I struggled in school I struggled just in everyday life with my memory at a very young age I thought
I was getting like dementia and Alzheimer's and I will see you know go see a neurologist and they
would tell me well you know it you don't have anything wrong structurally with your brain so
they send me back to my psychologist psychiatrist and they gave me the tales that all the Ritalin
you know they told me I had a TD and I should just focus on taking the medicine and going with
my life and that should improve it but I'm like for me I felt adjust how the temporary fix to
the problem that I had of having a bad ability to focus about ability to retain information
things of that nature and it wasn't until I started really learning about the foods that
I was eating that were really a huge contribute to the fact that I couldn't focus that I couldn't
remember and although you know other memory train things that I ended up doing later on to really
you know compete around the world in memory competition but I used to meet you know your
hot cheetos your chips every single day you're you know pizza everyday burgers for breakfast
lunch dinner sometime and then I started shifting it so what would you recommend for individuals to
to start doing to start changing those habits with dietary habits to help them out let me go back to
a statement that you made earlier in that question and that was you said you know I felt like I was
having dementia or Alzheimer's and I went to the doctor so they could give me something and I want
to just before I answer question i want to just amplify that moment if I could because if you
did have Alzheimer's disease and you went to the doctor which would be the case for 5.4 million
Americans there is nothing they could offer you there is no treatment for Alzheimer's none so you
know the notion of just hey I've suddenly got this terrible thing and I'll go to the doctor
they'll give me something that's not reality there's no treatment for Alzheimer's and you
know you and I are having this conversation here in 2016 there were five ten years away if at all
from having any meaningful treatment for that disease that said you also brought up some very
interesting points that you noticed quite readily that your food choices seem to be affecting how
your brain was working and that's a very brilliant observation because in fact our food choices have
a huge role to play in terms of how the brain work as well as the brain's resistance to disease so
the anti Alzheimer's higher brain function diet is a diet that dramatically gets rid of sugar
and simple carbohydrates is much much higher in fiber to nurture the gut bacteria and therefore
reduce inflammation which is the cornerstone of brain degeneration and finally welcome fats
back to the table I mean we've been fat phobic for thirty years based upon some really really
bad information that was put out by the sugar industry that was the front page of the New York
Times a couple of weeks ago we all learned about it how they had influenced medical publications to
tell doctors that they should tell everyone to be fat free and by default everybody ate more sugar
and the sugar industry under wrote that front page New York Times had published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association that is a clear and present danger for the brain there is a powerful
relationship between even subtle elevations of blood sugar and the brains degeneration this
was actually published in a wonderful study that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine
in September of 2013 where they took a group of individuals and they measured their blood
Sugar's and then they followed them for about six and a half years they found that those people who
became demented had elevations of blood sugar at the beginning of the test and the thing that
was really compelling as these weren't high elevations of blood sugar these were subtle
elevations like - 105 110 where you know you and your doctor not going to get it get excited but
nonetheless it's already a big problem so sugar is a brain toxin no matter how you slice it one
really interesting study from the Journal of E published in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease
of all places a Mayo Clinic study looked at diets of people basically found that those people who
favored carbohydrates as a calorie source had about an 88% increased risk of becoming demented
in contrast to those who derived a lot of calories from fat in whom the risk was reduced by over 40%
so just in looking at the macronutrients between fat and carbs the scales are strongly tipped in
favor of eating more carbs and much less rather eating less carbs are much more fat in terms of
protecting your brain and it turns out it's going to be not just your brain but your heart and your
risk reduction for diabetes and certainly for cancer we've been we've been eating fat
for about 2 and 1/2 million years and fiber and not very many carbs and certainly no sugar and
suddenly just in the black blink of an eye we've changed our diet dramatically to a diet that's
very pro-inflammatory and begin inflammation underlies Alzheimer's and brain degeneration