The Three S Model: Stimulus, Supply and Support for Cognitive Health and Dementia Risk | Dr Tommy Wood

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

0:10I think we have a very similar view that it's food first. The quality of your food is really important, but obviously there are like key supplements that can also help, especially if you're plant-based. You won't be getting your long-chain omega fatty acids. So you talk about long chain omega fatty acid vitamin d magnesium your favorite creatine and i'm also going to put hydration in there because i'm really glad that you put that in because we know that two percent dehydration already starts affecting our cognitive functioning so when we're looking at like those supplements how much of a role does this play in dementia as a whole is it just good for like cognitive performance or is it actually key to reducing like dementia risk i think i'll start because you sort of you've mentioned the individual components but i guess i'll start by just mentioning the model and what it looks like because this is kind of what the book built builds up to right i i have a chapter on each of these different areas that we talked about nutrition exercise stress sleep all these different things and sort of like tools to kind of improve those and and how they're related to cognitive function and cognitive decline but then i'd sort of bring them together in what we call the 3S model.

1:24So the 3S is a stimulus, supply, and support. So stimulus are all the things that we've talked about. And we can think about this very similar to how we would think about, say, lifting weights to build muscle. So if you want to build bigger muscles, you have to lift weights, right? The stimulus is the most critical thing. You can improve how much strength and muscle you get from a specific workout regimen by having better nutrition and by sleeping more, right? Because so you get more rest and recovery. But you can't just like take naps and chug protein shakes, you have to lift weights, right? And so stimulus is the core feature of what drives the whole system.

2:07But then once you've stimulated the brain, in order for the brain, the networks that you're using to do the thing that you want them to do, They need to bring in more blood supply. They need to bring in oxygen. They need to bring in some kind of energetic substrate. So that could be glucose or ketones or lactate. And then they need to bring in the nutrients that kind of build the synapses and run the mitochondria and all those things in those areas. So that's the kind of the supply bucket. And so it's supply of nutrients, but it's also having a good cardiovascular health. So good blood vessels.

2:40We talked about vascular dementia and how that overlaps, intersects a lot with Alzheimer's disease. so that's why what's good for the heart is good for the brain we know that's really important so that's kind of the supply bucket and then the support bucket we touched on sleep is one critical area but then also avoiding chronic stress so chronic stress sort of creates this hyper metabolic state in the brain but we can't fully recover right so that's like you kind of talked about the mental offloading and those things that kind of prevent us being able to rest and recover and sleep and then avoiding things that sort of kind of impair that adaptation process like alcohol, smoking, air pollution.

3:15There are sort of a lot of things that kind of fit into that sort of support bucket, kind of making sure that we can adapt to the stimulus that we get. But if we come back to supply, the way I kind of think about it is I kind of give this journey through a signal being sent in the brain, right? So you need energy and mitochondria. So you need, right, that's where a lot of B vitamins play a big role. and then you need the things that sort of make the neurotransmitters so if that's acetylcholine you're going to need choline and choline is actually also critical to help build the actual membranes of the cells and the synapses and choline is also sort of interconnected or converted into either serine like so phosphatidylcholine phosphatidylserine phosphatidylethanolamine these are kind of like the core phospholipid head groups that hold your omega-3 fatty acids like in hold them together and choline for no one that people don't know it's like eggs and it's in meat and it's in all of these type of food sources and then you need some minerals that are important for neuromodulation so like magnesium and zinc are critical vitamin d is really important for actually synthesizing certain neurotransmitters like serotonin so that you just by looking at that very simplified process you've covered some of these core nutrients that i think pop up again and again and it's not just these are important for sort of day-to-day cognitive function, we know that those who have poor B vitamin status, poor omega-3 status, lower vitamin D, if they're anemic or they have low iron, all of those are associated with a significantly increased risk of dementia, and they also compound.

4:58So there are actually now several studies that show that having multiple nutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies, so low vitamin D, high homocysteine is like a marker of B vitamin requirement, low omega-3s, these kind of interact to sort of like synergistically increase risk. And that's probably because they also synergize in the brain in terms of being able to play all their roles in terms of just the function that the brain requires on a day-to-day basis. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

5:39Thank you.