic fatigue issues related to lack of blood flow to the brain is when they actually move they notice that their circulation changes for the next few hours, they have the best amount of energy. And then as the hands and feet get cold again, their energy goes down. So sometimes we’ll have patients kind of track their fatigue levels and their brain function symptoms based on how they feel the temperature on their hands and feet. And they can actually get a surface thermometer and just kind of measure their hands and feet and they can kind of compare the temperature on the wrist or pay attention to fingertips.
They seem like a 10-degree difference. That’s usually a sign of poor circulation. And then if you can start to correlate their energy level, like they notice their brain functions great and their energy levels are great and then they measure their temperature and it’s somewhat normal. And then they notice when their function is down, that really helps us in a clinical window to determine like, “Well, we have to improve your circulation.”
So then we’ll maybe consider strategies to improve their circulation, which may be things like bepotastine which activates endothelial nitric oxide synthase. That’s a really fantastic way to get improved circulation, but just from different types of compounds. Just in the fact that they can just do some physical exercise and decrease things that impact the adrenaline levels, that could be an issue there. So those are all things that they should do.
Ari Whitten: Excuse me. So I’m sure that there are a number of different, like overt genetic conditions that might impair circulation, like mitral valve prolapse or something like that. How much of this, the circulatory issues do you think are more a direct function of nutrition and lifestyle inadequacies? Like somebody is just like mostly sedentary and maybe their heart muscle itself is just not that strong.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Well, yeah, so that’s a good point. So some would say very few cases are related to things like heart disease or things like mitral valve prolapse or pulmonary issues or Lyme disease. Those are more significant and those are usually associated secondary disease.
Now the other things are there’s some genetic susceptibility for some people. I mean one of the things we know with the whole, with all of the studies being done, the human genome project and just the genotype is that there’s so much variation between them. We don’t know what all the gene SNPs mean and we don’t know what the gene SNPs mean in combination.
And I think at this point the scientific community is at the point where they have to use machine learning to try to interpret all this because it’s just too many variables to do it. So in a clinical setting though, behind the science where the genes really fit in, we know that there’s a genotype and then all you can really do in a clinical setting is try to modulate the phenotype, the genes plus environment, nutrition and the lifestyle.
So when you see someone come in and they tell you, “Everyone, their sisters, their mom, their grandmother, they all have really cold hands and feet. Then they always get cold.” There’s probably some type of genetic uniqueness that impacts various receptor pathways. But at the end of the day those things can be one of the reasons why they’re not functioning as well as they can. If they can change those things, that can be a factor.
Sedentary lifestyle is for sure one of the most common ones for poor circulation. And some people are prone to things like hypothyroidism and various things. But I think as a clinician and as a patient suffering through it, you just kind of have to go through and figure all those things out and find the best way you can change the expression of your genes to make a difference, right?
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. A couple of specific questions on that one. One, are you aware of any other sort of common lifestyle factor other than exercise that can, that has a strong effect on the circulatory function?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Say that again. Besides exercise, what can affect circulation?
Ari Whitten: Besides exercise, is there any other common lifestyle factor that has a big impact on circulation?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Lifestyle factor, sedentary lifestyle and physically active is the single most common factor.
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: That is without question. The other part of it could be like we just talked about. Some of the genetic variations we don’t totally understand why some people have issues. They’re like, we see people who work out all the time, but everyone in their family has cold hands and cold feet and the circulation is poor. And if we can do things to change the expression of that, then they do better, but they always have that vulnerability. Outside of basic sedentary lifestyle and movement and genes, I’m not really sure of anything that comes to mind that is a key factor there.
Ari Whitten: Okay. Got you. You know, I always wondered, you know, just the fact that we’re living such indoor lives now and we have so much less exposure to infrared rays from sunlight, from spending time outdoors. I was, I always just kind of thought that that might have a big impact on things. Because, you know, I might in the middle of my house, I might feel cold in the winter and, you know, it might be as simple as going outdoors and just getting some rays of sun on my skin and all of a sudden I no longer have cold hands and feet. Do you know what I mean?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Yeah, absolutely. And every person is unique to themselves and you have to kind of dig through all that and figure out the best strategy.
How to treat brain fog and prevent Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease – how stress and sleep affect your brain and health
Ari Whitten: So, stress. I know that a couple of the big factors, I have your Save Your Brain program and have gone through that extensively. So stress and sleep are a couple of the other big factors that you go into, in that program.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Yes.
Ari Whitten: How does stress affect the brain? And I know that’s very broad and there are lots of different factors, but just kind of a broad overview of what stress does to our brains.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: So to make it very simple long-term chronic stress has several effects. One of them is the, and this is really related to, it would be specific to the cortisol shift, okay? So if cortisol goes up is the key factor.
So some people can adapt to stress, some can’t adapt to stress, but if we’re really talking about it, let’s just be specific. We’re talking about the effects of elevated cortisol on the brain. And cortisol, either it could be exogenous because someone’s taking cortisone or someone has just high production of cortisol. But cortisol itself can thin the blood-brain barrier, it can break down the gut barrier. That’s one key thing. Extensive cortisol use and high cortisol levels can atrophy the brain. And when you look at the brain, the hippocampus, which we talked about earlier, which controls the circadian rhythms, it is loaded with cortisol receptor sites. And because of that, it’s most sensitive to cortisol. So high chronic exposure to cortisol tends to have a degenerative effect there.
And so those are the key things that we know about the brain. So it can impair and promote degeneration overall throughout the brain. But the most sensitive area is the hippocampus, the medial temporal lobe for long-term memory recall, and the blood-brain barrier being breached and just global atrophy to the brain are all associated with high cortisol.
The vagus nerve and how it links to fatigue
Ari Whitten: Got you. So that’s sort of the primary thing that stress is doing to our brains. Is it, is there any issue of, sort of, I guess over time, decreasing vagal tone or rewiring the limbic system into hypersensitivity. Kind of like the limbic triune theory and kind of hyper excitatory state of the limbic system.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Sure. Okay. So the limbic system and the medial temporal lobe are different and have different responses. So the adrenal glands make cortisol, aldosterone and epinephrine, right? Different types of pathways. The effects of cortisol on the brain are different than the effects of epinephrine or norepinephrine. So the adrenal cortex releases cortisol.
But the dura mandela releases epinephrine, norepinephrine. The epinephrine and norepinephrine are what hits the limbic system. So when you look at the amygdala and you look at different areas of the limbic system that are involved with anger and stress and pain and heart rate and autonomic responses, those are real catecholamine based receptors.
So the effects with stress, I mean for some people they have stress and they release catecholamines, and for some people they have stress and they release cortisone. Then for some people who have stress and they have an opioid response and they have beneficial effects from it. So, and this could be some of the things that I think are conflicting with some of the research findings, stress and looking at cortisol because there are all these other variable factors.
That’s the way I was answering you this time. I was using not the word stress as a broad term. I used the actual chemical pathways itself, which I think is more precise, anyway. But, yeah, adrenaline and norepinephrine over-activate the limbic system.
So some people can have… so there’s a concept called negative plasticity. And we think of plasticity is how neurons communicate with each other and as they branch into each other more efficiently, that’s plasticity, right? But if you have pathways activated that have an adverse effect on your health, that’s called negative plasticity. So for example, phantom pain is negative plasticity.
You get such a severe injury, your arm is cut off, but you still feel your right thumb that’s no longer there. It’s still burning. And autonomic responses with the limbic system is also PTSD. Those are all considered negative plasticity. So you know, there are different theories about this from what I understand about it. And if you bombard a region of the brain with a high load of stress, whether it’s pain, whether it’s injury, whether it’s psychological and you continue catecholamine elevations that can auto-activate those centers.
Now I think with the limbic pattern, they are describing what I think a lot of people use in the literature called dysautonomia, where their sympathetic system is kind of firing at their own rate and their resting heart rate’s higher and then they have dilated pupils and they start sweating for no reason and trivial things like sound or light can increase their heart rate. Those are limbic phenomenon.
So that could be due to several things. It could be due that they have negative plasticity developing in their limbic system. It can be that they have some gene uniqueness where they’re extremely sensitive to catecholamines, so they react that way. The limbic area is shut down by an area of the brain called the basal ganglia indirect pathway that just shuts that system down.
Like I just had a consult and worked up a patient on Monday. He had an infection in his brain. He injured his basal ganglia, and now he can dampen his thalamus and his heart rate’s up all the time and he can’t handle sensory input. And he has to focus and concentrate on an iPad just to not be sensory bombarded.
So that’s a basal ganglia pathway. So if we see someone who’s got autonomic dystonia… like we’ll see it with some of these soldiers that have been in combat or they’ve had some serious traumatic events. We’ll see it with some people that have developed negative plasticity through some kind of sensory bombardment that’s been very adverse for them.
Other times we’ll see it because the basal ganglia have degenerated or they had injury to certain parts of the brain. I’m not really sure if I’ve answered your question, but the autonomic dysfunctions are all different.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, got you. So where does vagal nerve under-activity fit in all of this?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Sure. So sorry. Alright. So the vagus nerve in the brainstem, we have the vagal motor nuclei and we have an area called nucleus ambiguous and they fire into the gut and then we have motility and blood flow to our gut and all those things.
So the majority of the brain’s output… so the brain is constantly getting input from all the different receptors we have like sound, smell, taste, and whatever. Gravity’s pulling our muscle spindles. They all fire to the brain than the brain fires most of its output to the brainstem, which then has respiratory centers and our digestive centers, and that’s how we stay alive. So in the lower parts of the brainstem, we have the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve is constantly getting bombarded by the cortex. So when brain function starts to go down, we get decreased output, many times at the vagus and people start to have their digestion motility impacted.
So we know, for example, when kids are born their brains are not fully developed. They can’t digest. And as their brains develop they move and they function they start to be able to digest food and they’re getting neurological activities to the vagus and the gut now starts to develop.
But when people start to degenerate at the brain, not just the gut because the gut has a nervous system too, but the brain starts to degenerate, you get decreased output just like how movement and cognitive function slows down. You also can get slow down function in your output to the brainstem from the brain.
And then, too, from the cortex to the brainstem and then from the vagus nerve to the gut. So we sit all the time with people that have neurodegenerative changes.
Ari Whitten: Excellent. And I know you focus quite a bit, at least with a significant segment of the people you work with on vagal nerve activation.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Sure.
Ari Whitten: Can you describe what the benefits of that are and what are some of the techniques that you use to accomplish that?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Well, we only do that with people that actually have impairments. So let me kind of take a step back. So in a clinical workup… so if I see a patient that comes in and they tell me, “So it’s like I can’t swallow well,” or even more subtly, “Please don’t recommend supplements to me. Pills because I can’t really swallow them well, if you can give me liquids.” That’s a hint, that’s a red flag that their vagus nerve function is not doing well.
So the vagus nerve not only controls gastrointestinal motility, but it controls the palatine muscles in the back of the throat so you can swallow, right? So swallowing is primarily vagal activity.
So one of our red flags that someone may have an impaired vagus is that they come in with that type of history. Then on an exam, we actually evaluate vagus function. One of the things we do is just have him say, “Ahh” and look at their palatine muscles. And the Palatine muscles should move and they should be robust and have great activity when they say, “Ahhhhh.” Those things should move.
Sometimes we don’t see much movement there. Then we check their gag reflex, make sure their gag reflex is working. And if those things are not functioning, then we consider the vagus is a problem, but we wouldn’t jump to a clinical approach to the vagus until, unless those things were impaired.
Ari Whitten: Okay. What are some of the other kind of key signs or symptoms that indicate an impaired vagus activation?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Another vagal issue concern is when you look at gastrointestinal problems and the gastrointestinal problems are specific to motility, to movement. So a chronic inflamed gut or distention is different than just not having bowel movements.
To people that, there are people that have vagal dysfunctions like they have to have magnesium or soften their stool to have a movement. They have to take some type of botanicals to enhance the mobility to be able to have a bowel movement. Those are the ones that we’re worried about the vagus.
But also remember that those are the first signs of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease starts with gastrointestinal motility and then loss of smell, especially to coffee and peppermint and peanut butter. Those are the three known sensitive loss of smells first. And this goes into stiffness of joints and then rigidity.
So we always rule out vagal issues. And now there’s some research showing that the buildup of alpha-synuclein related to Parkinson’s starts in the gut and goes actually up the vagus nerve to the dopaminergic centers in the brain.
Ari Whitten: Oh, wow.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: So, vagal issues are always important for us. But when we see them, especially with low motility in the gut, again, we rule out Parkinson’s as we talked about. And the thing with Parkinson’s, too, is there is early onset Parkinson’s. People under the age of 30 develop Parkinson’s and it takes decades before they even have any signs of tremor.
How to treat brain fog – heal your gut
Ari Whitten: Interesting. Good to know. Well, thank you for that. So I want to be respectful of your time here. My last question to you is brain and gut health. Can you kind of quickly describe the relationship of gut health to the brain and how that might play a role, like how somebody’s gut health disturbances might manifest as brain fog or brain related fatigue?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Sure. So, you know, it’s interesting… is like back in the 1990s, 2000s, it was the decade of the brain. The decade of the brain lasted for like 30 years. And now we have this new big decade, the decade of the gut-brain axis, whereas there’s all this funding and research being done to look at these relationships and a lot of departments are studying it.
So lots of new information is coming in all the time. But it’s pretty clear now that the gut microbiome has a direct effect on the brain. And there are two types of effects on the brain, what are called canalized pathways and non canalized pathways. So canalized pathways are actual neurological tracks. So the thing to understand is that the brain is intimately connected anatomically to the gut through the vagus nerve.
I used to teach human brain dissection at Bastyr. One of the things we would do is we would do this extraction of the brain. But in order to extract the brain properly, you cut around it and pull the brain out, but you have to go behind the neck and do a laminectomy, cut the spinal canal out and then you can cut it there and preserve the brainstem and the vagus.
And if you do that, you can see the vagus go all the way from the brain stem all the way into the gut, all over the gut. And the vagus is a wandering nerve. It’s huge. You can literally take your hands on the gut, follow it all the way up to the brain stem into the brain. Like it’s anatomically connected. So those are canalized pathways. So there’s a lot of research and these pathways are bidirectional.
So there are actual chemical signals that go back and forth through the vagus, through the brain and down. Okay? Then there’s this whole field of non canalized connections. Non canalized means not an anatomical pathway, just chemicals. So there’s a bunch of chemicals that are released that pass the blood-brain barrier unrelated to the vagus and get effects in the brain. These are like neuropeptides and cytokines and proteins. But this constant feedback loop between both those systems is happening all the time.
So there’s no separation between these two. And what they’re finding is that that the microbiome, these bacteria produce different substances and different peptides and different polysaccharides, and these things have a direct effect on the brain. And the interesting thing that… what we know with the microbiome research is they don’t really know which bacteria species are bad, but the different bacteria species have different effects on different neurochemical pathways and the function in the brain. But there is a common agreement that the more diverse the microbiome is, the healthier you are. The more bacteria species you have, the more enzymes you have from these bacterial species to do various things. The more potential you have to be balanced out and attain homeostasis.
So to make it very simple, the more diverse your gut is, the healthier you are. And the more diverse your gut depends on how diverse your plant fiber foods are in your diet. So eating a highly diverse list of plant fiber foods, you have a healthy microbiome and you have the best potential for your brain/gut axis to function.
Ari Whitten: Which is a big problem, I think, when you consider the… I think the numbers are something like the average American has no more than three types of vegetables in their diet, if I remember correctly.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Yeah, that makes sense.
Ari Whitten: They eat iceberg lettuce and, you know, maybe potatoes, they count potatoes and French fries and potato chips as one category, and maybe tomatoes, tomatoes are technically a fruit, but yeah. It’s very, very limited in terms of…
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Yeah. And even people that are healthy they, or people that are sick, they’ll just plan like three things to eat every day and have the same salad every day, and then eat the same things and they don’t get the diversity they need, you know?
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I’m sure you saw the Hadza gut study where they looked at, you know, they were kind of expecting to find in the Hadza tribe in Africa. They analyzed the gut microbiome of these people and they were kind of expecting to gain this deep insight into what are the true good types of bacteria and the bad types because these people don’t seem to have really any of the gut issues and the IBS and the Crohn’s and all these things that we have.
So they analyzed this and they were actually shocked to discover that there was an amazing diversity of different microbes, and included lots of different microbes that actually were previously thought to be pathogenic. But they weren’t manifesting in any pathogenic way in these Hadza people because of the overall context of their lifestyle, their diet and just the context of those pathogenic organisms in balance with all the other organisms in there.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Exactly. In the, I haven’t read that study that you pointed out to, but this is a similar thing that they’re finding is that there is this whole version of bad versus good bacteria is really questionable. And, how one bacteria species works in combination with other species is another variable onto itself, and…
Ari Whitten: Yeah. It’s endlessly complex, I think.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: It’s exciting and also kind of defeats your excitement, too, at the same when you hear how complex it is, you know?
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. I think the same thing is going on with the whole, the gene SNPs and that whole area of research. But, Dr. Kharrazian, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. I have one final request for you. I know that you often work with a selection of the population that, you’re working with very complex cases. If people are ending up in your office, it’s because they’re kind of, they’ve probably have been to 50 other people and haven’t had results so they’re finally ending up in your office.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Right.
Dr. K’s top three tips to protect your brain health
Ari Whitten: And you’re dealing with a lot of complex stuff. But for those people who are listening to this interview who are maybe on the healthier side of the spectrum, maybe have some mild brain fog, maybe some low energy, but who don’t have really serious symptoms or complex illness in any way. What would be your top three tips for those people to protect and preserve their brain function and create the healthiest brain possible, that is the most resistant to neurodegeneration and neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Okay, I’ll try. The first key thing is healthy relationships. I mean we tend to focus on nutrition and diet and all that stuff, but healthy relationships are the most important. So not having toxic relationships, having an environment where healthy in your work, in your home, those are critical. That is absolutely a key factor in any chronic illness or just to be healthy. It has to be addressed.
Sleep is completely overlooked. You have to have sleep. More and more studies show if you’re not getting proper sleep, your brain’s in trouble. And so healthy relationships. Sleep is a great one.
Finding something that makes you happy every day, gives you joy, makes you smile. It’s important to have an opioid release throughout the day.
And you know, just things like you’re saying, get out there and get some sun, eat a diverse plant-based… diverse series of plant food in your diet. You can still eat other food, meat and other things if you want. But it’s not being vegetarian, but having a diversity of fibers in your diet. It seems to be critical of what we’re learning. And those are like very basic things that we all know. It’s just a matter of when we get stuck out of the routine of doing those things or having those things being part of our everyday life. Then we get in trouble and sometimes the answer is so obvious. Yeah.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. You have just reminded me as you were speaking there with you… you know, earlier in this interview, you went into such amazing complexity and then I love how you brought it back to a few simple things. But you reminded me of one quote that you had in the human longevity project film that you and I were both featured in. You said something that was so great. I’m trying to remember exactly what it was, but it was like something like, “You know, most people have this chronic stress. You know what? Most people just need to get outside and go for a fricking walk for 10 minutes.” You know?
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Yeah, that’s true.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely. So thank you again so much for doing this interview. It was such a pleasure. I’ve enjoyed it immensely and I’m sure that people are going to love it and learn a lot from it. Where can people find out more about your work? And also, I know that you have a new product or maybe a few new products coming out in the near future. If you want to let people know about anything that you have coming out in the near future.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Well, everything is in drknews, d – r – k – n – e – w – s.com. And the one thing we have is, I just wrote a couple of books. One on the brain. We have an online brain program. Then I have an office in San Diego. So those are actually the things I have to offer to people. But it’s all there at that website if you want to check it out.
Ari Whitten: Excellent. So drknews.com. And then you have this, you have a book on Amazon, what’s it called? “Why is My Brain Not Working?”
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: “Why Isn’t My Brain Working?”
Ari Whitten: “Why Isn’t My Brain Working?” That’s a great book.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Autobiography.
Ari Whitten: Yes. And your course, your six-week course, “Save Your Brain” which is on your website, which I have as well and I highly recommend. So Dr. K, thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure and enjoy the rest of your day.
Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Thanks, Ari, pleasure.
Show Notes
00:00 – Intro
00:42 – Guest Intro
02:07 – Dr. Dale Bredesen: Precision medicine for dementia
07:45 – Making normal cognition better
13:52 – Ending the Alzheimer’s pandemic?
22:30 – Heather Sandison: Dr. Bredesen’s and Sanderson’s research on reversing Alzheimer’s
35:13 – Dr. Sandison’s top brain health tips
40:00 – Dr. Datis Kharrazian: Why isn’t my brain working – how circulation plays a role in brain fog and fatigue
45:17 – How to treat brain fog and prevent Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease – how stress and sleep affect your brain and health
46:47 – The vagus nerve and how it links to fatigue
55:26 – How to treat brain fog – heal your gut
1:01:05 – Dr. K’s top three tips to protect your brain health
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