Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett This Is The Fastest Way To Get Dementia...The 6 Science-Backed Brain Fixes! About this episode New year, healthier brain? Start 2026 RIGHT by protecting your brain, with EXPERT advice from The Diary Of A CEO’s top guests on brain health, dementia risk, brain fog, nutrition, addiction, and more!
This EXCLUSIVE CHRISTMAS EPISODE brings together BRAIN HEALTH advice from world-leading experts, including:
◼️Dr Rhonda Patrick
◼️Dr Wendy Suzuki
◼️Andrew Huberman
◼️Dr Nathan Bryan
◼️Dr Daniel Amen
◼️Simon Mills
They explain:
◼️Why dementia and Alzheimer’s often begin with damaged blood flow, not memory loss
◼️How food, nitric oxide, and circulation directly affect brain aging
◼️The daily habits that grow or shrink your brain over time
◼️Which modern trends help neuroplasticity and which silently destroy it
◼️The simple lifestyle shifts that protect cognition for decades
(00:00) Intro
(01:03) Effects of Exercise on the Brain
(06:08) How to Improve Speaking Skills and Memory
(07:46) Effects of Coffee on the Brain
(09:20) What Destroys Your Brain?
(11:51) Impact of Social Relationships on the Brain
(13:24) Effects of Creatine on the Brain
(19:33) Creatine for Sleep
(22:31) Creatine Loading Myths
(25:20) Creatine for Depression
(27:07) Neuroplasticity Explained
(36:03) The Role of Nitric Oxide in the Brain
(44:32) Habits That Are Good for the Brain
(48:42) Is Loving Your Job Good or Bad for Your Brain?
(50:30) Bad Things for Brain Health
(51:49) Does Hearing Loss Lead to Alzheimer’s?
(53:12) Effects of AI on the Brain
(54:18) Natural Remedies for Brain Health
(57:56) Rosemary Effects on Brain Health
(01:00:29) Benefits of Dark Chocolate
You can purchase Dr Nathan’s book, The Secret of Nitric Oxide, here: https://bit.ly/4pq3ZVu
You can find out more about Dr Nathan’s N1o1 website, here: https://bit.ly/4jgcJfl
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Transcript 11,137 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? I think everybody needs to listen to this episode if they want to start 2026 properly. If there's one thing I've learned that's really stayed with me this year, it's from speaking to some of the world's leading minds about our brain, which might just be the most powerful asset that we all have. You know, if you listen to the Diary of a CEO, you're probably listening because you're trying to get something, whether it's information, inspiration, maybe entertainment, all of which because you're striving towards some kind of goal. And it's dawned on me this year because I've interviewed so many incredible neuroscientists that this all starts with having a healthy brain, because all of our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our memories, our chance of having a future, start in the brain. So in this special Christmas episode, we're going to focus on the brain, how you can have the most fundamentally healthy brain
0:44 Steven Bartlett? so you can live the most fundamentally meaningful life. I've been through all the episodes where we've talked about the brain and I've looked at the moments that you shared and replayed the most and the moments that added the most value to your life. And I've put all of them into this episode today.
1:03 Steven Bartlett? Do you remember the first time you saw a human brain?
1:06 Speaker 01 I do.
1:07 Steven Bartlett? Did it change how you think about your own brain?
1:09 Speaker 01 It changed my life because I was like, I want to study that. That is the coolest thing that I've ever seen in my whole life. It was life-changing.
1:23 Steven Bartlett? I say that because, you know, at the start of this conversation, we said that most of us don't appreciate our brain. A lot of people don't even realise it's there.
1:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29 Steven Bartlett? The minute I had a brain scan one day and that brain scan really changed my life because seeing my own brain for the first time, it was the push that I needed to start caring more about how my decisions and behaviours are impacting it. So let's talk about how I can make that ball of tofu in my head super healthy, super big, fat and fluffy.
1:47 Speaker 01 Right.
1:48 Steven Bartlett? You talked about exercise earlier on, but we didn't really dig into exactly what you mean by exercise because exercise, I think, is multifaceted in its definition. What kind of exercise should I be doing to make my ball of tofu in my head? Great.
2:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04 Steven Bartlett? Optimal.
2:04 Speaker 01 Mm hmm. Well, all the research shows that the best kind of exercise that you can do is anything that gives you aerobic activity, that is getting your heart rate up. So that that goes for, you know, power walking will get your heart rate up, soccer, so many different things. Name your activity. So many people want to say, oh, my favorite activity, will that work? And I always just say, is it, is your heart rate up when you're doing it? If the answer is yes, then yeah, that that works great. We know that that level of aerobic activity is critical because that's going to release that growth factor maximally to get into your hippocampus that will grow those new brain cells.
2:45 Steven Bartlett? How much?
2:47 Speaker 01 So, um, I have an answer to that. So, um, we did two different experiments in my lab. One in, um, low fit people, people that are really not exercising very much at all, less than thirty minutes, um, um, in the last three, three weeks you you've moved your body. And, um, we asked, what could we see any behavioral improvement in your memory function from your hippocampus or your ability to shift and focus attention? If we ask you to move your body in an aerobic way for two to three times a week? And we collaborated with a spin class, so clearly very aerobic. And what we found was in those people that did successfully do two to three times a
3:31 Speaker 01 week a forty five minute aerobic activity, their mood got significantly better, their memory function got better, and their ability to shift and focus attention got significantly better. So that gives a little bit of a guideline for low fit people, two to three times a week can start to give you some of those, some of those cognitive changes. But you don't look low fit. So let me, let me answer the question you're about to ask me with like, what about me? I I exercise pretty regularly and, um, how much, how much do I need? So to answer that question, we went to another spin studio and we said, look, we're going to give you free classes.
4:11 Speaker 01 You could exercise as much as you want in this, in this, um, at this studio and, uh, go up to seven times a week. And the control was just stay the same. You know, you, they were, they were working out twice a week at, at the studio.
4:25 Steven Bartlett? Control was the other group that you were testing them against?
4:27 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. And so what we found was Basically, every drop of sweat counted. The more you exercise, the more change in your brain we noted, both your hippocampal function, prefrontal function and mood. If you were already getting benefit, you know, you're already going twice a week. But the more you did, the more brain changes you got. So that that doesn't give the formula that I would like, but we were heading in that direction, which is part of one of the questions that I want to answer. But I love to leave people with the idea that every drop of sweat counts for building your brain into the big fat fluffy brain that you really want.
5:12 Steven Bartlett? And then in the real world, again, making it super real for people.
5:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:18 Steven Bartlett? How how does that change how I show up?
5:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. If you allow it to, should have a beautiful effect on your mindset. That your mindset around,
5:31 Speaker 01 how often should I take, wake up and 30 minutes early and do that walk before I start my day? Or accept the invitation to go walk the dog with with a neighbor? It's not an obligation. It is something that you're doing for yourself. It is going to have direct benefits on that ball of tofu, as you call it, in your head. It's going to make it work better. And and I mean, I think the most immediate thing that I benefit from every single day is the mood boost that you get from that serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline that gets released every time you move your body.
6:08 Steven Bartlett? I always think that because obviously I do a lot of podcasting and it's I'm super reliant on my brain being attached to my mouth. And sometimes I notice that it's not. You know what I mean? Like sometimes I'm not articulate, I can't get my thoughts together, whatever.
6:19 Speaker 01 Yes.
6:19 Steven Bartlett? And I always try and figure out the correlation between what I did that day, when I have a good day versus a bad day.
6:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:25 Steven Bartlett? And I've from from you and also I speak on stage sometimes. So I've often asked myself, because I saw Tony Robbins,
6:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:31 Steven Bartlett? the speaker one day on a trampoline before he goes up on stage.
6:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:35 Steven Bartlett? I asked myself, okay, should I be doing a workout in my green room before I go up on stage for a big talk or presentation? You think I should?
6:43 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, absolutely.
6:44 Steven Bartlett? What's the basis of that in science and neuroscience?
6:46 Speaker 01 Uh, it's the basis is that immediate fact. So there's three key effects that we know happen every time you move your body. First one is mood, you're gonna get your dopamine, your serotonin up. Second is focus and attention. So, so a single workout isn't going to make more synapses in your prefrontal cortex. But the prefrontal cortex uses dopamine. And so it's clear that even a single workout can make your prefrontal cortex work better in terms of focus and attention, also very important anytime you're speaking. And the third is reaction time. Your reaction time is, you know, motor, you're, you're, you're working your motor cortex when you move your body.
7:25 Speaker 01 And your response and reaction time is significantly shorter after a, even a single workout compared to if you just don't work out and sit, sit alone. So, great, great things to do, a great thing to do before you, you stand up and speak.
7:41 Steven Bartlett? What about coffee?
7:46 Steven Bartlett? I, I, I'm trying to figure out if coffee is good for my brain.
7:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:50 Steven Bartlett? Bad for my brain.
7:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:51 Steven Bartlett? I had a couple of mixed messages around the impact it might be having.
7:55 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, caffeine is a stimulant and people respond to that kind of stimulant in different ways. Overstimulation with caffeine is, is not good for your ability, your ability to put words together. You know, this is where I turn to a, a, a main theme in, in my book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life, with this, which is self experimentation. For you, how, what, can you titrate your coffee? To see what level of coffee is best for whatever, your podcast or you're giving a talk? The other thing that can work similarly to coffee that, that I've started and that I do every morning is hot, cold contrast showers.
8:39 Speaker 01 Because that cold that you Shower on yourself after the heat stimulates adrenaline in you. A natural adrenaline, it wakes you up. And okay, it was painful the first kind of few times I tried it. But then you get addicted to it. And I have forgotten to do it and gotten back in the shower just to douse myself with cold water. Because I feel better when I do that for, for, you know, first thing in the morning. So lots of different things that one can explore with.
9:13 Steven Bartlett? Okay, on the other side of the coin then, what are some of the central behaviors that people do that destroy their brain?
9:22 Speaker 01 Well, sedentary behavior is one of them. Not getting enough sleep is critical. We haven't talked about sleep yet. Sleep is so important for normal functioning of the brain. I like to scare my students by saying that, you know, in torture situations, if you deprive a person of sleep for too long, they literally die. They die. You cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row. It's that critical. Yet we don't, we happily, you know, watch too much Netflix at night and, and, and get only five hours of sleep when we could have had eight. So what's happening exactly? Why is it so important? Well, there's, there's so many different things.
10:06 Speaker 01 I'm gonna, I'm gonna say two. One is that we know that in regular, um, um, healthy sleep, there is activity in the hippocampus that helps you strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day. It's called consolidation and it's so important. If you shorten that, if you don't get enough, you are not consolidating your normal everyday memories. And second, it is the time during sleep when all the metabolites, all that garbage that your brain is producing, because all biological cells produce garbage, it gets kind of cleaned up through the cerebral spinal fluid that, that is flowing through your brain.
10:48 Speaker 01 And if you do not get enough sleep, you build up garbage metabolites in your brain. It's like you have a gunky brain. And do you feel like, I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don't sleep enough. That is exactly what is, what is happening.
11:02 Steven Bartlett? When you think about things that we consume, you know, like food and drink and alcohol and. All these kinds of things.
11:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:09 Steven Bartlett? Is there anything that if I'm trying to have an optimal brain, I should be
11:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:13 Steven Bartlett? Having or not having?
11:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, so um, I think the most evidence is around the benefit of the Mediterranean diet, which is basically all healthy uh um kind of organ, not organic, but non-processed is the word I was trying to think of. Things to eat that are very, very colorful. There is so much evidence about how good that is generally for the brain. That that is my go to. Like, what should I eat? Well, is it on the Mediterranean diet? If it is, then go ahead. If it's too processed, only do it just a little bit.
11:52 Steven Bartlett? Is it true that if we have less friends, if we have less strong relationships, if we're lonely?
11:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:57 Steven Bartlett? Then our brain will shrink and is more prone to dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that?
12:03 Speaker 01 Yes, we are social creatures and um there are uh really powerful studies that have shown the correlation between the number of social connections that we have, including just saying hello to the barista at Starbucks. It's not a close friendship that you develop over thirty years. It's it's just how many people you interact with and greet and longevity. The more people you are regularly interacting with, the longer you are living. Overall longevity. But if you go into brain health, absolutely, it's also very, very healthy for you. It also brings happiness.
12:43 Speaker 01 So a friend and colleague of mine, Robert Wallinger, uh studied um what makes people happy. The study started in the twenties, nineteen twenties in Harvard. And after all of those many, many, many decades, the answer is what brings happiness is the strength of your social connections. So it makes you happier, it makes you live longer. And and uh yes, loneliness on the on the um flip side causes stress, uh long-term stress that that damages the brain. And uh yeah, in the long term, can can make it smaller and uh less healthy.
13:19 Steven Bartlett? Here's the fifth most replay moment. When I asked you before this conversation started rolling, what you're really excited about at the moment, your response to me was, there was a few things, but one of them, which lit up your face was creatine.
13:32 Speaker 01 Yes, and it's funny because
13:34 Steven Bartlett? It lit up your face again.
13:36 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? Yeah, it's funny because creatine has been around for, I mean, ever, for decades. And it's always been, in my mind, it was like one of those gym bro things. I'm like, I don't need to be swole. I don't need creatine to get swole. And, you know, this was the thought for many, many years. And then, over the last five years or so, the effects of creatine on the brain started to really get my interest. Anything that affects the brain, I really become interested in. And so that's kind of what did get me the most excited about creatine. But also, I started doing a lot of resistance training. And so I was like, okay, here I am now. I'm like one of those gym guys.
14:19 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? I'm doing the barbells, I'm doing the squats and the deadlifts and all that. And so why not give myself some of the creatine? Well, what is creatine, right? Why is it important? You talked about earlier, you know, why doesn't our body just make more of these things that are so beneficial? We do make creatine. We make about, I don't know, our liver makes about one to three grams a day of creatine. And our brain also makes creatine. And those are the two organs that make it. Creatine gets consumed by other tissues, like the muscle's probably the one that's the greediest because creatine is stored as phosphocreatine, but it's used to make energy, essentially.
15:01 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? So it can increase muscle mass, it can increase muscle strength, in combination with resistance training because you're able to regenerate and make energy faster. So, for example, I became interested in it after reading studies where people that supplemented with creatine, that were engaged in resistance training, were able to gain more lean body mass, they were able to gain more strength. It was increasing their training volume. So you can do one to two more reps, right? Whatever exercise you're doing. And it seems to decrease the recovery time between those sets as well. So you're able to increase your training volume. Well, anything that's going to increase your training volume
15:44 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? is going to then have the downstream effect of, you know, increasing the adaptations, like increased muscle mass or increased muscle strength.
15:52 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? I started supplementing with creatine about a year ago. And I started supplementing with it for that reason, for the, my training. And I was doing about five grams a day because that was really what was shown to be beneficial for muscle health in combination with resistance training. And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by itself, without any type of resistance training, isn't going to grow your muscle. It's not going to make you stronger. You have to put in the effort because what creatine is doing, it's helping you make the energy quicker, right? And that, and then being able to make that energy quicker means that you're able to then do that exercise better, harder, more of it, right?
16:34 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? So it's sort of supercharging your exercise routine. I had already been aware of the effects on the brain. I thought maybe the five grams a day would do that. So what are the effects on the brain? Well, your brain also consumes a lot of energy, you know, needs a lot of energy. So it does make its own creatine. But it turns out, if you can, if you can give your brain more of that creatine, particularly under a period of anything that's causing stress. So let's say, lack of sleep. Or let's say, emotional, psychological stress. Or in my case, high cognitive load, where you're just every day, learning concepts,
17:19 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? complex things, you're trying to remember them, you're putting ideas together and coming up with new hypotheses and, you know, you're just, you're just, you're studying a lot. And it's very cognitively demanding and it's, it's a type of stress on your brain. That's like my life, right? Under this condition of stress, depression's another one, that's a stress on your brain. Or neurodegenerative disease, that's a stress on your brain. So any kind of stressful condition. That's where creatine shines in the brain. I would argue that, I mean, all of us, who has the perfect amount of sleep, never has stress, nobody, right? There's always some sort of stress in the background.
17:59 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? So that's when I was like, okay, so if you're the perfect person, you have no stress, you get the perfect amount of sleep every night, your brain makes enough creatine to kind of do what it needs to do. I know that I'm constantly under stress, so I'm like, okay, well, I think I need a boost. And this is where a lot of very interesting studies have come out of many different labs, some out of Germany that looked at the dose of creatine and how it increases creatine levels in the brain. And this is why I now supplement with 10 grams a day. So the study out of Germany found that five grams a day of creatine, if you're supplementing with five grams a day, your muscles are greedily consuming it, particularly if you're working out. They want it, they want it.
18:43 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? After about five grams a day, especially over a few months, like you're saturating your muscle and that's enough, right? Anything above that kind of spills over to the brain. And so what this German study found was that 10 grams of creatine increased creatine levels in several different regions of the brain. And that was probably the most exciting, you know, I would say, evidence that supplementing higher than five grams a day was actually doing something in terms of getting creatine to the brain. There have now been a variety of studies that have looked at different outcomes, right? So if you supplement with 10 grams of creatine, or even go higher than that, like 20 grams of creatine, how does that affect cognitive function, right? And so some of these studies have been done by Dr.
19:27 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? Darren Cando, he's at the University of Regina in Canada, and they've looked at things like sleep deprivation. And it's been found that if you take someone and you sleep deprive them for 21 hours and give them about 25 to 30 grams of creatine, it completely negates the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation. Actually, not only does it negate the cognitive deficits of sleep deprivation, it makes people function better than if they were well-rested. That's where I was like. Wait a minute. There's many times when I'm traveling, I'm jet lagged.
20:09 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? Lots of times when I'm sleep deprived and I have to be doing a podcast or a presentation, whatever. And in those situations, I go up from my 10 grams to more like 20 grams. Like today, for example, I wasn't really sleep deprived, but you know, there's a lot of high cognitive demand. This is a long podcast. There's all that stuff. And so I went up to 20 grams today on my creatine. And I will, I will say, even at the 10 grams for me, we were talking about this with respect to being in ketosis. I don't feel that mid afternoon crash when I have the creatine, not being on a ketogenic diet, not being in ketosis. It's very clear for me, and I've done this, where sometimes I only
20:52 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? do five grams. And then if I do that, I'll notice, I'm like, why am I tired right now? So there's something interesting, and maybe it's placebo. I'm gonna throw that out there, very possible. But I don't know, maybe the creatine is, again, it's able to regenerate that energy quicker. And so that's also beneficial for the brain. And now, I would say, all these creatine researchers, a lot of them are shifting to the brain. It used to be all muscle focused. And now people are super interested in what creatine is doing to the brain, especially if you're supplementing with more of it. And you know, this is important for people that are under a stressful situation, but also for vegans, because creatine is found in food, mostly in animal products, like meat and poultry and fish, dairy. A
21:37 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? lot of vegans don't eat that. And I've had so many of my vegan friends, I've got them on the creatine, and it's changed their lives. I mean, they're like, this is like incredible. You know, can you imagine someone who's not getting any creatine from their diet, because they eat no meat? And all of a sudden, they start supplementing with five, 10 grams of creatine. And it's like, they have energy. Some people say they, they require less sleep, which is kind of interesting. That's kind of a comment I've heard many, many times from people, is that it's like their brain doesn't need as much sleep. They have more energy. So I've been a big fan of the creatine, not only for the muscle, especially because, you know, working out is something that's very important, but for the brain as well.
22:19 Steven Bartlett? I always thought of creatine as something that you took and you kind of had to load up on. And then over a couple of weeks or months, the effects would kick in. But you're telling me that if I had creatine in the morning, that same day, I would experience potentially improved cognition if I have a big enough dose.
22:35 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? Yes, so, great question. A lot of studies that have been done that you're referring to have been done in the context of exercise and muscular performance. And the reason why people have to load up on like, they do a loading phase, let's say 20 grams, and then they go down to this sort of maintenance phase of five grams, is because it takes, I don't know, I think it's about a month or so before you can saturate your muscular stores of creatine.
23:05 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
23:07 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? It means that the creatine, which is actually stored in your muscle as phosphocreatine, is there and ready to be used to make energy. So it takes, again, it takes about a month or so to do that, unless you are really giving your muscles a high dose, right? So the five grams a day, it can only do it for so many days, and then finally you get saturated. When you do this loading phase, you kind of just accelerate that whole process. And so that's why when people are doing these experiments where they want to test the effects of creatine, they want the participants to have really high levels of creatine in their muscles quick, because they don't want to do a month-long experiment, right? They want the experiment to be like a couple of weeks or a week. So that was kind of the whole concept behind this loading phase.
23:51 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? If you're not someone who's going to some kind of competition, you know, like your CrossFit Games or something, you don't really need to do that loading phase if you've already been supplementing with five grams a day for like a month. When it comes to the brain, what's happening if you get above that five grams, that's pretty much all consumed by the muscle, you're having some left over in circulation and the brain takes it up and it takes it up, right? When it really shines is under that stressful condition, which again, for me, I feel like every day is like cognitively demanding for me because I'm constantly, you know, learning new material or learning new information or working on things, right? And so there's a lot of cognitive stress on my brain. And
24:34 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? so I feel like I'm constantly under that stress. And that's where getting the creatine in your brain helps you make that energy quicker. And so that's why, like I've done, I've had, you know, been jet lagged and have to give a talk at, you know, like 5:00 AM in the morning, my biological time after not getting sleep. And I've done like 25 grams of creatine. And it's insane how much it helps me. Again, it could be placebo because I'm anticipating that effect, which is fine. Placebo is a real thing. It's great. I'm all about it. But there's some evidence also that this works, right? That the creatine is helping with, under that sleep deprivation and that stressful condition.
25:11 Steven Bartlett? I was reading about a study in 2025 where they gave creatine to people that had depressive symptoms alongside CBT training. And the people that had creatine and the cognitive behavioral therapy training experienced a greater improvement in their depression symptoms than those who just received the cognitive behavioral therapy, which is incredible.
25:34 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? It's fascinating. I mean, depression is a type of brain stress, right? I mean, we know inflammation plays a role in depression. We know oxidative stress plays a role in depression. And there have now been some animal studies that have shown creatine is somehow having an anti-inflammatory effect. That hasn't all been worked out. So I don't know if it's all just the energy component of it. It could also be this other sort of newly identified role that creatine is playing in sort of having an anti-inflammatory effect. And I don't know much enough about that. I don't know that there's enough even known about that, but I do know that it exists. And it's fascinating because again, I think where creatine really shines in the brain, and it's been shown study after study, is
26:18 Dr. Rhonda Patrick? under some kind of stressful condition, depression or sleep deprivation. Or there's a new study that came out, it was published. I don't know, a month ago or so, showing that it was a very small pilot study, and I want to caveat this, there was no placebo control. But it did show that giving people with Alzheimer's disease creatine, I believe it was 20 grams a day, did improve their cognition. And so, again, this is a whole new field where now we're looking at creatine in the brain, not just the gym bros and not just the muscular effects, but in the brain and how it's affecting the brain and being beneficial for cognition, for brain aging, for depression.
27:01 Steven Bartlett? Here's the fourth most replayed moment. One of the most inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity, because if you're, if the brain can physiologically change based on what I'm doing, then it means that who I am now, my identity, that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing with the ferret, isn't who I always have to be. I can literally change. We've spoken a little bit around like what causes the motivation to actually change, but knowing that there's a, my brain will actually change. Those two things are really inspiring for me, because it means that whatever rut I'm stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one. Now, you said that the motivation to change comes from fear.
27:41 Speaker 03 Well, in my case, it took a fear circumstance, fear of becoming a permanent failure to motivate immense change. And that was that circumstance. I do believe, however, that the best work, our most creative and best work comes from a love of craft. But sometimes in order to find what you truly love, you have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it. So neuroplasticity is absolutely real. But if the question is, can a person change? Can you learn new things? Can you unlearn certain patterns? Can you overcome traumas at any age?
28:23 Speaker 03 The answer is absolutely categorically yes. How? Well, it's very clear that as a child, until about age 25, more or less, just passive experience will shape the brain, for better or worse. After about age 25, and again, these are not strict cutoffs. We can change our brain, but what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens. So one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered, although, by the way, you can remove some of the emotional load of that, trauma does not have to be traumatic
29:01 Speaker 03 forever, is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature, there is the release of certain, what we call neuromodulators, things like epinephrine, adrenaline, and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our body and brain. And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual, and as a consequence, in the subsequent days, there's reordering of the connections, so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again. This is why we have what's called one-trial learning. You go to a certain location, something terrible happens there, you will forever associate that location with something terrible.
29:42 Speaker 03 But there are tools, therapy and other tools, that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm, no fear whatsoever. The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn, provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment. This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused. We can't learn passively as adults. We can't just play, you know, a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room and then it just, the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis. But if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention, there's a shift in
30:27 Speaker 03 the neurochemicals associated with that attention, what we call the catecholamines. It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness, all which cause an increase in focus, a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field, so like cones of attention is one way to think about it. And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night... Maybe the next night as well. There's reordering of neural connections so that that knowledge, that new experience, is consolidated in your brain. You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience. So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing, everything that we encounter changes our brain, that's not true.
31:10 Speaker 03 Why would the brain change unless it needed to? Right? As a child, the brain is basically a template for change. It's trying to understand the environment and make predictions. And so that's true. Neuroplasticity is a cardinal feature of childhood and adolescence and the teen years. Just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen. No other music will ever have as much significance. And that's because as a teen, your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators. The amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense. That song meant so much, and it's because of the neurochemical milieu it creates in you. But as an adult, it takes a stronger stimulus, as we say. The nervous system is very efficient in that way.
31:55 Speaker 03 It doesn't change unless it has to. And it always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe. This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to just interest in terms of what will shift our brain. But it's nice to know that love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimuli for changing the brain. From everything we know about neuroscience, it's clear that it doesn't matter if you're 90 years old, 70 years old, 50 years old, if you want to learn, you can learn. And that learning occurs through neuroplasticity, which is the reordering of neural connections, strengthening of certain connections, weakening of others, and in some rare cases, the addition of new neurons.
32:39 Speaker 03 But you absolutely can change your brain, but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain. You have to be alert while you do that, and then you absolutely have to go get some rest. Because it's during sleep and during meditative states and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs.
32:59 Steven Bartlett? You know, every once in a while, you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer.
33:43 Steven Bartlett? So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/steven for 30% off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Ketone IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge. All I had to do was brain dump. Imagine if you had someone with you at all times that could take the ideas you have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct, and write them down for you. This is exactly what Whisperflow is in my life. It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say. And it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out and about, I can respond to emails and Slack messages and WhatsApps and everything across all of my devices just by speaking. I love this tool.
34:28 Steven Bartlett? And I started talking about this on my behind the scenes channel a couple of months back. And then the founder reached out to me and said, we're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you. So we'd love to be a sponsor. We'd love you to be an investor in the company. And so I signed up for both of those offers. And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called Whisperflow. You have to check it out. Whisperflow is four times faster than typing. So if you want to give it a try, head over to wisprflow.ai/DOAC to get started for free. And you can find that link to Whisperflow in the description below. There are few sports that I make time for, no matter where I am in the world. And one of them is of course football. The other is MMA, but watching that abroad usually requires a VPN. I spend So much time travelling. I've just spent the last two and a half months travelling
35:11 Steven Bartlett? through Asia and Europe and now back here in the United States. And as I'm travelling, there are so many different shows that I want to watch on TV or on some streaming websites. So when I was travelling through Asia and I was in Kuala Lumpur one day, then the next day I was in Hong Kong and the next day I was in Indonesia, all of those countries had a different streaming provider, a different broadcaster. And so in most of those countries, I had to rely on ExpressVPN, who are a sponsor of this podcast. Their tool is private and secure. And it's very, very simple how it works. When you're in that country and you want to watch a show that you love in the UK, all you do is you go on there and you click the button UK and it means that you can gain access to content in the UK. If you're after a similar solution in your life and you've experienced that problem too, visit expressvpn.com/duac to find out how you can access ExpressVPN for an extra four months at no cost.
35:58 Steven Bartlett? Here is the third most replayed moment. For those people who have just clicked to listen to this conversation, can you tell them the mission you're on and why it's so important?
36:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, thanks so much for having this conversation with me. I think that illustrates the problem, right? Someone as informed as you don't know anything, have never heard of nitric oxide. So-
36:17 Steven Bartlett? It's important for us to just make a distinction between like nitric gas that people inhale and that if you played like some of those racing car games, you press a button and the car goes really fast.
36:29 Speaker 04 Well, that's nitrous.
36:30 Steven Bartlett? Nitrous. These are two separate things.
36:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, very good point. So this is not nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is, I mean, a medicine, it's a dental anaesthetic, right? It's a gas, it's called laughing gas, that's N2O, that's the chemical formula. What we're talking about is nitric oxide or NO, one nitrogen, one oxygen. This molecule is foundational for human health and longevity. So nitric oxide is a gas, it's a naturally produced molecule, it's a signaling molecule in the human body. And so it regulates things like blood flow and oxygen delivery and it mobilises our own stem cells to help us recover and repair and replace dysfunctional cells. It improves energy production inside the cell and it regulates blood flow. So nitric oxide
37:15 Speaker 04 is a gas, it's produced in the endothelium. So the endothelium is the single layer of cells that line every blood vessel throughout the body. So the function of these endothelial cells is to regulate vascular tone and to regulate, you know, solute exchange and extravasation or transport of molecules across that endothelial layer. And so when your endothelial cells can no longer make nitric oxide gas, they no longer dilate. So the blood vessels become constricted. You start to get inflammation. You get stiff arteries, plaque deposition, and that's what starts cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis.
37:52 Steven Bartlett? So let me get this straight. I'll repeat back to you what I think I understand about nitric oxide, and you tell me if it's accurate. So this nitric oxide is a chemical that is in all the blood cells of my body, and it allows my blood cells to basically expand, open up so blood can flow through there. So if I'm
38:11 Speaker 04 It dilates, it dilates the smooth muscle. It's not affecting the cells per se, but it's dilating the smooth muscle that surrounds the blood vessels.
38:19 Steven Bartlett? Which is
38:19 Speaker 04 And that leads to relaxation and dilation.
38:22 Steven Bartlett? Fine. So my blood cells would then expand.
38:24 Speaker 04 Your blood cells.
38:24 Steven Bartlett? And more blood would go through there. But if I'm deficient, that mechanism doesn't work and my blood cells wouldn't expand, ultimately expand through the relaxation of the muscles.
38:34 Speaker 04 That's right.
38:35 Steven Bartlett? And therefore I would have higher blood pressure, which can lead to a series of downstream diseases and consequences. And so when we look at the graph that I showed a second ago, where we're seeing, for anyone that can't see this graph because you're listening on audio, we're seeing nitric oxide levels in young people up to the age of roughly around 20 are optimal. And then from about 30 to 70, there's this tremendous sort of 80, 90% drop. In terms of chronic disease, that is downstream from me losing nitric oxide level. Can you give me a bit of a menu of chronic disease that is associated with this nitric oxide deficiency?
39:15 Speaker 04 Yep.
39:17 Speaker 04 We've touched on them, so erectile dysfunction. So when erections in both men and women are dependent upon dilation of the blood vessels to get engorgement, to get increase in blood flow, and that's what an erection is. And we call that the canary in the coal mine. Because for years, people thought it was a lifestyle disorder, right?
39:34 Steven Bartlett? Well, erectile dysfunction.
39:35 Speaker 04 Yeah. But now it's recognized that it's a symptom of loss of nitric oxide and really an accelerated form of cardiovascular disease. High blood pressure, metabolic disease and diabetes. And then the other one is obviously Alzheimer's. Because Alzheimer's is a vascular disease. And nitric oxide corrects every single thing we know about Alzheimer's. It improves blood flow to the brain. It improves glucose uptake. So it overcomes the metabolic aspect of Alzheimer's. It reduces inflammation. In fact, the number of my patents are on a method of reducing inflammation. It inhibits the oxidative stress we see in Alzheimer's neurological disease, and it prevents the immune dysfunction. And when you do that, when you restore blood flow and you get nutrients and oxygen in
40:18 Speaker 04 and you take out the metabolic waste products, there's no misfolding of protein. So you don't get the amyloid plaque, you don't get the tautangels. So this simple molecule, nitric oxide gas, I'm absolutely convinced will eradicate and cure Alzheimer's.
40:33 Steven Bartlett? Really?
40:33 Speaker 04 Because it addresses every physiological root cause of Alzheimer's.
40:38 Steven Bartlett? If you can get it administered therapeutically to patients early enough?
40:43 Speaker 04 No, I think that's a very key because the success or failure of any clinical trial, any drug in any clinical trial is dependent upon the design of the clinical trial and what patients, at what stage of disease that you enroll these patients. So what are the inclusion criteria and what are the exclusion criteria? And there's a stage in every disease, whether it's heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer's, where you've reached a point of no return. There's really no medical therapy that's going to reverse that disease because it's progressed to a state that's irreversible. So I think what we try to do is take Take patients early in the process, what we call vascular dementia, mild cognitive impairment, early Alzheimer's.
41:25 Speaker 04 Because what I want to be able to demonstrate is two things. Number one, can we stop the progression of disease? Once it's started, can we stop the progression? And then number two is, we want to enroll patients far enough along to where we can show regression. So can you move, can you move the needle back? And so that's a very kind of a specific and finite patient population. When you design a clinical study, number one, at the, at the absolute worst, we want to stop progression. At the absolute best, we want to show that we can regress disease. And that's the goal of therapy, is that you understand the mechanism of disease to the extent that you can treat it, you can prevent it, you can reverse it, and you can cure it.
42:09 Steven Bartlett? Well, I want to think about the role that food plays in my nitric oxide production. What should I be eating to increase my nitric oxide levels or to keep them at a healthy level?
42:22 Speaker 04 I think the same answer is for that too. It's, it's not so much what we should be eating, it's what we should not be eating.
42:29 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
42:30 Speaker 04 So we'll, we'll cover those step by step. Number one, you have to avoid sugar and high glycemic index foods. Because sugar is a toxin, it's a poison. And let's think about what sugar is. So when we eat sugar or drink sugar beverages, right? Whether it's sucrose, whether it's fructose, whether it's high fructose corn strip. The end result inside the human is we see an increase in glucose. So elevation in blood sugar or blood glucose is diabetes, right? And now there's continuous glucose monitors that you can get anywhere. And everybody does this. So if you eat something and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, blood glucose, then you should avoid that.
43:13 Speaker 04 Because glucose, as the name applies, is glue, right? It's sticky. And if we, if you have a soda and you spill it on your countertop, you come back the next day, it's sticky, right? That's what happens inside the body. That sugar sticks to everything. It sticks to proteins, it sticks to enzymes.
43:29 Steven Bartlett? And it lowers nitric oxide production?
43:31 Speaker 04 Absolutely. That's why diabetics have a 10x higher incidence of heart attacks, stroke, all-cause mortality. That's why they develop neurological or peripheral neuropathy. That's why they have non-healing wounds. There's no nitric oxide. That's why they're developing diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, pancreatitis. I mean, all of that can be traced back to a lack of nitric oxide production. Because the sugar's stuck to the enzyme, the sugar destroys the oral microbiome and completely changes the ecology of the bacteria and completely shuts down nitric oxide production, right? But I think, to answer your question, what should we be eating? I think you've got to eat a balanced diet in moderation. You know, Americans are overfed. All you've got to do is walk around
44:16 Speaker 04 and see the epidemic of obesity. Good, high-quality protein, good-quality fats, and little or no carbs. And it's really that simple.
44:27 Steven Bartlett? Here's the second most replayed moment. When you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy at the moment, are there any that stand out to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain? Because I had a couple come to mind that I wanted to throw at you. I mean, one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle, which is kind of, I think you call it pickleball here. Good for my brain, bad for my brain.
44:54 Daniel Amen? It's so good for your brain because it's working your cerebellum. And I told you that because yours was sleepy. And as you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises, it then activates your frontal lumps.
45:12 Steven Bartlett? Does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue?
45:16 Daniel Amen? Yes.
45:17 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
45:19 Daniel Amen? And the more you do it, the better coordination you develop.
45:25 Daniel Amen? And that's why coordination exercises for kids, so we talked about kids, is you want to do that with them early. Play sports, but not sports where they're gonna get a head injury, right? I mean, we have to be smarter than we are. But when I was young, my mother, who's now 93, was the ping pong champion in the neighborhood. And she was really good, and she never let us beat her until we could. And but she was always encouraging.
46:05 Steven Bartlett? I've got, I was looking then, as you're speaking about different trends at the moment that are either good or bad for the brain. And one big trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training. Lots of people are doing games and using other things to, like there's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps. Does any of that stuff work?
46:24 Daniel Amen? Some of it.
46:25 Steven Bartlett? Some of it works.
46:26 Daniel Amen? And if you're, so for example, if you're doing memorization games, do them while you're on the bike. Now, not in the street, but if you're on a stationary bike and you're doing those games, it's been found that exercise increases blood flow to the hippocampus, meaning you're more likely to remember it, and you're strengthening your brain in the process. So, exercise with new learning, stunning.
47:04 Steven Bartlett? So if I want to learn something, I should do it while walking or moving in motion?
47:10 Daniel Amen? Right. So if you're listening to a language app, for example, do it while you're walking.
47:15 Steven Bartlett? Mindfulness and meditation, good or bad for the brain?
47:18 Daniel Amen? Great. I published three studies on a Kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya. It's a 12-minute meditation. I always say it's the perfect ADD meditation, because it's only 12 minutes. And for 12 minutes, you do this. Sa ta na ma, sa ta na ma, sa ta na ma.
47:39 Daniel Amen? It's two minutes out loud, two minutes whispering, four minutes silently to yourself, two minutes whispering, two minutes out loud, you're done. Sata na ma, birth, life, death, reborn, birth, life, death, reborn. But the one we studied is sata na ma. And so if they look it up, kirtan kriya activates your cerebellum, activates your frontal lobes, calms down your emotional brain. People who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks, their resting frontal lobe function
48:22 Daniel Amen? was stronger. So simple. What the hell is going on there? I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination meditation. Sata na ma. Loving your job, good or bad for your brain? Absolutely great for your brain. If you're learning new things, people who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease. So if you're stagnant in your work, you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's? Yeah. And like, if I just read brain scans all day, well, I know how to do it.
49:06 Daniel Amen? I'm not learning anything new. So I do that, but I also am writing about something I don't know about. Or I'm learning something new. What if you're working with assholes? I'm sorry? I love the job, but I'm working with assholes. Bad for your brain. Chronic stress increases cortisol, and I think everybody should sort of know their baseline cortisol level.
49:38 Daniel Amen? And cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly. So that's two very bad things for your brain.
49:48 Steven Bartlett? Breath work, that's a big trend.
49:49 Daniel Amen? Excellent, excellent. You want to break a panic attack? The 15 second breath, four seconds in, hold it for a second and a half. Eight seconds out, hold it for a second and a half. You just do that four or five times, your whole nervous system will calm down. And the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. That's why four seconds in, eight seconds out.
50:22 Steven Bartlett? It shifts your nervous system, doesn't it?
50:24 Daniel Amen? Yes, it increases something called vagal tone.
50:27 Steven Bartlett? Okay, some bad things then. Social media usage, chronic social media usage, good for the brain, bad for the brain.
50:32 Daniel Amen? That because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real.
50:38 Steven Bartlett? What about workaholism and hustle culture?
50:40 Daniel Amen? So I love my work.
50:47 Daniel Amen? Am I addicted to it? I don't know, but I love it.
50:55 Daniel Amen? When they say people are workaholics and it's bad for the brain. It's they're working with assholes
51:05 Daniel Amen? or doing something they don't like, or doing it for the money, but without other purpose.
51:13 Steven Bartlett? Microplastics, that's a big trend.
51:15 Daniel Amen? Awful for the brain. One of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer.
51:24 Steven Bartlett? And other environmental.
51:25 Daniel Amen? Thank you for not giving me a plastic water bottle.
51:27 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, it's okay. Imagine if, imagine if we did that, when we spend a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are becoming more aware of now, which is good. Noise pollution.
51:40 Daniel Amen? Bad for the brain. And if it hurts your hearing, hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's.
51:50 Steven Bartlett? Why is that? I did a, I did a.
51:52 Daniel Amen? Because you're not getting input.
51:54 Steven Bartlett? Right.
51:54 Daniel Amen? And if you're not getting appropriate input. Your brain starts to atrophy. And if you don't hear what other people are saying, and you have a lot of ants, you have a high negativity bias, is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity.
52:19 Steven Bartlett? I just bought some new Apple AirPods. And when I connected them to my phone, it said, you want to do a hearing test? So I did the hearing test. And then I asked my girlfriend, I said, you should do this hearing test as well because I needed something to compare it to. And I was a little bit shocked. It said I hadn't lost any hearing yet, but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers. And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, this is, but I didn't have any idea that it was linked to Alzheimer's at all. So now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think your hearing declines regardless really of what you do with age anyway. But as you said earlier, like, starting from a better baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves is really the game, I think, with aging.
53:02 Steven Bartlett? My last point is a, my last question is a bit of a, seems to be uncorrelated, but the world is heading towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence. It's like all the, all the rage at the moment. If you log on to the internet, people talking about they're going to lose their jobs, all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways. When you think about the world of AI that we're heading into, there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone who's doing scans of brains and so on. But do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad for our brains?
53:40 Daniel Amen? I think in the short run, it's going to be bad because your brain is going to do less. And that's bad for the brain. I, I think it's fascinating to watch what's going to happen. And ultimately, in the words of my friend Byron Katie, argue with reality, welcome to hell. We need to figure out how to use it to enhance our lives rather than to steal brain development.
54:13 Steven Bartlett? Here's the first most replayed moment. There was a study done in 2007 that showed, can't even say it. Curcumin. That shows curcumin upregulates anti-
54:26 Steven Bartlett? Oxidant defences and downregulates oxidative stress.
54:30 Speaker 06 Yeah.
54:30 Steven Bartlett? There was a study done in two thousand and sixteen, which is a meta-analysis of random controlled trials, found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief.
54:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, there's a lot of work on curcumin and turmeric. As I say, a lot of people get confused because they think it only works if you absorb it into the blood. And I'm saying that actually you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful.
54:57 Steven Bartlett? And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from turmeric can have on brain health.
55:08 Speaker 06 Yes, well, that's the focus is switching on to the blood supply to the brain, what we call the vascular effects on the brain. And there's something that we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you've probably heard of, which is seen to be the place where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it. We now know this blood-brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between the brain's tissue and the rest of us. It's now called the neurovascular unit, NVU, and it is so exciting. And the more
55:50 Speaker 06 we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovascular unit, the blood-brain barrier, are plants. And we have green tea. And, you know, we can, if you really want to help our brain health, regular drinking of green tea, you know, has been shown to be really useful. Not that rather than a supplement, by the way, is the drink that you have. I'll put it in here. Right, so we can make it.
56:24 Steven Bartlett? So, as you make that, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea?
56:31 Speaker 06 Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols.
56:35 Steven Bartlett? And polyphenols are those.
56:36 Speaker 06 These colours.
56:37 Steven Bartlett? These colours, yeah.
56:38 Speaker 06 In this case, it's green, obviously. And remember, green tea is just the smoked, unprocessed part of the tea leaf. It's a plant called Camellia sinensis.
56:53 Speaker 06 So this is a nice Japanese teapot, that's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. And these are the mugs, but we've filled these off already with ginger and cinnamon. So let's, let's leave it for a moment, but we can, while it's sitting there for a while, there are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier, we talked about the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble.
57:30 Steven Bartlett? What sort of trouble?
57:31 Speaker 06 The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.
57:35 Steven Bartlett? Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea, they have less dementia?
57:39 Speaker 06 Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect, so you need a few other things to establish that. What we're finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area, and I mentioned the rosemary. Now, all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff.
57:57 Steven Bartlett? Oh, it smells so good. Really nice.
58:02 Speaker 06 That's not just nice, because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell. And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain, because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world, it's called the olfactory lobe, and when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain. And from there into the limbic system. Remember, there's a line in a Shakespeare play called Hamlet, Ophelia, the young lady says, "Rosemary, that's for remembrance." Because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions. And when I was in, working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial
58:47 Speaker 06 with rosemary in people with, struggling with their crosswords, you know, as they get older, and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study, there were pointers to it improving cognitive performance in those people. And there's been other studies since that reinforced that. I would say that rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. There's another remedy called Ginkgo that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems. And that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as we've seen here and with the green tea. Check it here.
59:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, that looks all right. You see, it's more yellow than green. And this is flavoured with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favourite taste.
59:48 Steven Bartlett? Green tea is rich in polyphenols, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.
59:57 Speaker 06 It's got a nice minty flavour.
1:00:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:03 Speaker 06 You can live with that, couldn't you?
1:00:05 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. My girlfriend, again, she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right.
1:00:08 Speaker 06 Well, you know that, learned that lesson a long time ago.
1:00:12 Steven Bartlett? I know, right? Like, I say it all the time on this podcast, but she's always like two, three years ahead of what then someone really, really smart comes and tells me. And I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like, what the fuck is she like doing over there? Don't get me started on cacao, if you start talking to me about cacao. No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling me.
1:00:29 Speaker 06 I'm gonna nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Cocoa.
1:00:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:00:35 Speaker 06 Chocolate, stark chocolate is a medicine. End of. One of the best medicines around is 50 grams to 100 grams of 75% or more dark chocolate.
1:00:49 Steven Bartlett? Do you know what? I've just realised, my girlfriend, she's gonna live till she's 150 because she eats 90% or something, 80% dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day.
1:01:08 Steven Bartlett? She eats the full rainbow.
1:01:10 Speaker 06 She should be stepping in for you.
1:01:12 Steven Bartlett? I know, I know, exactly.
1:01:14 Speaker 06 No, cocoa, seriously, brain health as well, cardiovascular health. I mean, they just, they do studies where they've put cocoa into volunteers, it means students usually, um, you know, so young kids and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes, certainly within an hour of eating cocoa. Beneficial changes in your blood flow.
1:01:43 Steven Bartlett? They call it the heart medicine.
1:01:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, heart, circulation, brain.
1:01:49 Steven Bartlett? So she's, um, my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. Um, hashtag add if I have to say that, but in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them. And you notice instantly how people change when they've had a hot cup of cacao. It's, and she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons.
1:02:16 Speaker 06 It is, but it also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial stimulate stimulating things. And sort of similar to the effects of the coffee, which incidentally, as I've already said, is a medicine as well. Uh, but cocoa and chocolate does have a uplifting effect, which is why we love it so.
1:02:35 Steven Bartlett? And we have to be clear here, we're not talking about hot chocolate that comes from a packet or something necessarily.
1:02:40 Speaker 06 We would like it to be as dark as possible.
1:02:42 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so.
1:02:43 Speaker 06 The less sugar, the less fat. Um, so we talk about seventy five percent cocoa solids. You know, so it's dark chocolate and it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it? It's not as sweet. Um, but I'm saying to many of my patients, take fifty grams a day. It's a medicine.
1:03:01 Steven Bartlett? Hmm, damn, she's right. My fridge is full of dark chocolate. I tend to avoid it, but the drawer of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in and it's, she, she likes it ninety percent. If she can get it ninety percent, she'll take it.
1:03:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, ninety percent is quite bitter now. Yeah, yeah.
1:03:18 Steven Bartlett? Having a look at the green tea.
1:03:23 Steven Bartlett? There was a study done in two thousand and eight which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory attention accuracy and long term consumption is associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in two thousand and eleven. It's nice to have somebody else just say what you said. Yeah, but it's exactly, I didn't realise, I didn't, I had no idea.
1:03:48 Steven Bartlett? I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me. Hmm. Can't say sorry. I've literally, literally, I've got a, wow, heart health, brain function, fat burning and metabolism, cancer prevention, early evidence, blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, gut and oral health.
1:04:12 Steven Bartlett? If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards, because on this show, when I sit here with my guests and have those deep intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again. We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest and we've turned them into these conversation cards. And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me. But
1:04:53 Steven Bartlett? I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards. So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the description below.
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