What Really Causes Alzheimer’s? Root Factors and Risk

0:00So, again, every patient's causations and percentages are going to be different. And here's some interesting causes of Alzheimer's that I've seen throughout my career. It turns out that sleep is the number one cause of Alzheimer's from when I run some of the AI models, machine learning models. And so, poor sleep, and specifically the deep N3 sleep, where your brain is able to get rid of amyloid and consolidate memories. So sleep is very important. Next is inflammation, is a common root cause, and then infections that are linked to Alzheimer's includes herpathy virus, pneumonia, syphilis, Lyme disease, mold, and oral organ disease. And you can see anatomically the mouth is pretty close to the brain, so it's not a first stretch to say like, hey, if your mouth, your teeth are infected, it's not very far anatomically

1:04to go from the mouth to the brain. So how long does it take for Alzheimer's disease to develop? The answer is 30 years or longer and you actually may not be sympathetic for the first 20 years. So it's cool that you're all watching this because you can actually take action to prevent progression. So what are some of the risk factors for Alzheimer's? And you did a great job coming up with some of them. Genetics. Dr. Oz says genetics loads the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger, and he's right. So specifically, you could have two copies of one of the genetic risk factors. Let's say the ApoE4 gene, but the good news is if you do everything right from a lifestyle perspective, your risk is not increased.

2:05So that's why I encourage people to do genetic testing because you can be armed with that information and actually do something about it. So the earlier you detect Alzheimer's, the more you can do to slow its progression and improve your quality of life. Now I love the fact that we're talking on a weekend where people are actually interested in their own health because our existing healthcare system in the United States in April of 2025, unfortunately, is currently set up as a disease care system. If you want to do anything to prevent or even reverse a chronic disease like Alzheimer's, it's kind of out of normal, accepted practice and out of the law. If you look at Medicare guidelines section, 2251.3, a treatment plan that seeks to prevent

3:05disease, promote health, and prolong and enhance the quality of life, or therapy that is performed to maintain or prevent deterioration of a chronic disease is deemed not medically necessary. Yeah, craziness, all right. So going back to the risk factors, there are many things, not just the apolipoprotein e. And I would encourage you to find someone like myself where, you know, with genetic testing, you can look at half a million different SNPs. You want to find someone like me who actually knows how to focus on the right ones to look at Alzheimer's or dementia risk. And then they're also lifestyle concerns. So if you, if you're not eating a healthy diet, if you're not exercising, if you're abusing substances like tobacco or alcohol, that will increase your risk. And so will conditions like diabetes and heart disease, especially if they're not controlled.

4:11And exercise is one of my favorites because it's the key not only to physical health, but to peace of mind, that's from Nelson Mandela. And what I find is exercise is more important than any supplements that I could mention here. And I'll get to those, but exercise is amazing because when we exercise, we actually cause release of growth factors like BDNF, brain derived, neurotrophic growth factor that stimulates neurons to, new neurons to grow, and then also form new connections or synapses. All right, and it also turns out that what's good for your heart is good for your brain. You can imagine if your heart's not doing a great job pumping blood to your body and your brain, your brain's not going to have enough blood. And then also if your blood vessels are not healthy, it's really hard to get oxygen and other nutrients to the brain.

5:11Okay. And as Hippocrates never said, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. Yeah. So I studied ancient Greek in high school and college. And when I saw this quote being attributed to Hippocrates, I was like, okay, let me see the original Greek doesn't exist. I think this specific quote is about a couple hundred years old, if that old. But I guess you can extrapolate from reading the writings of Hippocrates thousands of years ago. All right. So what is the ideal food to eat? And again, I know there are a ton of different lectures that you all have heard. This is my opinion based on my two degrees in biochemistry and decades of clinical experience. You want to eat whole plants? You want to avoid animal products? You want to avoid adding salt, oil and sugar because added salt oil and sugar to damage

6:13to your blood vessels. And I know that there are some fans out there of olive oil or other oils, which I think oil is fine to put on your hair or your skin, but I don't recommend it for most people to put it in your mouth. Now, if you got someone who's severely caquectic, very low weight needs to put weight on sure in that scenario, take the highest calorie dense food. There is oil, but for most people, not recommended. Okay. So this is a busy table showing different types of foods and the amount of what are called advanced glycation end products or AGEs. The glycation or caramelization of proteins in your body, not healthy.

7:20So if you see from this table, things like bacon and butter, extremely high chicken, beef, tuna, cheese, mayonnaise, but even olive oil has some. The cool thing is if we're talking about whole plants, not processed green beans, apples, carrots, bananas, you're not going to get any of these AGEs that are toxic. The next category of toxins that can hurt the brain are what we're called LPS or lipopolysac rinds. If you look, these are different foods that have huge amounts of lipopolysac rinds that are prone to flammatory. These are all animal products from macaroni and cheese to turkey to lots of pork and milk. So if you cut out the animal products as much as possible, you're going to have less inflammation.

8:21And this is a study comparing the levels of this toxin lipopolysac in different populations. If you look at young normal people, not much, age normal people a little bit up to 150. People with MCI mild cognitive impairment, it goes up to 400, but people with full blown dementia are Alzheimer's. It goes all the way up to 700. So LPS is not a good thing. And then the next nutrient to look for or metabolite is called arachidonic acid, which is pro-inflammatory. I'm going over all these things that cause inflammation because inflammation is one of the common pathways to get Alzheimer's or dementia. And the foods that are highest in arachidonic acid are on the right here. The animal product seems like egg, bacon, chicken, beef, pork, turkey, and tuna. It turns out that fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, nuts, and seeds have none.

9:23None of this inflammatory arachidonic acid. All right. So in the last 100 years, the amount of sugar intake, salt, intake, and oil intake have gone up dramatically exponentially. And this is just an example for sugar, and the American diet actually goes back to 1700. But you can see in the last 100 years, it's gone up, up, and up, and up. And this is pounds of sugar per person per year added, and it's now over like 130 pounds of sugar per person per year. Next is the amount of oil in our diet per person per year, and it's actually gone up. You can see in the green here, it's gone up 20 times in the last 100 years. So not good, not oil is not a healthy, despite the marketing. Yeah, I actually had an olive oil company that wanted to advertise on my podcast, Alzheimer's

10:24podcast, and I had to say no, because I share with the people that olive oil is not a healthy food to consume. Again, if you want to put it on your hair or your skin, that's fine, but don't take it internally. All right. And then salt consumption over the last 100 years has also gone on dramatically as salt has added its flavor and to improve the shelf life of foods on supermarket shelves. Now you can see in this graph about 1990, that was about the peak salt consumption, because around 1990, we realized that, wow, we're getting all these people with high blood pressure. Maybe this is related to too much sodium salt in the diet. And so there was a re-communication like, yeah, you may want to have a low-salt, low-sodium diet. But if you look, we're still way above where we were 100 years ago. There's way too much salt consumption in the United States.

11:28And someone's asking, but don't our brains need fat in some form? So it turns out that the concern here, I'm not saying you're not going to have any fat. Guess what? If you're eating whole plants by definition, if you're eating live plants, leafy greens, et cetera, there has to be fat in it because our plant cell membranes are lipid bilayers, lipid. There's fat. So by definition, if you're eating plants, you're getting some fat. What I'm talking about is adding extra beyond what you need. And the concern is if you're eating a high fat diet, much of that fat is going to end up getting deposited in the blood vessels, the carotids in your neck, and other blood vessels to the brain, which in turn will impede blood flow to the brain. We call that vascular dementia.

12:29That is not healthy. So, okay. And this is what the government says, all right. Someone's asking, is flaxseed oil and essential food? I don't think so, but I've got to slide on that later. All right. The CDC, this is the government saying these are the risk factors for Alzheimer's and dementia's like it. Not enough aerobic physical activity, high blood pressure, cigarette smoking, diabetes. I like this one, excessive alcohol use. So this is an example, I think, of corporate culture, I mean, capture, corporate capture, where the alcohol lobby is very strong in this country, and they're saying, oh, yeah, just don't drink excessively, okay. To my mind, alcohol in any amount destroys brain cells. If you're worried about dementia, don't drink alcohol.