Part 43 - Dr. Dale Bredesen and the End of Alzheimer’s, How YOU Can Prevent it, and Hope for All Degenerative Diseases

This is an interview I’ve been looking forward to for years. Dr. Dale Bredesen is shaking up the medical world by showing that Alzheimer’s actually can be prevented, treated, and sometimes even reversed. This is really important to me because my mom is the final stages of Alzherimer’s and I, of course, am doing everything I can to prevent myself from falling to the same fate.

I believe the Sapien way of eating and lifestyle is doing just that - setting me up for my best chances at my longest healthspan. You can learn more about this at http://sapien.org/diet

Dr. Bredesen and I agree on all the core principles. He really is describing a Sapien diet with his protocol. We’re only at odds with the ratio of plant foods to animal foods.

As I’ve posted today on social media, I think people are actually more on the side of animal foods than they think. In the context of a whole foods, low carb diet without refined grains, sugar or vegetable oil, more often than not people are getting the majority of their calories from animal foods without necessarily realizing it. Only people eating Standard American Diets or Mediterranean Diets and the like are getting most of their calories from plant foods from all the empty calories coming from grains and other carbohydrates.

Many health figures in this space say things like “a plant heavy diet” or “fill half your plate up with greens” and people take this as being akin to a vegetarian diet. As I showed in my post, a daily intake where about 70% of the plates are filled with plants are actually 92% animal foods by calories.

I actually eat this way a lot. This is carnivore adjacent and is part of the Sapien Framework. You’re still getting a ton of flavor, variety, and nutrients from plants (even though they’re not as bioavailable), but you're really getting 90% of your calories from animal foods. So make your own decision on the ratio of plant to animal foods, but from what I’ve found, higher animal foods is more species appropriate for homo sapiens, and is actually what most people avoiding empty calorie, nutrient poor foods are already doing.

As always, I didn’t want to press him on this. I don’t invite people on my podcast to tell them I don’t agree with their opinions. I’d love for this to be debated with a moderator at some point, but as long as it’s a 1 on 1 Peak Human podcast I’m letting the guest speak their minds.

Here’s a bit of Dr. Bredesen’s extensive resume. He received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his medical degree from Duke. He served as Resident and Chief Resident in Neurology at UCSF, he was the Director of the Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, he’s a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA School of Medicine, and the Founder of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

The Bredesen Laboratory studies basic mechanisms underlying the neurodegenerative process, and the translation of this knowledge into effective therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions, leading to the publication of over 220 research papers. He and his group developed a new approach to the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, and this approach led to the discovery of subtypes of the disease, followed by the first description of reversal of symptoms in patients with MCI and Alzheimer’s disease, with the ReCODE protocol, published in 2014, 2016, and 2018. His book, The End of Alzheimer’s, is a New York Times Bestseller and has been translated into 29 languages.  

I’ll largely skip the plugs for today. Everyone listening knows about the Food Lies film on Indiegogo, the Patreon at http://patreon.com/peakhuman and my new grass fed meat company http://NoseToTail.org If you find any value in this podcast or my other content on YouTube or social media channels, please consider supporting me and my projects there. I wish I could really get across how much it means to me. It’s honestly the only way any of this is possible. Thanks so much, and I’ll most likely end season 3 with this episode and come back in a couple  weeks with an amazing season 4. Here’s the future legend, Dr. Dale Bredesen.

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SHOW NOTES

 

Dr. Bredesen has been studying the phenomenon of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) for 3 decades and have published over 200 papers on his research Understanding the fundamental nature of the disease is how we can design an effective treatment His protocol is different because it targets the root cause, not the symptoms like most AD drugs do Humans are extremely complicated and there is no one single therapy that will treat the complexity of AD AD is the result of the brain protecting itself from different insults The protective response in the brain causes the brain to shrink and “retreat” so that there is less for foreign substances (insults) to target Amyloids are antimicrobial, bind to toxins, and change the brain’s response to glucose but when they are overproduced and build up that’s when problems occur Some of the contributors to AD are: chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, glycation damage, toxin exposure, decrease in nutrients, hormones, trophic factors, poor vascular support He has identified and categorized 6 different types of AD: inflammatory, atrophic, glycotoxic, toxic, vascular, and traumatic Paraffin candles produce toxins that damage the brain Most damaging mycotoxins (produced from mold) are the ones you breathe - test your home for molds Go to www.survivingmold.com to learn how to test your home for mold and if you are concerned about mold exposure to learn about what to personally get tested For overall markers you should get tested, you can order tests directly from Dr. Bredesen’s site www.drbredesen.com or go to your doctor and test markers Markers for glycotoxicity: fasted insulin, HbA1c, and fasted glucose Markers for nutrients, hormones, and trophic factors: o   Vit. D, pragnenolone, progesterone, estradiol, testosterone, free T3 and free T4 (for thyroid), TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone), and reverse T3 (which is an inhibitor of the effect of your active thyroid hormone) Inflammation markers: HS-CRP, TNF-a, IL6, IL8, IL1-b Don’t wait until it’s too late to check for these things, because AD is preventable Glycotoxicity and how sugar is toxic Humans are not designed to eat sugar Overconsumption of sugar is linked to hypertension, CVD, diabetes, dementia, arthritic, leaky gut, and more Sugar is this generation’s smoking, we will get to a day when we think back to how crazy it was that we were eating this stuff We have biomarkers that will tell you whether AD is creeping up on you, so check early in life because you might not feel sick now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not on its way All these lifestyle and diet changes that you make to prevent AD, apply to so many other modern illnesses If AD runs in your family, you should be interested in prevention AD should be a rare disease APOE4 is the most common genetic risk factor If you have a single copy of APOE4 the risk is ~30% If you have a double copy of APOE4 the risk becomes greater than 50% For people with APOE4, find out early and get on prevention, and you will have a low chance of getting the disease 21st century medicine is about root cause and prevention There is no mono-therapy for AD Look out for symptoms of early cognitive decline like the lack of ability to learn new things, losing organizational skills, not being able to do simple calculations, not being able to find the right word, getting lost in familiar places Don’t shake these off as “senior moments” Basic things everyone can do: optimize insulin sensitivity, follow a low-carb, moderate protein, high (good) fat diet, exercise, get enough sleep, reduce stressors in your life, detox, avoid or fix any gut issues, go into periods of ketosis His diet plan is called “KetoFlex 12/3” “Keto” for going into periods of ketosis “Flex” because it is flexitarian, if you want to be a vegetarian or eat meat you can do either “12” because he wants people fasting for at least 12 hours between dinner and the next day’s first meal “3” because he wants people to finish eating at least 3 hours before they go to sleep The Big Four to avoid: grains, simple carbs, dairy, and lectins He has had amazing success with his patients and has been publishing results since 2014 He has never had someone at risk come in for prevention and develop even mild cognitive impairment (MCI) People who come in with subjected cognitive impairment (SCI) see improvement People who come in with MCI the majority improve People with full-blown AD, some people improve and some people don’t He has had people score zero on cognitive tests that have improved The most important point of all of this is that if you get put on a drug for AD you might get a little bump but you fall back to declining again, his approach targets what is actually causing the decline, the people who get better sustain their improvement Complexity gap between the complexity of the problem (human illness) and the data sets that traditional medical doctors are using to treat them (aka we can’t expect a simple mono-therapy to treat a complex condition) Dr. Bredesen’s daughter is a brain health coach and you can find her at www.siabrainhealth.com His protocol includes sauna for riding the body of toxins We are swimming in an Alzheimer’s soup with the amount of toxins we are exposed to in our modern world Get rid of toxins by sweating (sauna and exercise), high fiber diet, optimizing glutathione levels, filtered water, urination, each one of these gets rid of different things If you have leaky gut, fix that The importance of sleep Current research on macular degeneration His new book coming out “The First Survivors of Alzheimer’s Disease” will be about people’s first-hand stories of people told they had no hope but used his protocol and got better and have kept themselves better The future of medicine will need to look at how humans were evolutionarily designed to live You are not powerless to AD, you have control over it We can reduce the global burden of dementia, we can fight cognitive decline Find Dr. Dale Bredesen at www.drbredesen.com His Facebook page https://facebook.com/drdalebredesen/

 

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