Dementia Is Skyrocketing—Here’s How to Protect Your Brain NOW

With rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia rising steeply, especially among women, the conventional pharmaceutical model has largely failed in treating the brain. Functional Medicine takes a different systems-based, personalized approach—focusing on inflammation, metabolic health, and environmental exposures—which offers real hope for prevention and even reversal of cognitive decline. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Heather Sandison, Dr. David Perlmutter, and Maria Shriver, why it is possible to reverse cognitive decline and the cutting-edge science of brain health and Alzheimer’s prevention. Dr. Heather Sandison is the The New York Times bestselling author of Reversing Alzheimer’s The New Toolkit to Improve Cognition and Protect Brain Health. As a renowned naturopathic doctor specializing in neurocognitive medicine, she’s the founder of Solcere Health Clinic, San Diego’s premier brain optimization clinic, and Marama, a residential program turning memory care into memory recovery. Dr. Sandison has dedicated her career to supporting those suffering with dementia and published her most recent clinical findings in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. She’s excited to shatter common misconceptions about Alzheimer’s and share what she’s learned about keeping your brain sharp at any age. Dr. David Perlmutter is a Board-Certified Neurologist and five-time New York Times bestselling author. He serves on the Board of Directors and is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He is the author of Grain Brain and Drop Acid, among others. Dr. Perlmutter received his M. D. degree from the University of Miami School of Medicine where he was awarded the Leonard G. Rowntree Research Award. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals including Archives of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and The Journal of Applied Nutrition. Shriver is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist, former First Lady of California, founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, and Strategic Advisor on Women’s Health and Alzheimer’s at Cleveland Clinic. Shriver works to use her voice and platforms to advance some of our nation’s most pressing issues affecting women and women’s health. In November 2023, Shriver joined the President and the First Lady to announce the first-ever White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, an effort led by Dr. Biden and the White House Gender Policy Council, to galvanize the Federal government and the private and philanthropic sectors to spur innovation, unleash transformative investment to close research gaps, and improve women’s health. Shriver’s advocacy led to the establishment of this historic initiative, and she continues to advise and collaborate with Dr. Biden. She is also the co-founder of the brain health and wellness brand MOSH and founder of Shriver Media. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: How to Reverse Dementia with Dr. Heather Sandison https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep929?_pos=24&_sid=7873ecf2c&_ss=r How to Prevent Alzheimer’s with Your Fork https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep47?_pos=8&_sid=7873ecf2c&_ss=r Maria Shriver's Journey: Redefining Women's Health and Alzheimer's Prevention https://drhyman.com/blogs/content/podcast-ep908?_pos=12&_sid=7873ecf2c&_ss=r

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  So what you set up is what we call a vicious cycle whereby eating the wrong foods changes the microbiome, it changes your brain, it makes you less able moving forward to make the right choices. So you make further bad choices, further damaging your gut bacteria, further changing your brain.

• 0:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  I came to this as a skeptic. I had heard, like most clinicians, I was trained, that there was nothing you could do. And as you mentioned, to suggest there was something we could do for someone struggling with cognitive decline on their way towards Alzheimer's, it would be to give them false hope. The conventional model and the incentive structure of sort of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, the way that healthcare is set up is that what we want to find is a single molecule intervention, right? That can be patented, that is very simple to dispense from a pharmacy, that it's, there's simple instructions. Just take this one pill once a day and you'll feel better. And that works if you've got a UTI, right? And we can get a cure. And you can, that can be any of the past, take antibiotics for seven days, don't have to think about it again, hopefully.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Now, when we're talking about Alzheimer's, this is very complex. And our friend Daniel Schmottenberger, he really taught me to think. And I feel very privileged to have spent a lot of time discussing, we would meet every Tuesday afternoon for four, five, six hours on these marathons, just kind of reprogramming my brain about how to think through diagnosis of complex disease. And put simply,

• 2:11Speaker 02

  When you think of any complex system, whether it's a house plant, or a financial system, or government systems, or the brain, what you're looking for is balance, right? An imbalance is going to create dysfunction in that complex system. And so imbalance is going to be too much, or too little, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. And when we think of the brain, this leads to disease, when we have imbalance, especially over time. And so, we can say, okay, imbalance, that is helpful, we'll simplify. And then we want to systematize, imbalance of what? What are the causal level factors? And I would argue that they are, there are six of them.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  It's toxins, so imbalances of toxins, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, too much, too little. Nutrients, right? You mentioned insulin resistance, and blood sugar becoming so high that it becomes toxic, that can be a problem. But also, you mentioned B12, and having too little B12, associated with genetics, and maybe for one, maybe for your neighbor, they need more B12 than you do. So we have these individualized needs and requirements, where we want to get that functional requirement met, not just the RDA, not just that recommended daily allowance. So we have toxins, nutrients, stressors. We can have too much or too little stress, right? Some people want to kick their feet up, and just relax in retirement, but they're not getting that engagement.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  And then we also know on the flip side, that caregivers, care partners for people with Alzheimer's, are at higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's themselves later on, because they have too much stress. Cortisol becomes literally toxic to the hippocampus, those memory centers of the brain. So toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. You mentioned getting hit over the head, and causing pain. Well, that can also cause inflammation in the brain, and be a traumatic brain injury that can put us at risk. You mentioned APOE4, we can have molecular structure, genetic structure, that puts us at risk for developing Alzheimer's later on. So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. Infections. We know there are a handful of infections that are directly associated with the triggering

• 4:20Speaker 02

  of amyloid plaque production. So things like P gingivalis, which causes gingivitis in the mouth. Also, the Lyme spirochete has been found in amyloid plaques, as well as H. pylori is associated. And herpes, the herpes simplex one virus is another one. The gut-brain connection and infections in the gut can lead to imbalances in neurotransmitters, and there's many other. I mean, in fact, I have a reverence for how complex the gut-brain connection is and wouldn't pretend to understand it fully. But we know that there's a lot of back-and-forth communication between the gut and the brain, and the microbes specifically in the gut have a lot to do with that.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, infections can lead to dementia. And then signaling, are we getting the signals? Dr. Bettison has this phenomenal, I love this analogy of brain health, thinking of your brain like a country, my brainistan. If we are stuck in that fight-and-defend mode, if we're being invaded by infections, or if we're being, if we need to defend against toxins like heavy metals you mentioned, or mold toxicity, or chemical toxicity, then we're using our resource to take care of that attack-and-defend. We're not able to use that resource to build the infrastructure, right? To build new neurons and new connections between those neurons, the way a country might build roads and schools.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  We want to use those nutrients to fully resolve those issues that we're attacking and defending against. And it makes sense that if we're trying to do both, we're not going to be very good at doing either, right? We're not going to fully resolve the infections, or fully resolve the toxic burden, and we're also not going to be that great at having functional neurons to help remember our neighbor's name, or remember where we put our phone or our keys. So what we want to do is think really holistically about this. You mentioned, you know, there's multiple factors that go into brain health, and this is what I would think of as a comprehensive list, although I'm sure we will continue to know more. But it's a much more comprehensive way to approach each individual and what's causing

• 6:24Speaker 02

  them to go down this path towards this common diagnosis of Alzheimer's or memory loss associated with age.

• 6:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's something I see a lot of, you know, we get in this reductionist model where we're looking for the single drug for the single disease like you've talked about. And it's why we've spent billions and billions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of studies with zero real benefit. And I think, you know, what you're speaking to is that this is a complex set of diseases, not just one disease, even if it's called Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. They're really complex and have multiple causes. Not everybody who has that has the same causes. They might overlap, but it's really important to look at what's going on for that individual. Like that one patient I said, she had vitamin deficiencies. Another guy, he had a whole host of things like mercury.

• 7:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you have to find out what the treatment is for that person, not a kind of one size fits all. And it's just the antithesis of how we do research. And I think what you're talking about also, there's insults that happen, you know? Basically, in the way I think about it, it's too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. And I think you're talking about we were missing the things that we need to make our brains work well. And we're having too much of this stuff where there's infections or microbiome or toxins or sugar or stress that actually cause damage to our body. So when you start to think about someone like this, you're thinking about a lot of these these factors that have have modifiable solutions, right? It's not like, oh, well, if you have a toxin, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, oh, if you have insulin resistance, there's nothing you can do about it.

• 7:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, if you're nutritionally deficient, there's nothing you can do about it. They're all treatable, right? And so that's the beauty of this whole approach of functional medicine and this approach of dementia is that it really helps you to navigate a very complex set of variables and kind of understand how to start assessing them and actually treating them. So when you start to do assessment, you know, one of the things I love that Dale talked about was this whole idea of dementogens, you know? And I wonder if you could kind of go through what you kind of did a little bit, but I think it's sort of worth, you know, going through what the kind of framework is of these dementogens that he talks about and how and how those can impact

• 8:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  our us and what we call the exposome, which are the hidden things that tend to cause brain dysfunction.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so. When I work with a functional medicine patient, you know, there are all these medical pieces that I almost think of as icing on the cake. So I definitely want to go in this direction and support people in knowing how to communicate with their doctor and knowing what to ask for and what kind of testing. And certainly, there are a ton of modifiable things that we can address. And I also want to just take this step back to say, there are a ton of things that you can do without the help of a doctor, right? The foundations, like if that's the icing on the cake is all of the functional medicine interventions. The foundations are really come back to diet, exercise, sleep, stress management. And so I, of course, want to, because we're both functional medicine practitioners, I want to dive into that deeply and I wish that the whole medical system was coming in that direction.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  But I also don't want to miss the opportunity to tell people, if you don't have access to that, if cost is an issue, there are many, many, many things that have an outsized impact that really come back to what are the things I put in my mouth every day? What do I eat? What do I consume? What is, what are the nature of my relationships and my stress levels? What times do I get to bed each night? How much movement do I get each day? Those are the things that really impact health over time. Now, these hidden causes, these hidden things, this exposome, these dementogens, toxins are a big part of that. And I think of three flavors. There is chemical toxicity, which is ubiquitous. None of us are going to be able to avoid it all. But there are great strategies for avoiding the things that we have control over.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  You talked about modifiable risk factors and not modifiable risk factors. And just to give people kind of a sense of what the difference is there. We can't change the year you were born, right? We can't change your chronological age. That as that increases, our risk of dementia goes up. We can't change that you're born male or female. And if you, females have higher risk of dementia. There are two thirds of dementia or Alzheimer's patients. And we also can't change your genetics, your APOE status. This is set. But what can we change? We can change our toxic exposures. We can increase our ability to detoxify, whether it's one of these three flavors, heavy metals, mycotoxins or mold-associated toxins associated with water-damaged buildings,

• 11:02Speaker 02

  which I see many elderly folks who have been in their houses for a long time.

• 11:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Huge issue.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Really big, kind of underrepresented issue. And my other... Mentor is Dr. Neil Nathan, who I'm sure you've come across.

• 11:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  And I feel really grateful to have learned from him how to support very sensitive patients and also to just be hyper vigilant about that potential mold exposure. And then these chemical toxins that I mentioned, so metals, molds and chemicals. And although we can't completely avoid all of them, what we can do is we can measure how much we're being exposed to and see if there is some detective work that can go into lowering our exposure to phthalates or petrochemicals or Roundup, glyphosate is a big one that directly impacts the nervous system. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Stephanie Senna, she was at MIT and had done extensive research on how glyphosate impacts the nervous system. And so understanding-

• 11:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, she's been on the podcast, we'll link to that in the show notes, but yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's fantastic. And understanding what's coming into my system and then can my genetics tolerate those toxins? And how can I increase my ability to get rid of toxins through my liver, through my bowels, through my kidneys, through skin and lymph, maybe even through breath work through the lungs, so that we can optimize for cellular health?

• 12:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, this toxin thing is big. You know, there's, there's other things we're going to point to that, that are modifiable like diet, like your microbiome, like infections. You know, there's things that actually can be modifiable, but the toxin one is huge. And I think like the case I mentioned, it's one of those things that's, if you look at the scientific literature, there's ample evidence that toxins are linked to dementia. But on our clinical level, nobody's really looking at this from a traditional medicine perspective. When you go to see neurologists, they don't measure toxin levels, they don't ask you about them, they don't ask you about exposures, they don't do any testing about it. And you know, one of the challenges is it is very hard to test for some of these compounds. Mold, you know, there was a great lab for mycotoxins that was run out of business because insurance

• 13:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  companies didn't like it because they were getting- Actually, I think I was the cause of it, actually. I think it was like 20 years ago. But I had a patient who was in a house that was affected by mold. She had chronic fatigue. Her daughter had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And they lived in different bedrooms and I had them go assess what was going on in their house and what was, what was growing in each room. And they were different molds. And then when we did lab work with Dr. Vajani's lab, it was called the immunosciences. They did these mold toxin lab assessments. It matched exactly like the, the microtoxin antibodies or the microtoxins that were in the room. And then she got a million dollar settlement. Then the, the insurance company in California came shut down through the government, uh, shut down the lab. It's pretty bad. Uh, but anyway, that aside, it's, it's not as hard to test for these things.

• 13:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Uh, heavy metals are easier to test for. You can look at blood testing. Uh, that's helpful. There's challenge testing where you can take a key liter and, and collect your urine. Um, but the other toxins, which are ubiquitous like phthalates, BPA, glyphosate, PCBs, pesticides, plastics, microplastics, they're very hard to assess. And I, I recently learned about how to assess it in a different way. I want to tell you about it in a minute, but I'd love to hear how, how you think about those. And rather than just your general, like try to reduce your exposures and improve your own body's detoxification system, which are the sound advice. What are the other ways that you kind of assess these?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we do tests through real time labs has an environmental pollutant panel. And so I do look at urine, at urine levels of excretion. And what I've seen is many of the sickest people, they actually don't collect much in their urine the first time, but then as we start using some binders, some glutathione, some support, some biochemical support, as we start getting them sweating, maybe get them on a detox breathwork practice, we see that those numbers will go up. And so it's almost like, again, hidden, even with our testing, um, some of those exposures and that total toxic burden can, it takes a little bit to uncover. And 36 months later, we see those numbers go up even when there isn't an active exposure,

• 15:11Speaker 02

  but it's just that they're starting to actually mobilize more of it. Also getting on a ketogenic diet, we start to mobilize fat soluble toxins as we are using the fats, um, to create fuel. We can get that from adipocytes and then we're releasing those toxins into the bloodstream and then it's coming out in the urine a little bit more. So. I think that many of these toxins, initial testing can also be deceptive, right? They're, most of my patients are over 65, they've had a lifetime to accumulate these things. And this can be such a scary conversation, right? It can very quickly go to like overwhelm and anxiety about how much toxicity is in the environment. We can only control what we can control.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  So I think getting, testing your water or getting spring water, findaspring.com, I think is a great source to find spring water near you that hopefully isn't contaminated. I'd love your opinion on RO, water reverse osmosis is a great way to get a lot of toxins out, but it does require remineralization because it'll take the minerals out of the water. So getting away entirely from plastic, from drinking anything out of plastic, particularly because hot plastic will leach into the, into the water. But even just the screw cap, it's like you've got plastic sawdust in there. And so I think plastic water bottles are just toxic for so many reasons. But yeah, we could, we could talk for a weekend on all of the ways to think through toxicity.

• 16:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm going to tell you something that might blow your mind, and it's blown my mind actually. But before I do, I just want to kind of reinforce that the approach you're talking about fundamentally is lifestyle. It's what we eat, it's how much we exercise, it's sleep, it's how we manage stress, it's some basic nutritional support. And those have a profound impact. And, and there are some trials that have been done, the finger trial and the pointer trial, which is underway, which are multimodal lifestyle interventions with risk factor management that have shown not just to slow dementia, but to actually reverse it, which is again, something that all the drug studies never show, right?

• 17:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's like even the best drugs that have been approved, there's not many of them, they don't show that. And I don't know why it's not something that's headline news because studies are published. Your study should have been headline news. Again, it was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's. Because, you know, if, if something is incurable.

• 17:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you actually reverse it, then don't you think we should be actually spending the billions on that rather than more drug studies?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yes, I couldn't agree more.

• 17:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so, so we're going to get into all these factors that were studied in the finger trial and the pointer trial and your data as well, but I just kind of want to get back to the toxin conversation for a minute because, you know, I've personally had mercury poisoning and I know what it does to my brain. It was bad. I've also had mold toxicity, so I know what that does to my brain. It made me very demented and I had terrible memory issues and cognition issues and I figured out how to treat that, thank God. But I recently have been using a test out of Germany. It's a relatively new test that measures not just the stuff that comes out in your urine, that's in your blood, which is, by the way, these toxins that you're talking about are stored in fat. And so if you, if you look at what's

• 18:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  in your blood or what's cleared in your urine, they're not, they're not going to be there. Like they're just, they're just not, that's not what there's, it's like, it's like looking, I don't know, it's like looking in your urine for red blood cells. They're just, they're not supposed to be there, so they're just not going to be there. And, and this test that they do uses an analysis of cells, not, not blood, but your actual cells and cell membranes and using lymphocytes and they, they find the load of toxins in there that we've never been able to see before. And it's kind of shocking to me how loaded people are and how loaded I was with everything from pesticides to phthalates to glyphosate

• 19:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  to metals. And, and I, I've been treating myself and a bunch of others with a procedure called the PK protocol, which is designed to help replace the toxins in your cell membrane to improve cell membrane function and fluidity and cell communication and mitochondrial function, all of which are the things that go wrong when you have neurologic disease or dementia. And so I just talked to a patient, actually a couple of days ago, who is a dementia patient. She's in her early eighties and very bright woman and was starting to go downhill and was diagnosed with MCI, mild cognitive impairment, and was getting worse and worse.

• 20:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I did this test on her and I got the result and I was sort of shocked. And you know, it matched against what I would expect her history was. For example, she was a smoker, so there was a lot of cadmium in her cells. Cadmium is a metal that you get from smoking. She also had lindane, which is a pesticide that's been banned for years. She had glyphosate. She had all these plastics, fungal toxins that were in her cells. And what we did is a protocol that basically flushes out all that stuff using high doses of intravenous phosphatalkolin, which is basically the fatty substance that makes up your cell membranes. And then we poured her with the glutathione and things to help detoxify and the B vitamins we talked about and a bunch of other minerals and support.

• 20:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I talked to her on Sunday and I was like, how's it going? She's like, I don't know, it's amazing. My memory's back. I have full short-term memory or long-term memory is better. You know, someone can tell me something in the morning, I remember it the next day. You know, that was, she couldn't remember five minutes from before when she had a conversation with her husband about something and 10 minutes later she wouldn't remember it. And it was so exciting to me because I'm like, wow, finally we have a way to actually assess and to monitor and to treat in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before in my practice. I'm curious if you have any experience with that, what you think about it, if you know what I'm talking about. The lab is a German lab, it's called IGL.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  IGL, I'm writing that down. I'm not familiar with IGL, but I have been using the Patricia Kane, the phosphatalkolin for a long time, for many years. The IV PC and we do the exchange by IV and then also oral PC, which we know helps with gallbladder. Basically the discharge of bile, that toxic sludge that we build up. And so PC, I think also very clear that that helps with the brain, as is phosphatalkolin and choline, is part of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, the most abundant neurotransmitter. In the brain and but choline, we do know that choline has a big role to play in the brain.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  So not just the phosphatidylcholine, but choline found in eggs and um and in other food sources and also in many nootropic formulas.

• 22:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. That's the major neurotransmitter that goes down is acetylcholine in Alzheimer's. So you know, um, I don't know what doses you're using, Heather, but we're using basically uh twenty grams, which is a lot. Uh, and we over ten weeks, we give two kilos, basically a phosphocoline intravenously.

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Are you doing the inosential vials?

• 22:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yep, but we're doing twenty of them.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Twenty of them. Wow. Yeah, we've, we do five typically.

• 22:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I think, I think that's way underdosing. That, that, yeah, I think I, cause I used to do five and I didn't see the same results. Uh, and it's, it's done over a period of time, but it's, it's essentially twenty vials twice a week for ten weeks. And if people are wanting to know how to do this, uh, we do this at our center, an ultra wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts. I'll send Heather the protocol.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  I would love that. Yeah. Cause are you dripping it in D five W?

• 22:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's dripped in, in, right? You're dripping it in and then you drip in a bag of glutathion, you have multi, I mean, uh, methylfolate and, and lukaburan and, and it's other bio ten and a bunch of other stuff. So it's, it's a pretty interesting thing, but I, I did my before and after testing and it was completely different. I mean, I'll, I'll even share my, my, uh, my results in the, in the, in the uh show notes because I think it's so compelling. And I, I think the before and after was just striking and I personally felt different, uh, dramatically different. So I think we're like, we're learning about all these things that we didn't even know before. Medicine is advancing so fast and you know, there's, there unfortunately, there's not billions of dollars spent on researching uh IV phosphocoline in dementia, but we should.

• 23:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause if, if what I'm finding is what I think is I'm finding, it's pretty exciting. Um, and then of course, you know, for the mold stuff and the metal stuff, there's other things to do. Uh, the phosphocoline actually also helps with the mold, but there's other things you could do for mold, but it's important to really assess whether you've got mold exposure because uh, it's, it's really one of those things that can be treated and so can heavy metals. Like I, I shared in my, in my case study with, with the patient, we did chelation on him. And other things like infections, right? I mean, Chris Christopherson had Lyme disease that caused his dementia. When he treated his Lyme disease, his dementia got better. So.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, Rich Horwitz is also saying that the treatment of Lyme disease can help with dementia. My patients, the first patient I saw who really opened my eyes to this, Darlene was her name, and she came in soon after I was trained by Dr. Breterson in 2017. And she and her husband came in, she was entirely dependent on him. She had a Mocha score of two. So the Mocha is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and we use this as a clinical tool to tell us where on the spectrum of cognitive decline someone is. And a perfect score is thirty. It's a one-page worksheet that some of your listeners may be familiar with. You copy a cube and draw a clock, identify some zoo animals. And she had a Mocha score of two. So she was essentially answering, yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  She was answering questions with like yes or no, and not much more than that. Their life had been completely, you know, changed since she had gone down very quickly with dementia and diagnosed Alzheimer's. Now, her very dedicated, loving husband had read Dr. Breterson's book and was all in. I mean, he had, thank goodness, enough confidence for both of us, because I had never done this. And she was so severe that I was, I didn't, I wasn't hopeful at all. But they asked.

• 25:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just to give this perspective, if you're, it's out of thirty. So if your score is less than twenty-five, it's a problem. Two is, you know, nobody's home.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, twenty-six and above is normal. Once you're down in the single digits, this is severe dementia. This is where you are dependent on others for activities of daily living. Your dignity is more or less gone, right? You're not able to do anything on your own. And so she was in that, in that state. But she had this bright smile, and her eyes would track me. And she had this beautiful floral dress, and you could just see how much soul was in her. And they just shocked me. She came back six weeks later, and her Mocha had gone up to a seven. And of course, my initial response was like disbelief. I was like, oh, my gosh, we must have done the test wrong. Like, this isn't possible. Like, what is going on here? And her husband assured me, no, no, she's different.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Listen to her, she was speaking in complete sentences. They started bickering about something while they were in my office. And she was remembering things that he had said. And she wasn't going back to work. She wasn't a hundred percent better. But this was the moment. I mean, I remember it like exactly what I was wearing and the way the light was shining in the room. Cause it was so emotional for me to be like, what? If this is possible for Darlene, like what is possible for everybody else? Who's not so far down along this path. There is so much suffering that we could be avoiding by taking this approach. So what did they do? They moved out of a moldy bedroom and they didn't just, they didn't have to move out of their house entirely, but they moved into their, their living room. They started ballroom dancing three times a week, even though they weren't very good at it.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  They were going on walks every day. They got on a ketogenic diet. They ate only whole foods, got rid of all of the processed foods in their diet. She got on all the supplements that we put together based on Dr. Breterson's approach. She got on bio-identical hormone replacement. She went and got the mercury out of her teeth, her root canals out. Um, she got all of her dental work taken care of very quickly. And lo and behold, she improved. And she, I really owe so much to obviously Dr. Breterson, but also to Darlene because, and her husband. Cause that was the moment, like I could not deny how much better she had gotten.

• 27:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. What was her score after? Are you done on that?

• 27:42Speaker 02

  It was a seven then, and she continued to go up a bit. Um, I, I've lost touch with them. They kind of, they, they're doing things on their own, but they, we were together for a couple of years and probably like your patients, you know, you hear from them years later and, and you think, oh, have they gone down? Or do they need extra help? And she'll probably be like, nope, we're doing great. They were, they were very motivated. It was really fun.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  What you eat or looked at through the lens of your microbes does affect your behavior and your choices. And at the same time, those choices that you make affect the health and vitality of your gut microbes. So what you set up is what we call a vicious cycle whereby uh, eating the wrong foods changes the microbiome. It changes your brain. It makes you less able moving forward to make the right choices. So you make further bad choices, further damaging your gut bacteria, further changing your brain. And let me say that it's not just moment to moment changes in your brain that happens. You know, that you make the wrong decisions. But ultimately, as you continue to make these wrong decisions,

• 28:50Speaker 01

  you rewire your brain through a process called neuroplasticity. So you compromise your ability to tap into that part of your brain that lets you make good and appropriate decisions. And you connect more aggressively to the part of your brain that is much more impulsive and much more fear-based and much more narcissistic.

• 29:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So basically, we move from a place of love and connection to a place of fear and reactivity.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  That's right. And you mentioned Alberto Bioldo. We wrote a book about this years ago called The Neuroscience of Enlightenment.

• 29:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Power up your brain.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Power up your brain. And it dealt with what can we do first in terms of our lifestyle choices to enhance this process of neuroplasticity, to enhance the brain's ability to make stronger connections? Okay, once we've got that put to bed, in other words, higher levels of omega-3s, less inflammation, aerobic exercise being very important, then let's do the right things. Let's make the best choices. And that will then set the stage for hardwiring the brain to those good parts.

• 29:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's pretty amazing how, you know, you, in the pioneering saying this, but the brain is, is plastic. It can actually change and reverse some of the insults that happen. So not only is it about prevention, but it's about treatment or slowing down of these conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And I, I had mercury poisoning years ago. And early on, I had a brain scan called a spec scan, which looks at the blood flow in the brain. And I had all these areas of my brain that had no blood flow, that were dysfunctional, that looked like holes.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Not a good thing.

• 30:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They looked like holes, like Swiss cheese in my brain. And as I used functional medicine, as I repaired my brain, as I repaired my body to fix my brain, essentially, my gut and my, also the mercury affected my gut in terrible ways.

• 30:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I actually repeated the scan, you know, more than a decade later and all those holes had filled in. My brain had recovered. No, that it's not something that you learn as a typical neurologist, right?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Well, even, gosh, when I was 19, I was doing research on micro, what's called microneurosurgery. We had the, the operating room just got a microscope. And so neurosurgeons didn't have a roadmap to use the microscope because the anatomy of the brain had never been really teased apart microscopically. So our job was to create this roadmap for doing aneurysm surgery. So as part of what I did my research on, we were exploring how we can bring blood supply from outside the brain into the brain.

• 31:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  So I became really kind of handy at tying small blood vessels together. And I was invited to go teach in Madrid, Spain at what's called the Centro Ramon Ica Halle. And there, you know, this is an institution named after Ramon Ica Halle, maybe the father of neurophysiology. And I walked into the lab and there was a statue of him with his statement saying that the brain is immutable, that it never changes, it never regenerates, that's it. And you know as well as I do that we were taught that in medical school, that the brain will never grow new brain cells.

• 32:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Your brain cells in college, too bad.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you drank too much or whatever. But we know now that the brain A can regenerate itself and B can rewire or reroute pathways. How does a stroke patient recover? Well, he or she recovers because they bring online different alternative pathways. They reroute the signal ultimately, and that's how they can improve. So we take advantage of that process called neuroplasticity and turn it on by turning on the body's production of a chemical growth factor for the brain called BDNF. But at the same time, we have to capitalize then on the brain wanting to rewire itself by behaving in ways.

• 32:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You remove the insults and you provide the right inputs.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Changing our behavior.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  The Dalai Lama said that if you want to be happy, practice compassion. And if you want others to be happy, practice compassion.

• 32:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  So it really, you know, it's, it's you can be happier if you can wire into the happy part of your brain by doing things outwardly that are demonstrate empathy, demonstrate planning for the future.

• 33:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, so let's get into some of the details here because you've written a lot about, for example, grains, Grain Brain. This is a new edition of Grain Brain. Everybody needs to get a copy. It's completely revised and updated. It's pretty awesome. And I think this guy has really nailed it. Now, a lot of people are not too happy with these ideas. You've been attacked on television. You've been attacked in the media. You've been attacked in medical journals, including, you know, indirect attacks against me and, and our colleague Dale Bredesen, who's really pioneered the idea that we could actually stop or reverse Alzheimer's, which you actually were talking about decades ago.

• 33:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What, what are the things that are challenging? You're, you're talking about changing your diet. So let's talk about the food part because there's such controversy. Should we eat saturated fats? Should we not? Do we, is sugar really that bad or not? Because the Sugar Association says sugar's fine. So why wouldn't we believe them?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  So I would say to your viewers, Google Pearl Mutter and CBS and watch a recent interview.

• 34:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  CBS this morning.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but just put CBS and Pearl Mutter. It'll come up. And as they, they show the book, Dr. Pearl Mutter has written a new book about carbohydrates in the brain. But before they cut to me, they said, but we reached out to the sugar industry and the sugar industry told us that we should eat sugar, decades of research. It's all good. Have at it. What would you expect them to say? And how, why would you ask the sugar industry? And my response was, yeah, because, you know, it wasn't that long ago that the tobacco industry was telling us we should be smoking cigarettes. That's a good thing. But the reality is, the question that I was supposed to answer, but I diverted because I wanted to really hit the sugar thing, was, Dr. Pearl Mutter, what you're saying is

• 34:59Speaker 01

  that all grains are bad. And I've never said that. I've, you know, despite the name of the book. I believe that when we look at gluten containing grains, we should avoid them. As you know, there's plenty of research in terms of what gluten, specifically a subpart of gluten, alpha glyden does in terms of threatening what we talked about earlier, and that is the gut lining.

• 35:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is that in everybody, or just people who are sensitive to it?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  It's difficult to say. I think we know that probably most people have some degree of increased gut permeability or leakiness of the gut when they consume gluten, or specifically glyden. That said, the non-gluten containing grains, grains meaning seeds of grass, things like rice and corn, can be consumed in a quantity that doesn't present a lot of carbohydrate. So if you're watching your daily consumption of carbohydrate and you want to have a little bit of wild rice, have at it. Or some non-giomo corn, good luck trying to find that. But I think that if you're counting your carbs, as you should be, looking at net carbs, that I don't think that's necessarily the worst idea.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Having said that, again-

• 36:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because you know, just to back up on the carb thing, now there's been some recent studies published by Walter Willett and others at Harvard, looking at thousands and thousands of people, showing that people who eat very low carbohydrate diets don't do well, they die early, or people eating very, very high carbohydrate. But somewhere in the middle, about 50%, which to you and I seems like a lot of carbohydrate-

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  -do better. Can you kind of address that?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Well, I think people should eat tons of carbohydrates.

• 36:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  You should be eating carbohydrates. And I just did a blog with somebody and it was said, "Why We Need More Carbs," David Perlmutter, MD and people, I think the hashtag was "Why That's Fantastic," WTF, right?

• 36:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  So, yeah, we need lots of carbs because we need lots of fiber in our diets by definition.

• 36:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, broccoli is a carb.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  You bet, it's a carbohydrate.

• 36:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Different than a bagel though.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  So, that's right. And there's something magic when you take, you make a bagel or a croissant, I mean, it's no longer a carbohydrate or simple carbohydrate, it's a croissant or whatever it is.

• 37:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  But you're right. So broccoli, kale, I mean, these are good sources of dietary fiber, which is by definition, a carbohydrate. Though it's non digestible.

• 37:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And polyphenols and antioxidants.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  You bet. And fuel for the microbiome, fuel for your gut bacteria. So.

• 37:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I actually in my book Ultra Metabolism, I wrote carbohydrates are the single most important food for health and longevity. And what I was referring to was vegetables.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  But then people take it out of context. They say, yeah, he's not, he's not paleo, he's not keto. Uh, so I think that, you know, the biggest faults then with the, well, with that type of research is you've got to qualify. And the other area that needs great qualification is, uh, you know, I'm often challenged by people saying, well, you know, the, the China study said that you eat meat, you're going to die. And, uh, and Dr. Dean Ornish says, we need a very, very low fat diet. And people ask me, what do you think about that? And I would say, you know, I agree with both of them. Why do I agree with both of them? Well, I think by and large, the type of meat that people eat that goes into these studies, where they come up with the relationships to colon cancer, for example,

• 38:14Speaker 01

  you bet those are very, very threatening forms of meat.

• 38:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's actually not even meat. It's, it's actually processed meat, which is bacon.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  It's processed meat and, and you know, there is a sense of alchemy that somehow you can feed a cow or other animal that you're going to eat garbage and it'll magically turn into gold.

• 38:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Literally garbage.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They start them skittles and.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  You bet.

• 38:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That are spire.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  So, uh, so I think there is a place on the table, if you choose to eat meat for grass fed, uh, organically raised for, uh, forms of meat, of, of animal product. And similarly, uh, do I think that Dr. Ornish, uh, has some merit in his discussion of a low fat diet? Yes, because the type of fat that is eaten in Western cultures is awful.

• 38:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  It's highly processed omega six oils.

• 39:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Soybean oil, canola oil.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Sunflower that dramatically increase, uh, the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body and get back to where you and I started our conversation today. And what's really interesting, uh, to think about, you know, we've wondered the mechanism for that over the years. We've said, well, and this is a little technical for your viewers, but they'll love it. The omega sixes produce chemicals called prostaglandins and leukotrienes that can be pro-inflammatory. We kind of, uh, glammed on to that for many years.

• 39:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And like the hormones of your immune system, they create inflammation.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Right. But now we know with all the interest in what's called the endocannabinoid system, which is what everyone's interested in now because of the availability of CBD and the use of medical marijuana, that the omega-6s help to increase the production of two important cannabinoid chemicals that are produced within the body. We call them endocannabinoids because they're produced in the body, 2AG and another one called anandamide, which bind to a receptor called the CB1 receptor that absolutely explodes the production of these inflammatory molecules. And interestingly, omega-3s-

• 40:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So to break that down, when you said it was eating vegetable oil activates these receptors, it creates inflammation?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is yet another way to understand the beauty of the omega-3s. Because similarly, the omega-3s create cannabinoid-like chemicals in the body that block that activity. And that's another important pathway by which the omega-3s are so good for us. So when people like Dr. Ornish say we should be on a low-fat diet, pretty much based upon the type of fat that people consume in America, I'd say, he's right. But you can get even more bang for the buck if you not only cut those oils out and fats out, but add to the equation the omega-3s. So we improve this ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s, which is so high now

• 41:01Speaker 01

  in America, down to a level of 3 to 1 or 2 to 1, where it's typically in most people's diets, it's about 20 to 1 in favor of the omega-6s.

• 41:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We didn't have these oils 1,000 years ago, 100 years ago.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 41:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We increased our intake of soybean oil, which is now 10% of our calories, 1,000-fold since 1900.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And canola oil that health advocates still talk about, which was developed at the turn of the century as an industrial oil to lubricate machinery.

• 41:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, rapeseed oil.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good thing.

• 41:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And now it's highly GMO contaminated. Yeah, it's an issue. So you mentioned omega-3s. The other issue people concern about is saturated fat, in particular in the context of Alzheimer's, an ApoE4 gene, which is a gene that may increase your risk of Alzheimer's. Well, it does, depending on how many copies you have and so forth. Is this something we should be worried about? I mean, bulletproof coffee and everybody.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's, let's.

• 41:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cover of Time magazine says eat butter. Like, what's the deal here?

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Butter is back. And let's take that apart a little bit, unpack that just for your viewers to be really clear that there are some genes that help increase a person's risk for Alzheimer's. And one of them is this so-called APOE4 allele. And you can learn about it by having an at-home genetic test that anybody can do. And 20% of Americans will carry the APOE4 allele.

• 42:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  One copy.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  One copy, and some carry two copies, which is clearly associated with as much as a 12-fold increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. The APOE genes are involved in the production of apolipoproteins. And that's a big term, but it has to do with proteins in the body that carry fat, deliver fat to where those fats might be needed. And there is some indication that the benefits of saturated fat for the brain, we'll talk about that in just a moment, and even the benefits of a ketogenic diet, and we'll talk about that as well. I guess I'm putting a lot of things on the plate here.

• 43:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, we got it.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We might go a little long here.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  We might have to add another memory card. But those things are less beneficial in the APOE4 carriers, meaning that they're not going to gain as much benefit directly from ketogenic diet or a diet that's higher in saturated fat.

• 43:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is there harm?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Doesn't look like there's harm. And that said, I think that there are benefits that everybody gains that I believe if there is some sense of harm would offset those potential issues, which are very minimal to begin with. And that is, what the benefits are from consuming saturated fat is the types that we recommend, MC2 oil, coconut oil, the saturated fat that's found in eggs, for example. The benefits are that we enhance our body's ability to produce these important chemicals that are called ketones. There's this huge interest these days all over the internet and certainly in various venues for lectures, et cetera, in what is called the ketogenic diet.

• 44:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The number one diet books today.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  You bet, and with good reason. And it's a brand-new phenomenon for humans. It's only the type of diet we've been on for a couple million years.

• 44:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Technically, on and off of it.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Right. But we've been in and out of ketosis for a long, long time. So it's got a heck of a track record.

• 44:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Uh huh.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Uh, and we, we can talk about that, but basically it's a diet that counters inflammation, that enhances energy production, that activates this BDNF gene pathway to create more of that growth hormone to grow new brain cells. That helps reduce the production of free radicals, that helps get rid of damaged energy producers called mitochondria, that helps us with our ability to rid our bodies of cells, for example, that are damaged. So in multiple arenas, being on a ketogenic diet is really a good thing.

• 44:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Hmm.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  So I think that the ability of the coconut oil and the MCT oil to make that happen really is very, very powerful.

• 45:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And there's data that's showing that those actually help improve outcomes in Alzheimer's patients.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  There's actually a data that indicates interventionally that simply using MCT oil improves cognitive function in established Alzheimer's patients. And what did I just say? There's data that shows that a nutritional intervention is effective in turning dementia around.

• 45:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  There's also data from Iran that demonstrates that probiotic intervention demonstrates improvement on the Mini Mental Status Test, which is a standardized test doctors use in the office to determine how well a person's brain is functioning.

• 45:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's impressive. I just, I just reviewed a book by the new head of the Lou Ruo Center at Cleveland Clinic, which is the Alzheimer's research program there. And I was shocked to read, he talked about using ketogenic diets in patients with Alzheimer's as a way of treating the problem, which is pretty radical. You've got the head of a major academic medical center saying, yes, we can use food as medicine. We're, we're seeing this trend.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Food as medicine. Who knew?

• 46:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And yet there's this incredible backlash about this. We're going to get into that in a minute. Uh, there was an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association called "The Rise of Pseudomedicine for Dementia and Brain Health." And you and I would be considered in the pseudomedicine quack category. I think I, I, I, for me, it's a personal badge of honor that I'm on quack watch.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 46:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Along with most of our best friends. But the saturated fat thing, I just want to come back to.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  And the founder of Quack Watch commented on this article in JAMA. You need to see that.

• 46:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm sure, I'm sure. I feel like I'm doing a good job when I get more people attacking me from, you know, certain categories of like Monsanto and the Far East. But the saturated fat thing is fascinating because I want to be able to hear that saturated fat is not necessarily bad, that it is something that can be helpful in many conditions. But that's with one big caution is to avoid what I call sweet fat. And the reason that saturated fat, I believe, causes, and I want to hear your opinion on this, causes problems in the research, which can correlate saturated fat with disease like heart disease and other problems, is that when those studies were done, they're done in the context of people eating saturated fat in a high starch sugar diet.

• 47:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I call that sweet fat. Think of donuts, french fries, ice cream, cookies. These are high fat, high sugar combos that are deadly. So the caution is if you're going to eat saturated fat, you can't eat a diet high in starch and sugar. Yes, high in carbohydrates, right? Plant foods. I always say 75% of your diet should be plant foods in terms of starch, not in terms of starch, in terms of vegetables. In fact, most of your diet should be plant foods by volume, but they have very little calories. And most of your calories should be fat, but it's not much volume. Can you comment on that?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And I would say let's even take this, unpack this further. And it doesn't even have to be in the, in a relationship to eating carbohydrates, uh, simple carbohydrates, because the data comes from these studies that look at calculating the amount of saturated fat in somebody's diet based upon the foods that they eat. Then they calculate, well, this person eats, you know, a bunch of beef, they eat a bunch of bacon, etc. They get a lot of saturated fat. Well, as we talked about earlier, those are the wrong kinds of foods for many, many reasons. So this is a calculated determination of saturated fat. It's not a biochemical demonstration that saturated fat does something in the body.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  It's people who ate a diet higher in saturated fat, which delivers lots of toxins because these are foods from animals that have been fed, as we said earlier, garbage. That's where those saturated fats, how they're delivered to the human body. So it's not a clean type of study. It doesn't relate to telling a person to take a tablespoon of organic coconut oil. No relationship whatsoever. Look, 50% of the fat in human breast milk is saturated fat.

• 49:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute. So basically breast milk is almost as much saturated fat as pure butter.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  You bet. And why is it there? Because it helps for brain development, helps for immune system development. It helps prime.

• 49:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I thought it was 25%.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  50%. It's of the fat.

• 49:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of the fat.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  It helps prime.

• 49:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But 25% of the calories in breast milk is from saturated fat.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we're told to get less than 5% by the American Heart Association. So according to the American Heart Association, we should ban breastfeeding.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  I think it needs a label. They need to go around and stamp breasts all around the world saying, uh, this is not hard health.

• 49:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  High saturated fat.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, avoid this. I mean, you know, it wasn't long ago when we were told not to eat avocado, avocados or nuts.

• 49:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Because they had high levels of the dreaded fat. That was about the worst, and we know where that came from now. We know how medical literature in the late 1960s was tainted by industry, by sugar, who wanted, who influenced what was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, as recently revealed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and ended up on the front page of the New York Times.

• 50:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  And, you know, doctors bought into that. We bought into what our journals were telling us, and it was patently wrong. Now you bring up a journal article from the Journal of the American Medical Association that is castigating our approaches to dealing with brain health, calling it pseudoscience. We began our.

• 50:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Pseudomedicine.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Pseudomedicine. We began our conversation today. With a discussion of the publication in the same journal, I'll have you know, in November of this year, wherein it was revealed that the so-called Alzheimer's drugs that this article is a proponent of

• 50:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Don't work, but actually make people worse.

• 50:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Worse.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Which is the pseudo-medicine?

• 50:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly. Well, I think, you know, part of the problem is that, you know, our type of medicine has not had the funding to study these interventions. Nobody's funding dietary interventions because they're expensive, they take a long time. Nobody's looking at these complex systems approaches to treating dementia, which you and I have done for decades. It's not just treating one thing. Like our friend Dale talks about, the medicine, maybe there's 36 different problems, or 54, or 12. And if you don't deal with all of them, you're not going to get better. And our colleague and mentor Sid Baker says if you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better, and if you're standing on two, taking one tack at it doesn't make you 50% better, right? So if you have mercury poisoning and gluten sensitivity, and you just deal with the gluten,

• 51:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the mercury still might be a problem and you don't get better. And I think that's a really important lesson. I think this article is very disturbing to me because it didn't really analyze the data behind it. And there's so much data behind the kinds of things we're doing, whether it's optimizing our diet, or exercise, or restoring sleep, or meditation, or using nutritional support, which is, you know, the B vitamins and methylation, or getting rid of mercury, or fixing the microbiome, or balancing hormones. These are the things that we use in constellation to help optimize brain function. And what we know is that these things work. I mean, the only study that's ever been shown at a scale to reverse or slow cognitive decline is called the Finger Study, which was basically using multiple interventions, diet, exercise,

• 52:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  stress reduction, addressing risk factors for the heart, for example, and some resistance.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  And therein lies the criticism.

• 52:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They got better.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yes, but therein lies the criticism because... The notion of leveraging multiple inputs into a system and looking for an outcome is absolutely at odds with the current model of how science, as it relates to medicine, is carried out. You mentioned Dr. Breterson has a new book coming out where he actually reviews case studies of reversing Alzheimer's disease. And I had the opportunity to write the foreword for that book. And I talked about how this is unprecedented, that he is not looking at what we call monotherapy to find the golden

• 53:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Single drug.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  That can be monetized.

• 53:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  You know, and yet he's looking at using multiple, but getting a great result. So why would we argue with that? But, you know, it is an inconvenient truth for people who want to believe otherwise, that we need to create single approaches with monotherapy, and that can be the home run, billion dollar product that makes the investors very happy.

• 53:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's exciting, maybe you'll be excited to hear that I'm working with some of the top scientists at Cleveland Clinic, talking about how do we study these systems approaches? How do we break the paradigm? How do we actually design a trial where we can test this theory, instead of calling it pseudomedicine, conundrum of the future of medicine, which is really what it is.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  So I have to say that as I get older, I'm less offended by these.

• 53:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  And I really find it to be almost complimentary. It's sort of like complementary medicine, because to be the outlier and to be disruptive, I think is really a good thing these days. Because the status quo is not where we want it to be. And we need to challenge the status quo, and it's why people call us out. It's why, you know, you appear on the various videos, and so do I, and some people put a thumbs down and comment, "Well, you know, I read the China study, and it said we should all, we shouldn't..." You know, it's great. People want to believe.

• 54:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Because it's an inconvenient truth to tell somebody, "You need to stop drinking diet drinks. You need to stop eating as much sugar as you're eating, because it's going to compromise your health." Most people don't want to hear that message. They'd rather, as I mentioned earlier, hope for the magic bullet. As it relates to Alzheimer's, it's interesting that in February of 2018, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, gave up.

• 54:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Gave up, yeah, a lot of companies.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  We're not going to chase down the magic bullet for Alzheimer's anymore because it's not, it doesn't have a good enough ROI, return on investment.

• 54:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's going to be hundreds of studies, billions of dollars spent going down this rabbit hole that is the wrong strategy for identifying the risks, the causes, and the treatments for cognitive decline or Alzheimer's. It's pretty stunning and everybody's failing. And now people are trying to pay attention to what we're doing.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  I have a slide that I'll show you, a conference you and I will be attending in a couple of days. And it's really quite interesting because it shows, it measures a group of people in terms of insulin resistance, whether they have insulin resistance, which is the consequence of diet, or not, over time, who collects the most beta amyloid, this sticky protein in the brain that is associated with Alzheimer's risk. Who collects more beta amyloid? And it's dramatic how much more amyloid is in the brains of people who are insulin resistant. The reason I mention it in the context of our discussion right now is because the amyloid in the brain has really been the focus of the pharmaceutical industry trying to create

• 55:49Speaker 01

  an Alzheimer's drug. Amyloid does or doesn't play a role, whatever, but...

• 55:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sort of like sticky toffee that comes up in the brain.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Right, but developing drugs to get rid of amyloid or to keep it from forming in the first place has been the focus of billions of dollars of research. Because if you could get rid of that protein, that might cure Alzheimer's. It doesn't. But the point is that we can determine on the front end how to lower our risk for developing amyloid in the brain in the first place.

• 56:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's a reaction to something. It's driving inflammation.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  That's right. It's an overreaction. It's an overreaction to infection, for example, to herpes simplex virus, to chlamydia, to various organisms that do in fact colonize the brain.

• 56:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The microbiome of the brain.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  There is a microbiome of the brain. In fact, in a book we have coming out, there's a title, I mean, a chapter dedicated to that from Dr. Tanzi's group at Harvard.

• 56:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  So it is really quite incredible to realize, another slide, a series of slides, looks at the degree of brain shrinkage if you carry the Alzheimer's gene.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  In comparison to the degree of brain shrinkage in one year, plotted against your hemoglobin A1C or your average blood sugar. And it turns out that the rate of shrinkage of your brain is greater with a higher A1C than it is carrying the Alzheimer's gene.

• 57:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  You can't change.

• 57:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's pretty frightening.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  You can't change the Alzheimer's gene. If you got it, you've got it.

• 57:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can change the expression of the gene.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  You can, but you can sure as heck lower your A1C by simply making some dietary changes.

• 57:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, low sugar.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  You bet. More carbohydrates in form of fiber.

• 57:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And more good fats.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Retraining your gut bacteria, reducing inflammation. But again, that is the inconvenient truth people don't want to embrace. The ball is very much on your side of the net. It's not up to me on the other side of the net, the doctor to fix this.

• 57:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  It's up to you to hit that ball appropriately with some topspin. So that I can't return it. You know, give it a good shot.

• 57:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Here, and here's how to do it.

• 57:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Lower your consumption of simple carbohydrates.

• 57:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Eat more healthful fat. Eat more dietary fiber. Exercise. Make sure that your sleep is restorative. Really important, very much underrated. We spend a third of our lives sleeping or trying to sleep. And we recognize that so much is going on during that activity, which we used to think is simply passive. But that we understand that this is hugely involved in reducing inflammation, in enhancing the brain's ability to take the garbage out through the activity of the glymphatic system. To triage our daily.

• 58:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Lymph system of the brain, David talked about.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  System, which has to work at night.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  It works at night. It's got the night shift.

• 58:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Garbage out of your brain.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  So that you're ready to go the next day. And to triage our day to day experiences and put them where they will be meaningful for us to rely upon in terms of leveraging new information to make decisions. So, so underrated.

• 58:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The good news is there's a lot of things that we can do. And we know, for example, in Alzheimer's that diet plays a key role.

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 59:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exercise plays a role. The nutritional status plays a role. B12 and vitamin D and methylation. We know the toxins play a role, that the gut microbiome plays a role, that insulin resistance and blood sugar play a role. So these are all modifiable risk factors. People don't think of preventing Alzheimer's. They think of preventing heart disease.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  Well, I think what's interesting about that is that when I I've been in the kind of Alzheimer's advocacy space for 20 years, because my dad was diagnosed in 2003. And lifestyle was not a part of the conversation when he was originally diagnosed. And then when, as I started researching it as a reporter and started been looking at women and trying to understand what was happening in women. I said, is there anything women, is it lifestyle connected? Is there anything we're doing, how we live? Is it menopause? Any of these things? And everybody's like, no, no, lifestyle has nothing to do with any of this.

• 59:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Jump to today, in the last five years, there's been a sea change around how we talk about Alzheimer's, about saying now you have people saying, well, maybe half of these cases could be preventable due to lifestyle choices made early on, right? What you're talking about. That was when I started, it was only plaques and tangles, plaques and tangles, right? That's tau, plaques and tangles.

• 1:00:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amy, yeah, this is basically the stuff that happens in the brain.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Right. So, but, but no one spoke about the importance of exercise. Nobody spoke about diet. Nobody spoke about nutrition and the brain. So I think this is a sea change in the Alzheimer's space. Nobody even talked about prevention.

• 1:00:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Of Alzheimer's. We opened the first women's Alzheimer's Prevention Center at the Cleveland Clinic. And everybody's like, you can't say that. And I was like, why not?

• 1:00:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, you absolutely can.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, but now you can.

• 1:00:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The data's there. I mean, it's interesting, you know, you know, the data about anybody. We've spent billions and billions of dollars on drug discovery for Alzheimer's, all of which have failed miserably, in my opinion. Maybe we delay the admission to nursing home by a few months, and that's a grand success. But the only trials that I've seen that really have shown a difference in slowing or even Reversing it have been aggressive lifestyle intervention trials like the finger trial where they use a multimodal intervention of lifestyle, diet, exercise, so forth, and then aggressively treating risk factors. And they showed that they were able to slow or even reverse the cognitive decline. And then Richard Isaacson's work, you know, you know, very well, he's he's done a even a more personalized approach where he looks at their biomarkers and those are nutritional levels and customizes and personalized approach to what's going on. And it's had tremendous

• 1:01:29Dr. Mark Hyman?

  success compared to like what we see in in typical medicine, Del Bredesen, who also has been doing this. I've treated many Alzheimer's patients. And by doing this, by taking a deep look at their biology and their biomarkers, their nutritional status, their metabolic status, their hormonal status, their toxin levels, their gut health, all these things we can actually modify and change the trajectory of people's health. And this is really why we created Function Health was to help people identify things early on and not just kind of wait until something really serious happened.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  When we talk about women and Alzheimer's, so it disproportionately, as I said, Alzheimer's disproportionately impacts women, but also disproportionately impacts black and brown women, right? And so so many people don't have access to really what you're talking about. You know, some of these more kind of concierge medicine approaches, looking at biomarkers and looking at. So I'm really interested in how to democratize all of this to make it accessible to people who don't have money, who might be in maternal health deserts, who might be in just health deserts, period. So with the Prevention Center, I always looking at how do we bring this kind of home? How do we bring this, the education to people? How do we bring doctors who can talk

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  about this in a way that people aren't scared? I think the conversation, I do a lot of work around, how do you speak about this in a way that people can go, oh, I don't have to be so scared. Oh, maybe I could do this today. Maybe I could do this tomorrow. Bringing it kind of to Main Street is the challenge.

• 1:02:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think that's right. I mean, we need to democratize the information out there because it's not there's a lack of information or knowledge or scientific evidence. It's just that it hasn't been. Presented to the public in a way that they can access and use and they have to go through the firewall of the healthcare system and the doctor who is not to his or her detriment, has not been trained. My daughter's in medical school now and like, Rachel, have you learned about insulin resistance or microbiome or nutrition or toxins? Like, no. Like, the things that actually matter most.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Or women's health or menopause. But this is why I think, you know, when I talk about women's health, it starts by also changing the way medicine is taught in schools, right? It's by incorporating, so many doctors said, well, I had an hour about menopause. I never even talked about perimenopause, much less post-menopausal women. You know, that was like, not even in the textbook. So you're talking about a sea change, not only with doctors who are practicing, but for those coming into the space. And then also, when we talk about women's health, or when we talk about Alzheimer's, getting people interested in working in that space, in the geriatric space, right? Geriatric psychiatrists, geriatric doctors. It's not, young people are going into orth- it's not sexy. They're going into orthopedics.

• 1:04:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like my daughter, that's what she wants to do.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  Orthopedics. Because that's where the money is, right? And so this is a challenge on so many levels. It's a challenge on how do we talk about it? How do we bring it home to Main Street? How do we change medical schools? How do we bring doctors who are working up to date?

• 1:04:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  How do we make it enticing to go into this space as we're an aging country?

• 1:04:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  You know, in California, I did a big report for Gavin Newsom about what does California, which is an aging state, you don't think of California that way. What do we need to do to be ready for the tsunami of baby boomers?

• 1:04:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Who are going to get Alzheimer's and dementia, right? We're not ready. We're not ready as a nation. We don't have caregivers, which also disproportionately falls on women. So I think it's a exciting space to be in, but it's an urgent space.

• 1:05:04Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It is, yeah. I mean, it's really kind of why, why we've created a function health list is to democratize access to people's own health data.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And make it very low cost, you know, for $4.99 a year, you get over 110 biomarkers and testing twice a year to Track your numbers and see what's going on. And in that data, you get empowered with not only just the information about what's going on, but you get empowered with insights and actionable steps to actually improve.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  That's the key.

• 1:05:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And things that your doctor may not know. So we're taking all the scientific evidence, all the expert knowledge extracted from all the world's top experts, both traditional and functional medicine, and helping create a personalized guide for how you can up level your health and what you need to do to explore if there's different issues going on. So I think four nine nine is still a fair bit of money.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:05:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's certainly a lot less than people spend, for example, on coffee every day is like a dollar.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  I saw on there that you have like you could gift it.

• 1:05:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  Right. I was like, okay, well, that's actually something that's an interesting concept. By the time you finish buying somebody flowers or coffee, you could add a coffee for you for the next.

• 1:06:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's really about empowering people with the health data. And even people like you who are, you know, super active and powerful and doing stuff in the world and energetic, there's always little stuff that you find that.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  That you can find too.

• 1:06:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That's what I'm curious about.

• 1:06:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So when we did your test, we found some good news, right? You're.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's start with the good news. I'm not going to die right now.

• 1:06:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're not going to die yet.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  At this moment, and you're six year plus younger than your.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  But I want that to be better.

• 1:06:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So you're an overachiever. I got it.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  I want to be, I have grandchildren.

• 1:06:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  I have, you know, adult children and I want to be around for them. And I don't, I think that's the other thing, watching a parent or two parent, my mother ended up with lots of strokes too later in life. And I think being a caregiver for two parents is a lot.

• 1:06:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  Emotionally, financially, physically, spiritually, in every way, right? And then I think once you've watched that up close, you think about yourself. And if you have children, you think about, okay, well.

• 1:07:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How do I keep myself healthy?

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  How do I keep myself so that my children?

• 1:07:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Don't have to do that.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Don't have to do that. Maybe they're not capable of doing that, or maybe they don't have the money to do that, or maybe they're not in the same town. There's all these things. So I think to myself, how can I be as independent for as long as I can, be as strong as I can? So when I go to the gym now, actually, I say to the trainer, I said, give me an exercise that can help me with my overhead compartment in the, in the plane.

• 1:07:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  I want to lift the bag in the overhead compartment.

• 1:07:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Give me an exercise. I have a granddaughter who weighs thirty some pounds.

• 1:07:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You want to pick her up?

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  I want to pick her up. I want to walk around with her.

• 1:07:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  I don't want to say when she says, Mama G, lift me up, lift me up. I don't want to go, oh, I can't. I want to be able to lift her up and then the next one up and the next one. So when I go to the gym today, I'm looking for

• 1:08:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  To be functional.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  To be functional. Yeah. To be able to be strong for those things, to be independent for my kids so that they're not overwhelmed because I found it overwhelming to be a caregiver.

• 1:08:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, it's hard. And I think, you know, what you're talking about also is how do we prevent those things that actually are preventable, like Alzheimer's is preventable, heart disease is preventable, diabetes is preventable, so many things we see autoimmune disease is preventable, but people don't know what's going on under the hood until it's too late. So we found that you're six years younger, which is great, and you can get younger.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. We're going back to my test now, right? We're going to go to the bad news now. My son said, you're not really going to talk about your own blood tests on the thing, are you? I was like, yeah, actually, I think I am, but.

• 1:08:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's empowering for other people to hear because people are walking around thinking they're fine. So we didn't find anything really terrible and you're sixty one years old biologically, which is good.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  That's okay.

• 1:08:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you could get younger. I just got a year younger in the last five months by doing a whole bunch of things based on my own function results. So I was able to sort of optimize my health, just learning even.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  How old were you on your results?

• 1:09:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fifty three.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Fifty three?

• 1:09:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:09:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's different biomarker tests for aging, but you want to look at all these things because they reflect really what's going on under the hood. And, and we found.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  You can get me to fifty.

• 1:09:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. The other thing, you know, Maria, is that your family history is significant, right? You have a history of maybe, you know, celiac or autoimmune disease with your mom's stomach.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:09:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, certainly your uncle had that and your cousin has that. And we know it's in an Irish family. So right there, somebody should be looking at autoimmunity, at gluten and things that are not normally checked on a regular panel. And we did find some things. Also, you know, your family history of Alzheimer's concerning. And we want to make sure that the things that tend to promote Alzheimer's are not showing up in your blood test, right? We want to look at your B vitamin levels. We want to look at something called homocysteine. We want to look at inflammation. We want to look at your metabolic health, like insulin resistance. And these are things that are not usually checked on your annual physical. So when you went to your doctor, they said your tests are quote, normal. Looking at 20 or 30 things, you know, we looked at over 110 things on your labs.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And a few things popped up. One was you have low levels of inflammation. Inflammation is one of the things that drives Alzheimer's. We know that Alzheimer's is a disease of inflammation in the brain, just as almost all chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  So why would I have low levels of inflammation?

• 1:10:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Higher levels.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  I have higher.

• 1:10:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Higher levels than we've.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't have low.

• 1:10:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No. So you want low, you want something called C reactive protein. Again, a test not normally checked. It should be under one.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yours was 1.4. Not terrible, but it's like a trend, right? I don't want you to have that.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  I don't want to be on that trend.

• 1:10:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we also saw this low level of autoimmunity. Now, why you have this autoimmune marker, it doesn't mean you have an autoimmune disease. It just means you have this low grade autoimmunity, which means your body is somehow attacking itself. And then we can figure out why, right?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It may be something you're eating and maybe gluten, it may be heavy metals, it may be things that if left untreated, could progress and lead to more serious inflammation in your body and.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  But we don't know what it is.

• 1:11:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And we can find out. Like we had, for example, you had high levels of mercury that were from probably eating fish. You know, people know how to fish.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The thing is healthy, but all our oceans are polluted. So mercury is a big, for example, factor.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  I had high levels of mercury?

• 1:11:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You did.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, I thought I had low levels.

• 1:11:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, your, your level range on the lab, a lab reference range, according to Quest, is zero to 10. But there's no biological requirement for mercury. There's no safe level of mercury. It's a neurotoxin.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  Okay, so no more swordfish for me?

• 1:11:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No more swordfish. It's no more tuna.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  Favorite. I don't, I don't like tuna, but I do like swordfish.

• 1:11:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It is one of the worst. Swordfish, shark, worst.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm not a big, I don't like shark at all. So that's not an issue.

• 1:11:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I know you'll, you'll have to spend time.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  Swordfish at the Ivy.

• 1:11:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yes. Swordfish is, is so high.

• 1:11:46Speaker 03

  You're gonna hurt me. This is gonna be a hard show for me.

• 1:11:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For giving up the risk of Alzheimer's, you might want to give up swordfish.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Okay, swordfish. Bye bye.

• 1:11:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But the high mercury, for example, is, is, yours was nine and, you know, 10 is the limit, but nine isn't good. The normal level is zero. And so we don't know what's stored in your body. We need to look at that. These are things that are not checked, like for example, heavy metals are not checked in your general checkup. But they should be.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because they're risk factors for autoimmunity, for Alzheimer's, for fatigue. And some of these things you were just mentioning, low grade fatigue. Well, no, yeah, you're busy running around, but maybe it's not normal. Like if your body was working properly, you should have energy to do whatever you want.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, and I think I'm turning 65 this year and I just, last month I went to Patagonia and I climbed a mountain. It was 15 miles. It was a mile straight up, a mile straight down and took, you know, 13 hours and I was able to do it.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Look at you.

• 1:12:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I know, but, but we should be able to do that. Our bodies can do that.

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:12:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If we don't optimize them, they don't. We send a decline. So we want to look at factors that may be triggering some of this low grade inflammation. And for me, it's a, it's a red flag if you have a family history of Alzheimer's.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 1:12:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you've already done your APOE testing.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which test did you have? Which?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Well, actually Richard Isaacson did it. So I don't know which test he did.

• 1:12:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Did you have APOE four?

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  No, I don't.

• 1:12:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you didn't have the Alzheimer's gene, which is really good, but a lot of people who get Alzheimer's don't.

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:13:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it may not be just that, but there may be other factors. So I really want to look at that. You also said, you know, I'm a little tired and maybe I have as much energy and I saw your iron levels were low.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  Right. So I need to eat more meat.

• 1:13:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So maybe you need to eat more meat or maybe we need to think about if you're losing blood somewhere and it, you know, could be a sign of, you know, that you need a colonoscopy or.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  I just had a colonoscopy.

• 1:13:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So that was clean. So that's great. So you don't, if you're not having vaginal bleeding.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:13:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So then I wonder, you know, maybe you're, you're not having proper absorption in your gut. Maybe you do have a little bit of gluten sensitivity. Maybe you do have.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  I definitely have some feeling of gluten sensitivity.

• 1:13:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So this is, again, this is something that we need to dig deep in. And then if we find, oh, probably the reason for your iron deficiency and your elevated inflammation and this low grade autoimmunity. With an ANA is maybe because you're gluten sensitive, not full celiac, but enough.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've tested for celiac and no.

• 1:13:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But enough that it creates a little bit of damage to your gut and you're not absorbing things. So these are the things that are super fixable. So I say, don't eat fish. Let's get your body to detox from mercury. Let's get you off gluten, see what happens. Let's retest your tests and see how they're doing. So there's really powerful things we found in your labs.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'm going to come back. We're going to retest all of these things. We're going to change it. I'm going to come back and see how old I am and whether I.

• 1:14:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're going to get you younger. You're going to get you under.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Better on my blood test.

• 1:14:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, we're going to get you under sixty, under sixty.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Under sixty.

• 1:14:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We want you under sixty.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  I want to get to fifty.

• 1:14:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We'll get you to fifty.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Yes, in my mind, I'm like forty five.

• 1:14:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Well, I did another test. It's a different scale. We can do that for you too. It grades it differently, but I'm forty three on that test. So I'm happy about that. It's the number I try to use, but fifty three is this other calculus that is based on when we do it function health. But the other thing we found, Maria, is, you know, and this was a little surprising to me. Could you're traveling, dehydrated, maybe, but your kidney function was just slightly off.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:14:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so this is something that is going on in our society that can be caused by many factors. It can be caused by inflammation, autoimmunity, heavy metals, obviously, high blood pressure, diabetes. You don't have those.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:14:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You have low blood pressure.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:14:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so those things often need to be addressed. And so we're finding things early so that we can do something about it. And you're not going to end up having some problem with your kidneys later on.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  No, I don't want that.

• 1:15:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you didn't even know that.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right? So these are the things we were finding on the function health panels that allow people to become empowered. And then you get guidelines on exactly how to fix it and when to go to the doctor. So for example, for the kidney function, I might say, gee, in the recommendations, you need to go see a kidney specialist to just double check what's going on.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So we really have learned all these.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  Then I always wonder like, you know, a lot of times you do these and they're like, go to this doctor, go to this doctor. And I'm like, oh, you know, then it's like, it's a time issue, but I know that it's, I mean, I will do it.

• 1:15:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, there's certain things that are really important, but most of the things, I would say eighty percent of the things we find, people can take care of on their own, right?

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:46Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They might recommend, you know, do you need to do maybe a different kind of gluten sensitivity test? You maybe need to do a different heavy metal test. We need to look at why you're losing iron. If it's something that's losing iron, maybe it's just your diet. So we would fix these things. We saw your vitamin D was a little bit low. So it's just really tweaking things. And I think your energy level will come up. You'll feel better. You'll feel stronger. Your brain will be clear. And more importantly, you know, we're going to mitigate the risks of you ending up with the same issues that your dad had.

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I don't want that.

• 1:16:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What's really interesting now is, and soon we're going to be offering this on the Function Health panel. There's even blood tests where you can detect in the blood biomarkers of Alzheimer's, years and years before you ever have a symptom.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  So people always talk about that, you know, do you want to know if you have the Alzheimer's gene? Do you want to know if you can find it? Because then what? As long as we have no cure, is that actually gonna freak people out? Is that gonna, you know, be helpful in any way? And I think this is a debate going on with doctors, right? Goes on. I hear it a lot.

• 1:16:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right.

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  That people are like, I don't want to know. That's not going to be helpful to me until we find a cure.

• 1:16:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Which I totally also understand.

• 1:16:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's true, Maria, if you're operating from the traditional medical paradigm where drugs are the solution.

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But if you actually look at the data around Alzheimer's, or heart disease, or diabetes, or cancer, most of these conditions are lifestyle-driven conditions. So there's really significant things you can do with your diet, with exercise, sleep, stress management, nutritional supplements, fixing your microbiome, dealing with heavy metals. There's so many things you can do to lower your risk. And it's all data-driven. It's not like the data isn't out there.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it takes decades for scientific discoveries to actually be implemented into medical practice. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinion. And my guests' opinions, neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.

• 1:18:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

• 1:18:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N dot com.