5 Daily Habits That Could Lower Your Dementia Risk! Dr. Gundry Explains

I'm going to give you five daily habits that could lower your dementia risk. Now, every 60 seconds, someone in this country is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Now, here's the thing. Almost nobody realizes how much of that risk comes down to ordinary daily habits, not bad luck or bad genes. So I've got five of them for you today, and I promise at least one is probably going to surprise you. So let's start with the one almost nobody treats like brain medicine. Tip number one, move your body. Who would believe that the single biggest factor researchers have found isn't a supplement, a superfood, or anything you can buy at all? It's moving. In fact, if you look at women, and ladies, women get far more Alzheimer's than men. Yes, I know you're the stronger sex. But when it comes to Alzheimer's, you are the most at risk. Here's the great news. The more you move, beginning in your 40s and 50s, and continue, you cut your risk of dementia by at least 80% just by moving. Now, there's all sorts of reasons. One thing, movement flips on AMPK. It's also part of the same switch that resveratrol hits in the brain. The second thing is we now know that when muscles are working or moving, they produce what are called myokines. And myokines actually improve brain building, improve neuron building just by moving. Now, the good news is it really doesn't take much to activate this. Really just a 15-minute period a few times a week. is needed to move the needle for people over the age of 65. Now, I get questions, well, when or is it too late to start? The exciting thing is, it is never too late. I have patients in their early 100s who actually teach chair yoga to people in assisted living centers. It's never too late to start exercising, even... If you're chair-bound, the sooner you start with an exercise program that you will actually keep with, the better you're going to do. All right, tip number two, eat for your brain chemistry. Now, I've been saying for years, the next one, and the data keeps proving me right. Your brain is 60% fat, and DHA makes up half of that fat. The other fat is arachidonic acid that's supposedly evil omega-6 fat, and yet half of your brain is made up of this fat. What I've found through the years is you really want to get a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Most of the time, you're going to get it from seafood. Now, if you're a vegetarian, if you're a vegan, I make these compounds. out of plant compounds, but you can get it from other companies as well. So there's no excuse not to get 1,000 milligrams of DHA a day. Why is that so important? The framing data shows that the higher your DHA, you have a 47% lower risk of all-cause dementia. Now, that's not subtle. Where else could you get DHA? Well, here's the problem. You can get plenty of short-chain omega-3 fats from walnuts. You could get them from flaxseeds, flaxseed oil. Our problem as humans is we're not a fish. We do not have very good enzyme systems. For making short-chain omega-3 fats into long-chain omega-3 fats that our brain needs. In fact, in my vegetarian and vegan population, it's incredibly unusual to see any of these people have enough DHA in their blood. And we measure this all the time. What else can you do? Eat mushrooms. Mushrooms actually increase BDNF. Eat curry. Studies out of Southeast Asia show that people who eat curry once a week dramatically lower their incidence of dementia. Add fermented cheeses to your diet. Cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano, for instance. Also, as you'll learn in my next book, Feed Your Brain, eat sardines or other small fish or shellfish. They're a great way to get these long-chain omega-3 fats and arachidonic acids into your brain. Finally, do not forget that phospholipids are incredibly important for brain function People who have memory loss, people who have early-stage dementia, people who have full-blown Alzheimer's, have very low levels of phospholipids in their brain. Where do you get phospholipids? Well, one of the easiest ways to get phospholipids is from seaweed. And you'll learn all about seaweed in the upcoming book and why it's a great choice. Also, shellfish. Bivalves are loaded with phospholipids. In fact, a number of studies out of Japan show that adding the phospholipids from scallops reverses early stage dementia in actual patients. Protect your fasting window and your sleep. Now, here's one that almost everybody gets backwards. Your mitochondria make energy, they make ATP. Your mitochondria basically run like a hybrid car. They burn gas by day, meaning glucose, and they burn battery power, which is basically ketones, at night. Now, they do this for two reasons. Number one, your brain is loaded with mitochondria. It is energy hungry. This little brain of yours consumes at least 25% of all the energy in your body. So it's packed with mitochondria and mitochondria making energy damages mitochondria. So they've got to have a repair time, a downtime. So if you're using battery power at night, ketones actually tell your mitochondria to repair themselves. So our problem in America is we're snacking literally 24 hours a day. Most Americans eat 16 hours a day with only about a six-hour window of not eating, but you're still digesting food. So you never get the switch turned on. Normally, about six hours after you take your last bite, your body, if you have metabolic flexibility, starts making ketones that repair mitochondria overnight. The problem is that If you went to bed at 10 o'clock at night and you ate just before you ate, you probably won't start making ketones until, if you're lucky, six o'clock in the morning. And then if you actually start eating at eight, you've only got a two-hour window of ketones repairing the mitochondria in you and your brain. So that's part of the huge problem. So if I can get you to stay away from eating three hours before you go to bed, that improves our window. The other thing is, if you can not eat until later in the morning, break fast later in the morning, you have a much longer time for the ketones to have an effect on repairing your mitochondria. Now, most of us know that we need sleep. But the problem is reaching for a sleep aid to fix the fact that we don't get enough sleep backfires. Men 65 or over on prescription sleep meds show a actual 3.6 times higher Alzheimer's risk. And new data came in that every 1% drop in deep sleep per year raises dementia risk. Now, what the heck is deep sleep? Deep sleep usually occurs early in the sleep cycle and it's during deep sleep that your brain literally undergoes a wash cycle where all of these toxins, all of these amyloid, all of these tau proteins literally get washed off, very much like a dishwasher. Here's the problem. That wash cycle needs lots of blood flow. Eating 35% of all your blood flow flows down into your guts after you eat. So if you go to bed shortly after your last meal of the day, deep sleep occurs early in the sleep cycle, and you don't have the blood flow to clean your brain. That's why every study shows that eating late increases your dementia risk, and that you should have about a three-hour window. Between the last thing that goes in your mouth and the time you go to bed. So all of us think, oh, I need my REM sleep, my REM sleep, my dream sleep. Yeah, that's great. But it turns out to prevent dementia, you've got to clean your brain every night. And that's where deep sleep comes in. And you're not going to get the right deep sleep if you eat too soon right before you go to bed. Here's number four. Stay socially connected. Now, this one has nothing to do with food, and it might be the one people blow off the most. The new data shows that loneliness alone raises dementia risk by roughly 30 percent, and isolation looks even worse. We obsess over what goes in our mouth and ignore what's missing from the calendar. Now, there is a gut-brain angle here. Loneliness seems to hit the microbiome just like stress does. In fact, being socially engaged, having some communication with somebody, being in groups dramatically improves your brain health. Is there a microbiome connection? Well, I certainly think there is. We exchange microbiome with the people around us. They're in the air around us. That's the holobiome. And one of the things we know about these super long-lived people is that they are social creatures. And it could come down just to the fact that in these long-lived communities, They eat together, and they eat together for a very long time, where there is this interaction. It always surprises my wife and I, and it shouldn't, that when we have a table at a restaurant or cafe in France or Italy, that We can't get the check when we want to leave because they believe that you should sit there and talk and enjoy two hours of each other's company, and they think it's an insult to you to ask you to leave. So think about that. And you think about these family gatherings. It's always over food and conversation. It's the social factor. Number five, challenge your brain on purpose. And this last one is the one people love to argue with me about. There's a new data called the crossword study. In a real trial, people doing crosswords beat people playing computer brain games on memory and brain shrinkage over 18 months. One twist, a separate study found regular crossword habits delayed serious memory decline by about two and a half years. Now, it turns out it's not the puzzle itself. It's forcing your brain to retrieve a word instead of recognizing one. Same thing can be said for learning a language. Learning a language, as most people know, is pretty doggone easy as a kid. But take it from me, who's trying to learn French and Italian, learning a language later in life is a real learning challenge. So... I'm being challenged by trying to learn a language. Yeah, do I fail miserably? But that doesn't mean it's not making a difference because my brain is calling up a new memory that wouldn't have existed before. So what's the difference between using your brain and actually challenging it? Well, none of this is complicated and none of them require a prescription. Pick something you're not already doing and start one of these new habits tomorrow morning. Now your brain, just like your gut, is an ecosystem and it's paying attention to every choice you make. So like I say, you don't have to do all of these all at once, but pick one for And let me know how it goes. See if you notice a difference. See if you notice that you're not being challenged enough or you notice that a new exercise program, again, something that you'll actually enjoy doing, makes a big difference on how you're aging. More importantly, how your brain is working.