← The Dr. Hyman Show
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.
- [00:03]
Dr. David Perlmutter
So what you set up is what we call a vicious cycle whereby eating the wrong foods changes the microbiome. It changes your brain and makes you less able moving forward to make the right choices. So you make further bad choices, further damaging your gut bacteria, further changing your brain.
- [00:22]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Now, before we did you know that.
- [00:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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- [00:44]
Dr. Heather Moday
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- [00:47]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I take Magnesium Breakthrough every night and I've noticed a huge difference in my sleep, stress and muscle recovery. It's a game changer. Right now, Bioptimizers is offering my listeners a special discount. Just go to bioptimizers.com hyman and use code HYMAN10 at checkout. Don't wait. Your body will thank you. Jump into today's episode.
- [01:04]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale.
- [01:11]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's why I've been busy building.
- [01:13]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Several passion projects to help you better understand. Well, you.
- [01:17]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're looking for data about your.
- [01:19]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights.
- [01:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted.
- [01:30]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Supplements and health products for your health.
- [01:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Journey, Visit my website, Dr.hyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.
- [01:40]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
I came to this as a skeptic. I had heard, like most clinicians, I was trained, that there was nothing you could do. And as you mentioned, to suggest there was something we could do for someone struggling with cognitive decline on their way towards Alzheimer's, it would be to give them false hope. The conventional model and the incentive structure of sort of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry. The way that healthcare is set up is that what we want to find is a single molecule intervention, right, that can be patented, that is very simple to dispense from a pharmacy, that there's simple instructions. Just take this one pill once a day and you'll feel better. And that works if you've got a uti right and we can get a cure. And that can be in the past. Take antibiotics for seven days, don't have to think about it again. Hopefully. Now, when we're talking about Alzheimer's, this is very complex. And our friend Daniel Schmattenberger, he really taught me to stay. And I feel very privileged to have spent a lot of time discussing. We would meet every Tuesday afternoon for four, five, six hours on these marathons. Just kind of reprogramming my brain about how to think through diagnosis of complex disease. And put simply, when you think of any complex system, whether it's a house plant or a financial system or government systems or the brain, what you're looking for is balance, right? An imbalance is going to create dysfunction in that complex system. And so imbalance is going to be too much or too little at the wrong time or in the wrong place. And when we think of the brain, this leads to disease when we have imbalance, especially over time. And so we can say, okay, imbalance, this is helpful, we'll simplify. And then we want to systematize. Imbalance of what? What are the causal level factors? And I would argue that there's six of them. It's toxins. So imbalances of toxins in the wrong place at the wrong time, too much, too little nutrients, right? You mentioned insulin resistance and blood sugar becoming so high that it becomes toxic. That can be a problem. But Also you mentioned B12 and having too little B12 associated with genetics. And maybe for your neighbor, they need more B12 than you do. So we have these individualized needs and requirements, requirements where we got to get that functional requirement met, not just the rda, not just that recommended daily allowance. So we have toxins, nutrients, stressors. We can have too much or too little stress. Right? Some people want to kick their feet up and just relax in retirement, but they're not getting that engagement. And then we also know on the flip side that caregivers, care partners for people with Alzheimer's, are at higher risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's themselves later on because they have too much stress. Cortisol becomes literally toxic to the hippocampus, those memory centers of the brain. So toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. You mentioned getting hit over the head and causing pain. Well, that can also cause inflammation in the brain and be a traumatic brain injury that can put us at risk. You mentioned Apoe 4. We can have molecular structure, genetic structure that puts us at risk for developing Alzheimer's later on. So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, infections. We know There are a handful of infections that are directly associated with the triggering of amyloid plaque production. So things like P. Gingival. So P. Gingivalis, which causes gingivitis in the mouth. Also, the Lyme spirochete has been found in amyloid plaques as well as H. Pylori is associated. And herpes, the herpes simplex one virus is another one. The gut brain connection and infections on the gut can lead to imbalance. And there's many other. I mean, in fact, I have a reverence for how complex the gut brain connection is and wouldn't pretend to understand it fully. But we know that there's a lot of back and forth communication between the gut and the brain, and the microbes specifically in the gut, have a lot to do with that. So again, toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, infections can lead to dementia and then signaling. Are we getting the signals? Dr. Bredesen has this phenomenal. I love this analogy of brain health. Thinking of your brain like a country. My brain is gone. If we are stuck in that fight and defend mode, if we're being invaded by infections, or if we're being. If we need to defend against toxins like heavy metals you mentioned, or mold toxicity or chemical toxicity, then we're using our resource to take care of that attack and defend. We're not able to use that resource to build the infrastructure. Right. To build new neurons and new connections between those neurons the way a country might build roads and schools. Schools. We want to use those nutrients to fully resolve those issues that we're attacking and defending against. And it makes sense that if we're trying to do both, we're not going to be very good at doing either. Right. We're not going to fully resolve the infections or fully resolve the toxic burden. And we're also not going to be that great at having functional neurons to help remember our neighbor's name or remember where we put our phone or our keys. So what we want to do is think really holistically about this. You mentioned, you know, there's multiple factors that go into brain health. And this is what I would think of as a comprehensive list, although I'm sure we will continue to know more. But it's a much more comprehensive way to approach each individual and what's causing them to go down this path towards this common diagnosis of Alzheimer's or memory loss associated with age.
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Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, it's something I see a lot of. You know, we get in this reductionist model where we're looking for the single drug for the Single disease like you've talked about. And it's why we spent billions and billions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of studies with zero real benefit. And I think, you know, what you're speaking to is that this is a complex set of diseases. Not just one disease, even if it's called Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. They're really complex and have multiple causes. Not everybody who has that has the same causes. They might overlap. But it's really important to look at what's going on for that individual. Like that one patient, I said she had vitamin deficiencies. Another guy, he had a whole host of things like mercury. So you have to find out what the treatment is for that person. Not a kind of one size fits all. And it's just the antithesis of how we do research. I think what you're talking about also there's insults that happen. You know, basically in the way I think about it is too much bad stuff, not of good stuff. And I think you're talking about we were missing the things that we need to make our brains work well, and we're having too much of the stuff, whether it's infections or microbiome or toxins or sugar or stress that actually cause damage to our body. So when you start to think about someone like this, you know, you're thinking about a lot of these. These factors that. That have. Have modifiable solutions. Right. It's not like, oh, well, if you have a toxin, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, oh, if you have insulin resistance, there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, if you're nutritionally deficient, there's nothing you can do about it. They're all treatable. Right. And so that's the beauty of this whole approach of functional medicine and this approach to dementia is that it really helps you to navigate a very complex set of variables and kind of understand how to start assessing them and actually treating them. So when you start to do assessment, you know, one of the things I love that Dale talked about was this whole idea of dementogens, you know, And I wonder if you could kind of go through what you kind of did a little bit. But I think it's sort of worth going through what the framework is of these dementogens that he talks about and how those can impact us and what we call the exposome, which are the hidden things that tend to cause brain dysfunction.
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Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Yeah. So when I work with a functional medicine patient, there are all these medical pieces that I almost think of as Icing on the cake. So I definitely want to go in this direction and support people knowing how to communicate with their doctor and knowing what to ask for and what kind of testing. And certainly there are a ton of modifiable things that we can address. And I also want to just take this step back to say there are a ton of things that you can do without the help of a doctor. Right. The foundations, like if that's the icing on the cake, is all of the functional medicine intervention, the foundations are really come back to diet, exercise, sleep, stress management. And so I of course want to, because we're both functional medicine practitioners, I want to dive into that deeply. And I wish that the whole medical system was coming in that direction. But I also don't want to miss the opportunity to tell people if you don't have access to that, if cost is an issue. There are many, many, many things that have an outsized impact that really come back to what are the things I put in my mouth every day, what do I eat, what do I consume, what are the nature of my relationships and my stress levels, what time do I get to bed each night, how much movement do I get each day? Those are the things that really impact health over time. Now these hidden causes, these hidden things, this exposome, these dementogens, toxins are a big part of that. And I think of three flavors. There's chemical toxicity, which is ubiquitous. None of us are going to be able to avoid it all. But there are great strategies for avoiding the things that we have control over. You talked about modifiable risk factors and not modifiable risk factors. And just to give people kind of a sense of what the difference is there, we can't change the year you were born. Right. We can't change your chronological age, that as that increases, our risk of dementia goes up. We can't change that you're born male or female and if you females have higher risk of dementia, they're two thirds of dementia or Alzheimer's patients. And we also can't change your genetics, your APOE status. This is set. But what can we change? We can change our toxic exposures, we can increase our ability to detoxify. Whether it's one of these three flavors, heavy metals, mycotoxins or mold associated toxins associated with water damaged buildings, which I see many elderly folks who have been in their houses for a long time. Huge issue, really big kind of underrepresented issue. And my other mentor is Dr. Neal Nathan, who I'm sure you've come Across. I feel really grateful to have learned from him how to support very sensitive patients and also to just be hyper vigilant about that potential mold exposure. And then these chemical toxins that I mentioned, so metals, molds and chemicals. And although we can't completely avoid all of them, what we can do is we can measure how much we're being exposed to and see if there is some detective work that can go into lowering our exposure to phthalates or petrochemicals or Roundup. Glyphosate is a big one that directly impacts the nervous system. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Stephanie Seneff. She was out of MIT and has done exciting, extensive research on how glyphosate impacts the nervous system. And so understanding.
- [12:36]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, she's been on the podcast. We'll link to that in the show notes.
- [12:39]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
But yeah, yeah, she's fantastic. And understanding what's coming into my system. And then can my genetics tolerate those toxins? And how can I increase my ability to get rid of toxins through my liver, through my bowels, through my kidneys, through skin and lymph, maybe even through breath, work through the lungs so that we can optimize for cellular health?
- [13:01]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, this toxin thing is big. You know, there's other things we're going to point to that are modifiable, like diet, like your microbiome, like infections. There's things that actually can be modifiable, but the toxin one is huge. And I think, like the case I mentioned, it's one of those things that's. If you look at the scientific literature, there's ample evidence that toxins are linked to dementia. But on a clinical level, nobody's really looking at this from a traditional medicine perspective. When you go to see a neurologist, they don't measure toxin levels. They don't ask you about them, they don't ask you about exposures, they don't do any testing about it. And, you know, one of the challenges is that it's very hard to test for some of these compounds. Mold. You know, there was a great lab for mycotoxins that was run out of business because insurance companies didn't like it because they were getting. Actually, I think I was the cause of it, actually. I think it was like 20 years ago. But I had a patient who was in a house that was affected by mold. She had chronic fatigue. Her daughter had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And they lived in different bedrooms. And I had them go assess what was going on in their House and what was what was growing in each room. And they were different molds. And then when we did lab work with Dr. Varjani's lab was called Immunosciences that did these mold toxin lab assessments. It matched exactly like the mycotoxin antibodies where the mycotoxins that were in the room. And then she got a million dollar settlement. Then the insurance company in California came shut down through the government shut down the lab. It's pretty bad. But anyway, that aside, it's something it's hard to test for these things. Heavy metals are easier to test for. You can look at blood testing that's helpful. There's challenge testing where you can take a key leader and collect your urine. But the other toxins which are ubiquitous, like phthalates, BPA, glyphosate, PCBs, pesticides, plastics, microplastics, they're very hard to assess. And I recently learned about how to assess them in a different way. I want to tell you about it in a minute, but I'd love to hear how you think about those. And rather than just your general like try to reduce your exposures and improve your own body's detoxification system, which is sound advice. What are the other ways that you kind of assess these?
- [15:09]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Yeah, so we do test through real time labs has an environmental pollutant panel. And so I do look at urine, at urine levels of excretion. And what I've seen is many of the sickest people, they actually are don't collect much in their urine the first time. But then as we start using some binders, some glutathione, some support, some biochemical support, as we start getting them sweating, maybe get them on a detox, breathwork practice, we see that those numbers will go up. And so it's almost like again hidden. Even with our testing some of those exposures and that total toxic burden, it takes a little bit to uncover. And three, six months later we see those numbers go up even when there isn't an active exposure. But it's just that there starting to actually mobilize more of it. Also getting on a ketogenic diet, we start to mobilize fat soluble toxins. As we are using the fats to create fuel, we can get that from adipocytes and then we're releasing those toxins into the bloodstream and then it's coming out in the urine a little bit more. So I think that many of these toxins initial testing can also be deceptive. Right. They're most of My patients are over 65. They've had a lifetime to accumulate these things. And this can be such a scary conversation.
- [16:28]
Maria Shriver
Right.
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Dr. Elizabeth Boham
It can very quickly go to, like, overwhelm and anxiety about how much toxicity is in the environment. We can only control what we can control. So I think getting. Testing your water or getting spring water, findaspring.com, i think, is a great source to find spring water near you that hopefully isn't contaminated. I'd love your opinion on RO water. Reverse osmosis is a great way to get a lot of toxins out, but it does require remineralization because it'll take the minerals out of the water. So getting away entirely from plastic, from drinking anything out of plastic, particularly because hot plastic will leach into the. Into the water. But even just the screw cap, it's like you've got plastic sawdust in there. And so I think plastic water bottles are just toxic for so many reasons. But, yeah, we could talk for a weekend on all of the ways to think through toxicity.
- [17:22]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
I'm going to tell you something might blow your mind. And it's blown my mind, actually. But before I do, I just want to kind of reinforce that the approach you're talking about fundamentally is lifestyle. It's what we eat, it's how much we exercise, it's sleep, it's how we manage stress, it's some basic nutritional support. And those have a profound impact. And there are some trials that have been done, the Finger trial and the Pointer trial, which is underway, which are multimodal lifestyle interventions with risk factor management that have shown not just to slow dementia, but to actually reverse it, which is, again, something that all the drug studies never show. Right. So even the best drugs that have been approved, there's not many of them, they don't show that. And I don't know why it's not something that's headline news. Because these studies are published. Your study should have been headline news again. It was published in the Journal of Alzheimer's. Because, you know, if something is incurable and you actually reverse it, then don't you think we should be actually spending the billions on that rather than more drug studies?
- [18:33]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:35]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
So. So we're going to get into all these factors that were studied in the Finger trial and the Pointer trial in your data as well. But I just kind of want to get back to the toxin conversation for a minute because, you know, I've personally had mercury poisoning and I know what it does to my brain. It was bad. I've also had mold Toxicity. So I know what that does to my brain. It made me very demented, and I had terrible memory issues and cognition issues, and I figured out how to treat that, thank God. But I recently had been using a test out of Germany. It's a relatively new test that measures not just the stuff that comes out in your urine that's in your blood, which is, by the way, these toxins that you're talking about are stored in fat. And so if you. If you look at what's in your blood or what's cleared in your urine, there's not. They're not going to be there. Like, they're just. They're just not. That's not what they're like. It's like looking. I don't know, it's like looking in your urine for red blood cells. They're just. They're not supposed to be there, so they're just not going to be there. And this test that they do uses an analysis of cells, not blood, but your actual cells and cell membranes and using lymphocytes, and they find the load of toxins in there that we've never been able to see before. And it's kind of shocking to me how loaded people are and how loaded I was with everything from pesticides to phthalates to glyphosate to metals. And I've been treating myself and a bunch of others with a procedure called the PK protocol, which is designed to help replace the toxins in your cell membrane, to improve cell membrane function and fluidity and cell communication and mitochondrial function, all of which are the things that go wrong when you have neurologic disease or dementia. And so I just talked to a patient, actually, a couple of days ago, who is a dementia patient. She's in her early 80s and very bright woman, and was starting to go downhill and was diagnosed with mci, mild cognitive impairment, and was getting worse and worse. And I did this test on her, and I got the result, and I was sort of shocked. And, you know, it matched against what I would expect. Her history was, for example, she was a smoker, so there was a lot of cadmium in her cells. Cadmium is a metal that you get from smoking. She also had lindane, which is a pesticide that's been banned for years. She had glyphosate. She had all these plastics, fungal toxins that were in her cells. And what we did is a protocol that basically flushes out all that stuff using high doses of intravenous phosphatidylcholine, which is basically the fatty substance that makes up your cell membranes. And then we, with the glutathione and things to help detoxify and the B vitamins we talked about and a bunch of other minerals and support. And I talked to her on Sunday and I was like, how's it going? She's like, I don't know. It's amazing. My memory's back. I have full short term memory. Long term memory is better. You know, someone can tell me something in the morning. I remember the next day, you know, that was. She couldn't remember five minutes from before when she had a conversation with her husband about something and 10 minutes later she wouldn't remember it. And it was so exciting to me because I'm like, wow, finally we have a way to actually assess and to monitor and to treat in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before in my practice. I'm curious if you have any experience with that, what you think about it, if you know what I'm talking about. The lab is a German lab. It's called igl.
- [22:03]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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- [22:30]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Oh, I'm writing that down. I'm not familiar with igl, but I have been using the Patricia Kane, the phosphatidylcholine for a long time, for many years, the ivpc. And we do the exchange by IV and then also oral PC, which we know helps with gallbladder, basically the discharge of bile, that toxic sludge that we build up. And so PC, I think also very clear that that helps with the brain, as does phosphatidylserine. And choline is part of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, the most abundant neurotransmitter in the brain. But choline, we do know that choline has a big role to play in the brain. So not just the phosphatidylcholine, but choline found in eggs and in other food sources and also in many nootropic formulas.
- [23:17]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Right. That's the major neurotransmitter that goes down is acetylcholine in Alzheimer's. So, you know, I don't know what doses you're using, Heather, but we're using basically 20 grams, which is a lot. And we. Over 10 weeks, we give 2 kilos, basically, of phosphylcholine intravenously.
- [23:38]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Are you doing the inessential vials?
- [23:40]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, but we're doing 20 of them.
- [23:42]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
20 of them. Wow. Yeah, we've. We do five typically.
- [23:46]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, I think. I think that's way under dosing. Yeah, I think I. Because I used to do five, and I didn't see the same results. And it's. It's done over a period of time, but It's. It's essentially 20 vials twice a week for 10 weeks. And if people are wanting to know how to do this, we do this at our center in Ultra Wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts. I'll send Heather the protocol.
- [24:04]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
I would love that. Yeah. Because are you dripping it in D5W?
- [24:07]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah, it's dripped in. Right. You're dripping it in, and then you drip in a bag of glutathione. Glutathione. You have multi. I mean, methylfolate and leucoboran and other biotin and a bunch of other stuff. So it's a pretty interesting thing. But I did my before and after testing, and it was completely different. I mean, I'll even share my results in the show notes because I think it's so compelling, and I think the before and after was just striking. And I personally felt different, Dramatically different. So I think we're learning about all these things that we didn't even know before. Medicine is advancing so fast, and, you know, there's. Unfortunately, there's not billions of dollars spent on researching IV phosphylcholine in dementia. But we should. Because if what I'm finding is. What I think is I'm finding it's pretty exciting. And then, of course, you know, for the mold stuff and the metal stuff, there's other things to do. The phosphylcholine actually also helps in the mold, but there's other things you can do for mold. But it's important to really assess whether you've got mold exposure, because it's really one of those things that can be treated and so can heavy metals. Like, I shared in my case study with the patient where we did chelation on him and other things, like infections. Right. I mean, Kris Kristofferson had Lyme disease that caused his Dementia. When he treated his Lyme disease, his dementia got better.
- [25:25]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Yeah. Rich Horowitz is also seeing that the treatment of Lyme disease can help with dementia. My patients, the first patient I saw who really opened my eyes to this, Darlene was her name. And she came in soon after. I was trained by Dr. Bredesen in 2017, and she and her husband came in. She was entirely dependent on him. She had a MOCA score of 2. So the MOCA is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. And we use this as a clinical tool to tell us where on the spectrum of cognitive decline someone is. And a Perfect score is 30. It's a one page worksheet that some of your listeners may be familiar with. You copy a cube and draw a clock, identify some zoo animals. And she had a moca score of 2. So she was essentially answering. Yeah, she was answering questions with like, yes or no. And not much more than that. Their life had been completely changed since she had gone down very quickly with dementia and diagnosed Alzheimer's. Now, her very dedicated, loving husband had read Dr. Bredesen's book and was all in. I mean, he had, thank goodness, enough confidence for both of us because I had never done this and she was so severe that I was, I didn't. I wasn't hopeful at all.
- [26:35]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
But they asked just to give this perspective. If you're, it's out of 30, so if your score is less than 25, it's a problem. Two is, you know, nobody's home.
- [26:44]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Yeah. 26 and above is normal once you're down in the single digits. This is severe dementia. This is where you are dependent on others for activities of daily living. Your dignity is more or less gone. Right. You're not able to do anything on your own. And so she was in that, in that state. But she had this bright smile and her eyes would track me and she had on this beautiful floral dress and you could just see how much soul was in her. And they just shocked me. She came back six weeks later and her mocha had gone up to a seven. And of course, my initial response was like disbelief. I was like, oh, my gosh, we must have done the test wrong. This isn't possible. What is going on here? And her husband assured me, no, no, she's different. Listen to her. She's speaking in complete sentences. They started bickering about something while they were in my office and she was remembering things that he had said and she wasn't going back to work. She wasn't 100% better. But this was the moment I mean, I remember it, like, exactly what I was wearing and the way the light was shining in the room because it was so emotional for me to be like, what if this is possible for Darlene? What is possible for everybody else who's not so far down along this path? There is so much suffering that we could be avoiding by taking this approach. So what did they do? They moved out of a moldy bedroom. And they didn't just. They didn't have to move out of their house entirely, but they moved into their living room. They started ballroom dancing three times a week, even though they weren't very good at it. They were going on walks every day. They got on a ketogenic diet. They ate only whole foods, got rid of all of the processed foods in their diet. She got on all the supplements that we put together based on Dr. Bredesen's approach. She got on bioidentical hormone replacement. She went and got the mercury out of her teeth, her root canals out. She got all of her dental work taken care of very quickly. And lo and behold, she improved. And she. I really owe so much to, obviously, Dr. Bredesen, but also to Darlene because. And her husband, because that was the moment, like, I could not deny how much better she had gotten.
- [28:47]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah. What was her score after you'd done all that?
- [28:50]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
It was a seven then. And she continued to go up a bit. I've lost touch with them. They kind of. They're doing things on their own. But we were together for a couple of years and probably like your patients, you know, you hear from them years later and you think, oh, have it gone down? Or do they need extra help? And she'll probably be like, nope, we're doing great. They were very motivated. It was really fun.
- [29:15]
Dr. David Perlmutter
What you eat are looked at through the lens of your microbes does affect your behavior and your choices. And at the same time, those choices that you make affect the health and vitality of your gut microbes. So what you set up is what we call a vicious cycle, whereby eating the wrong foods changes the microbiome. It changes your brain and makes you less able moving forward to make the right choices. So you make further bad choices, further damaging your gut bacteria, further changing your brain. And let me say that it's not just moment to moment changes in your brain that happens. You know that you make the wrong decisions. But ultimately, as you continue to make these wrong decisions, you rewire your brain through a process called neuroplasticity. So you compromise your ability to tap into that part of Your brain that lets you make good and appropriate decisions, and you connect more aggressively to the part of your brain that is much more impulsive and much more fear based and much more narcissistic.
- [30:19]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically we move from a place of love and connection to a place of fear and reactivity.
- [30:25]
Dr. David Perlmutter
That's right. And you mentioned Alberto Biolodo. We wrote a book about this years ago called the neuroscience of enlightenment.
- [30:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Power up your brain.
- [30:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Power up your brain. And it dealt with what can we do first in terms of our lifestyle choices to enhance this process of neuroplasticity, to enhance the brain's ability to make stronger connections. Okay. Once we've got that put to bed, in other words, higher levels of omega threes, less inflammation, aerobic exercise being very important, then let's do the right things. Let's make the best choices. And that will then set the stage for hardwiring the brain to those good parts.
- [31:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's pretty amazing how, you know, you, you in the pioneer in saying this, but the brain is, is plastic. It can actually change and reverse some of the insults that happen. So not only is it about prevention, but it's about treatment or slowing down of these conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And I had mercury poisoning years ago. And early on, I had a brain scan called a SPECT scan, which looks at the blood flow in the brain. And I had all these areas of my brain that had no blood flow that were dysfunctional.
- [31:36]
Dr. David Perlmutter
They look like holes, not a good thing.
- [31:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
They look like holes like Swiss cheese in my brain. And as I used functional medicine, as I repaired my brain, as I repaired my body to fix my brain, essentially my gut and also the mercury affected my gut in terrible ways. I actually repeated the scan more than a decade later, and all those holes had filled in. My brain had recovered. Now, it's not something that you learn as a typical neurologist, right?
- [32:04]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Well, even, gosh, when I was 19, I was doing research on micro, what's called micro neurosurgery. We had the. The operating room just got a microscope. And so neurosurgeons didn't have a roadmap to use the microscope because the anatomy of the brain had never been really teased apart microscopically. So our job was to create this roadmap for doing aneurysm surgery. So as part of what I did my research on, we were exploring how we can bring blood supply from outside the brain into the brain. So I became really kind of handy at tying small blood vessels together. And I was invited to go Teach in Madrid, Spain, at what's called the Centro Ramon y Cajal. And there, you know, this is an institution named after Ramon y Cajal, maybe the father of neurophysiology. And I walked into the lab and there was a statue of him with his statement saying that the brain is immutable. It never changes, it never regenerates. That's it. And you know as well as I do that we were taught that in medical school that the brain will never grow new brain cells.
- [33:12]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Your brain cells in college.
- [33:13]
Dr. Heather Moday
Too bad.
- [33:13]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Yeah. If you drank too much or whatever. But we know now that the brain, A, can regenerate itself and B, can rewire or reroute pathways. How does a stroke patient recover? Well, he or she recovers because they bring online different alternative pathways. They reroute the signal ultimately, and that's how they can improve. So we take advantage of that process called neuroplasticity, and turn it on by turning on the body's production of a chemical growth factor for the brain called bdnf. But at the same time, we have to capitalize then on the brain wanting to rewire itself by behaving in ways.
- [33:51]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You remove the insults and you provide.
- [33:52]
Dr. David Perlmutter
The right inputs, changing our behavior. The Dalai Lama said that if you want to be happy, practice compassion, and if you want others to be happy, practice compassion. So it really. You can be happier if you can wire into the happy part of your brain by doing things outwardly that demonstrate empathy, that demonstrate planning for the future.
- [34:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay, so let's get into some of the details here, because you've written a.
- [34:24]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Lot about, for example, grains.
- [34:26]
Dr. Heather Moday
Grain Brain.
- [34:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
This is a new edition of Grain Brain. Everybody needs to get a copy. It's completely revised and updated. It's pretty awesome. And I think this guy has really nailed it. Now, a lot of people are not too happy with these ideas. You've been attacked on television, you've been attacked in the media, you've been attacked in medical journals, including indirect attacks against me and our colleague Dale Bredesen, who's really pioneered the idea that we could actually stop or reverse Alzheimer's, which you actually were talking about decades ago. What are the things that are challenging? You're talking about changing your diet, so let's talk about the food part, because there's such controversy. Should we eat saturated fat? Should we not? Is sugar really that bad or not? Because the Sugar association says sugar's fine, so why wouldn't we believe them?
- [35:18]
Dr. David Perlmutter
So I would say to your viewers, Google Perlmutter and CBS and Watch a recent interview.
- [35:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And as this morning, yeah, but just.
- [35:27]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Put CBS and Perlmutter, it'll come up. And as they show the book, Dr. Perlmutter has written a new book about carbohydrates in the brain. But before they cut to me, they said, but we reached out to the sugar industry and the sugar industry told us that we should eat sugar. Decades of research. It's all good. Have at it. What would you expect them to say? And how. Why would you ask the sugar industry? And my response was, yeah, because, you know, it wasn't that long ago that the tobacco industry was telling us we should be smoking cigarettes. That's a good thing. But the reality is the question that I was supposed to answer, but I diverted because I wanted to really hit the sugar thing, was, Dr. Perlmutter, what you're saying is that all grains are bad. And I've never said that. I've, you know, despite the name of the book, I believe that when we look at gluten containing grains, we should avoid them. As you know, there's plenty of research in terms of what gluten, specifically a subpart of gluten, alpha gliadin, does in terms of threatening what we talked about earlier, and that is the gut lining.
- [36:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Is that in everybody or just people.
- [36:31]
Dr. Heather Moday
Who are sensitive to it?
- [36:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
It's difficult to say. I think we know that probably most people have some degree of increased gut permeability or leakiness of the gut when they consume gluten or specifically gliadin. That said, the non gluten containing grains, grains meaning seeds of grass, things like rice and corn, can be consumed in a quantity that doesn't present a lot of carbohydrate. So if you're watching your daily consumption of carbohydrate and you want to have a little bit of wild rice, have at it, or some non GMO corn, good luck trying to find that. But I think that if you're counting your carbs, as you should be looking at net carbs, that I don't think that's necessarily the worst idea. Having said that, again, because, you know.
- [37:19]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
There'S a bit just to back up.
- [37:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
On the carb thing now, there's been some recent studies published by Walter Willett and others at Harvard looking at thousands and thousands of people showing that people who eat very low carbohydrate diets don't do well, they die early, or people eating very, very high carbohydrate. But somewhere in the middle, about 50%, which to you and I seems like A lot of carbohydrates. Yeah, do better. Can you kind of address that? Because it's.
- [37:38]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Well, I think people should eat tons of carbohydrates. Yes, you should be eating carbohydrates. And I just did a blog with somebody and it was said why we need more carbs. David Perlmutter MD and people, I think the hashtag was why? That's fantastic. Wtf, right? Yeah. So yeah, we need lots of carbs because we need lots of fiber in our diets. By definition.
- [38:01]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, broccoli is a carb.
- [38:02]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You bet it's carbohydrate. So that's right. And there's something magic when you take, you make a bagel or a croissant. I mean, it's no longer a carbohydrate or simple carbohydrate, it's a croissant or whatever it is. But you're right. So broccoli, kale, I mean, these are good sources of dietary fiber, which is by definition a carbohydrate, though it's non digestible.
- [38:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And polyphenols and antioxidants.
- [38:27]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You bet. And fuel for the microbiome, fuel for your gut bacteria.
- [38:30]
Dr. Heather Moday
So I actually, in my book Ultra.
- [38:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Metabolism, I wrote carbohydrates are the single most important food for health and longevity. And what I was referring to was vegetables.
- [38:38]
Dr. David Perlmutter
But then people take it out of context. They say, yeah, he's not, he's not paleo, he's not keto. So I think that, you know, the biggest faults then with the, well, with that type of research is you've got to qualify. And the other area that needs great qualification is, you know, I'm often challenged by people saying, well, you know, the China Study said that you eat meat, you're going to die. And Dr. Dean Ornish says we need a very, very low fat diet. And people ask me, what do you think about that? And I would say, you know, I agree with both of them. Why do I agree with both of them? Well, I think by and large the type of meat that people eat that goes into these studies where they come up with the relationships to colon cancer, for example. You bet. Those are very, very threatening forms of meat.
- [39:26]
Dr. Heather Moday
But it's actually not even meat.
- [39:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's, it's actually processed meat, which is.
- [39:30]
Dr. David Perlmutter
It'S processed meat and salami. And you know, there is a sense of alchemy that somehow you can feed a cow or other animal that you're going to eat garbage and it'll magically turn into gold, literally garbage.
- [39:43]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, they find skittles and you bet that are aspire.
- [39:46]
Dr. David Perlmutter
So. So I think there is a place on the table if you choose to eat meat for grass fed, organically raised forms of meat, of, of animal product. And similarly, do I think that Dr. Ornish has some merit in his discussion of a low fat diet? Yes, because the type of fat that is eaten in western cultures is awful.
- [40:08]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yeah.
- [40:08]
Dr. David Perlmutter
It's highly processed omega 6 oils, soybean oil, canola, soybean, sunflower, that dramatically increase the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body. And get back to where you and I start our conversation today and what's really interesting to think about. You know, we've wondered the mechanism for that over the years and we've said, well, and this is a little technical for your viewers, but they'll love it. The Omega 6s produce chemicals called prostaglandins and leukotrienes that can be pro inflammatory. We kind of glammed onto that for many years.
- [40:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like the hormones of your immune system, they create inflammation.
- [40:44]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Right. But now we know, with all the interest in what's called the endocannabinoid system, which is what everyone's interested in now because of the availability of CBD and the use of medical marijuana, that the Omega 6s help to increase the production of two important cannabinoid chemicals that are produced within the body. We call them endocannabinoids because they're produced in the body 2ag, and another one called anandamide, which bind to a receptor called the CB1 receptor that absolutely explodes the production of these inflammatory molecules.
- [41:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And interestingly, omega 3 eating vegetable oil activates these receptors, that creates inflammation.
- [41:30]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Yeah, and this is yet another way to understand the beauty of the omega 3s, because similarly, the omega 3s create cannabinoid like chemicals in the body that block that activity. And that's another important pathway by which the Omega 3s are so good for us. So when people like Dr. Ornish say we should be on a low fat diet, pretty much based upon the type of fat that people consume in America, I'd say he's right. But you can get even more bang for the buck if you not only cut those oils out and fats out, but add to the equation the omega 3. So we improve this ratio of omega 6s to omega 3s, which is so high now in America, down to a level of 3 to 1 or 2 to 1, whereas typically in most people's diets it's about 20 to 1 in favor of the omega 6s.
- [42:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
These are new. I mean we didn't have these oils a thousand years ago, 100 years ago.
- [42:24]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You're right.
- [42:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
We increased our intake of soybean oil, which is now 10% of our calories, 1000 fold since 1900 and canola oil.
- [42:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
That health advocates still talk about which was developed at the turn of the century as an industrial oil to lubricate machinery.
- [42:40]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah, rapeseed oil.
- [42:41]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Yeah, that's a good thing.
- [42:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And now it's highly GMO contaminated. Yeah, it's an issue. So you mentioned Omega 3s and making the other issue people concern about is saturated fat. I'm particularly in the context of Alzheimer's, an APOE4 gene which is a gene that may increase your risk of Alzheimer's. Well it does depending on how many copies you have and so forth. Is this something we should be worried about? I mean bulletproof coffee and everybody. Yeah, let's cover of Time magazine says eat butter. Like what's the deal here?
- [43:08]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Butter is back. And let's take that apart a little bit. Unpack that. Just for your viewers to be really clear that there are some genes that help increase a person's risk for Alzheimer's and one of them is this so called APOE4 allele. And you can learn about it by having an at home genetic test that anybody can do. And 20% of Americans will carry the APOE4 allele.
- [43:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
One copy.
- [43:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
One copy. And some carry two copies which is clearly associated with as much as a 12 fold increased risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. The APOE genes are involved in the production of apolipoproteins and that's a big term. But it has to do with proteins in the body that carry fat, deliver fat to where those fats might be needed. There is some indication that the benefits of saturated fat for the brain. We'll talk about that in just a moment. And even the benefits of a ketogenic diet. And we'll talk about that as well. I guess I'm putting a lot of things on the plate here.
- [44:09]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Okay, we got it might be a little long here.
- [44:12]
Dr. David Perlmutter
We might have to add another memory card. But that are those things are less beneficial in the Apoe 4 carriers. Meaning that they're not going to gain as much benefit directly from ketogenic diet or a diet that's higher in saturated fat. Having is there harm? Doesn't look like there's harm. And that said, I think that there are benefits that everybody gains that I believe if there is some sense of harm would offset those potential issues which are Very minimal to begin with. And that is what the benefits are from consuming saturated fat is the types that we recommend. McTool, coconut oil, the saturated fat that's found in eggs, for example. The benefits are that we enhance our body's ability to produce these important chemicals that are called ketones. There's this huge interest these days all over the Internet and certainly in various venues for lectures, et cetera, in what is called the ketogenic diet.
- [45:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The number one diet books, you bet.
- [45:14]
Dr. David Perlmutter
And with good reason. And it's. It's a brand new phenomenon for humans. It's only the type of diet we've been on for a couple million years.
- [45:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So we on and off of it.
- [45:25]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Right. But we've been in and out of ketosis for a long, long time. So it's got a heck of a track record, and we can talk about that. But basically it's a diet that counters inflammation, that enhances energy production, that activates this BDNF gene pathway to create more of that growth hormone to grow new brain cells, that helps reduce the production of free radicals, that helps get rid of damaged energy producers called mitochondria, that helps us with our ability to rid our bodies of cells, for example, that damage. So in multiple arenas, being on a ketogenic diet is really a good thing. So I think that the ability of the coconut oil and the MCT oil to make that happen really is very, very powerful.
- [46:10]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's data that's showing that those actually help improve outcomes in Alzheimer's patients.
- [46:14]
Dr. David Perlmutter
There's actually a data that indicates interventionally that simply using MCT oil improves cognitive function in established Alzheimer's patients. And what did I just say? There's data that shows that a nutritional intervention is effective in turning dementia around.
- [46:31]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [46:32]
Dr. David Perlmutter
There's also data from Iran that demonstrates that probiotic intervention demonstrates improvement on the Mini Mental Status test, which is a standardized test doctors use in the office to determine how well a person's brain is functioning.
- [46:46]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's impressive.
- [46:47]
Dr. Heather Moday
I just reviewed a book by the.
- [46:49]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The new head of the Le Ruo center at Cleveland Clinic, which is the Alzheimer's research program there, and I was shocked to read he talked about using ketogenic diets in patients with Alzheimer's as a way of treating the problem, which is pretty radical. You've got the head of a major academic medical center saying, yes, we can use food as medicine.
- [47:11]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
We're seeing this trend, Food as medicine.
- [47:13]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Who knew?
- [47:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And yet there's this incredible backlash about this. We're going to get into that In a minute. There was an article in the Journal of the American Medical association called the Rise of Pseudomedicine for Dementia and Brain Health. And you and I would be considered in the pseudo medicine quack category.
- [47:29]
Dr. Heather Moday
I think I.
- [47:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
For me, it's a personal badge of honor that I'm on quack watch.
- [47:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Me too. Along with most of our best friends.
- [47:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But the saturated fat thing, I just want to come back to.
- [47:39]
Dr. David Perlmutter
And the founder of quackwatch commented on this article in jama. You need to see that.
- [47:44]
Dr. Heather Moday
I'm sure.
- [47:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm sure. I feel like I'm doing a good.
- [47:46]
Dr. Heather Moday
Job when I get more people attacking.
- [47:48]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Me from certain categories of, like Monsanto and the farming industry. But the saturated fat thing is fascinating because I want people to hear that saturated fat is not necessarily bad. That it is something that can be helpful in many conditions, but that's with one big caution, is to avoid what I call sweet fat. And the reason that saturated fat, I believe, causes, and I want to hear your opinion on this causes problems in the research which can correlate saturated fat with disease like heart disease and other problems is that when those studies were done, they're done in the context of people eating saturated fat in a high starch sugar diet. I call that sweet fat. Think of donuts, French fries, ice cream, cookies. These are high fat, high sugar combos that are deadly. So the caution is if you're going to eat saturated fat, you can't eat a diet high in starch and sugar. Yes. High in carbohydrates.
- [48:44]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Right.
- [48:45]
Dr. Heather Moday
Plant foods.
- [48:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I always say 75% of your diet should be plant foods in terms of starch, not in terms of starch, in terms of vegetables. In fact, most of your diet should be plant foods by volume, but they have very little calories. And most of your calories should be fat, but it's not much volume. Can you comment on that?
- [49:03]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Yeah, sure. And I would say, let's even take this. Unpack this further. And it doesn't even have to be in relationship to eating carbohydrates, simple carbohydrates, because the data comes from these studies that look at calculating the amount of saturated fat in somebody's diet based upon the foods that they eat. Then they calculate, well, this person eats, you know, a bunch of beef, they eat a bunch of bacon, et cetera. They get a lot of saturated fat. As we talked about earlier, those are the wrong kinds of foods for many, many reasons. So this is a calculated determination of saturated fat. It's not a biochemical demonstration that saturated fat does something in the body. It's people who ate a diet higher in saturated fat which delivers lots of toxins because these are foods from animals that have been fed, as we said earlier, garbage. That's where those saturated fats, how they're delivered to the human body. So it's not a clean type of study. It doesn't relate to telling a person to take a tablespoon of organic coconut oil. No relationship whatsoever. Look, 50% of the fat in human breast milk is saturated fat. Saturated fat.
- [50:16]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wait a minute. So basically, breast milk is almost as much saturated fat as pure butter.
- [50:22]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You bet. And why is it there? Because it helps for brain development, helps for immune system development. It helps prime the.
- [50:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was 25%, 50%.
- [50:30]
Dr. David Perlmutter
It's of the fat.
- [50:31]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It helps prime.5% of the calories in breast milk is from saturated fat.
- [50:36]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Yeah.
- [50:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
We're told to get less than 5% by the American Heart Association. So according to the American Heart association, we should ban breastfeeding.
- [50:44]
Dr. David Perlmutter
I think it needs a label. They need to go around and stamp breasts all around the world saying, this is not hard health. Yeah, avoid this. I mean, you know, it wasn't long ago when we were told not to eat avocados or nuts.
- [50:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes.
- [50:57]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Because they had high levels of the dreaded fat. That was about the worst. And we know where that came from. Now we know how medical literature in the late 1960s was tainted by industry, by sugar, who wanted, who influenced what was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, as recently revealed in the Journal of the American Medical association and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. And, you know, doctors bought into that. We bought into what our journals were telling us and it was patently wrong. Now you bring up a journal article from the Journal of the American Medical association that is castigating our approaches to dealing with brain health, calling it pseudoscience. We began medicine pseudo medicine. We began our conversation today with a discussion of the publication in the same journal, I'll have you know, in November of this year, wherein it was revealed that the so called Alzheimer's drugs that this article is a proponent of.
- [51:55]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yes.
- [51:56]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Don't work, but actually make people worse. Which is the pseudo medicine.
- [52:01]
Dr. Heather Moday
Exactly.
- [52:02]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Well, I think, you know, part of.
- [52:04]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The problem is that our type of medicine has not had the funding to study these interventions. Nobody's funding dietary interventions because they're expensive. They take a long time. Nobody's looking at these complex systems approaches to treating dementia, which you and I have done for decades. It's not just treating one thing like our friend Dale talks about medicine. Maybe there's 36 different problems, or 54 or 12, and if you don't deal with all of them, you're not going to get better. And our colleague and mentor, Sid Baker, says if you're standing on a tack, takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. And if you're standing on two, taking one tack out doesn't make you 50% better, right? So if you have mercury poisoning and gluten sensitivity and you just deal with the gluten, the mercury still might be a problem and you don't get better. And I think that's a really important lesson. I think this article is very disturbing to me because it didn't really analyze the data behind it. And there's so much data behind the kinds of things we're doing, whether it's optimizing our diet or exercise or restoring sleep or meditation, or using nutritional support, which is, you know, the B vitamins and methylation, or getting rid of mercury or fixing the microbiome or balancing hormones. These are the things that we use in Constellation to help optimize brain function. And what we know is that these things work. I mean, the only study that's ever been shown at a scale to reverse or slow cognitive decline is called the Finger study, which was basically using multiple interventions. Diet, exercise, stress reduction, addressing risk factors for the heart, for example, insulin resistance.
- [53:33]
Dr. David Perlmutter
And therein lies the criticism. Yes, but therein lies the criticism because the notion of leveraging multiple inputs into a system and looking for an outcome is absolutely at odds with the current model of how science as it relates to medicine is carried out. You mentioned Dr. Bredesen has a new book coming out where he actually reviews case studies of reversing Alzheimer's disease. And I had the opportunity to write the Ford for that book and I talked about how this is unprecedented, that he is not looking at what we call monotherapy to find the golden single drug that can be monetized, you know, and yet he's looking at using multiple but getting a great result. So why would we argue with that? But, you know, it is an inconvenient truth for people who want to believe otherwise that we need to create single approaches, monotherapy, and that can be the home run, billion dollar product that makes the investors very happy.
- [54:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's exciting. You'd be excited to hear that I'm working with some of the top scientists at Cleveland Clinic, talking about how do we study these systems approaches, how do we break the paradigm. How do we actually design a trial where we can test this theory instead of calling it pseudo medicine, calling it the future of medicine, which is really what it is.
- [54:48]
Dr. David Perlmutter
So I have to say that as I get older, I'm less offended by these and I really find it to be almost complimentary. It's sort of like complementary medicine. Because to be the outlier and to be disruptive, I think is really a good thing these days. Because the status quo is not where we want it to be and we need to challenge the status quo. And it's why people call us out. It's why, you know, you appear on the various videos and so do I. And some people put a thumbs down and comment, well, you know, I read the China Study and it said we should all. We shouldn't. You know, it's great. People want to believe.
- [55:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [55:26]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Because it's an inconvenient truth to tell somebody, you need to stop drinking diet drinks. You need to stop eating as much sugar as you're eating because it's going to compromise your health. Most people don't want to hear that message. They'd rather, as I mentioned earlier, hope for the magic bullet as it relates to Alzheimer's. It's interesting that In February of 2018, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, gave up.
- [55:50]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Gave up.
- [55:50]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. A lot of.
- [55:51]
Dr. David Perlmutter
We're not going to chase down the magic bullet for Alzheimer's anymore because it's not. It doesn't have a good enough roi.
- [55:58]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Return on investment, hundreds of studies, billions of dollars spent going down this rabbit hole. That is the wrong strategy for identifying the risks, the causes and the treatments for cognitive decline or Alzheimer's.
- [56:10]
Dr. Heather Moday
It's pretty stunning.
- [56:11]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And everybody's failing. And now people are starting to pay attention to what we're doing.
- [56:15]
Dr. David Perlmutter
I have a slide that I'll show you. Conference you and I will be attending in a couple days. And it's really quite interesting because it shows it measures a group of people in terms of insulin resistance, whether they have insulin resistance, which is the consequence of diet, or not over time. Who collects the most beta amyloid, this sticky protein in the brain that is associated with Alzheimer's risk? Who collects more beta amyloid. And it's dramatic how much more amyloid is in the brains of people who are insulin resistant. The reason I mentioned it in the context of our discussion right now is because the amyloid in the brain has really been the focus of the pharmaceutical industry trying to. To create an Alzheimer's drug. Amyloid does or doesn't play a role.
- [57:01]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Whatever, but sort of like sticky toffee that gums up.
- [57:04]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Right. But developing drugs to get rid of amyloid or to keep it from forming in the first place has been the focus of billions of dollars of research. Because if you could get rid of that protein, that might cure Alzheimer's. It doesn't. But the point is that we can determine on the front end how to lower our risk for developing amyloid in the brain in the first place.
- [57:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's a reaction to something. It's a.
- [57:27]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
It's.
- [57:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It is something.
- [57:28]
Dr. Heather Moday
It's driving inflammation.
- [57:29]
Dr. David Perlmutter
That's right. It's an overreaction. It's an overreaction to infection, for example, to herpes simplex virus, to chlamydia, to various organisms that do, in fact, colonize.
- [57:40]
Dr. Heather Moday
The microbiome of the brain.
- [57:41]
Dr. David Perlmutter
There is a microbiome on the brain of the brain. In fact, in a book we have coming out, there's a title, I mean, a chapter dedicated that from Dr. Tansey's group at Harvard.
- [57:50]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Yes.
- [57:50]
Dr. David Perlmutter
So it is really quite incredible to realize. Another series of slides looks at the degree of brain shrinkage if you carry the Alzheimer's gene in comparison to the degree of brain shrinkage in one year plotted against your hemoglobin A1c or your average blood sugar. And it turns out that the rate of shrinkage of your brain is greater with a higher A1C than it is carrying the Alzheimer's gene. You can't change.
- [58:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's pretty frightening.
- [58:22]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You can't change the Alzheimer's gene. If you got it, you've got it.
- [58:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You can change the expression of the gene.
- [58:27]
Dr. David Perlmutter
You can. But you can sure as heck lower your A1C by simply making some dietary changes.
- [58:33]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. Low sugar, you bet.
- [58:35]
Dr. David Perlmutter
More carbohydrates in the form of fiber.
- [58:38]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And more good fat.
- [58:38]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Nurturing your gut bacteria, reducing inflammation. But again, that is the inconvenient truth people don't want to embrace. The ball is very much on your side of the net. It's not up to me on the other side of the net, the doctor to fix this. It's up to you to hit that ball appropriately, with some topspin so that I can't return it. You know, give it a good shot.
- [58:57]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah.
- [58:58]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Here. And here's how to do it.
- [59:01]
Dr. Heather Moday
How?
- [59:03]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Lower your consumption of simple carbohydrates.
- [59:05]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah.
- [59:05]
Dr. David Perlmutter
Eat more healthful fat. Eat more dietary fiber. Exercise, make sure that your sleep is restorative. Really important, very much underrated. We spend a third of our lives sleeping or Trying to sleep. And we recognize that so much is going on during that activity, which we used to think is simply passive, but that we understand that this is hugely involved in reducing inflammation, in enhancing the brain's ability to take the garbage out through the activity of the glymphatic system.
- [59:35]
Dr. Mark Hyman
To triage our daily lymph system of the brain.
- [59:37]
Dr. Heather Moday
David talked about the lymph system which has to work at night, it works at night. It's got the night shift garbage out of your brain so that you're ready.
- [59:45]
Dr. David Perlmutter
To go the next day and to triage our day to day experiences and put them where they will be meaningful for us to rely upon in terms of leveraging new information to make decisions so underrated.
- [60:03]
Dr. Heather Moday
The good news is there's a lot of things that we can do. And we know, for example, in Alzheimer's that diet plays a huge role. The exercise plays a role, the nutritional status plays a role, B12 and vitamin D and methylation. We know the toxins play a role, that the gut microbiome plays a role, that insulin resistance and blood sugar play a role. So these are all modifiable risk factors. People don't think of preventing Alzheimer's, they think of preventing heart disease.
- [60:25]
Maria Shriver
Well, I think what's interesting about that is that when I've been in the kind of Alzheimer's advocacy space for 20 years, my dad was diagnosed in 2003 and lifestyle was not a part of the conversation when he was originally diagnosed. And then when as I started researching it as a reporter and started then looking at women and trying to understand what was happening in women, I said, is there anything women, Is it lifestyle connected? Is there anything we're doing, how we live? Is it menopause, any of these things? And everybody's like, no, no. Lifestyle has nothing to do with any of this.
- [60:59]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah.
- [61:00]
Maria Shriver
Jump to today. In the last five years, there's been a sea change around how we talk about Alzheimer's. About saying now you have people saying, well, maybe half of these cases could be preventable due to lifestyle choices made early on. Right. What you're talking about, that was when I started, it was only plaques and tangles. Plaques and tangles, right. That's tau, plaques and tangles, amyloid.
- [61:23]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. It's just basically the stuff that happens in the brain.
- [61:26]
Maria Shriver
But no one spoke about the importance of exercise. Nobody spoke about diet, Nobody spoke about nutrition and the brain. So I think this is a sea change in the Alzheimer's space. Nobody even talked about prevention of Alzheimer's. We opened the first women's Alzheimer's Prevention center at the Cleveland Clinic. And everybody's like, you can't say that. And I was like, why not?
- [61:50]
Dr. Heather Moday
You absolutely can.
- [61:51]
Maria Shriver
Yeah, but now you can.
- [61:53]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The data's there.
- [61:53]
Dr. Heather Moday
I mean, it's interesting. You know the data better than anybody. We've spent billions and billions of dollars on drugs discovery for Alzheimer's, all of which have failed miserably, in my opinion. Maybe we delay the admission to nursing home by a few months, and that's a grand success. But the only trials that I've seen that really have shown a difference in slowing or even reversing it have been aggressive lifestyle intervention trials like the Finger trial, where they use a multimodal intervention of lifestyle, diet, exercise, so forth, and then aggressively cheating risk factors. And they showed that they were able to slow or even reverse the cognitive decline. And then Richard Isaacson's work, very well. He's done even a more personalized approach where he looks at their biomarkers and also nutritional levels and customizes and personalized approach to what's going on. And it's had tremendous success compared to what we see in typical medicine. Del Bredesen, who also has been doing this. I've treated many Alzheimer's patients, and by doing this, by taking a deep look at their biology and their biomarkers, their nutritional status, their metabolic status, their hormonal status, their toxin levels, or gut health, all these things, we can actually modify and change the trajectory of people's health. And this is really why we created Function Health, was to help people identify things early on and not just kind of wait until something really serious happened.
- [63:06]
Maria Shriver
When we talk about women and Alzheimer's, so it disproportionately, as I said, Alzheimer's disproportionately impacts women, but also disproportionately impacts black and brown women. Right? And so, so many people don't have access to really what you're talking about. You know, some of these more kind of concierge medicine approaches, looking at biomarkers and looking at. So I'm really interested in how to democratize all of this to make it accessible to people who don't have money, who might be in maternal health deserts, who might be in just health deserts, period. So with the Prevention Center, I always looking at how do we bring this kind of home, how do we bring this, the education to people, how do we bring doctors who can talk about this in a way that people aren't scared? I think the conversation, I do a lot of work around how do you speak about this in a way that people can go, oh, I don't have to be so scared. Oh, maybe I could do this today, maybe I could do this tomorrow. Bringing it kind of to Main street is the challenge.
- [64:07]
Dr. Heather Moday
I think it's right. I mean, we need to democratize the information out there, because it's not. There's a lack of information or knowledge or scientific evidence. It's just that it hasn't been presented to the public in a way that they can access and use, and they have to go through the firewall of the healthcare system. And the doctor who is not, to his or her detriment, has not been trained. My daughter's in medical school now, and like, Rachel, have you learned about insulin resistance or microbiome or nutrition or toxins? Like. No. Like the things that actually matter most.
- [64:35]
Maria Shriver
Or women's health or menopause? But this is why I think, you know, when I talk about women's health, it starts by also changing the way medicine is taught in schools. Right. It's by incorporating. So many doctors said, well, I had an hour about menopause. I never even talked about perimenopause, much less postmenopausal women. You know, that was, like, not even in the textbook. So you're talking about a sea change, not only with doctors who are practicing, but for those coming into the space. And then also when we talk about women's health or when we talk about Alzheimer's, getting people interested in working in that space, in the geriatric space. Right. Geriatric psychiatrists, geriatric doctors. It's not. Young people are going to orthopedics. It's not sexy. They're going into orthopedics like my daughter.
- [65:20]
Dr. Heather Moday
That's what she wants to do, orthopedics.
- [65:23]
Maria Shriver
Because that's where the money is. Right. And so this is a challenge on so many levels. It's a challenge on how do we talk about it? How do we bring it home to Main Street? How do we change medical schools? How do we bring doctors who are working up to date? How do we make it enticing to go into this space as we're an aging country?
- [65:44]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah.
- [65:45]
Maria Shriver
You know, in California, I did a big report for Gavin Newsom about what does California, which is an aging state, you don't think of California that way. What do we need to do to be ready for the tsunami of baby boomers who are gonna get Alzheimer's and dementia? Right. We're not ready. We're not ready as a nation. We don't have caregivers which also disproportionately falls on women. So I think it's a exciting space to be in, but it's an urgent space.
- [66:13]
Dr. Heather Moday
It is, yeah, it's an urgent. It's really kind of why we've created Function Health was to democratize access to people's own health data and make it very low cost. For $4.99 a year, you get over 110 biomarkers and testing twice a year to track your numbers and see what's going on. And in that data, you get empowered with not only just the information about what's going on, but you get empowered with insights and actionable steps to actually improve things.
- [66:35]
Maria Shriver
That's the key.
- [66:36]
Dr. Heather Moday
And things that your doctor may not know. So we're taking all the scientific evidence, all the expert knowledge extracted from all the world's top experts, both traditional and functional medicine, and helping create a personalized guide for how you can uplevel your health and what you need to do to explore if there's different issues going on. So I think 499 is still a fair bit of money.
- [66:56]
Maria Shriver
Right.
- [66:57]
Dr. Heather Moday
But it's certainly a lot less than people spend, for example, on coffee every day. It's like a dollar I saw in.
- [67:02]
Maria Shriver
There that you have like you could gift. Right. I was like, okay, well that's actually something. That's an interesting concept. By the time you finish buying somebody flowers or coffee, you could add, no coffee for you for the next year.
- [67:18]
Dr. Heather Moday
So it's really about empowering people with their health data. And even people like you who are super active and powerful and doing stuff in the world and energetic, there's always little stuff that you find that you can fine tune.
- [67:30]
Maria Shriver
Absolutely. That's what I'm curious about.
- [67:32]
Dr. Heather Moday
So when we did your test, we found some good news, right?
- [67:35]
Maria Shriver
Yeah. Let's start with that. The good news is true. I'm not gonna die right now.
- [67:38]
Dr. Heather Moday
You're not gonna die yet in this moment. And you're six year plus younger than your chronologies.
- [67:45]
Maria Shriver
But I want that to be better.
- [67:46]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [67:46]
Dr. Heather Moday
So you're an overachiever. I got it.
- [67:47]
Maria Shriver
Yes. I wanna be. I have grandchildren, I have adult children and I wanna be around for them. And I don't. I think that's the other thing. Watching a parent or two parent. My mother ended up with lots of strokes too, later in life. And I think being a caregiver for two parents is a lot.
- [68:07]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah, it's a lot.
- [68:08]
Maria Shriver
Emotionally, financially, physically, spiritually, in every way.
- [68:12]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Right.
- [68:13]
Maria Shriver
And then I think once you've watched that up close. You think about yourself and if you have children, you think about, okay, well.
- [68:21]
Dr. Heather Moday
How do I keep myself?
- [68:22]
Maria Shriver
How do I keep myself so that my children don't have to do that? Don't have to do that. Maybe they're not capable of doing that, or maybe they don't have the money to do that, or maybe they're not in the same town. There's all these. And so I think to myself, how can I be as independent for as long as I can, be as strong as I can? So when I go to the gym now, actually, I say to the trainer, I said, give me an exercise that can help me with my overhead compartment in the plane. I want to lift the bag in the overhead compartment. Give me an exercise. I have a granddaughter who weighs 30 some pounds.
- [68:54]
Dr. Heather Moday
You want to pick her up?
- [68:55]
Maria Shriver
I want to pick her up. I want to walk around with her. I don't wanna say when she says, mama G, lift me up, lift me up. I don't wanna go, oy. I can't. I wanna be able to lift her up and then the next one up and the next one. So when I go to the gym today, I'm looking for to be functional. To be functional. Yeah. To be able to be strong for those things. To be independent from my kids so that they're not overwhelmed. Because I found it overwhelming to be a caregiver.
- [69:23]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. I mean, it's hard. And I think you know what you're talking about also is how do we prevent those things that actually are preventable? Like Alzheimer's is preventable, heart disease preventable, Diabetes is preventable. So many of the things we see, autoimmune disease is preventable, but people don't know what's going on under the hood until it's too late. So we found that you're six years younger, which is great. And you can get younger.
- [69:42]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Oh, yeah.
- [69:43]
Maria Shriver
We're going back to my test now, right? I'm going to go to the Bad News now. My son said, you're not really going to talk about your own blood tests on the thing, are you? I was like, yeah, actually, I think I am.
- [69:53]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
But, well, it's empowering for other people.
- [69:55]
Dr. Heather Moday
To hear because people are walking around, think they're fine. So we didn't find anything really terrible. And you're 61 years old biologically, which is good.
- [70:03]
Maria Shriver
That's okay.
- [70:04]
Dr. Heather Moday
And you could get younger. I just got a year younger in the last five months by doing a whole bunch of things based on my own function results. So I was able to sort of optimize my health just learning.
- [70:13]
Maria Shriver
How old were you on your results?
- [70:15]
Dr. Heather Moday
53.
- [70:16]
Maria Shriver
53.
- [70:17]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. So, wow. There's different biomarker tests for aging, but you want to look at all these things because they reflect really what's going on under the hood. And.
- [70:25]
Maria Shriver
And we can get me to 50.
- [70:27]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. The other thing, you know, Marie, is that your family history is significant. Right. You have a history of maybe, you know, celiac or autoimmune disease with your mom's stomach.
- [70:35]
Maria Shriver
Yeah.
- [70:36]
Dr. Heather Moday
You know, certainly your uncle had that and your cousin has that. And we know it's in an Irish family. So right there, somebody should be looking at autoimmunity at gluten and things that are not normally checked on a regular panel. And we did find some things also, you know, your family history of Alzheimer's is concerning. And we want to make sure that the things that tend to promote Alzheimer's are not showing up in your blood test. Right. We want to look at your B vitamin levels. We want to look at something called homocysteine. We want to look at inflammation. We want to look at your metabolic health, like insulin resistance. And these are things that are not usually checked on your annual physical. So when you went into your doctor, they said your tests are, quote, normal. Looking at 20 or 30 things. You know, we looked at over 110 things on your labs.
- [71:13]
Maria Shriver
Right.
- [71:14]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And a few things popped up.
- [71:15]
Dr. Heather Moday
One was you have have low levels of inflammation. Inflammation is one of the things that drives Alzheimer's. We know that Alzheimer's is a disease of inflammation in the brain, just as almost all chronic diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer.
- [71:27]
Maria Shriver
So why would I have low levels of inflammation?
- [71:29]
Dr. Heather Moday
Higher levels.
- [71:30]
Maria Shriver
I have higher.
- [71:31]
Dr. Heather Moday
Higher levels than we've seen.
- [71:32]
Maria Shriver
Oh, I don't have low.
- [71:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
- [71:33]
Dr. Heather Moday
So you want low. You want something called C reactive protein. Again, a test not normally checked. It should be under 1. Yours is 1.4.
- [71:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Not terrible, but it's like a trend.
- [71:42]
Dr. Heather Moday
Right. I don't want you to have that.
- [71:44]
Maria Shriver
I don't want to be on that trend.
- [71:45]
Dr. Heather Moday
And we also saw this low level of autoimmunity. Now, why you have this autoimmune marker, it doesn't mean you have an autoimmune disease. It just means you have this low grade autoimmunity, which means your body is somehow attacking itself. And then we can figure out why. Right. It may be something you're eating and maybe gluten, it may be heavy metals and maybe things that, if left untreated, could progress and lead to more serious inflammation in your body. And.
- [72:07]
Maria Shriver
But we don't know what it is.
- [72:09]
Dr. Heather Moday
And we can find out. Like we had, for example, you had high levels of mercury that were from probably eating fish. People eat a lot of fish but they think it's healthy. But all our oceans are polluted, so mercury is a big for example factor.
- [72:20]
Maria Shriver
I had high levels of mercury.
- [72:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You did?
- [72:23]
Maria Shriver
Oh my gosh. I thought I had low levels of mercury.
- [72:24]
Dr. Heather Moday
Well, your level range on the lab reference range according to quest is 0 to 10. But there's no biological requirement for mercury. There's no safe level of mercury. It's a neurotoxin.
- [72:36]
Maria Shriver
Okay.
- [72:37]
Dr. Heather Moday
So no more, no more swordfish. It's no more tuna.
- [72:41]
Maria Shriver
I don't like tuna, but I do.
- [72:43]
Dr. Heather Moday
Swordfish is amazing.
- [72:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It is one of the worst.
- [72:44]
Dr. Heather Moday
Swordfish, shark worst.
- [72:46]
Maria Shriver
Oh, I'm not a big. I don't like sharks at all. So that's not an issue.
- [72:50]
Dr. Heather Moday
I know you'll.
- [72:51]
Maria Shriver
You help spend time at camp Swordfish at the Ivy.
- [72:53]
Dr. Heather Moday
Oh yeah. Swordfish is so high hurt me.
- [72:55]
Maria Shriver
This is going to be a hard.
- [72:57]
Dr. Heather Moday
For giving up the risk of Alzheimer's, you might want to give up sword.
- [73:01]
Maria Shriver
Okay, swordfish.
- [73:01]
Dr. Elizabeth Boham
Bye.
- [73:01]
Maria Shriver
Bye.
- [73:02]
Dr. Heather Moday
But the high mercury, for example, yours was 9 and 10 is the limit, but 9 isn't good. The normal level is 0. And so we don't know what's stored in your body. We need to look at that. These are things that are not checked. Like for example, heavy metals are not checked in your general checkup, but they should be because they're risk factors for autoimmunity, for Alzheimer's, for fatigue and some of these things. You were just mentioning low grade fatigue. Well, yeah, you're busy running around, but maybe it's not normal. If your body was working properly, you should have energy to do whatever you want.
- [73:30]
Maria Shriver
Right.
- [73:31]
Dr. Heather Moday
You know, and I think, you know, I'm turned 65 this year and I just. Last month I went to Patagonia and I climbed a mountain. It was 15 miles. It was a mile straight up and a mile straight down and took, you know, 13 hours and I was able to do it.
- [73:42]
Maria Shriver
Look at you.
- [73:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I know, but, but we should be.
- [73:44]
Dr. Heather Moday
Able to do that.
- [73:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Our bodies can do that.
- [73:46]
Dr. Heather Moday
But okay, if we don't optimize them, they don't. We tend to decline. So we want to look at factors that may be triggering some of this low grade inflammation. And for me it's a, it's a red flag. If you have a family history of Alzheimer's.
- [73:57]
Maria Shriver
Gotcha.
- [73:57]
Dr. Heather Moday
And you've already done your APOE testing.
- [73:59]
Maria Shriver
Yes.
- [73:59]
Dr. Heather Moday
Which test did you have?
- [74:01]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
Which.
- [74:01]
Maria Shriver
Well, actually, Richard Isaacson did it, so I don't know which test he.
- [74:04]
Dr. Heather Moday
Did you have Apoe 4?
- [74:06]
Maria Shriver
No, I don't.
- [74:07]
Dr. Heather Moday
So you didn't have the Alzheimer's gene, which is really good. But a lot of people who get Alzheimer's don't.
- [74:11]
Maria Shriver
Correct.
- [74:11]
Dr. Heather Moday
So it may not be just that, but there may be other factors. So I really want to look at that. You also said, you know, I'm a little tired and maybe I don't have as much energy. And I saw, well, your iron levels were low.
- [74:20]
Maria Shriver
Right. So I need to eat more meat.
- [74:21]
Dr. Heather Moday
So maybe you need to eat more meat. Or maybe we need to think about if you're losing blood somewhere and it, you know, could be a sign of, you know, that you need a colonoscopy or.
- [74:28]
Maria Shriver
I just had a colonoscopy, so that.
- [74:29]
Dr. Heather Moday
Was clean, so that's great. So you don't. If you're not having vaginal bleeding, so then I wonder, maybe you're not having proper absorption in your gut. Maybe you do have a little bit of gluten sensitivity. Maybe you do have.
- [74:39]
Maria Shriver
I definitely have some feeling of gluten sensitivity.
- [74:41]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. So this is, again, this is something that we need to dig deep in. And then if we find, oh, probably the reason for your iron deficiency and your elevated inflammation and this low grade autoimmunity with an ANA is maybe because you're gluten sensitive. Not full celiac, but enough.
- [74:55]
Maria Shriver
Yeah, I've tested for celiac and no.
- [74:57]
Dr. Heather Moday
But enough that it creates a little bit of damage to your gut and you're not absorbing things. So these are the things that are super fixable. So I say, don't eat fish. Let's get your body to detox for mercury. Let's get you off gluten, see what happens. Let's retest your tests and see how they're doing. So there's really powerful things we found in your labs.
- [75:14]
Maria Shriver
Okay. So I'm going to come back, we're going to retest all of these things, we're going to change it. I'm going to come back and see how old I am and whether I. We're going to get you younger.
- [75:22]
Dr. Heather Moday
You're going to get you under better.
- [75:24]
Maria Shriver
On my blood test.
- [75:24]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah, we're going to get you under 60.
- [75:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Under 60.
- [75:26]
Maria Shriver
Under 60.
- [75:27]
Dr. Dale Bredesen
We want you under 60.
- [75:28]
Maria Shriver
I want to get to 50.
- [75:30]
Dr. Heather Moday
We'll get you to 50.
- [75:31]
Maria Shriver
Yes. In my mind, I'm like 45.
- [75:33]
Dr. Heather Moday
Yeah. Well, I did Another test that's a different scale. We can do that for you, too. It grades it differently. But I'm 43 on that test, so I'm happy about that. That's the number I try to use. But 53 is this other calculus that is based on the one we do with function health. But the other thing we found, Maria, is, and this was a little surprising, could. You're traveling dehydrated maybe, but your kidney function was just slightly off.
- [75:54]
Maria Shriver
Right.
- [75:54]
Dr. Heather Moday
And so this is something that is going on in our society that can be caused by many factors. It can be caused by inflammation, autoimmunity, heavy metals, obviously high blood pressure, diabetes. You don't have those.
- [76:05]
Maria Shriver
No.
- [76:05]
Dr. Heather Moday
You have low blood pressure.
- [76:06]
Maria Shriver
Yes.
- [76:07]
Dr. Heather Moday
And so those things often need to be addressed. And so we're finding things early so that we can do something about it. And you're not going to end up having some problem with your kidneys later on. Right. And you didn't even know that. Right, right. So these are the things we were finding on the function health panels that allow people to become empowered, and then you get guidelines on exactly how to fix it and when to go to the doctor. So, for example, for the kidney function, I might say, gee, in the recommendations, you need to go see a kidney specialist to just double check what's going on.
- [76:35]
Maria Shriver
Right.
- [76:35]
Dr. Heather Moday
So we really have learned all these things.
- [76:37]
Maria Shriver
Then I always wonder, like, you know, a lot of times you do these and they're like, go to this doctor, go to this doctor, go to this. And I'm like, oh, you know, then it's like, it's a time issue. But I know that it's. I mean, I will do it.
- [76:49]
Dr. Heather Moday
Well, there's certain things that are really important, but most of the things, I would say 80% of the things we find people can take care of on their own. Right.
- [76:54]
Maria Shriver
Okay.
- [76:55]
Dr. Heather Moday
They might recommend, you know, do you need to do a. Maybe a different kind of gluten sensitivity test? You maybe need to do a different heavy metal test. We need to look at why you're losing iron. If it's something that's losing or maybe it's just your diet. So we would fix these things. We saw your vitamin D was a little bit low, so it's just really tweaking things. And I think your energy level will come up, you'll feel better, you'll feel stronger, your brain will be clear. And more importantly, you know, we're going to mitigate the risks of you ending up with the same issues that your dad had.
- [77:22]
Maria Shriver
Yeah, No, I Don't want that.
- [77:23]
Dr. Heather Moday
What's really interesting now is and soon we're gonna be offering this on the function health panel. There's even blood tests where you can detect in the blood biomarkers of Alzheimer's years and years before you ever have a symptom.
- [77:34]
Maria Shriver
So people always talk about that. Do you wanna know if you have the Alzheimer's gene? Do you wanna know if you can find it? Because then what? As long as we have no cure, is that actually gonna freak people out? Is that gonna be helpful in any way? And I think this is a debate going on with doctors goes on. I hear it a lot that people are like, I don' that's not gonna be helpful to me until we find a cure. Which I totally also understand.
- [78:01]
Dr. Heather Moday
It's true, Maria, if you're operating from the traditional medical paradigm where drugs are the solution. But if you actually look at the data around Alzheimer's or heart disease or diabetes or cancer, most of these conditions are lifestyle driven conditions. So there's really significant things you can do with your diet, with exercise, sleep, stress management, nutritional supplements, fixing your microbiome, dealing with heavy metals. There's so many things you can do to lower your risk. And it's all data driven. It's not like the data isn't out there. But it takes decades for scientific discoveries to actually be implemented into medical practice.
- [78:38]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at drmarkyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions.
- [78:47]
Dr. Heather Moday
Questions.
- [78:48]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my Clinic the Ultra Wellness center at ultra ultra wellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your.
- [79:43]
Dr. Heather Moday
Corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare.
- [79:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
- [80:02]
Dr. Heather Moday
Are you feeling stuck on your health journey?
- [80:04]
Dr. Mark Hyman
With so much conflicting advice out there, it's hard to know what actually works and when things don't go as planned, it's easy to blame yourself. But what if the problem isn't you? Maybe the real challenge is that you're trying to do it alone instead of more confusion. You need expert guidance, proven protocols and a support system that helps you every step of the way. That's why I created the Hymenhive, a place where you can get deep insights from me and my team, learn what works for your body, and be part of a supportive community that has your back every step of the way. Inside the Hive, you'll get access to monthly live events with me, expert coaching, behind the scenes content, science backed protocols, challenges to keep you motivated, and so much more. If you're tired of feeling stuck and ready to take control of your health, I'd love to have you join us. Right now you can join the Waitlist and lock in founding member pricing. Just $27 a month, the lowest it'll ever be. But this offer won't last. Head to Dr. Hyman.com hive h I v e to join the waitlist. Now that's Dr. Hyman.com hive hive I can't wait to see you inside.