Why Alzheimer’s Cases Are Tripling - And What You Can Do About It
69m 0s
In this episode of Stronger, host introduces neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola, emphasizing her dedication to finding an Alzheimer's cure. The conversation delves into an anti-Alzheimer's protocol covering exercise, diet, sleep, and supplementation with exogenous ketones. Nicola highlights the impact of lifestyle on Alzheimer's prevention, particularly for women experiencing hormonal shifts. The discussion sheds light on Alzheimer's as a disease affecting neuron connections in the brain rather than neurons themselves. It stresses the significance of lifestyle choices in preventing Alzheimer's, with 95% of cases being preventable through healthy habits and neuroprotective measures.
Transcription
12935 Words, 71806 Characters
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Stronger.
Today, I just brought on Louisa Nicola.
Louisa is a friend and she's a neurophysiologist.
She studies the brain.
She is incredibly passionate about trying to find a cure
for Alzheimer's.
And I think you guys are gonna get a lot
of great information out of this.
There are so many things that she dove into
in reference to anti-alcoholic Alzheimer's protocol.
So specific things that she listed, like exercise,
diet, sleep, supplementation,
she spoke about the importance of exogenous ketones
and why she would have you supplement those.
I think there's a lot of great points today.
Louisa and I spent an hour.
We could have probably spent about five hours.
I know whether you are a man or a woman,
you're gonna absolutely love this episode.
There's so many great points to be able to implement
and to start young,
start putting these into your daily routine,
reap the benefits of it long-term.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Let's go.
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All right, guys, have fun.
Luis Nicola.
- Hi.
- Super excited.
- Me too.
- My Greek friend, people don't know.
I'm a quarter Greek.
So I got to brag that all the time when I meet Greeks.
- You should.
- Definitely.
But I met you through Gabrielle Line, brilliant,
incredible person.
We just hit it off.
And I just was grateful that you came down here.
But you're a neurophysiologist.
Okay, you're also the founder of the neuro-experience podcast.
Can you talk to me about what a neurophysiologist does?
- Oh my gosh.
So it's a subspecialty of neurology.
So generally when you're seeing a neurologist,
and maybe you've got a headache
or something, you go to the neurologist.
And if there may suspect something else along the lines of,
if you've had a seizure, right?
Or if you've had maybe suspecting of multiple sclerosis,
you go and see a neurophysiologist.
So what we do is we usually scan brains,
scan the functionality of the brains using something
called an EEG.
So I've scanned about, I would say,
10,000 brains right now,
usually picking up on epilepsy, Alzheimer's disease.
We also use something called an EMG,
which electromyography that can pick up on anything
from myesthenia gravis, ALS, things like that.
So I actually have a unique role.
I'm a neurophysiologist intraoperatively.
So I'm in neurosurgery three days a week,
specifically in an area called neuroplastic neurosurgery.
So when you are in neurosurgery,
it's not just about the surgeon.
It's an entire team, right?
And because the brain is so complex,
when the surgeon is cutting, so to say,
you have to be so mindful that you don't go near a nerve
because anything can paralyze a person,
because the brain is so intricate.
So I will be in there and using EMGs,
going really deep within the brain
and basically guiding the surgeon on where to cut,
where not to cut, and assessing whether this patient
has stroked out or not during surgery.
- You got almost, I feel like you're one of these people
that develops somewhat of an obsession to this.
- I have.
- It's not, this is not your job.
This is your life's work.
- It has been since the age of 20 when I first saw a brain.
- What, can you talk about that?
- So during my second year of my undergraduate degree,
we had to go into a cadaver lab,
and I fell in love with the bodies.
And that sounds kind of crazy, right?
And the woman who was in charge,
I don't know what sound, I don't know,
the what you'd name her,
she was in charge of actually cutting up the bodies
once they came in.
And she said to me, this man came in
and it was just the top part of his torso.
She said, I'm actually going to be drilling through,
getting his brain.
And I thought, can I stay back?
And I stayed back until 10 pm.
- That didn't freak you out at all watching that?
- No, and when I first saw it,
I thought this is magnificent.
So I actually pulled an entire, like a human brain out.
Unfortunately, this man was 62 years old.
He had a car accident.
He donated his body to medical research.
So when I first saw that,
and this woman guided me on everything,
like incisions and autopsies.
And it was just, I thought I have to dedicate my life to this.
- So, I mean, getting into now.
- Kind of sounds morbid, and makes me sound like a neighbor.
- No, it does, but like you're doing,
you're improving, you know, life, I mean, you really are,
because people have to come in,
and that sounds like such an unintelligent comment there.
But I had to find something very broad.
I mean, your work right now is giving us the information.
That's scary stuff.
When someone's coming to a neurophysiologist,
it's not like, "Oh, hey, I've got a bump on my elbow."
They're like, these are problems.
I mean, you probably see people in their worst state,
or let's say most vulnerable state.
- 100%, and you know, when you're delivering news,
I give multiple scores, which actually is,
not a death sentence, thank God, and anymore.
It can be scary.
It can be scary to hear something like that.
- What about, I mean, there's something,
I mean, I'm gonna jump right to it right now.
Alzheimer's, I mean, this is something
that I saw my grandfather go through when I was very young,
and I saw my father have to go through it with his father,
scared of living shit out of me.
I just, I couldn't believe that my dad just shows up
one day and his father doesn't know who he is,
and is telling my dad about his son,
and that to me was one of the most,
it's one of the most sickening things
I've seen someone go through.
I'm like, how do you just remove someone's memories
and relationships and love?
These are things that we spend an entire life
building and developing and evolving,
and to have that taken away from you is,
it's almost, it's just a terrible thing to say,
it's almost worse for the relative,
because at least the person who's going through it
doesn't know what's going on in a way,
but my dad is sitting there and watching his father
going through that, so why?
Why did you suddenly become so passionate about
trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's?
- So when you're in neurophysiology,
I was actually, as I mentioned,
you're scanning all these brains,
so I was tasked in 2018 with picking up on early
on-set Alzheimer's disease.
That was my entire task.
I was in a neurology wing, and I was like,
okay, great, I was scanning all these brains,
and I kept coming up with mild cognitive impairment,
so meaning that people had pre-dimension states.
And every time I asked my superior, the attending,
whoever, I would ask, okay, great,
what are we going to do with this person?
They said, no, that is it, just mild cognitive impairment.
I thought, well, what are we going to do?
Can we reverse it?
Can we cure it?
I didn't have the answers, and they just kept telling me
just get on to the next patient.
So I had no time, and it was really frustrating,
but that's what I was told.
I was told that we could not do anything about it.
So one woman came in and really changed my life.
I saw her over the course of two years,
she was 52 years old, and she had mild cognitive impairment,
and the...
- So that's when it's called before Alzheimer's?
That's when you start to get those short-term memory
complaints, maybe you forgot where your keys are,
and then you start, and then it's a massive,
acceleration, and I actually saw that
because she went from coming in,
"Hi Louise, I'm so excited with her husband
and her kids to who are you, and what am I doing here?"
- And what span of time do that really happen?
- Two years.
- Two years, she went from knowing you
and being friendly to not knowing who you are.
- Yeah, and that's when I actually decided to go all in
on Alzheimer's disease, and let me tell you,
I've dedicated seven days a week,
I would say 24 hours a day to this disease,
for the better half of my career.
So ever since, that was around 2017, 2018.
- So, talk to us about some of the things
that you've seen evolved.
I mean, there's not a cure for Alzheimer's.
- So, yeah.
- But we're on a way to finding out things that might,
I wanna see a cure, can you slow the process maybe, or...
- You can slow the process, we don't have a cure,
you can't reverse it, so that's all we can do.
You, no matter where you are on that time course,
no matter where you're five, 10 years into it,
you can slow the progression of it accelerating,
but let's just do a crash course for everybody,
because people keep misinterpreting what it is.
So dementia is the umbrella term
that we use for all of the different neurodegenerative diseases,
Parkinson's dementia, dementia with the Louis bodies.
We've got Bruce Willis, who's got front at temporal dementia.
His wife, Emma, has spoken about being a caregiver,
which is what you said, you know,
the devastating moments of being a caregiver.
Alzheimer's disease is the most prominent form of dementia.
It affects, right now, around 50 to 60 million people worldwide,
and that number is going to triple by the year 2015.
- Why is it triple?
- Because of the state of our environment.
- Yeah, the food, everything that we're consuming.
- 95% of Alzheimer's disease cases could be prevented.
- Stop it.
- Yeah, so...
- That's not a theory, that's a statistic.
- That is a statistic, you don't have to get Alzheimer's disease.
We now know after many years of research,
the very first patient with Alzheimer's disease was 1901,
and it was a female, and she was 52 years old.
- So you developed this form of dementia in the beginning,
or what did you call it?
- Myled cognitive impairment.
- Myled cognitive impairment.
At that point, you're...
- You're on the trajectory.
- You're on the bus.
- So at that point, there's no preventative.
It is no preventative, but do you want to go along the bus
at 20 miles an hour, or do you want to just bring it down
to two miles an hour?
- Slow it down.
- So instead of getting the Alzheimer's disease diagnosis
at 70, do you want to get it at maybe 95?
- Right.
- Much better.
- So this is why now, when we start talking about neuroathletics
and neuroathletic principles,
these are things that a lot of coaches out there
do talk about in their everyday life,
but you obviously know the exact things
that you would recommend someone to do
to basically slow this process down as quickly as possible,
or protocols that you might have someone follow
if it's something that's in their family,
and they're nervous, and they're just...
It's in the back of their head.
My grandfather had it.
My father had it.
What's the chance of me having it?
I'm gonna do what Luis is saying.
That's pretty much what neuroathletics is, or...
100%, so there's a common myth and misconception,
and that is everyone's going to get dementia,
as you get older.
But that's not the case.
Dementia isn't a disease of old age.
It's a disease of the lifestyle that you live.
So we can definitely prevent Alzheimer's disease.
Now what you were just referring to, you said genetics.
So a lot of people understand that there is risk genes
involved in this disease.
It's called the APOE4 genes.
And if you have one allyl, so we get two allyls,
one from mum, one from dad.
If you've got one APOE4 allyl,
you raise your risk of getting the disease by three times.
Three times greater than the general population.
If you have two, you raise your risk by about 10 to 12 times.
- Wow. - Even so, it does not mean
you have to get the disease.
And we know this from...
There was a massive study in Africa
that showed that a lot of the population,
they have two allyls of APOE4,
but actually have the lowest amount of Alzheimer's disease cases.
Why is that because they're living healthier lifestyles?
Which means that lifestyle prevention
is the number one key to preventing Alzheimer's disease.
- There was a book years ago I read by Weston A Price
called of physical degeneration.
It was basically showing the different regions
and how we're affected by things like our environment
and the foods we're exposed to.
And they took people who lived in these regions
that had perfectly white teeth and jaw lines.
And suddenly they brought them into different regions.
And within two weeks they were six for the first time
or things started changing.
It really is.
I mean, you are a product of your environment.
So there's so many directions we can go with this today
and I'm praying that you'll agree to come back on down the road
and we can highlight more things.
But I would really like to kind of focus out of the gate
on Alzheimer's because I know right now
we're gonna be peaking people's interest about this.
And that's not to disrespect all the other work
that you've done.
But can you start maybe educating people
or what are some things that they want to think about
from recognizing that this might be an issue.
I don't friend the other day contacting me about someone
that they're really concerned with
because they're starting to see health decline.
And they're starting to have some symptoms go on.
And what would you recommend for someone who's nervous,
unsure, am I going down this path?
Well, let's start there.
Well, unfortunately this is the only time I will do this.
We have to separate the sexes because we do have a problem here.
There are sex differences in this disease.
We know that women represent two thirds
of all Alzheimer's disease cases.
Two thirds.
Wow.
Yeah.
I thought you were going to go the other way around.
I thought you were going to save us guys.
No.
No, men are more predisposed to,
if we're talking about Parkinson's disease, for example,
but women represent two thirds of Alzheimer's disease cases.
So we do have to be sex specific right now.
Why is that?
I think it was because we lived longer or women lived longer.
But we now know it's because of this hormonal shift
that occurs at around 45 to 55.
You know, it's called perimenopause and menopause,
which I know is spotlighted right now on the internet
and rightfully so because back in 2002,
there was a huge, huge study called the Women's Health Initiative
that basically scared millions and millions of women
out of taking hormone replacement therapy.
So during the perimenopause stage,
women can get it as early as 41, 42.
Average age, about 45.
Things start to shift.
We get a decline in estrogen and progesterone
and testosterone.
And we used to think that these hormones
were responsible for reproduction.
But we now know that they serve so much more roles
than that.
We've got estrogen receptors in the brain.
I'm just going to focus on,
estrogen receptors all over the body.
Sure.
Mainly the brain.
You have estrogen, too, by the way.
And it's neuroprotective.
So it's protecting our brain against inflammation,
toxic exposure from the environment.
It's protecting us against harmful chemicals.
It helps us utilize glucose better in our brain.
This is why you've probably heard of Alzheimer's disease
being type three diabetes, which we'll get to.
So it's so neuroprotective.
So what happens if we all of a sudden get a loss in it?
Well, our brain doesn't function as well.
Because it doesn't have its protector there.
It's like taking, it's like being in an NFL game
and then all of a sudden you're going in the NFL game,
but you've taken the helmet off.
What's going to happen?
Well, you're going to be predisposed to concussions, right?
So it's the same thing.
So we've taken all of the estrogen out.
So the brain is there.
It's starving.
It's thinking, what am I going to do to survive?
And it starts to malfunction.
And the way that it malfunctions is,
we have 87 billion neurons in the brain.
87 billion nerve cells.
And all of them connect with one another.
There's about 15,000 connections per nerve cell.
So Alzheimer's disease is the breakdown of these connections.
OK.
Yeah, so you're not killing neurons itself.
You're breaking down the connections.
But these connections are responsible for everything
we do.
The way you think, the way you breathe, the way you throw a ball,
everything is connected.
And so if these start to break down, which they do,
they start to break down in certain regions.
The first area is the hippocampus.
That's the area responsible for memory formation, memory
consolidation.
That's why the first signs of Alzheimer's diseases,
what was that man's name?
Or honey, where are my keys?
And you're looking around, or it's when you go into the garage.
Hang on, just go to go into the garage.
What did I come in here for?
You've probably had those moments, right?
I've been having a lot more of those moments lately.
And I just think it's from more stress and stress.
And I think that's my wife got all panicked.
And she's like, no, she's on chat.
She VT checking it out.
And she's like, if you forget table or stuff like that,
then you're in trouble.
Like, just shut up.
I leave you alone.
The amount of people that I get thousands of DMs on Instagram.
So that's how it starts.
And then if you don't take care of it,
what tends to happen is then this is actually
so interesting.
And I just found this out.
It's this is like, brain your research
what I'm about to say to you.
And it's quite scary.
Your brain uses glucose as its primary fuel source, okay?
Glucose in order to produce energy.
So during menopause, we actually see a reduction
of brain glucose metabolism by 30%.
So 30% of our utilization of our brain fuel decreases.
So then you think, okay, great.
Where is the neuron going to get fuel from?
If it can't utilize glucose, where does it get fuel?
Because it needs fuel to survive.
I would think my guess would be fat, but what are you going to say?
It is fat, but where does it get the fat from?
Because dietary cholesterol cannot cross the blood brain barriers.
It's like you can eat a stick of butter
and then just accept and have your brain eat it.
I'm trying to guess right now and where would be not,
not the place that we'd want it to come from,
but the place that you wouldn't want it to come from.
So remember those connections that I told you about?
So your brain, so your brain cell is your brain cell.
And then the connection that comes off it,
it's called an axon.
The axon is myelinated, okay?
It's covered in this myelin sheet.
That myelin sheet is fat.
It's made of a ligadendrocytes.
Guess what happens?
The brain, the brain cells itself start eating the fat.
So it starts eating the coating of the myelin sheet.
So your brain literally eats itself to survive.
And in that moment, your axon is left with no myelin sheet.
So therefore something occurs.
It's called conduction velocity starts to stop.
So that's what causes you to stop thinking properly
and the speed.
You know how sometimes I don't know if you've spoken to your parents.
You know, I speak to my parents now they're 70 years old,
but when I was speaking to them when they're 50s,
oh my dad was sharp, he was onto it.
Now he's like slower, right?
Things start to slow down.
And then you start, that's, and that's the start of it.
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So how do we supply the brain with all of the essential tools
that it needs?
Well, one, it needs propping nutrition.
Right, so the mind diet is the best diet across the board
for Alzheimer's disease.
So you're referring to more of a fat-adapted diet,
less carbohydrates, less glucose, right?
Yes.
And I'm not really going to say plant rich.
Plant rich, yeah.
But still pro, but not, but that animal protein also.
Yes, yes, but you're looking around.
Plant strong as well.
Plant strong, yeah.
The mind diet, Mediterranean intervention, dash diet,
is what it stands for, was like 70 or 80 percent plants.
So yeah, so the Mediterranean diet, you would say.
So what about the theory on people getting into ketosis?
Great, we love that.
Exogenous ketones, ever let me tell you.
So I, one of the sponsors of my show, it's a ketone company.
They send me boxes of, I got in touch with them.
I said, please stop.
I've got like too much, it's ridiculous.
My dorm and things like, I'm like selling these in the black market.
It's ridiculous, right?
When I read, when I really got into this research, because I'm...
You drag it all.
I said, actually, I said, put it back on the list,
and send them to Australia, okay?
Because now I see, I have to see something in deep flesh
to actually really believe it for myself.
And so what did you see?
So ketones, like people are starting
to consume this a lot more now, right?
Right, the last few years.
Wonderful.
So what did you see instantaneously through?
I mean, how did you quantify the success from consuming this?
It's not like you're getting on a scale or your body fat.
It's like, oh, look, my body fat dropped.
Like, how are you seeing that this is improving?
Well, for me, I see that my thinking is great.
For some reason, ketones really obliterates my appetite.
I don't know if you have the same feeling.
I feel like I can fuel my brain for a long period of time.
Two weeks ago, we had a 16-hour surgery.
I thought, is, I don't know how I'm gonna last 16 hours.
And I gave every surgeon, everyone in the OR,
like boxes of these ketones.
And we drank them throughout.
I'm telling you, we were so sharp.
It was like taking medicinal.
You know, it's funny.
The first time I've ever experienced that
was when I was speaking.
And I, for once, I'm a carbohydrate person.
I just always, I'm good with carbs.
If I don't have them, I get super skinny.
I just, it's part of my, it's just part of what I've always consumed.
But I did, I eliminated carbohydrates
and I went more fat-adapted.
And I could not believe from a brain function standpoint.
I'll sometimes forget things or I'll stutter or I was like wired.
Like you gave me the best cup of coffee, non-jitters.
And that's, this was probably 10 years ago
when that happened and that light bulb went off
'cause I was reading things about this.
And you know, I'm just--
Your brain actually uses ketones way better than it uses glucose.
Right.
Even though glucose is the main energy source.
So yes, ketogenic diet is fantastic.
But also a plant-rich diet is wonderful
because another thing you have to remember about the brain
is it's the most vascular-rich organ in the entire body,
which means it houses the most amount of blood vessels,
capillaries, veins, arteries.
And what are they?
That's, you know, they're filled with blood, okay?
So it delivers oxygen and nutrients to the brain.
If you clog them just the same as what you do
with cardiovascular disease, if you clog them with plaque,
then it's going to lead to a stroke, okay?
Or vascular dementia.
So that's why plants having high fiber diets
is going to be really good for the blood vessels of the brain.
When people are eating a certain way
or treating their body a certain way,
they don't truly understand what it's like
to feel good from nutrition.
And, you know, you've been doing this a long time.
I've been doing this a long time.
I feel it sometimes.
I'm not going to say I don't go off the deep end ever.
I mean, I do it less and less as I get older and older
because I realize how it makes me feel and how it makes me perform.
But for people out there that are watching this
that don't truly understand the gut brain connection.
Oh, gosh.
Can you, can you talk a little bit about that really low level?
I'm not looking for a full breakdown
but I want to just give people a little bit of a taste
on because you're diving into some really important things there.
I'm so happy you brought that up and also low level
because it's not my field.
But your gut and your brain communicate with each other.
Via the 10th cranial nerve, it's called the vagus nerve, right?
So this is, nerve, it comes out of the brain, it goes into the gut
and they communicate with each other.
So whatever's happening in the gut is happening really in the brain
and a lot of most of the serotonin that is produced in our body
is produced in the gut.
So if we're having poor inflammatory diets,
it's going to go straight up to your brain
and call some encoding neural inflammation,
which is another risk factor for Alzheimer's disease
because when you're in an inflammatory, today my knee is sore.
Yes, I checked my ordering.
I walked 35,000 steps yesterday.
- Wow. - Big day.
- Yeah, with a backpack on my knee.
- That's a big day.
- I'm like, am I getting older or am I like oh my god
and then I'm like no Louisa, you walked to the backpack all day.
So imagine that, I can feel that,
but you can't feel, we can do awake brain surgery
because the brain can't feel pain, right?
So imagine your brain being inflamed but you can't feel it
but it does come off as a headache.
- Or fogginess or disease or disease or anything.
But you know what I ever think.
It's because I ate an inflammatory muffin earlier on.
- So what are some protocols you like to,
because a lot of this stuff is intertwined, right?
- Oh yeah.
- The avenue you would tell someone to do to,
do I want to say prevent Alzheimer's
or maybe cut down the risk of Alzheimer's, right?
That avenue is going to fix so many different things.
Can you go through some protocols or some things
that you've learned that you just wish everyone do?
- Okay, well, I'm glad you're bringing this up
because I have a program coming out in two weeks
as my flagship program that is, it's called Brain Code,
decoding a women's risk for Alzheimer's disease.
But this is for everyone across the board.
- Okay.
- I have done a meta-analysis, okay?
Do you know what a meta-analysis is?
- I know the word.
- Okay, it is the highest like scientific study
that you can do.
Basically, it's a statistical analysis
of all of the evidence available right now
that we have in 2025.
When I did that to show what is the number one tool
to prevent Alzheimer's disease, it is exercise.
- Mm-hmm.
- And for some reason, I was hoping
it would be some crazy miracle drug.
- Drug, supplement or something, that's it.
- So when you're asking me like,
what's the number one thing we can do?
I say exercise and it still doesn't get through to people.
It doesn't get through to my mother.
We've had a 20-year discussion on this
by the way.
We're at the stage now where it's getting really serious.
I said, I'm not coming home for Christmas,
unless I see like, I want to,
like I'd communicate with their person trying to--
- Here it's tough.
- They don't listen to me.
- They don't listen to me.
- But get this.
Her doctor, she listens to her doctor
and her doctor said, oh my God,
I was listening to your daughter on her podcast.
I agree with her.
- Yeah.
- So how about that, she's smart?
- So it's unbelievable.
So what's the number one thing everyone can do
and be doing exercise without a doubt?
The more muscle mass you build, the better for your brain.
Actually, it turns out the bigger the legs,
the bigger the brain, did you know that?
- Muscle is the organ of longevity.
- That's what Gaps says.
- But the larger the leg muscles, the larger the brain.
- I love that.
- Yeah.
But we don't just want muscle mass.
We want strength.
Strength is a huge correlator for all cause mortality
and dementia.
We want to be exercising aerobically
because what's that doing?
It's not just feeding the brain with blood.
It's also sending these little chemicals to the brain.
They're called myocons.
Muscle-based proteins.
They get released when we are running, cycling,
but they're also getting released when we're strength training.
And what these do is they help the function of your brain.
They're basically, I mean, neuroscientists,
I don't like this word, they call it fertilizer for the brain,
but it's actually a pharmaceutical for the brain.
That's why I use it.
The end of all of my carousels, I say, exercise is medicine.
- What's your minimum recommendation for people?
- So the data showed that at least at minimum two days a week.
That's all of strength training.
And then around two hours a week of aerobic training,
I personally think you should be doing a lot more,
but we're talking like minimal, like baseline.
And about 80% of the US population isn't meeting.
- They don't do that.
- Exactly.
About two hours a week of aerobic training is a lot for most people.
And do you, are you paying attention to specific,
do you want people in specific zones without training?
What would you, how would you,
and let's not even get to your technical with zones,
but say a higher intensity, medium intensity,
or slow steady state, like where do you want people?
- Females, I want them heavy strength training.
- Love it.
- Okay, and I want them out of zone three.
Zone two, zone three, zone four.
I want them in zone five, okay?
For their baseline.
If you have time and you want to do zone two with the kids,
great, reserve your,
the one thing I hate so much is seeing females
at the gym walking.
Because I think to myself, either,
you've got all the time in the world, and that's fine.
But come on, you know, most females at around 45,
and I'm, you know, everyone's different.
I've reached, maybe you've, you've got a spouse,
maybe you've got some kids, maybe you've got a heart,
like doesn't leave a lot of time to exercise.
- Right.
- At least what four hours a week to exercise,
spend that time working in the ranges that you want them.
- Yeah.
It's funny with walking, because we know the importance
and how healthy it is, but I don't consider.
- But incidental.
- Yeah, I don't consider it.
I don't consider that part of a cardio energy system
development regimen.
I don't, I consider it for recovery.
I would consider it for steps and, you know,
creating, you know, calorie burning
and doing all these things, especially, I use it.
I actually argued with, I remember Willa Med from Woop,
the founder of Woop.
He was like, well, a year ago we brought me on a podcast
and he says, well, steps aren't a high performance metric
and I go, I completely disagree with you.
I said, I use steps with my athletes on recovery days.
I don't like them sitting around doing nothing.
That's high performance.
If I have a professional athlete, I need them
accumulating steps.
And then, you know, he changed it recently
to where now Woop is tracking steps.
And so I think there is this misconception
of where people think they should be,
because I have seen someone out walking on a flat piece
and measuring their heart rate.
And I'm like, wow, you're at 140.
But I told you, I walked 35,000 steps yesterday.
What I'm trying to say is, and on an average day,
we, I mean, I live in Manhattan.
You're in Manhattan a lot.
So you're probably 15 to 20 a day normal.
My average is around 18,000.
But I go to the gym, I don't treat that as exercise.
I treat that as going to get from uptown down to downtown.
I'm not getting in a car to do that.
Just a moment, yeah, just a moment.
So that's what I mean when I say steps,
it's a phenomenal.
I prescribe my parents, they've got a hilly walk.
And so that's exercise for them.
Because I've got them on what they've got there.
- A little bit of a way to invest.
- A way to invest, the poor things here.
They're like, so my daddy's 72, my mommy's 70,
my mom's like, the neighbors are asking me
what we're doing looking like this.
- It's a Kevlar vessel.
It's full of proof.
- We have exactly.
- We've got enemies.
- So exercise, let me tell you.
If you don't fall in love with it,
and I know, as I'm getting older,
it's actually getting harder for me, mentally.
- Oh, just what, actually the discipline
of doing it every day, it's also stress and work
and you're building business,
and you're emotionally around a lot of people.
It's got to be very emotional what you do.
- I gotta tell you, I don't, I don't know how you,
I mean, it's a special person to do that.
- But you see, it's interesting
because the area of neurosurgery I'm in,
we do two things, you know, you've got one side,
they're taking out the tumour.
You know, of, you know, or you see a woman,
and maybe it's her last surgery, unfortunately,
and these are the things you're up against,
and you just see devastating things,
but then you come over to neuroplastics
and where reconstructing skulls.
And so it's, and then you go from there,
then I'm on Instagram telling the world what I see,
and it's just, it's hard.
- Your IG is incredibly beneficial,
because I think it's very digestible.
- I hope so.
- Because the stuff that you can talk about,
and we know, I mean, it can get lost,
but I think the things that you're putting up
is very digestible, and I think you're giving people
good snit bits, your accounts, Luis and Nicola.
- Undescore.
- Undescore.
- Yeah, someone stole the name, Luis and Nicola, yeah.
- Check it out.
I mean, I'm obviously, I was like,
and you're, you're...
- Okay, let's move on the second thing we can do, sleep.
- Okay.
- Okay, sorry.
- So we got an exercise.
We understand that you'd like that zone five.
- Yeah.
- Resistance trained, ladies, resistance trained,
at least two days a week.
- Yeah.
- Go hit more if you can.
- And, um, next sleep.
- Yeah, by the way, I don't want, you know,
the men should be doing this as well,
but I would prescribe men doing zone two a lot more.
- Why is that?
- Well, mitochondrial biogenesis, yeah.
So, let's, so sleep fundamentally is probably
the second most important pillar.
What happens during sleep is we have five stages.
We only really care about stage three and stage four.
So stage three, non-rem sleep is deep sleep.
We can measure that on the whoop or the aura ring.
You would probably see it every morning
if you tracked your sleep.
So, what happens during deep sleep is really phenomenal.
We go through, we activate the system
called the glimphatic system.
Now, the glimphatic system is the washing machine,
a surge removal system in your brain.
Literally, we've got these little cells.
They're involved in immunity in the brain, glial cells,
comes from the Greek word glue
because they literally stick out like between two neurons
in the cerebral spinal fluid.
So, when they shrink, the cerebral spinal fluid
has time to wash itself.
So, the brain literally washes itself.
And when it does, it gets rid of all of the waste products
that build up during the day from the environment.
One of the waste products that it eliminates is amyloid beta.
That is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
Yeah, it's a protein that builds up in your brain.
And if we don't clear it, that's what ends up being a plaque.
And so, we need to be getting into deep sleep every night.
REM sleep is wonderful because it actually helps
with its emotional first aid.
It helps you really get everything that happened during the day.
That's more memory, right?
Memory consolidation, emotional first aid.
But it's deep sleep that really matters.
Question about deep sleep.
And this might not be your expertise.
But a lot of people are as age.
They're struggling to get through a night's sleep.
I mean, I remember how easy it was.
I'm 48 now, but it was so easy for me when I was younger
to put my head on the pillow.
And if I woke up once to use the bathroom,
that was a shocker, it just never existed.
Now, this is happening two, three times at night.
You're trying to cut water consumption down early.
You're trying to eat earlier.
Sometimes it doesn't always work.
And if you're going to bed dehydrated, you're waking up.
Now, feeling great, like, what is, are there any tricks?
And I know that may not be your expertise,
but it might be something that you do know about.
It's interesting, because with men,
we see them getting up a lot more.
And that's a prostate, aging thing.
I know it has to do with vasopressin.
And I just know that men at a certain age
end up getting up at around 4am every night.
Yeah.
Don't know the pathophysiology behind that.
But I do know for women, hormones.
So the loss of estrogen ends up messing with the hypothalamus,
which is where the temperature regulation occurs.
And this is why you've probably heard of hot flashes.
I was with a bunch of my girlfriends last night,
and one of them said, "Lawiza, she was doing this."
And I said, "Is everything okay?"
She was, "My friends are all, I'm mid-30s."
And she's 42, 43.
She's like, "I don't know what's going on.
I'm getting these heat, like sudden onset of heat."
I said, "Hot flash."
I said, "Hot flash, she's telling me all night."
She goes, "I'm waking up, sweating."
I said, "Hot flashes."
I said, "Now is the time, my friend."
And so hot flashes are waking women up
as well, getting them out of deep sleep.
And it's horrible.
I don't know what it feels like, but I see it.
And I think that's horrible.
So that's another reason.
So you went through, you exercise, you went through sleep.
Okay.
And then diet.
Okay.
Okay.
And then something I'm very, very passionate about
and very well-known for, not this is completely by accident is,
I do believe in supplementation.
But really quick, backing up to diet,
you just said animal-based, but plants strong.
More of the Mediterranean types of diet,
the olive oils, the, you know,
a very veggie lean protein.
That's more of what you're...
Yeah, eight the rainbow.
Now, I will tell everybody, I think you should pair diet
with really understanding where your blood work is at
because what we see with Alzheimer's specifically,
but we do see that you need to have an LDL
of around 60 or less.
If you look at your cholesterol panel
and you look at two things called APOB,
APO-LIPO protein B, a very strong risk factor
for cardiovascular disease and LDL, the bad cholesterol,
you will see that if you have extremely high numbers,
then you're putting your brain at risk of cognitive decline.
And the reason why I bring that up is because the plants,
we know that a high-fibre diet is great for blood and cholesterol.
Yeah, I never really understood the whole concept
of just eating meat, of just eating carnivore.
I'm like, wait a second.
And people, whoa, I feel that I have less symptoms.
I go, well, you're probably just removing foods
that you were normally having and that's just throwing
a bandaid on it.
I think the big question is, is this giving you
long-term success?
And I've never seen anyone who's been on a diet like that
or one extreme approach for a very long time.
When you said the Mediterranean diet, I smiled
because I never wanted to categorize a diet,
but if you had to throw it out there,
I'm like, yeah, Mediterranean would probably be one of my favorites.
Yeah, exactly.
It's anti-inflammatory.
That's exactly why olive oil is a longevity superfood.
So talk to us now about, so you went to exercise,
sleep diet supplementation.
So supplementation is not the bill and end all.
Supplementation isn't the answer to your problems.
It is a supportive, it plays a supportive role.
Remember how I said to you supply and demand?
Yes.
It can definitely help with the supply issue.
But you're considering ketones as part of that supplement?
You can, yeah, ketones, exogenous ketones.
You can get into a ketogenic state with food, but God, that's hard.
I've tried that and then a great kick to me out.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Wow.
So, don't recommend it.
So, what other supplements can we have outside of?
If you look at your blood work and it says low vitamin D, right?
I strongly recommend you should have vitamin D.
And vitamin D is actually preventable against dementia.
A recent study came out this year in 2025
that showed a 40% reduction in dementia.
Not just as like, or cause dementia.
If you have optimized levels of vitamin D.
Do you think the ranges are a bit low?
Well, when we're going into our general practitioner
and they're saying you need to be in these ranges, do you?
Well, yeah, mine, for some, God knows what reason is 20, right?
And that's so low, yeah.
20, your vitamin D level?
Yeah, what's yours?
Oh, I got to look at the numbers.
I got real just in my numbers.
That was a lot higher than that.
Yeah, well, that's great.
You're optimized.
I don't know why mine's so low.
And so therefore, I'm going to be supplementing
with 5,000 I use a vitamin D.
Right, right.
Interesting.
Maybe I spend too much time indoors.
What are some of the things we all do?
So you talk about exercise, sleep, diet, vitamin D.
Talk about diet a little bit more.
And I know this is very a very cookie cutter question.
But I want to give people an understanding
of what are meals looking like for you?
What is meal timing looking like for you?
What is a typical day in your life?
And honestly, if you think it's boring,
it's not like kind of run us through it.
I know it's very.
It is boring.
So I wake up.
I used to struggle extremely with eating prior to the gym.
So I go to the gym in the morning.
That's when I do my exercise.
I'm at the gym at 7.
Yeah, 7, 7, 30.
So far from your apartment, are you pretty close by?
One block.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
Literally, I walk out.
I go walk in the New York.
Yeah, and I love it.
I'm an equinox.
And so I have now forced myself to get at least 15 grams
of protein.
Like at minimum, just before I go to the gym.
And that's hard for you to get down?
Yeah, I also have half a banana.
OK, so what are the grams from what, 15 grams from what?
Is it protein supplement?
It's a protein shake.
OK, so you have one scoop of protein powder
pretty much, and a half of an anna.
That doesn't float you.
And you feel like, OK, I'm all right.
I'm actually getting really into the pre-made slate meal.
Oh, yeah, like the RTDs or any other things.
Yeah, it's easy, just like.
Yeah, so I'm off to the gym.
Whatever is going on at the gym, I do my work.
When I come home, I usually have eggs.
I don't know if you know this, but one of the most supportive
nutrients in the brain is calling, because it helps
with acetyl calling.
And we are-- we've got an epidemic of calling deficiency.
And calling is jam-packed in eggs.
Eggs, right.
I love eggs.
So I have around two full eggs, or maybe three,
and about five egg whites.
All right.
That's a hefty protein.
That's a big protein.
That's 15 grams from the egg whites.
And then if you have three, that's another 18.
So you're over, what's that, 33?
Yeah, so that's-- I keep going.
And that's all I have.
Three grams.
That keeps me going until about--
I do have a snack at about 3 p.m. 4 p.m.
It's usually generally yogurt.
OK.
Yeah.
By the way, if something I'm doing, I
have two liters of water throughout the day.
It's more.
Yeah, I have two liters of water.
Sometimes I have my electrolytes as well, just
because we need electrolytes.
Of course, of course.
Brain functions on electrolytes.
Dinner, I cook every single night.
I love it.
I make-- it's always high protein and always a salad.
All right, so you make some type of salad
with chicken, fish.
Correct.
Yeah.
It's high protein.
Yeah.
OK.
And that's generally getting like 40 grams.
OK, so it's 40--
I'm trying to hit 100 grams a day of protein.
About to say, 40, 33, you're already at 73.
The shake's another 15.
Exactly.
But to be honest, I do sometimes have a protein shake
after the gym is smoothie instead of the eggs.
And that's like 40 grams of protein in there.
Right.
Do you notice a difference when you're
eating more food during the day?
Because I'm always like, you're
using a lot of brain power during the day.
And you exercise.
You're in that zone five, which is tough.
You're resistance training.
You're walking 30 something thousand steps, which you did
yesterday.
I know, but 18,000 on average is a lot.
Do you ever feel like you're under-fueled?
Or do you feel--
Oh, yeah.
I've got right now in my bag, which I never do.
I've got a protein bar.
And I just know, because I need to leave the house
with something.
Because I'm in New York.
Sometimes I take my backpack.
And I don't know what time I'm going to return home.
It's such a good feeling.
It's like, I don't know what's going to work today.
It's just people messaging you and you hear you there.
You see, it's just ridiculous.
So I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen today.
It's Friday.
And there's a huge event on this weekend.
And I've got about 50 friends who have flown in for it.
And I'm like, I don't know what's going on.
I've got heels in my bag.
I've got another banana.
And I've got two protein bars.
I love-- that's what I love about New York City.
When I-- the thing I do miss the most
is when I started in Manhattan back in 1999,
I was on foot in 2000.
And I was running as far uptown as 100th Street,
as far downtown as Battery Park, West, which is York.
And I'm sorry, East, which is York.
And as far West is probably 10th, 11th Avenue,
on foot all day.
And there was no trackers.
I don't even know what I was running for walking.
But just to have that type of movement and back
was never sore.
Neck was never sore from sitting.
I mean, it really is one of the biggest problems
I see with most people is the amount of sitting.
How much do you see?
Or with a lot of your brain--
you put the brain under the microscope a lot.
Have you seen, or what could you advise on the decline
from people who are just sedentary?
Oh, my God.
Yeah, of course, you're just basic.
Yes, a new smoking.
Talk about a little bit.
I mean, sitting is the new smoking.
And how much muscle mass you actually lose just
by being sedentary?
They've done studies on this to show
that bed rest in hospitals.
You can lose-- I don't know what the percentage was.
But it was massive.
Massive percentage of muscle mass, strength, fitness.
So it's the same.
You just do it in micro.
And but you know what, I get it.
I sit-- I take calls now.
And it's ridiculous.
I don't have one of those walking desks, whatever people call it.
I don't have one of those.
What about talk about training the brain?
Oh, yeah.
So we're still used to training the muscle or training
our cardiovascular system.
Talk about training the brain a little bit.
Is this something?
Is this just a term?
Is this something that you really focus on?
Yeah, this was actually the birth of Neuroathletics,
my company.
In 2014, I got hired.
I was still living in Australia.
I got hired by the number one soccer player.
He said, can you help me with my brain processing speed?
I was like, OK.
And I had to invoice him because he was-- he actually hired me.
And I didn't have a business.
And so I literally just called it Neuroathletics.
I love it.
Yeah, and because that's what I was doing,
I was literally making the brain more athletic
and the way that you do this.
And it's so easy if you get two tennis balls
and you just start throwing them to the wall.
You think you're just having fun.
But what you're doing is you are improving information
processing speed, hand-eye coordination.
You are improving your eyesight.
You're improving your memory.
You are doing so much just by throwing the ball to the wall.
And there's about-- I've counted.
There's over like 300 different variations.
So any, like, just two balls and you're just kind of bouncing
them back and forth and--
You probably are not going that fast.
Right.
Yeah, just because that would be--
That's it, that's hard.
--you hit yourself, yeah.
But you're just throwing the ball to the wall.
Maybe you're throwing with the right hand,
catching with your left hand, throwing back.
But then you can actually get even more creative.
You stand on one leg.
You start throwing the ball to the wall.
I get what you're doing there.
OK, or what we teach at Neuroathletics,
you put an eye patch on.
So what you've done is you've blocked out half of your vision.
Remember, the right side of your brain
is responsible for the left side of the body.
OK, so imagine if you block out 50% of your vision,
then half the side of your brain is like, what the hell?
It starts to compensate.
So it starts to work harder.
You need to understand, we hear a brain.
I want everyone to understand this.
To form new connections, your brain
has to be placed under load.
It's the same as your bicep.
If it's not placed under load, it's not going to grow, right?
You have to tear apart the fibers.
And it's the same with your brain.
If it's not stressed, it won't grow.
One thing you can do for brain training is--
and I actually--
I'll tell you how I do this with my parents.
Your brain loves novelty.
So if you're talking to the same person every day,
your husband, your wife, kind of gets mundane over 20, 30 years.
You know how they're going to actually know all their stories.
If you sit with somebody and have a conversation
about politics and you don't agree with them,
it challenges your brain because you have to think--
you have to think about what they're saying, how to respond to them.
So it actually puts your brain under pressure.
So what I always tell people is, as you're getting older,
your brain wants new experiences.
This is why travel is so good.
Your brain sees new things, architecture is phenomenal.
If you go for a walk and do a New York City architectural tour,
your brain sees different shapes, different sizes.
And it starts to see things that it hasn't seen before.
So it starts to make new connections.
Hearing things, music, opera, the American Academy
of Neurology released a statement saying
that hearing loss is a risk factor and can be added to the list
of mild cognitive, it can be added to the list of dementia.
If you start to experience hearing loss,
why does it add to dementia?
Because your ears just sit here behind the temporal lobes.
And that's the first thing to go during our science disease.
If your brain is not using what it's meant to be using,
it'll just die off.
It's a good die off.
But it can be resurrected is what you're saying.
But imagine if, let's just say you don't have any problems.
- Right. - Listening to different forms of music,
pianos, violins, going to the opera,
you're hearing things that your brain's like,
"I've never heard that before, what is it?"
That's why a baby is like a sponge
because they've never seen anything.
And they're like looking around.
- So Neuroathletics is pretty much a program
that you put together.
It's basically, you've systemized all these different elements
that you wanna have people implement into brain training.
- Well, no.
Neuroathletics is actually a ticket turn.
- Neuroathletics principles, what is it?
- So Neuroathletics is my company
and we are an education provider now.
So we actually have our flagship course
in Neuroathletics coaching certificate.
We're teaching all of these principles to coaches.
- Okay, but you have packaged these principles
into a program, which is what we all do.
I mean, in training where you have to.
- You have to.
You have to, we're not saying it's the best.
We're saying it's a system that we followed
and we recommend you following it.
It's a great place to start.
Otherwise, people don't know how to package these things together.
They don't know what's too much and what's too little.
When's this launching?
- So, while brain code is launching in two weeks.
- So talk to me about brain code.
- Brain code is my official program
are decoding a woman's risk of Alzheimer's disease.
So there'll be five modules, very easy, very low level.
What other things that you can do to assess your risk today
of getting the disease and what can you do
to minimize your risk?
- And what's stopping a guy from turning around
and downloading that same program?
- Well, the thing is, men don't go through menopause
and I do speak heavily about that.
- Okay.
- So let's talk about marijuana and alcohol.
I mean, these are things, especially marijuana now
because so many people are using it more frequently
'cause you can just get it off the streets now.
I'm not a user, it's not something.
I've tried it in the past, sure.
I get more anxiety from it.
It just doesn't mix well with me.
Alcohol, I've had a beer once in a while.
Again, don't like how I feel.
Talk to me about the effects and what this is doing.
I mean, we can relate it to someone who might have Alzheimer's
in the family or just general health,
run with it any which way that you want to run with it.
- So we'll start with alcohol.
- And what you found.
- Okay, alcohol, there was a massive study done out of
from the UK BioBank and what they found was that moderate drinkers
who consume alcohol both men and women.
It's also a men have a higher amount of what's considered moderate.
- Sure.
- I think it's around seven drinks a week for females
and around 13 for men, considered moderate.
Yeah, what they found is that they had a higher amounts
of white metal lesions.
- What's that now?
- So remember the white matter that I said
that's on the axon?
- Yeah, like the sheath that was--
- My own sheath, yeah.
- So it's all the myelinating neurons.
So there's little lesions all through there
for the more alcohol that you drink and they had, yeah.
So and then the gray matter is the cortex
that sits on the outside of the brain.
It holds all the cell bodies.
There's also problems there.
So you're actually affecting your brain
in a pathological way.
Not just you're getting groggy.
You're actually literally forming lesions in your brain.
Are these permanent lesions or these things that, yeah.
- You're ruining your brain, you're rotting it.
And that's because alcohol does so many things.
Like, directionally and indirectly.
Directionally is what I just told you
because it's actually a poison.
Because acetyl aldehyde, which is what ethanol is
metabolized after it goes through the liver, is poison.
Acetyl aldehyde is poison.
So you're poisoning your brain and the rest of your body.
What it does indirectly is, well,
it completely blocks out sleep.
You're blocking out REM sleep, you're blocking out deep sleep.
Therefore, you're not going to get the activation
of the lymphatic system.
You're going to wake up.
It's funny because people think that a hangover
or a, you know, you feel hungover or you feel not,
you know, whatever it is, whatever people feel these days
when they drink, I don't know.
And it's literally because you blocked sleep,
you blocked blood flow, you've killed off some neurons
and you've starved your brain of oxygen.
That's what you've done.
And you're going and getting a burger
to make yourself feel better.
Their alcohol is not, is not good for your brain.
It's not good for your body.
Now, there is no research to show that one glass of wine
or one drink is going to kill you per week.
Right.
Okay.
This is moderate drinkers.
Moderate drinkers.
So what would you consider light drinking
as it went to two a week?
Probably.
And you're probably around there.
Marijuana now is becoming a lot more THC's,
becoming a lot more popular.
Why?
I don't know.
People are, I think people are drinking less
because they're, they don't like the effects
of what it is doing to their sleep quality
or how they feel or wake up with a hangover.
And I'm just telling you what people are telling me.
They're like, no, I can, I can, I can take a gummy
or smoke a joint and I fall asleep and I sleep better.
I mean, it's like, it's, it's, they're understanding.
Yeah, so it's, it's the same thing.
You're not only blocking sleep.
People think that they're inducing sleep.
You know, you're just, you're probably just activating
the sympathetic nervous system.
Maybe it's down regulating that
and you're, it's, you're feeling calmer.
You're actually blocking sleep.
But the worst part about THC is there's been long term studies,
obviously for 10 to 20 years,
that shows that it can induce psychosis, paranoia.
A lot of people who were, who suddenly developed anxiety,
they claim, I'm not saying that there's studies here on this,
but they claimed it was from the incorporation of THC.
And guess what, when they got off of it,
a few weeks later, they stopped having those episodes.
Go figure.
Go figure.
Um, thank you.
I think we covered a lot of great stuff.
Chris, I know we got some questions in here.
I'd love to fire them off to Luis.
So Luis, I'm, I'm grateful.
Thank you.
This is great.
Yeah, we do.
We have a couple questions.
This first one is from Katrina and we'll have one following up
after this.
Here we go.
Wow.
Hey, Dawn.
Nicola, my name is Katrina.
And my question today comes from personal experience.
I have about 3,500 volunteer hours with the VA hospital.
A lot of that time working in mental health with Alzheimer's
and dementia veterans or veterans that have trauma-related
cognitive decline.
So my question is, what are some early lifestyle changes
that we can do in our 20s and 30s that will really reduce
that risk of Alzheimer's?
Maybe especially with those of us that have trauma
or, you know, a very long family history.
Really excited to hear your answers
and things again, bro, opening up the questions.
Great question.
Oh, it's, I love this.
I love people who are, especially women who are in their 20s
and 30s and they're actually taking control of their brain.
Good time.
Yeah.
You know, one of the best things that you can do, first of all,
is there was an 80-year follow-up study from Harvard that
showed that those with that have the greatest brain
health along the years is those who have quality
relationships.
And the reason being, OK, is because you can offset,
first of all, your brain feels safe.
The second thing is you can offset a lot of cortisol
by having close quality relationships.
The reason why I bring this up is because when you're
around in an environment, that is so stressful.
And you have to have an outlet to do that.
So the first thing I would recommend
is make sure you have an outlet to share all of the trauma
and everything that you're going through
to get out of your brain.
And then if you can start building out a brain healthy lifestyle,
like exercise, sleep, getting sunlight,
fixing your nutritional profile, I always
think that you can't optimize what you don't measure.
Make sure you're going to get a blood panel and--
And minimizing the damage of things
that people just overstay their welcome with,
like you talked about earlier with the alcohol
and all that other stuff, I mean, that's always--
people don't want to-- they think taking a sauna
is going to biohack their way into living--
Yeah, you can't.
And you can neglect the things that pay real dividends.
You can't ice bath your way out of a good diet.
I'm not saying those things are bad.
I'm saying that they're good, but she's
100% right.
Chris, next question.
All right, yeah.
Next question is from Amy from Pennsylvania.
Here we go.
Hey, Don and Louisa.
My name is Amy.
I'm from just outside of Philadelphia
in Reading, Pennsylvania.
My question today is, I have a family history of dementia
and Alzheimer's, specifically on my father's side.
And I have been reading that certain GLP ones
are being developed that can help reduce risks of cognitive
decline in addition to their other benefits.
And I just really wanted to see if either of you
could shed some light on this and if you've
heard anything yourselves.
And what other things I can be doing
to help project myself against Alzheimer's risk?
OK, I love this question.
So the first thing, if you have a family member,
the most important part of all of this process
is family history.
If you have a family member that was diagnosed
and maybe passed away of some form of dementia,
it's really important that you go and get a blood test
to figure out what is your risk.
And that is called getting an APOE4 gene.
You can go and get this from your doctor.
Then you can see, what's my lifetime risk of getting
the disease?
The second thing is you mentioned GLP ones.
You and I didn't talk about it.
And I actually-- I love it.
I love GLP ones in terms of what they've done for society.
So specifically, the GLP and GIPage is appetite.
What we've seen is that if you fix obesity and diabetes
and insulin resistant, what are you going to do?
You're going to minimize three of the biggest risk factors,
three of the biggest risk factors of Alzheimer's disease.
You're shooting the alligator closest to the boat
as soon as it's a term I always use.
But not just that.
We actually have done a study on GLP ones
in Alzheimer's disease, reducing the risk by 30%.
Why is that?
Not because you inject yourself and the GLP goes to the brain.
No, it's because you're fixing the underlying effects.
Yeah, exactly.
I am so for these in the right way, in the right way.
I just said that you just said it.
OK, not on the black market way.
The problem right now, I'm dealing with--
I can't mention her name, but she's a friend.
She weighs about 415 pounds right now.
She just lost 150.
That's phenomenal.
But she's working a job that she has to change.
She's underpaid.
She can't afford these sort of things.
She went to an insurance company.
Her insurance company says, we'll pay for a surgery,
but we're not going to pay for these GLPs.
And that, to me, is shocking.
I'm like, how are they going to pay for a surgery?
But not for this person to go get on ozemic
or a specific peptide that she needs.
I think it's a shame.
And I think it will evolve.
And I think these things will--
people will realize now they're coming
around where I'll be the first to admit it.
Years ago, I was like, oh, you know, we can do it through diet.
No, we can't always do it through diet and exercise.
It doesn't work that way for certain people.
But these GLP ones have got so much more than just diet.
You're down regulating inflammation.
100%.
I honestly think-- I'll say this.
I honestly believe that you and I
won't see the effects of GLP ones.
I think we won't see the effects of.
I think in decades to come, people
are going to look back in history books of all of us walking
around.
And they're going to be like Alzheimer's disease.
Obesity.
Type II diabetes.
What?
They're going to say, what was that?
That's fantastic.
And I hope they do.
You just mentioned how you love it.
Give me an example when you don't love it.
GLP ones.
I don't love it when women specifically
or men take it.
And they completely reduce their protein intake.
And we get what we call skinny fat.
You have to take it responsibly.
It's not used to completely starve you for God's sake.
And I've seen many people-- I'm like, I don't understand.
It's there to help you stay in control.
That's what it is.
It's a great way to close.
First off, I want to thank you.
Thank you.
I know you've done-- you do these like crazy.
And I appreciate what you're doing in your business
and your mission and the topic of Alzheimer's today.
I just think it's so special.
It's very near and dear to me, because I've
seen family members go through it.
And I pray you find something.
Because I know someone does, you might be the one to do it.
I also want to thank Christian Ponder and the team over
at the post.
This place is great, right?
I love it.
I'm a big fan.
It's close to your home, right?
Yeah.
Guys, thanks a lot for joining in.
Love you guys.
Thanks again.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The views, information, or opinions expressed in the series
are solely those of the individuals involved
and do not necessarily represent those of chip
and joy in a gains by no audio nor magnolia.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Louisa Nicola is a neurophysiologist passionate about finding a cure for Alzheimer's.
Discussion on anti-Alzheimer's protocol including exercise, diet, sleep, and supplementation like exogenous ketones.
Importance of lifestyle prevention in Alzheimer's disease, especially for women due to hormonal shifts.
Alzheimer's disease affects the brain's neuron connections.
Lifestyle choices play a crucial role in preventing Alzheimer's, with 95% of cases being preventable.
Summary:
In this episode of Stronger, host introduces neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola, emphasizing her dedication to finding an Alzheimer's cure. The conversation delves into an anti-Alzheimer's protocol covering exercise, diet, sleep, and supplementation with exogenous ketones. Nicola highlights the impact of lifestyle on Alzheimer's prevention, particularly for women experiencing hormonal shifts.
The discussion sheds light on Alzheimer's as a disease affecting neuron connections in the brain rather than neurons themselves. It stresses the significance of lifestyle choices in preventing Alzheimer's, with 95% of cases being preventable through healthy habits and neuroprotective measures.
FAQs
A neurophysiologist is a subspecialty of neurology that focuses on scanning brains using techniques like EEG and EMG to study brain functionality and pick up on conditions like epilepsy and Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's disease is a form of dementia that affects memory and cognitive functions. It is a major concern due to its increasing prevalence worldwide, with lifestyle factors playing a significant role in its development.
While there is currently no cure for Alzheimer's, lifestyle changes and preventive measures can help slow down its progression and delay the onset of symptoms.
Genetics can influence the risk of developing Alzheimer's, with specific genes like APOE4 increasing the likelihood of the disease. However, lifestyle choices still play a crucial role in prevention.
Hormonal shifts during perimenopause and menopause in women can affect brain health, as estrogen plays a neuroprotective role. Decline in estrogen levels can lead to brain dysfunction and increase the risk of Alzheimer's.
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