Preventing Dementia: Expert Tips From A Doctor!

Hello Health Champions today we're going to talk about frontotemporal dementia what it is what you can do to prevent it and also if there's anything that you can do if you already have it frontal temporal Dementia or FTD became a Hot Topic very recently when the family of the famous actor Bruce Willis came forward and announced that he did have FTD earlier they had believed that he had simply had Aphasia which means lack of speech but then the disease had progressed and now he'd gotten the diagnosis of FTD so the family came forward in the

hopes of bringing some attention to this devastating condition and maybe the hopes of bringing some light to it and some progress my heart goes out to the family and I applaud them in this effort and not only is Bruce Willis one of my favorite actors of all time but I even happen to look like him some people say so unfortunately though whenever something like this happens when a celebrity gets a diagnosis or there's a tension around a celebrity we get a few days or a few weeks of attention on the topic but by the time

this happens very often it's too late to really do something about it we're going to talk about the different things and there's still some things that may be able to help but we really want to understand that we wanna understand the principles and then do something about our lifestyle to reduce the chances we want to work much much harder at preventing these things because they're not all that different most degeneration has things in common so frontotemporal dementia refers to the area in the brain that is being affected so if we have the brain here then

the frontal lobe is the front half of it we put a little F here for frontal lobe then we have the parietal lobe which is up here we have the occipital lobe which is in the back and we have the temporal lobe down here so with Alzheimer's with the most common types of degeneration it affects mostly that temporal lobe and the occipital lobe so it's further back in the brain it does have some influence on the parietal and frontal but not so much it's mostly in the lower and back portion of the brain but with

fronto temporal now it affects the frontal and the temporal so with Alzheimer's the frontal lobe is spared longer but with frontotemporal it's one of the earliest areas that are being affected so Alzheimer's affects mostly the temporal lobe the lower and the posterior aspects and those areas are mostly concerned with memory so when you have Alzheimer's then it's the memory that's slipping but with the frontal temporal now it affects both and the frontal lobe has a little bit more to do the frontal lobe is our Executive Center it's our thinking it's our abstract thought problem solving

it is also the area that controls impulses it is also the area that controls motivation and it is also known as the motor Center the front of the brain is more about the motor output the area that makes things happen so when you speak for example that's the frontal lobe when you listen and understand speech that's more of the temporal and typically the frontal temporal hits people a little bit earlier in life for people under the age of 60 it is the most common form of dementia and part of that might be that because the

frontal lobe is affected we notice it sooner because it's not just a little bit of memory loss it's not just a little forgetfulness we have major deterioration in motor function and speech and so forth so what we're really talking about is improving the odds and we want to understand that there is a genetic component a strong genetic component to most diseases and there's also a lifestyle component to most diseases so in the case of something congenital that means you're born with it let's say that you're born blind you're born with too many fingers you have

a cleft palate you're missing a kidney that's congenital you're born with it it could be a genetic Defector it could be a developmental defect but either way it is 100 percent there right there's nothing you can do with a lifestyle to prevent it however there are things that you can do within a wide range to improve the quality of life and then there are other conditions like type 2 diabetes that while this has this very strong genetic component to it like some people could be 10 20 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than

someone else they have a predisposition the genetic link is very very weak because the lifestyle can convert can reverse up to 90 percent of these conditions there's virtually no one that is doomed to get type 2 diabetes and then there's these other conditions like dementia and cancer for example where the percentages fall somewhere in between maybe it's 50 50 maybe it's something else I'm not trying to pick a number I'm just trying to show you a concept that you might have a very strong genetic predisposition but it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone with that genetic

makeup gets it because there are still a lot of Lifestyle decisions lifestyle choices that you can make so what we're hoping for here is to create a delay and that delay might be 10 maybe 20 maybe 30 years of a delay and hopefully then you might get to the end of the life and you've delayed it long enough that you actually never get it but we don't know these all we're trying to do is to improve the odds and if we understand the variables if we understand a little bit more about how the brain works

and what it needs then we can figure out what speeds up the degeneration what slows it down and now we have a way of influencing and improving the odds the main characteristic of dementia is that it is a degenerative disease what does that mean it simply means that some things that used to work don't work anymore or don't work to the same degree anymore so in the body we have about 40 trillion cells and out of those we have a hundred billion brain cells but brain cells are unique in that they make connections to other

cells so each brain cell has about five to ten thousand different connections called synapses so those are like little wires that connect and that is how the brain cells talk to each other that's how we create patterns that's how we learn things that's how we develop skills is by creating these neural networks so let's make it really basic if something used to work and it's not working let's try to answer the question of what is it that normally makes them work for as long as they do and the second question would be what is it

that makes them stop working what is it that interferes with their function and makes them degenerate brain cells are designed to live forever but in order to do that they need three things they need fuel they need something to make energy out of they need oxygen to burn that fuel and they need stimulation and we're going to talk about all these separately and then just for completeness we're not going to talk much about that today they also need some nutrients some building materials and some catalysts so one would be DHA that's the longest most complex

type of fish oil that is a structural component of the brain we also need some minerals as a catalyst and we need cholesterol as a building material and insulation but for this discussion we're going to focus on the top here just so that we understand the mechanisms and why the brain degenerates so the first two here that's the energy source and the second is the stimulation which is the reason for that brain cell to stick around so first of all the brain needs fuel and contrary to popular belief glucose is one of the fuels but

not the only fuel the other fuel the brain can use is ketones and when glucose is plentiful when we have lots of food and the glucose stays high for a long time then up to 100 percent of the fuel is provided by glucose the energy is provided by glucose however when there's the scarcity of glucose when we don't have food every day or every three hours when we go a little bit longer without food called fasting now the brain makes do with ketones we can break down fats we can have ketones as a byproduct of

that and up to 75 percent of the fuel for the brain can come from ketones now this is really really important because for most of human history we've had a mix of these two fuels sometimes we have plenty of food and sometimes we had not so much but in the last hundred years we've had so much food that glucose has never been scarce however historically ketones are more stable it's a more stable fuel source it is also anti-inflammatory it has anti-inflammatory signaling properties and glucose of course is the opposite it's pro-inflammatory when glucose goes high

but most importantly which we'll get to a little bit later is that ketones do not require insulin to get into the cells so ketones flow freely they're not affected by insulin resistance which we'll come back to the oxygen part is really simple we need to oxidize the fuel just like you're burning fire you're burning gas in your car you're burning wood on the fire you need oxygen if you choke off the oxygen then the fire goes out same thing in the body without enough oxygen we can't make energy we've got plenty of oxygen we can

make energy but the stimulation is the least understood good of all of this we tend to think in nutrition and biochemistry and so forth but stimulation is the key stimulation is the purpose and the reason for that cell to exist use it or lose it so muscles need tension if you use muscles on a regular basis if you work out if you put the muscles to use the body will make new muscles some fibers break down but then the body makes new ones but only if you use the muscles otherwise they will atrophy and go

away same thing with bones bones have the purpose of resisting gravity without gravity if we don't do weight-bearing exercise if we don't live in a field of gravity then there's no need for bones that's the biggest problem for astronauts you can maintain most of the cells and the organs in the body but without gravity the bone bones disappear and by the same token brain needs signals that's the purpose of the brain is to process signals it has an incoming amount of billions of bits of information every second and every one of those bits of information

is processed and responded to so if we don't get as many signals anymore then there's less reason for the brain to stick around so we need to understand where do most of those signals come from what what's involved with most of those signals and the thing that makes the brain stop working the thing that gets in the way is called interference and we'll talk about these but real quick if these are the thing if fuel and oxygen and stimulation is what makes the brain work if those are the needs then anything that causes a decrease

in fuel delivery oxygen availability or in the amount of stimulation is going to make the brain degenerate and deteriorate and there's also some huge metabolic factors that we want to include and that's inflammation oxidative stress and toxicity now what will decrease the availability of fuel and this is a shocker and surprise to most people because we're told that glucose is so important for the brain that it's the primary fuel source and yet high levels of glucose is the number one reason that the brain cannot get enough fuel so let's explain that part when glucose is

low when there's a starvation famine fasting now the glucose is low and the body burns more fat and ketones are available as a byproduct of the fat so when glucose is low the body has a backup fuel source so it's not a problem and this is how humans survived with the biggest brains in proportion to body size of any animal in history however when glucose is high when it's chronically High when we have a lot of things to eat all the time now we develop insulin resistance and it used to be thought even just a

few years ago a couple of decades ago we used to think that glucose could get into the brain without insulin and then they found out that even the brain needed insulin to get the fuel into the cell and the Brain can also become insulin resistant so even though glucose is a fuel source for the brain the brain is more likely to be starving when glucose is high than when it's low because when it's low we get this backup fuel source another reason for low fuel could be poor circulation because the fuel is in the bloodstream

and if we're not circulating enough if we have plaquing in the carotid arteries or if the heart is unable to pump enough blood on a consistent basis up to the brain now that could also be a problem and the reason I talk about stress related to every topic is that stress relates to every topic and whenever we are stressed we shift the blood flow the body re-prioritizes so our frontal lobe is our cognitive center it's our creative Center but when you're stressed you're not very creative if you're being chased by a tiger that's not the

time to be creative it's the time to use your instincts and just get out of there so whenever we have stress when we're in fight flight mode the brain shifts the blood from the front and further down into the brain stem so we're starving the frontal lobe for blood to some degree when we are stressed if we're low on oxygen that could again be poor circulation because just like the fuel it needs to follow the bloodstream and again of course that could be stress for the same reasons but here we have a few more reasons

it could also be a lung disease if we're not oxygenating the blood properly then there's no Oxygen to carry and also if the heart itself has a problem like congestive heart failure now for whatever reason the heart cannot pump enough blood it doesn't pump effectively enough to circulate the blood and get consistent supply to the brain we can also have something called anemia which means lack of blood if we just don't have enough of the red blood cells or red blood cells containing enough hemoglobin now we don't have the oxygen carrying capacity so now again

we're not getting enough oxygen to the end organ and number three is stimulation so let's first understand what stimulation is and what it does to the brain so we have receptors and a receptor is anything that takes one type of stimulus and converts it into a signal so we have our five senses for starters we have Vision hearing smell taste and touch so when you look at something you have photoreceptors that take photons and they've been stimulated and then they turn that into an electrical signal the hearing we have a membrane that that picks up

vibrations in the air they turn that into an electric signal same thing with taste and smell whenever you touch something the reason you can feel it is that there's a receptor that takes that deformation of the skin of the tissue creates an electric signal so receptors are different but they convert a stimulus into a signal so even though we usually just talk about touch as one of the five senses it's a kind of deformation if you want to call it and that would include then pressure and vibration and temperature the ability to sense hot and

cold and just different receptors and depending on where they end up we perceive all these different senses but also part of this deformation of the change in shape is stretch receptors and mechanoreceptors so when you move a limb when you move a body part you you have muscles that get stretched and that shortened you have muscle spindle cells that send electrical signals to the brain you have tendons that stretch a little bit that get certain tension on it and you have joints with mechanoreceptors that sense a change in position and here's why I'm making a

big deal out of that because this movement these receptors these sensors that translate movement account for 90 percent of all the stimulation that the brain receives and remember muscles need tension bones need gravity and the Brain needs signals so without these signals the brain degenerates it's the juice that keeps the brain alive and ninety percent of them come from movement and then there's also thought and thought very often translates to emotion and we have different no neurotransmitters and these neurotransmitters in turn fit into receptors and create different signals so we create signals with our senses

with our movements with our thoughts and our emotions so here are the things that can account for a lower degree of stimulation so obviously a sedentary lifestyle would reduce the amount of signals but also skills whenever you learn a new skill then you have to create additional wiring in your brain and this additional wiring the complexity of that wiring creates more stability and these brain cells are going to have an increased probability of stimulating each other if they are more interconnected if you are monolingual meaning you speak one language rather than two or three or

four then you're gonna have a lesser complexity of your neural network so picking up an extra language or two can dramatically improve the complexity in your wiring and the stability and health of your brain but it could also be a lack of Joy if we don't feel good if we don't have a purpose if we don't get a lot of stimulation emotional stimulation like if we have a lack of a social network if we don't interact with people if we don't have very many hobbies if we just work and come home sit in the sofa

there is less Variety in life if we don't feel like we have a purpose that reflects on our level of Joy so here's where we need to understand the difference between a brain cell's strength and its interconnectedness because so often we hear that you should stay active you should go out with friends you should do crossword puzzles and all of those things are good but here's how you want to think about it that if you have a brain cell then it has all these different spikes where it can make connections and then it has a

cell a nucleus so a brain cell just like a muscle it can be big and strong it can have a high metabolic threshold it can have a large work capacity just like a muscle if it's healthy if it's gotten the fuel and the oxygen and the stimulation consistently we have a nice big fat strong brain cell but if we if the brain has been suffering in those regards and it has not been stimulated now we have a little wimpy brain cell just like we have a big muscle versus a small muscle so this weaker brain

cell would have a lower threshold a lower work capacity so if we want to improve on that we want to juice up the brain cell we want to pump some life into it and what's the way to do that is exercise okay we want to get the hormones going we want to get some intense exercise large volumes of exercise and movement because that's going to pump it up but the other aspect is called interconnectedness so now we're talking about how many connections how many synapses is this brain cell making so on average they have five

to ten thousand so brain cell with ten thousand synapses and connections it is more well connected it has a greater interconnectedness it's going to be stimulated more by other brain cells because it has more connections whereas something with only a few connections is not going to be as strong and stable a brain cell so you use the exercise the large volume of signals to Pump It Up but then you use all the other things like crossword puzzles and Bridge and hobbies and skills to increase the number of connections and the complexity so please don't miss

that piece usually when they tell you to stay active they're usually just talking about cognitive activities which will increase the number of synapses but that doesn't help much if you have a skinny and weak and depleted brain cell and then we have the metabolic factors which are inflammation oxidative stress and toxicity and as I always bring it up stress is involved with everything and stress does cause inflammation as well and beyond that the two most important factors are sugar and insulin resistance because they're strongly involved with all three of these factors something most people don't

pay enough at attention to are the processed plant oils these are the so-called healthy vegetable oils that we're told to eat because we have this phobia of saturated fat saturated fat is very safe because it's stable it doesn't oxidize very much whereas these plant oils are polyunsaturated and in the processing of these oils they are subjected to incredible oxidative stress they're some of the worst foods on the planet so just because they tell us that they're plant-based and healthy doesn't make it so and then we have in the aspect of toxicity we have pesticides and

metals and chemical exposure so there's dozens and dozens of common metals and there's thousands of different chemicals that can be involved and here's how you want to think about that but think of it as your breaker box at home your electric panel but instead of just a few dozen circuit breakers you have a hundred billion circuit breakers and they're connected to ten thousand other each one is connected to ten thousand other circuit breakers and every time that you get a short circuit then the body has to reroute the body has to create a workaround and

the brain is much better at that because your your electric box won't do that by itself but your brain will make the attempt however everywhere that you have these foreign chemicals especially when it comes to brain especially Metals then they can create one of these short circuits and I've never seen a neurological problem that didn't have a mental involvement and it doesn't have to mean that on a blood test or a hair sample or a urine test that your levels are higher than anybody else's it just means that for you those short circuits are affecting

something critical so what are some things that you can do about this well first of all I really really urge you that when it comes to to the brain you want to change before you have the symptoms or very very early when you have the symptoms because in a lot of conditions you can go quite far and still reverse it that's not true about the brain the brain cells even though we have some capacity to rewire and regenerate it's not nearly as capable of regeneration as other organs so diabetes for example type 2 diabetes you

can be quite far gone in your 70s and still reverse it that is not true for dementia so you want to make these changes before there is a problem and that's why we talk about these principles in these videos and what you'll find if you watch a hundred videos is that the solutions are remarkably similar because there are certain things the body needs and there's certain things that interfere so the first thing I would cut out is sugar eliminate it completely all added sugar should be gone and if you're insulin resistant then don't just cut

out the added sugar cut out all natural sugars and you also want to minimize your carbohydrates if this was me or someone that I know then I would tell them first thing you want to do is keto a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting and why is that because a ketogenic diet will provide ketones which is an alternative fuel for the brain so if your brain is starving because your glucose is high all you're feeding it is carbohydrate but it can't get into the brain if you can develop some ketones they can go straight in and

start fueling that brain and even in some cases of mild to moderate dementia that can make a huge difference the other part is intermittent fasting which is as powerful or even more powerful because intermittent fasting will generate ketones but intermittent fasting also will generate growth hormone and something called bdnf brain derived neurotrophic factor and these are the two hormones that promote neuroplasticity so your ability to rewire the brain depends on these hormones your ability to make new synapses and circumvent a problem depends on those two hormones and one of the most powerful ways to generate

that is intermittent fasting now here's the problem when we start talking about keto is that everyone out there knows someone who knows someone who heard someone say or read a scientific paper that high fat is bad and that high fat creates causes insulin resistance now here's the truth of the matter so insulin resistance is caused by what's called a fuel overload [Music] and there are two types of fuel it there is fat and there is carbohydrate so the average person in America they have learned to eat less fats they're down to about 35 percent fat

most of it is horrible quality fat processed plant oils oxidized fried oils Etc and they're eating about 45 percent of their calories from carbohydrate almost half of that is added sugar about 22 percent in the average diet so they realize that's not a great diet so they tell people to eat even less fat and even more carbs but a higher quality but then when they do research on what they call a high fat diet here's what they do they raise the fat to 45 percent and they lower the carbs to 35 percent and we're assuming

here the protein is about 20 percent so it could be 15 could be 20 but just to keep the the number simple so what they've done now is they've raised the fat and they call this a high fat diet but what they don't realize is this still is a high carb diet and the absolute worst thing that you can do to create a fuel overload is to have high fat and high carb at the same time there is a small percentage of people who have success with high carb and really really low fat because they

can reduce the fuel overload but it's because they don't do both of them high at the same time but it's much much easier to reduce the fuel overload if you increase the fat dramatically and lower the carbs dramatically so this is high fat high carb if you want to do a true high fat diet you want to go to at least 70 percent fat and 10 percent carbohydrate none of which should be added sugar so at this level now what's happening is you're reducing the carbs low enough that you're going to reverse insulin resistance you're

going to dramatically reduce the amount of insulin released and secreted to handle the carb load so probably eighty percent of people will get a dramatic Improvement on that level and if you don't then you take it a little bit further and you go ketogenic which is about 75 fat 5 carbohydrate so realize what they call a high fat diet is not a high fat diet it is a high fat high carb diet it is one of the absolute worst things that you can do if you get the carbs low enough it's going to work beautifully

and if you don't believe me get some blood work and try it measure your triglycerides and your glucose and your insulin and you'll find that this is what's going to reverse the condition you also want to eliminate all processed plant oils and you want to replace them with natural fats and those are fats that are naturally occurring in meat nuts fish cheese Etc and if you add fat you want to make them as natural as possible which means things like butter and olive oil and coconut oil those are saturated or mono unsaturated and they're very

stable and undamaged and then you want to include some exercise you want to do as much as you can without exhausting your body so things like walking are great because you can do them for hours every day you can do things like high intensity interval training because that is the thing next to fasting intermittent fasting that produces the highest amount of these hormones that help neuroplasticity that helps you make new brain tissue and new brain connections you could do things like yoga or Pilates you can lift weights all of those are fantastic you can take

on or you can add various Hobbies you can read books and books are vastly different than watching a video when you're reading a book you're involving different areas of the brain much more precisely much more actively than when you're watching a movie you can learn a different language that would increase the complexity as well or you can join a club you can volunteer in an organization just start doing more things another thing to help organize your brain and promote brain plasticity is called meditation and because meditation is a little challenging if you don't have the

patience or skill for it there is a tool that we use in the office called brain tap I'll put some information down below if you want to check that out as well it's like a guided assisted meditation that requires no skill and even if you fall asleep during a session it still works now here's the problem depending on how far progressed the disease is there are some things on here that you could do and others that would be a challenge so in the case of Bruce Willis for example they said that he had Aphasia to

the point where he stopped his acting career little under a year ago and now the disease has progressed so I don't know anything about him other than those statements that they made but obviously it wouldn't be possible for him to change before the symptoms because they're already there it would be rather difficult to make high intensity interval training or things like yoga because they require a lot of motivation and focus things that go missing when the frontal lobe degenerates same thing with Pilates and weights to the degree that you can't do that it would be

great but there may be a limit in how much you can perform also with Hobbies books and languages there may be some hobbies that are easier than others some that you can still perform whereas books and picking up a language might be more difficult but again everyone is different so we have to look at these things and maybe add to the list and and figure out things that we can do and I would think that meditation would be very difficult because meditation requires very very strict Focus it's about sitting down and controlling your thoughts so

that's very very much involvement of the frontal lobe but the things that you could do that would be still very powerful there's no way of telling if it could create an improvement but there's a very good chance that it might light or at the very least that it could slow down the progression and these would be things like decreasing the sugar like starting keto and intermittent fasting to cut out all processed plant oils and to promote more brain plasticity and kind of give the brain a little bit of fitness workout I believe that the brain

tap will be a fantastic tool and if you have something that you really like to get done in the face of overwhelming odds maybe that's just the time that you want to go and if you want to dig a little deeper and really understand some of the markers that I talked about in this video I've created a blood work course it has over 15 hours of recorded materials it's divided into nine modules with various different topics and while not everything can be explained in blood work it will give you a lot of information to understand

what's really going on especially metabolically and help you really take charge and make some changes in your lifestyle if you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one and if you truly want to master Health by understanding how your body really works make sure you subscribe hit that Bell and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video