welcome to this talk and I'm pleased very pleased today to welcome Patrick Holford who is the uh chief executive and I think uh probably founder and chief scientist of food for the brain uh Patrick welcome and do correct me on anything I've got wrong no you're you're on the money so far thank you thank you for having me yeah it's pleasure we've had some preliminary chats and I'm just there some this is this is really good stuff listen to this video it's going to be really interesting I'm sure now dementia is is feared by many
people I mean I've recently looked after my own father who died with dementia um there's probably not um a person watching this video who hasn't had a family member or a close friend that have seen with dementia and there's a lot of fear around dementia but the consensus now that you're putting forward and by the way congratulations on reaching the front page of caducus um which is uh where I got some of these initial thinking from um depression and dementia and and the links between these is very interesting but if we start off with dementia
and nutrition MH well um and you're bringing together a lot of synthesis on this Patrick yeah I mean I think the first to actually understand and there's no controversy about it it's just true is that uh 2third of dementia's Alzheimer's which is a shrinking of a central part of the brain and this is not a natural part of the aging process this does not need to occur in just the same way that the average woman in the EU will spend 14 years unable to climb 10 steps that's the statistic that's not a natural part of
the aging process that's you know that is due to a lack of exercise and our brain is the same We Are The Architects of our brain's future health you do not need to get Alzheimer's there are uh less than 1% of cases caused by causative genes and if you have those things will happen but for 99% % of us Alzheimer's is preventable dementia um is preventable and in relation to nutrition as with so many diseases there are in essence four what I call the horsemen of the mental health apocalypse one is sugar the other is
brain fat so we can dig into each of these the third is to do with B vitamins especially B12 very important and the fourth are antioxidants and that's both smoking and pollution on the bad side and fruit and veg vitamin C Etc on the good side and those are the four biological drivers of the breakdown and brain function that ultimately leads to dementia so we're really talking about a disease of of Western uh hesitate to use the term civilization um the fact that we've got all these ultr processed foods readily available largely but also it's
not just that I mean for example if you look at um you know who data on fish consumption you can actually predict a country's rate of depression uh suicide and dementia based on its Seafood consumption so um you know never mind Western Civilization people who lived sort of in the middle of India and had no access to fish and maybe their religion was such that they would never eat it um they do actually have more brain degeneration and by the way the brain I I was talking to the wonderful Professor Michael Crawford now this is
something fundamental because in the 70s he analyzed the fatty acids in different animals and their organs liver heart brain Etc and they vary in the liver massively depending on what they eat except in the brain of every single animal um there are two fatty acids one is omega-3 DHA which is a marine food and the other is omega-6 arachadonic acid which is comes ultimately from Plants there is not a single brain from a mouse to an elephant to a dolphin to a human to a lion to a tiger to a cat to a dog that
is not those two fatty acids in other words what he discovered was that the the process of the development of the brain which originally happened in the ocean requires these two fundamental pieces you know they're just they' got to be there you cannot have brains neurons Etc without which is really quite extraordinary and all that varies is the size of the brain so yes what we're seeing now this massive increase in invention Alzheimer's is a function of modern living too much sugar not not eating fruit and veg and I I mean the terrible truth you
know when I was growing up everyone had fish on Friday you know I was just you had fish on Friday at school you had fish on Friday and of course for our parents I mean a little bit before it was cod liver oil you know at school everyone had that nowadays there are many kids many many kids who have no fish no omega-3 have no control of their emotional uh you can't control emotions if you have no omega-3 so these kids who are flying off the handle having massive Hissy Fits um are often it's a
function of lack of Omega-3 and now what we've learned and it's not really surprising since the brain is 60% fat when you take out the water that having a lack of Omega-3 uh predicts your risk for dementia I mean actually the omega-3 index which is a measure we do from Blood of EPA and DHA which are the really important Omega-3s that you get in fish percentage of them in your red blood cell membranes not floating around but actually bound into the m M braan which is what we need that will predict how big your brain
is I mean the density of the brain it literally predicts the the the density of your brain plus your cognitive powers and your future risk of getting dementia I mean it's it's that linear Patrick I'm I'm mid 60s now is it too late for me to change no not at all we just had a man actually I mean it's a tragic story but this is what we want to avoid and his wife Dorothy kept finding him his name is Allan nickname know in different rooms uh at night because he couldn't find the L in his
own home he he was a computer programmer he couldn't turn his computer on or off he couldn't conceive of tomorrow he he he was a gardener he couldn't begin to plant plant his garden anyway he was diagnosed with mixed dementia which by the way is nearly always Alzheimer's which is 62% of dementia and Vascular which is 177% of dementia so poor supply of nutrients to the brain oxygen and so on and um you know she said what do we do and they said nothing and he went on to our website food forth brain. org did
the free test which also then has a questionnaire which works out what your risk is and then his wife um you know supported him in making all the changes like going to bed an hour earlier sleep is important he started to take omega-3 fish oils plus a B vitamin supplement he cut out the sugar he actually went ketogenic cuz you can the brain cells run on ketones made from fat 5 days a week various other things he's joined a Morris dancing group I'm not entirely sure if that's good view or not um but he's literally
doubled his cognitive function score which was in the dementia Zone and reduced his risk his future risk if you're doing everything wrong on our questionnaire you score 100% if you're doing everything right you score 0% you want to get below 30% he was up in the top 50s he's now in the low 30s he has planted his entire Spring Garden he's back on the computer doing emails and this is a man with diagnosed mixed dementia so no there's hope for you yet John good I'm thank you I'm very pleased to hear it let's carry on
with the with the the fats spit a bit if we can uh Patrick um uh after our conversation I went to a local supermarket other supermarkets are available I have no interest in this yes um ma is that is that going to be quite useful for me it's absolutely excellent uh we say smash it s for salmon M for mackerel a for Anis s for sardines and H for Herring or Kipper so and and I don't know the story for how we discovered all this is quite interesting because on the one hand we had Michael
Crawford on the other hand we had Professor Hugh Sinclair and Professor Hugh Sinclair uh noticed something quite interesting um because basically for every disease that exists there's a country that doesn't have a and the Inuit um have heart disease so he went and lived with the in and he thought it was their diet so he shipped their diet of seal meat back to Cambridge University where he ate literally exactly what they ate seal moo and he proved that omega-3 was the active ingredient that was good for his heart and now we know it's good for
the brain and what he basically worked out was the Cold Water Plankton has the basic omega-3 which you also get in cheer seeds walnuts and other such things which is good uh the little fish e eat that and then the fish with teeth like the mackerel um eat the the little fish and then the seals eat the fish with teeth and this is how we learned if you want to have a healthy heart and a healthy brain you eat Eskimos indeed that was a joke by the way yes but seals would be a reasonable thing
to eat but uh we won't have it it is we don't no seal oil is the highest seal oil seal oil is the highest source and caviar is the is actually even better than seal oil so oh I'll be okay then that's fine You' be fine just have caveat but you know I've never even tasted it but yeah mackerel is good mackerel is we make a ker you know with mackerel I mean there's s things you can do and there's a sardine Pat my book is full of you know very very simple things that you
can do with fish yeah am I right in thinking it's not the fish that synthesiz the useful Omega-3s it's it's the Marine phytoplankton and then it just concentrates up the up the food chain is that is that correct that's absolutely true and I'll tell you something really extraordinary uh if you think about it now that we know that every single brain of every single animal is omega-3 DHA and there's something special about DHA it's actually um it converts solar photons into a electricity and it was that that was a billion years ago some little organism
we think the dof flatulate effectively Incorporated this fat got an electric shock and it was to sort of twitched towards food and it was the beginning of the whole process of that was quite extraordinary and I remember and the the dino Flaga is a little bit like an eye cell I remember asking Michael Crawford is the eye an extension of the brain he said no the brain is an extension of the eye because the eye is absolutely totally drenched in DHA omega-3 and vitamin A and at the age of 94 next month he's worked out
something no one ever knew which is how the energy that hits your eye the photons turns into the image that you are seeing accurately in color and it requires quantum physics and a lot of DHA so DHA is not like a sideline every single thought feeling um Vision hearing is going through this network of DHA it's it's um you know it's it's so key so one of the questions that came up you may or may not know that the dolphin was the last animal to leave the the land so to fully commit to the sea
has every single bone we have in our hands and arms in its flippers and in fetal Evolution it's got legs and arms and so it it decided to leave the land uh completely as did Wales and so on so one of the questions was well now they're all in the sea um has that brain ratio omega-3 omega-6 changed omega-3 Marine Foods omega-6 plant foods and the answer is it hasn't and what we've learned is the migratory Roots uh of Wales for example are exactly to go to the hot Waters where the algae and the Plankton
have omega 6 and back to the cold Waters where the alga and Plankton have omega-3 that's that's how it works it's extraordinary amazing to totally amazing now vegetarians watching what's the advice I mean can can we um I think you can get preparations now where there is the Marine phyto planktons the oils extracted directly from the vegetarian sources are they available what's happened and this isn't genetic modification by the way is that there are certain species of algae that actually do make DHA and um certain big companies um have exploited that and have farmed these
specific algae to produce DHA so you can go into a health food shop and get a vegan DHA it's the same thing so it's just as good uh so I I know a lot of vegans who actually sort of cross the line and they will supplement fish oils but they don't want to eat fish which is also fine so you can do it vegan but you're in slightly Muddy Waters because I don't want to give the impression that fish is just Omega-3s a lot more than that um it's got things called phospholipids also rich in
eggs and it's got vitamin D and it's got B12 and it's got minerals like selenium zinc and so on so you get a lot more in a piece of fish than you do in just an omega-3 fish oil and really we could not have become human without a diet that was both marine food and plant food there is there is no way we could have gone from the brain size of a chimp which is 350 G which has stayed the same 6 and a half million years ago to a peak of close to 1700 gram
about 20 30,000 years ago and this is all done on skull size so you look at homo sapian skull size and the Shocker John is that today the average brain size is 1,330 G so we have lost 20% of our brain size in the last 20,000 years and it probably is around the time that we moved into Agriculture and we stopped being if you like hunter gatherers along the estras the coast the rivers and so on which of course is the easiest food I mean you don't have to go hunting for animals when you know
population is very small I mean where you are up in Scotland or where I am down in Wales I mean you just walk along your esteras and they'd be full of muscle and oysters and crabs and The Rock pools would catch little fish I mean you literally scoop them up and eat them you don't need to go you know hunting for deer which have a terribly annoying habit of running away when you get close so much more I want to talk about on that but let let's go on uh to uh B vitamins if we
can please because I want to do a bit of a pray first of all yeah I mean a very good context for this is that actually what your brain has made out of um is those omega-3 DHA which is bound to something called the phos fpid and um if we call this is the fat the fatty bit the fatty cell membrane really uh yeah that's what the membrane is made out of that's what all your all the talking in your brain is happening through this membrane and the phospholipid holds the DHA in place and um
so the phosph the phospholipid is like a nail and the DHA is like the wood you know the timber but the putting of those two together requires a process called methylation which is to do with B vitamins now the real big breakthrough was back in the early 2000s uh Professor David Smith who was the second in charge of Oxford Medical School professor of pharmacology I mean literally the man who made Oxford one of the leading pharmacology departments in the world um they had found out what Alzheimer's was which was a degeneration of the central part
of the brain they had developed a brain scan for it which is now used globally to diagnose Alzheimer's so you know these are the top scientists they found a high level of something called homosysteine homosysteine um in in Alzheimer's brains and homosysteine is only um produced in the body if you lack B vitamins so it's it's a measure of of of dysfunction in relation to B vitamins B it's a measure of vitamin B deficiency really it is really it's a functional measure B6 B12 and folate because you know we have a billion methylation reactions every
two seconds it's how the body works like we've heard about genes you know they're not set in stone you can up regulate down regulate dim switch up you know it's why half of women with the bracket Gene get breast cancer the other half don't you can you can manipulate genes through epigenetics the environment that's done by methylation and methylation depends on B6 B12 folate so if you're not doing methylation your homos is high you definitely are not getting enough B vitamins for you so so what he then did was to take take a group of
almost 300 people with pre-dementia which we call Mild cognitive impairment uh give half of them B vamin half of them Placebo measure the rate of brain shrinkage over the following year and the first thing he found in the placebo group is the higher the homosysteine the greater was the rate of brain shrinkage so homosysteine predicts the rate at which your brain will shrink which is what dementia is in the half they got the B vitamins uh it less than or more than half the rate of brain shrinkage which is a phenomenal result and you know
best best study no criticism perfect study but then a few years later um and I'll tell you my conversation with him in a minute because it's critical on how we prevent Alzheimer's a few years later they were thinking about the importance of Omega-3 and went back to the original blood samples and uh split the group into the third who had the lowest omega-3 in their blood and the third who had the highest didn't give omega-3 and what they found was the B vitamins had no beneficial effect at all in the third with the low omega-3
um but in the third with a high omega-3 they got 73% less brain shrinkage and a third ended the year with no clinical dementia rating in other words the brain shrinkage fell to that that you see in normal older people who have no cognitive decline and 30% of them had no clinical dementia rating in other words they could not be diagnosed with dementia and what really annoys me as we see Charities out there saying we exist for a cure and a cure is defined as no more abnormal brain shrinkage and no more symptoms and that's
exactly what they showed and to put it into context the latest anti-id drug that hit the front pages the beginning of the end of Alzheimer's the Breakthrough we've been waiting for and all that other hyperball actually produced 20% increased brain shrinkage in the drug group versus placebo and I'm telling you here in Immaculate study 73% less brain shrinkage in the same period of time using the same measures exactly I think I can work this one out myself it must be simple you have to give the vitamin B's and the Omega-3s together exactly and there have
been four studies now like what happened in Sweden they given a whole lot of Omega-3 to people with Alzheimer's didn't work so they went back to their blood samples split them into thirds and found the third with the lowest home ayine above 10 you have brain shrinkage uh or 11 um and by the way that's half of everyone over 65 so I'm 66 most people my age have a level of homosysteine which is already causing brain shrinkage they may not yet have cognitive decline but they are actually declining behind the scenes that's the point and
anyway in the Swedish study uh they found the same thing high homosysteine no benefit of Omega-3 low homosysteine a massive benefit and that's been replicated in Holland in Sweden in China and the UK so we now have a 100% this is quite rare in science there are some studies on omega-3 that haven't worked there are some studies on B vitamins that haven't worked but there is not a single Le study factoring in both that haven't produced a very very large statistically significant effect it's really strange I can sit here in my back room and I've
seem to have worked it out but all these brilliant scientists in the pharmaceutical industry don't seem to have realized it's really really very strange but uh and here's the other way we probably save that for another video well yeah I mean here's the weird thing because you know we're men of science so we look at the studies and what we like ideally is metaanalyses of randomized control trials so I'm looking for the best systematic review metaanalysis which was done in China by a man called Professor gint taiu who heads the direct The Institute of Neurology
at Fudan University which B like Oxford University for China and uh it was 396 studies 156 randomized control trials and it grades all the prevention factors and number one I mean literally number one level a evidence it says the most promising treatment is homocystine luring with B vitamins and then I go to the National Institute of Health which is the US you know top place and they did a review and uh it's called the population attributable risk what percentage of the risk is attributed to whatever 22% was to be vitamin homine and 22% to Seafood
um omega-3 and that was before they knew about the combination yeah so you know if the DHA is the Timber and the phospholipid is the nail the the B vitamins are the hammer and if you get all those right we haven't spoken about sugar yet um you have already at the very least cut your wrist by a third amazing let's go on to I do want to come back to these things but uh for now let's go on to sugars please well in a sense what we've been talking about here is the structure of your
brain and you got to understand that you are the architect of your own brain and what you take in literally changes the structure of your brain um but then those brain cells they got to work um and to work they need fuel and uh fuel is either glucose or ketones the brain cells are so tightly packed together they have to have five star fuel muscle cells can burn fatty acids brain cells can't they have to have either pure glucose or pure ketones which are not fat not protein not carbohydrate they're ketones they're a fuel and
they're made in the liver from fat and the interesting thing is if you give a neuron a brain cell the choice they slightly prefer Keats so they will run on either and by the way since we were getting a little bit Arctic earlier on you know with the whales and the eskimos um an emperor penguin will sit um up there in somewhere on the ice for 3 months not eating um turning their body fat into ketones in the liver to power their brain so if we fast we make ketones some people do a ketogenic diet
where they have no carbohydrates so um here is the sort of irony if you eat too much sugar uh year on year on year you make more and more insulin because insulin is the hormone that sends the sugar into your brain cells it's a transporter and as soon as you have more sugar than you need the insulin will store the excess as fat so we call insulin the fat storing hormone and the more insulin you make the more deaf you become to it it's bit like if you listen to heavy metal all the time you
get deaf and you have to turn the volume up so you make even more insulin and that is called insulin resistance So eventually the effect of eating too much sugar is your brain cells are starved of glucose they're starved of sugar they're actually Sugar deprived um that's what happens and then you get a sort of energy gap and this is experienced as brain fog you know I can't concentrate can't quite remember that person's name can't remember where my keys are and so on and one of our scientists a brilliant man Professor Steven canine from Canada
um he did a very simple thing because we we've learned something really interesting you hear a lot of sort of um lyrical talk about coconut oil and it turns out that within coconut oil there is a type of fat which I'll just call C8 because that's it's prlic acid triglyceride whatever but it's eight carbons with C8 and that is what we make ketones from so we and Steven Kain have been taking the C8 out of coconut oil and it becomes a sort of very very light clear oil you know it's sort of watery but oily
tasteless tiny hint of coconut and he gave people with predementia two tablespoons and measured uh energy in their brain and their brains came back to life I mean literally they were making 230% more energy from ketones than before didn't change the glucose it's a bit like your brain cells are like a hybrid car they can run on petrol or electric and the petrol engine the sugar engine is all gunked up can't work and then you deliver some electricity and they come back to life so he was able to improve people's cognition improve their brain energy
by filling the energy gap with a couple of tablespoons of this CA oil so you know this is the the fuel supply you know some people not not wrongly but a bit you know monopolar say isn't demena just type three diabetes and the answer is you can definitely get dementia because you have a blood sugar problem and the risk if you're diabetic is much much higher but it's not the only thing um that's the fuel supply and of course whenever the brain is making so much energy I mean in babies by the way it's 75%
of all the energy um is happening in the brain and whenever you're burning sugar for fuel um for energy you make oxidants they're like the exhaust fumes and and therefore the brain is exquisitely um in need of anti antioxidants which by the way is the fourth Horseman but that's why smoking increases risk pollution increases risk very interesting new study that pollution increases risk for dementia but not if your homosysteine is low because if your homy is low got enough B vitamins you can do methylation and methylation is how we detoxify so what we're starting to
do which of course is very anti you know conventional reduction science you know which says I've got you know one drug that has one effect and that's what you must do is we're starting to learn surprise surprise that the brain fats omega-3 also vitamin D we haven't spoken about that and the B vitamins and the sugar and the fruit and veg and antioxidants they all have an effect and and and when you sort of reverse engineer all this you get to the point where we realize the modern man is doing exactly what is necessary to
completely mess up their brain health mhm so it's it's it's actually the insulin resistance that's the problem yes depriving the brain cells of yes glucose it's the issue yeah and and when you start to the interesting thing is that when you start to you know go a bit more ketogenic like Nodge the guy I mentioned earlier he takes two tablespoons of CI oil every day it's a little bit like putting your car in for a service um in the sense that that uh it it get it repairs so it reverses insulin than resistance so if
you give your sugar engine a break for a period of time um it can actually reverse insulin resistance I mean I got slaughtered back in whenever it was the 1990s when I went on TV and said type 2 diabetes is reversible and actually on prime time TV they gave me a diabetic I said I need six weeks and at the end of 6 weeks they didn't have diabetes so the point is it is reversible sadly Alzheimer's while while I've already given you a case of someone getting better truly Alzheimer's is holes in the brain so
you know I mean I learned it was a progressive irreversible impairment of intellectual function when I was 18 I think when you get the holes in the brain I mean people don't realize this office of national statistics in in the UK 2022 it's the number one killer it's the number one fear it's the number one Health cost and actually these brain disorders cost more than all of cancer and heart disas combined and a study in April in uh the lanet neurology said 43% of the world's population 3.4 billion people have disability due to brain neurological
diseases so it's like right up there and we know that this massive escalation we've seen a four-fold increase in autism for example in the last you know decade or so it's not genes you know because the genes are the same it has to be environment and of course the most direct environment that we have control over um is what we put in our mouth amazing more to do on that as well let's go on to antioxidants Patrick please yeah so here you imagine your brain is generating all this energy it's making all these exhaust fumes
and it's it's those oxygen that age us and that is why uh you know with all our wonderful good practices John uh our ages our skin is not quite you know as uh you know as it used to be you know these things happen so oxidation is a is a reality and I mean what I started to realize and this maybe sort of shows you the importance of it is that in order to burn glucose you have to generate oxidants and and they kill you in the end vitamin C ascorbic acid um is four steps
away from glucose every single animal with very very few exceptions and we are one of them makes vitamin C every single plant with no exception makes vitamin C um from fructose glucose for the animals fructose for the plants so in other words I believe that we could never have become an oxygen-based life form generating energy from glucose without simultaneously having vitamin C as an antioxidant now we'll come on to why we don't make it perhaps in a minute but the point is when you eat fruits when you eat vegetables all those brightly colored Foods you're
getting antioxidants and in studies where they add up the total antioxidant intake of people those in the top third of antioxidant intake herbs spices fruits veg and so on have their risk of dementia so we spoke about structure B vitamins omegas phospholipids now we've got function sugar and ke turns now we've got the protection um and obviously smoking is a you know a trillion oxidants with every puff of cigarette smoke major risk factor so when you get all those antioxidants in it it makes a phenomenal difference so that's the fourth question really vitamin C and
eer rainbow yeah vitamin C and eer rainbow and I would say vitamin C supplements for the very simple reason that we just don't make it uh primates have lost the ability to make vitamin C as has the guinea pig which is why the guinea pig is the experimental animal of choice it has the same defect as us I didn't know that didn't know that and then the other species that don't make it are are bats and someone asked me a very good question the other day it's rare we get good questions but the question was
if bats don't make vitamin C why aren't they you know dying from covid you know and the answer is that they're the only flying mammal and when they fly their heart rate goes up to 1,000 beats a minute their temperature can increase by up to two degrees and it's basically interval training they have such a strong cardiovascular respiratory system that um just respiratory cold you know no big deal so bats can carry it but they can't um die from it and a lovely example of this not far from you in Newcastle a few month ago
was a study that found that cats got the same variant of covid as their owners um none of them died because they make vitamin C you know so lonus sping who was actually you know two Nobel prizes 48 phds genius chemist um I when Einstein was asked are you a genius he said if you want a genius it's Li's Pauling and it was lonus Pauling who was the patron of my Institute for Optimum Nutrition which started the old profession of nutritional therapy um he he did something incredibly obvious he said if animals don't get you
know who make vinia really very immune to viruses and cancer um and heart disease uh he he said how much vitamin C does a goat make you know when exposed to a virus or or a cow or a dog whatever and he works out that we would have to supplement a gram which is about 22 Supermarket oranges an hour to get the blood level to the same as an animal who is exposed to a virus so that was his logic and his thinking and we do know that it's incredibly effective so the long and short
of that story is that I want to eat my fruit and veg and herbs and spices oregano is really good I grow it I eat blueberries and all that sort of stuff um but I can't get enough vitamin C because I'm actually part of those species that lost the ability to make it so I'm going to supplement one or two grams a day and a gorilla will eat 4 and a half grams a day and every monkey uh will eat about 2 gr a day in their tropical jungle environment but unfortunately in Wales we don't
have a tropical jungle so I'm going to supplement it just say something about vitamin good studies on vitamin C supplementation lowering Dimension yeah just say say something about vitamin D uh Patrick please well um if your vitamin D level is low you increase your risk of cognitive decline by 17 times and if it's high you reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by four times and in studies where people supplement vitamin C those who supplement versus not uh vitamin D vitamin D vitamin D yeah and um reduce their Risk by um a third and actually these were
sort of medical studies where they were giving people I mean we don't know the exact dose because it was sort of pulling it but probably 3,000 units a day so so um you know it's it's the amount that you and I if we study the science will say what we need in the winter CU something very simple which um many people don't know is as soon as your Shadow is longer than the length of your body the angle of the sun is insufficient for you to produce Vitamin D from the action of sunlight on cholesterol
in the skin so I got busted actually 10 years ago by the advertising standards Agency for a campaign I ran saying everyone in the winter must supplement vitamin D and they have a rule number four or something which says you cannot imply that you can't get all the nutrients you need from a well-balanced diet you know it's the biggest lie in nutrition anyway I got busted and then when the government finally announced we have to supplement vitamin D in the winter I felt like reporting them to the ASA but I thought you know better to
light a candle than Rage Against the darkness which of course is the government guide now even though we could debate about the remarkably small dose that they are advising and they're ineffectiveness because only 4% of people actually take it so so one of the things I'm interested in in this project we're doing at food for the brain citizen science is is uh it's one thing knowing I mean you can basically denture proof yourself that's the bottom line we know how to do it so so the big question is how do you motivate people to actually
make the changes the government's ads on vitamin D are not very effective only 4% of people are doing it so even if they wanted to do prevention which they not even on that page yet um they they wouldn't know how to do it and that's what we're specializing in how to get people motivate them to make the changes that make a difference now I have done your test Patrick and I must say it's excellent and the software that goes with it is truly uh impressive so we encourage people to do this it is completely free
uh here is mine that I show some embarrassment to myself yeah let's see how you SC so I just logged in and did the test now to be fair you've got to give it probably a good half hour you got to really focus um it's not something you do casually you've got to give it 100% of your time to get a cognitive assessment turn I did mine turn your phone off get the cat up the room yep it's got to be 100% of your time but well well worth it because uh here is mine that
was my first test there and I'm afraid I'm kind of uh not quite as green as I'd like to be yeah so this cognitive function test is the actual it's not questionnaire it's an interactive test um you can't do well on it by cheating you can do badly because you are blind drunk or you know you answered the phone but you cannot do better so so you know that is it and as you can see we want you John in the green and uh you're in the sort of uh you know beginning of yellow you're
not in the red so you if you went for a and this by the way is the digital version of what you do at a memory Clinic uh if referred for you know concerns about denture and if you did it there they'd say you're fine because basically you know in medical language you're either sick or you're fine uh they say you're fine but actually you're drifting in the wrong direction so we need to do something about this are these I mean I've chosen to reveal mine to anyone who chooses to watch Patrick but normally would
this be completely confidential it is completely confidential and we've tested 430 I think actually 440,000 now because literally 8,000 people will or 7,000 will have done it this month it's the minute you the minute you you know enter your details it's anonymized so behind the scenes you are a number um your data you know your information isn't sold to anyone your name is not attached to it so you really don't need to have those fears and what all I had to put in was my name and my email I don't think I had to put
anything else in you do have to select the area where you're in geographically and what is really amazing and I kind of want to emphasize this is that the you've now become um a citizen scientist in the sense that you've shared your data anonymously and with hundreds of thousands of people and we hope to reach a million by the end of next year we can actually really look at what combination of behavior because the next part of this test is actually the questionnaire so this is the yard stick it says your cognitive function is is
here yes and I'm afraid mine your di is based on a questionnaire where if you're doing everything wrong you smoke you don't supplement vitamin D or vitamin C you you know you don't exercise you don't eat fruit and veg and so on your score is 100% that is your future risk if you like and if you're doing everything right your score is zero % and the most important thing is that this part is totally under your control so by changing what you eat and how you behave you can drive it down and you're sort of
in the mid Zone you know which yeah not great but it's sort of good in a way because the fact that your actual cognition is not perfect um if it was like that and you were hunt you were perfect on your behaviors then you know what do you do but the reality is you've got loads of room for improvement in your behaviors and then and and it breaks it down really nicely doesn't it here yeah yeah I mean you can be red orange yellow or green and you've got no Reds um so in other words
there are no zones where you're really really really doing badly um you've just got a number of yellows which you can turn green so it means a bit less sugar that's on the low carbs and GL a bit more brain fats maybe we have a blood test we'll tell you about so we can find out whether it is omega-3 or vitamin D or whatever uh vitamins again we have a very cool blood test to find out your homocysteine level you may need a bit a lot of older people don't absorb B12 well it's not necessarily
their eating it's it's their absorbing antioxidants you know you're in the right direction but a room for improvement healthy gut is fine bit more activity physically it's hard to believe that your mind is not you know completely totally active but uh you know uh I don't know and then there's yeah sleep and calm so sleep is how we repair the brain calm relates to stress so you know little tweaks really I mean you should be able within three months I would say um to get everything into the green and then your dementia Risk Index will
drop from 57 down to under 30% and then you have to be completely H completely honest I was maybe a little hard on myself but you have to be completely honest when you fill this out yeah otherwise there's no point yeah and I mean the point is that we you know if you get your score down um we have a graph I I won't show you it now but um it shows the gradual and this is an extraordinary thing that no one knows The Descent of cognitive function in relation to age of all the people
who've done it and it's actually dropping every year from the age of 18 um but it's only in most people when they get to like 80 they're hitting the danger zone in terms of cognitive function so the point is this isn't something you only do when you're 60 like us um you'll still get your cognition will be in the green I'm sure if you're 20 but you may still be doing the behaviors now what we found is the people who score in the green for demential Risk Index in other words are doing most things right
um their cognitive function still declines with age but it starts at such a higher place that it it predicts they will get Alzheimer's when they're about 290 yeah so I mean I'd like I'd like to push it a little Beyond 20 90 but I would I would accept that yeah so the point is if we move your line up so to speak you get to the point where you are dementia proofed yeah and that's and important to stress all this is completely free and it's great citizen science and nearly half a million people have done
it it's uh it's cool isn't it dude it it really is seriously cool and uh and it's just brilliant so like if you if you click on low carbs there yeah um it gives you yeah my yeah there yeah it actually tells you it gives you individualized information as to how to get your act together for for full disclosure there are two things that you have to pay for if you choose to and this is really the second part the first part in our research um which is headed by um a brilliant neuro neuroscientist uh
Dr Tommy wood associate assistant professor at University of Washington is we can now really really really start to look at what combination of behaviors are most protective and most harmful it's the sort of what but the next thing is you know you've done this which is great now how do I know you're going how do I know you're going to change your behaviors yeah so the how and we've employed a brilliant woman Dr Christina ctis who runs the applied Behavior change unit originally from UCL um if you pay 50 a year you can join something
called cognition which then emails you things to read things to watch things to do there are Zoom groups to join so you click on a domain maybe sugar and and and you kind of know I'm not saying you but one might know is a bit of a problem but you know you crave sugar and you now go through a month's worth of Education Zoom groups encouragements etc etc to change that and at the end of the month you rescor just that part of the questionnaire and hopefully you've gone from red to green and then you
pick the next one and the next one and the next one so our our sort of major investment now is how to not just you know know the what but actually we consider ourselves successful when we're able to change people's behavior and that costs money I mean it cost money because we're investing in you know real experts and research and it's 50 a year and some people do it and the other thing that costs if you choose to do it which is exactly what you're showing um is we've developed now a test it's called Drift
and it's a pin prick blood test so you literally you buy the kit um it's 179 pounds a bit less if you choose to do it every six months and it will measure your homocysteine that's the B vitamins it will measure the omega-3 and the vitamin D that's the brain fats and it will measure what's called hba1c or sugarcoated red blood cells glycosilated hemoglobin is literally counting the percentage of damaged red blood cells which is what doctors use to diagnose diabetes so now you say well you know if you say to me should I supplement
B vitamins am I eating enough um you know fruit and veg or should I have less sugar I said don't ask me ask your body and the blood test shows you and then I mean to give an example and I'm I'm sure she won't mind me saying this but you know my wife and I were in our 60s um we re I mean this is all very recent in December we finally working with a genius uh Team of Cl Clinical Laboratory people found a way to measure home ayine inexpensively and accurately because it's actually quite
a difficult test and immediately my wife and I send in our you know pin break blood test you can by the way just get you can just get the home ayine test if that's all you want to know about and by the way home ayine predicts a 100 diseases aund yes it's not just dementia this is a whole range of things absolutely high blood pressure heart disease arterial disease and and just as a slight side I wouldn't get well I'm not going to get pregnant anyway but I would recommend someone to not get pregnant unless
the homoy is below seven and to give you an example of that um in a study of healthy women whose homosysteine was above nine uh at the age of six their children were significantly more socially withdrawn anxious depressed you know had various problems so you you you know the reason women are told to take fast and pregnancy is very simply to lower homocysteine improve methylation and improve the the brain development so it's very important so my wife and I we prick our fingers it's very painless and simple send it in my score is seven which
is great hers was 15 um so she's in the brain shrinking Zone unknowingly you know and she takes a multi every day um and eats good food I we eat pretty much the same food um and that really woke her up so she started to take a home assisting lowering B vitamin which by the way the difference between that and a b complex or a multivitamin is a b complex may give you 10 microgram of B12 the RDA which I call the radicul dietary arbitrary is 2.5 microgram but the homocystine luring B formula is 500
microgram not because we need that much in our blood but because many people later in life absorb B12 less well and the nice thing about B12 I mean that's why some people have injections of B12 to bypass the stomach is that it's very cheap it's non-toxic it really doesn't matter how much you have but what we've learned is that if you supplement a lot more 500 micrograms that's what Professor David Smith used in his study brings the home assisting down so two months later my wife retests and her score is eight so a temp A
Day vitamin pill has brought her brain out of the brain shrinking Zone into plenty of resilience it's as simple as that and that literally that for some people is what's the determin of whether they will or won't get Alzheimer's yep amazing stuff um yeah so do the cognitive function test completely free get your score be honest when you fill out the questionnaire be a citizen scientist and there's so much more to talk about on this Patrick but I'm just going to leave that there as an introductory appetizer and uh um lot more to process but
for now thank you very much indeed and thank you for helping spread the word
