Longevity Doctor: Alzheimer’s Is Preventable If You Do These 5 Things Early | Dr Darshan Shah

0:00Dr. Darshan Shah:Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10Dr. Darshan Shah:So Alzheimer's is a big thing. I know you have like a five-stage approach to Alzheimer's. This is probably the thing that I'm the most nervous of. One, because it's in my family. So I've seen it firsthand. I've seen how it can cause just a lot of pain to not just yourself, but also the people around you. it's one of those diseases that really affects the family but it's massively on the rise I've had so many different conversations on this show with Dr. Chris Palmer where he talks about as a metabolic kind of problem and you know we see a rise in obesity and we see a rise in mental health I've had the brain doctors on here who talk a lot about you know Alzheimer's and what we should be doing it is on everyone's minds I think you know the fact that we could all get this at some point what are your kind of main things that we should be doing to avoid Alzheimer's or to try and reduce it and look at prevention.

1:00Yeah, my favorite researcher in this, I love Chris Palmer too, by the way, but also Dale Bredesen is excellent. Have you interviewed him yet? I'll make the introduction. You should have him on for sure. His message is basically like there's different types of Alzheimer's due to different things. And you have to find out what type of Alzheimer's you have and you can do that through testing. And once you know, then you start working on those things and you will decrease your chance of getting Alzheimer's. The critical piece of this puzzle is timing, to know as soon as possible, okay? And so some of the reasons people get Alzheimer's are poor metabolic health, high levels of inflammation, high levels of toxic exposure, all of those things we can test for, right?

1:48We talked about the continuous glucose monitor. We can do a urine toxin test for toxins and see what toxins are building up. who can check for inflammation with the HSCRP and go looking for where you have inflammation. And so even if you have a genetic susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease, you can prevent it by removing all of these problems, right? The other things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's is to exercise your brain and keep it healthy. How do you do that? Meditation is really, really good. You want to give your brain time to rest. In this life, we rarely give our brains time to rest, especially with our cell phones, we feel like we have to keep our brains constantly active all the time.

2:29And that's a big problem. That's what's leading to a lot of buildup of toxins in our brain, right?

2:34Dr. Darshan Shah:Yeah. I always say the best way someone can do that, that's how I say to myself, when you're in a queue, don't get out your phone. Right. The automatic thing when you're in a queue, what do you do? Get your phone out. Right. Or you're in a waiting room, I better get my phone out. And that's the moment. Because I think it can be really hard to go home and just be like, I'm not going to look at my phone. But actually, we have so many moments in the day when we might go and get a coffee when you're going to the bathroom. Yeah. Massive. Just don't take the phone into the bathroom with you. Exactly.

3:06Exactly. Why?

3:07Dr. Darshan Shah:They're the big moments. Yeah, there's not a time to go look at the phone. Exactly. No one did that until like 20 years ago, right? This is the thing. Yeah. So I think that is a real problem. And so, you know, giving your brain time to relax and just kind of empty is really important. When does your brain clean itself? It's at night when you sleep. So making sure you get really, really good sleep and you prioritize sleep is super important. And then lastly, what I would say too is, you know, I keep talking about toxins, is like really, really reducing your toxic burden in your life. That could come in many forms, like, you know, air purifiers at home, opening your windows at home, not drinking out of plastic water bottles all the time, filtering your water, either with a reverse osmosis unit or through filtration devices, making sure the products you put on your skin aren't toxic products, right?

3:56And then eating organic food and staying away from ultra-processed food, all of that will reduce the level of toxic exposure to your body and let your body catch up and kind of mitigate for the toxins you do get exposed to. So that's very important.

4:11Dr. Darshan Shah:Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

4:21Thank you.