Your Brain on Food, Sleep & Stress: What Top Experts Want You to Know | Brain Health Masterclass

31:18So again, accept the fact these are different diseases, different conditions. Are there things that I could generally say with lower risk? A couple of things. Number one, better gut health is probably going to wind up being one of the central, it's probably going to be the bullseye, I think. In 20 years, we're going to be looking back and say, why didn't we think of this 100 years ago? gut health, bad gut health, poor gut health is bad brain health. So, and by the way, when does it start? It probably starts when we're children. So, for all the parents out there, younger people who, you know, have younger kids, you're saying, eh, you know, they got the rest of their lives to figure it out.

31:58Wrong. We, when we're thinking about making decisions, when young parents are making, young parents are making decisions for young children. They may be actually casting their fate, both positive and negative, at a very, very early age. And so I think getting kids onto good dietary patterns that foster better gut health, they're going to be thanking you when you're long gone, okay? Because their gut microbiome will be healthier, their brain will probably be healthier as well. And you're right, there are lots of research studies, clinical research studies, being able to look at this now to see what we can actually, um, getting more evidence to have a better understanding of.

32:38So number one, gut health. So all the things related to gut health, better, better diet, less ultra processed foods, you know, um, et cetera, et cetera. Number two, regular physical activity. Everyone feels, you know, when you're younger, you feel like, you know what, I want to be in shape. I'm going to join a gym. Some people say, I want to get a trainer and you look in the mirror and you look pretty good look uh that is uh something that people can do in a certain window in their lives but really being physically active is something that we can actually do our entire lives and that's what's important is consistent regular physical behavior look kids are running around all the time they're bouncing off the walls right teenagers are super active young adults you're rushing off to work you know you're zipping around going out to events and parties and you know things like that when you get to middle age you're tired You know, there's things happening to you.

33:30You sort of, you're worn down. And a lot of those physical activity things that we might have otherwise done, we slow down on. I would encourage people to keep up your physical activity. Be mindful of your movement, right? But I even think the younger generation, because a lot of us can sit behind laptops all day for nine hours and we don't move. And then we think a 20 minute run is going to solve the movement crisis. Well, as it's, we're not in a crisis, but, you know, tick all of our boxes of movement. but actually we're probably getting less because we're sitting down all day. Right. Well, that's, you know, that's bringing up not only the kind of the laptop phenomenon.

34:05Look, if you're a laptop, yeah, but if you're mobile, you can still walk when you're on mobile. Yeah, totally. However, now we're talking about another dimension, which is blue light that shines out of our devices that interferes with our sleep. So after physical activity, I'm going to get to the sleep part. Staying in motion is really important throughout your whole life. Not only is it important for brain health, but it's important for overall mobility as well. You know, somebody once told me that, you know, as we get older, when we're younger, we can, you know, climb on walls like Spider-Man.

34:36But when you get older, you don't think about doing that anymore. And yet, if you think about like a leopard in the jungle, it's hunting. It is pouncing from tree to tree branch to tree branch its entire life. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to hunt or eat. that's kind of what we need to be able to actually do is to stay limber stay agile and and stay in motion that has been shown to improve vascular health blood vessel health which then of course addresses the blood brain barrier which then also directly addresses the circulation in the brain more movement brings better blood flow just by the nature of movement so stay in motion all right the other thing that i think is really important is social connection social connection turns out to be it sounds like a kind of a hand wavy sociology psychology thing you know have good friends make good connections network it's much more vital than that if you look at the blue zones where people live not just long lives but they live vitally they live with a vibrancy part of their vibrancy is their connection to other people they want to be connected to other people when you you know and and so that's also important is to to find meaning you know there's a term called uh um uh hedonia right so that's where you get great pleasure in something and then there's eudaimonia this is a more a newer concept eudaimonia is actually feeling a sense of purpose and happiness because of your purpose when you've got friends when you've got family when you've got good connections you feel like you're part of a part of your purpose is to be there for them that's really important too and although we don't understand the biology behind that that's also very important for brain health and probably ties into the preventative aspect, the social connections that actually lower the risk of dementia.

36:29I've watched the science of adaptogens grow personally over the last few years and I've become more curious in their role in nervous system support, focus and resilience because adaptogens basically buffer the cortisol that gives us that stress and anxiety. But here's the thing, quality is everything. Most adaptogens on the market don't actually contain enough of the active compounds that you see in clinical studies to make a difference. That's why I've partnered with London Nootropics. These guys only use clinical studies standardized extracts. This is really really important to get the benefits that you're seeing in clinical research.

37:02And they work with Hifas Deterra, Europe's leading mushroom bioscience company. They have high bioavailability, they use incredible ingredients like KSM-66, ashwagandha, and redola life. And these are the active ingredients that you need to see the difference. They have lots of different blends. Flow gets me into deep focus with Lion's Mane. Zen helps support my calm and steady my clarity with ashwagandha. And Mojo gives a clean lift, no crash. And Mush Love made with fantastic fungi with three hefastaterra mushrooms to elevate your day. Enjoy 20 % off and use code LIVEWELLBEWELL. They come in these fantastic little sachets and they are great for traveling too.

37:43how does mdma work with the brain and ptsd ah okay this is an easy one all right so the the first step is what does how does ptsd change your brain so ptsd is this post-traumatic stress disorder people are fearful very much of whatever happened before is not really in the past it's going to happen again and so your amygdala the part of your brain that is more processing fear is hyperactive there's more activity in the in the amygdala for people that have ptsd than than average normal people the other thing about ptsd is that it's hard to separate out what's real threat what's not if you you know people are always triggered by different things so there's less activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically.

38:33So you're sort of short-circuited by your emotions. So you see somebody that looks like somebody that assaulted you, and now you feel like you're about to be assaulted again. If you had a moment to think about it, it's a whole different person. It's a whole different context. It's not that. And then these traumatic memories are never really put into the past. And so the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that stores memories into long-term storage, there's lower activity in the hippocampus and less connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus when you have ptsd right so that's kind of how your brain changes and you've got these real circuits that are activating all the time so mdma works great for ptsd but we found later that or not we other people found we felt that if we focused on the healing other people will do the neuroscience so what we know is that mdma reduces activity in the amygdala so that when you are remembering a traumatic memory, it's not as fearful.

39:36MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. So you're able to sort of think logically more so. And then MDMA increases connectivity between the hippocampus and the amygdala so that you're able to process memories and put them into long-term storage. Then the other big part of what it does is oxytocin so the hormone of love and connection of self-compassion of self-love yeah my favorite one yeah so mdma releases oxytocin and there's a woman gul dolan a neuroscientist who has done studies that show that in mice that the oxytocin is released by mdma and that's what promotes neuroplasticity and that's what we really need with ptsd is that we need to create more of these neural highways and kind of shunt them off from the trauma loop and create new neural highways.

40:27So we're having new processing methods, right? Yeah, you definitely can have one session where you rewire your brain. And then if you do the therapy. Now, I should add though that, for example, this woman that I worked with in 1984 who had PTSD, MDMA, by reducing this fear response to traumatic memories can be destabilizing as well as healing. So she initially did it with a friend of hers and memories of past sexual abuse came up and it so destabilized her. She'd previously attempted suicide. She'd been medicated. She'd been hospitalized from this trauma. And under MDMA, even in a safe place relatively with a lover, these memories came up and she felt that they were overwhelming.

41:13So she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself. and while she was there they stabilized her but they gave her the same SSRI stuff that she'd had before whatever medicine she didn't think it would work so she was more suicidal when she got out so I don't want people to think you take MDMA and now all of your problems you can deal with if you're not in a safe therapeutic setting you you can trigger traumatic memories and then they can be overwhelming so it's the context more than the drug that is what produces the healing

41:49so lines main is getting a really big kind of moment i'd say where a lot of people are adding it to their coffees in the morning um and i would reference it as a nootropic so things that can kind of allow us to connect more wiring in our brain and work with neuroplasticity and new neural networks i want to start with lines main because i think it's having a real buzzword at the moment and it's on a trend and there's lots of different research studies out there. There are some really interesting ones that I've come across, whether it's neuroprotective, neuroplasticity. This is words that, you know, a lot of our listeners would have heard.

42:29And I also heard you kind of mention just before you came on on also how it's involved in gut health. So is lion's mane just a trend, first of all? And if it's not, what does the research say and how can people use it really day to day? Well, definitely it's not a trend. It is a trend how it got now to be known. It is something that we've been researching now for more than 20 years. And there's a lot of research from other universities, research centers, hospitals. But we have big research in autism in children, for example, with lion's mane and reishi, which is giving an incredible result. And this is very much linked to that link of the brain axis to the gut, because we are seeing that when they are in the metabolism of the microbiota, we're missing some of those secondary metabolists that are produced by the specific microbiota.

43:39We're conducting now a study in Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia. Wow. And is it safe? I guess it's safe for kids to take, right? The beautiful thing of mushrooms is that they're really safe. Only people who cannot take mushrooms are the ones that are allergic. But if not, they're completely compatible with every treatment. the mushroom, the pure mushroom. So when we're talking about the extract that is dry and extracted or the pure mushroom powdered or even the mycelium, depending on how it's done. But what is very important is how then it's been produced, the excipients that it's put, that is when it can interact with other drugs.

44:26But if not, if it's the mushroom pure, the extract pure in the whole form, then there's no problem and we have tested it. This is something that we need to always, when we go into research, we need to go through something that is called the ethical committee of the hospital, where you need to bring all the proofs and all the previous studies in cellular forms and also in rats, in murine models that are cold, in order to see that it's safe, there's no toxicity, and that people can take them. That's really important. So you mentioned that two mushrooms, lion's mane, and then you slipped in one very quickly and we didn't have time to interrupt you, but it was reishi.

45:11So I want to make sure that people kind of who are new to this really understand what these mushrooms are. So you've just mentioned lion's mane and that can work really well on our gut health, you were saying, and our brain health. Yes. What we have seen in the studies we have conducted is that it gives you neuroplasticity, meaning that your neurons become younger. And that is something, an idea that I really love, which is not the pro-aging or anti-aging. It's not only for the face. Oh no, it's for the mind. It's for the whole system. Yeah. Even for the gut, even for the heart and the circulatory system.

45:49So that is one of the big treasures of mushrooms that pro-aging or anti-aging works in every single cell of our body, in the mitochondrias, in the L-S-Tin, for example. So it's for our skin, for our arteria, for every single membrane of the cells. And what we're going to see with the intake of lion's mane is that you can have a better sleep, you can have a better focus and concentration because of those neurons that are even growing, because they activate the synthesis of the nerve growth factor. So lion's mane ericinones are molecules that are contained, ingredients, and that can surpass the hematophephalic barrier.

46:43This is a barrier that normally nothing can. This is the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier. The brain barrier. And normally nothing can trespass it because it has to be closed there, the brain. Yeah, of course. Nothing can trespass it. But this erycinone scan, so they will be there activating… The myelin sheath. The myelin sheath that is protecting the nerves. And this is so important because it's going to give us the connections from the brain to activate the muscles and to activate the action. So what we're thinking, it has to go all the impulse, the nerve impulse directly to move actually the action that we're sending.

47:30And this happens when everything is completely connected with that meal-in sheet. And this is something that Lion's Mean does. So we can see an improvement in multiple sclerosis, for example. Wow, so you can be working with MS. We are working with MS as well, and it's helping there. As I was saying, with autism, we have now a research that is starting, that's a clinical trial with 500 elderly people. that we're going to work to see how we can work in early stages of Alzheimer's because we are seeing that we can help incredibly with Alzheimer's. With lion's mane? Yes. With the extract of lion's mane.

48:25I think that's something that so many of us are scared of, right? I know it's the leading cause of death in the UK. I say that all the time in this podcast because I think dementia and Alzheimer's is something that always arises. It's incredible. So I guess even thinking pre-Alzheimer's, right, maybe if you've got a genetic risk for it, a genetic disposition, yeah, this is maybe something that people should be thinking about, right, as a prevention measure. Totally, because so we need to change the medicine that intervenes for the medicine that prevents.

49:04we do know that mushrooms uh which have dietary fiber have something a bioactive called beta d glucan beta d glucan by the way is really good for your endothelium your lining good for uh blood vessels of the body also good for blood vessels of the brain it's also anti-inflammatory also improves your immune system as well this beta-glucan is also found in oats so like oatmeal and so we took a page of the playbook from what we're what we've learned from mushrooms because we know that the beta-d-glucan can be important for healing and we extracted from oats and tested to see if the oats beta-glucan will actually have healing.

49:51And guess what we found? And this has been, we presented this last year at a wound meeting. In the lab, when you actually treat a wound with oat-derived bioactives, including beta-glucan, you can double the rate of normal healing. You can speed up normal healing. You can improve the circulation underneath the surface. So after the wound is healed, kind of like the covering is shut, right? But what about underneath? Well, we found that beta-D-glucan from oats will actually improve the circulation, better blood flow, which is what you want for better healthy tissue, right? And we also found when we cut out the wound and look under the microscope, something startling, the wound that healed is scarless, no scar, okay?

50:38And then when we looked even deeper, we found that part of what made it scarless was it recruited stem cells. Right? So this is insights we gained from mushrooms. We applied it to oats. Then we went, jumped into wound healing. It was also powerfully anti-inflammatory as well. This is how food is medicine researchers like me actually take discoveries in one area and try to apply it to other areas and explore what else can we do. So I think it'd be fascinating to take a look at this Chinese celery-derived NBP and ask, are there any other plants that have this? And if so, could we develop some protocols, potentially, for people who need better brain recovery or brain regeneration?

51:26What I heard you say, and I don't know if this is correct, we can regenerate parts of our brain. Is that true? I know this is a very big thing because it's coming on to understanding more around cognitive decline. But thinking about that is such a large statement and gives a lot of hope if that is true. Is that true? Okay. So, when I went to medical school, it was very clearly taught to all the doctors-to-be that humans don't regenerate. and of all the things that heal very slowly, the brain, once you have a stroke and you have a blockage to the circulation of the brain or bleed that destroys the brain, that's it.

52:08Game over for that part of the brain. We know that's not true. And I actually questioned that as I went through my schooling and training because I saw plenty of stroke patients who they were kind of knocked out immediately after their stroke. But over the course of a week, you saw differences towards recovery. a month, six months, and even a year later, you see people can continue to improve. That is not a scar, even though there might be scar-like features in the scan. That's recovery. Now, what causes recovery? Rewiring? We used to say, well, you know, the brain electrical signals found a way around the blockage, so it was able to ignore the blockage and find its way through.

52:54That's true. We do know that you can rewire after brain injury. But as we began learning more about stem cells, progenitor cells, we began realizing that progenitor cells also play a role in brain recovery after traumatic injury. Now, how do we know this? Well, one thing is that if you take a look at somebody with a stroke and you try to, and, you know, we can scan somebody after a stroke in a hospital, you can see the exact area where there's a problem. All right, right where the block after where the blockages is a part of the brain that that looks like is dying and what looks worse, you know, a couple of days later.

53:36You could actually draw blood from that same patient, which we do all the time in the hospital and stroke patients. Let's get some blood and let's run their blood tests. You're checking their blood chemistry or touching your blood count, all the usual things that happen. but once we began um doing research on stem cells we were able to actually count the stem cells and guess what after a stroke stem cells are called by your brain out of your bone marrow to help rescue parts of the brain through healing repair and regeneration because that's what stem cells do they regenerate so i think that this idea that the brain doesn't regenerate is an old idea.

54:17And now as we're beginning to learn more about stem cells, we're beginning to realize that they also play a part in recovery from stroke. They also play recovery in traumatic brain injury as well, you know? So, and then the real exciting thing, and I've been, you know, I run the Androgenesis Foundation. We've been part of this. Could we in the future deliver a dose of stem cells to the brain after a stroke in an effort to recover. Now, in animals, in a lab, delivering stem cells will actually help the brain regenerate and recover from stroke. It'll protect it from having as much damage as might otherwise happen.

54:59So, again, research is showing that stem cells play a role. Brain can regenerate, even human brains. It does it slowly. It would be great to optimize it. And we don't have that magic key to unlock how to optimize it. However, in China, which has a completely separate FDA, it's called the S-FDA, the Sino-FDA, they've already approved a regenerative substance that comes from a plant, Chinese celery. I don't know if you've been to an Asian market to look at celery. Yeah, I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the same short, fat, thick, very rigid celery. Chinese celery is very long, and it kind of droops.

55:42It's floppy. It's also a lot more potent. It smells like celery. If you were to cut it up and stir fry it, it really has a really, really powerful celery taste to it. Actually, it's a delicious—I like to cook, so I always talk about this. It's got a delicious flavor to it. It really enhances a vegetable dish, for example, like a vegetable stir fry. That's what you want to do. There is actually a compound in there, a natural compound called nitrilebutyl phthalate, NBP. In the lab, NBP, delivered to animals who have had an experimental stroke, will cause stem cells to come out to limit the damage of the stroke and also help the brain recover.

56:25So in China, they ran the clinical trials, phase three clinical trials. It worked like gangbusters. So now this is actually an approved treatment for stroke. plant-based substance nbp to treat stroke expressively for the goal or i should say for the expressive goal to be able to actually prompt brain regeneration

56:50we're also talking about ketogenic diets as well um in psychiatry so i thought that'd be a really interesting place to go down actually is obviously at the moment and you'll know this the word longevity, everything is toted about within mental health and how we should be optimizing our diet. But they're two quite different diets. So someone listening to this, how can they navigate what they think should be going down? Was it the Mediterranean diet? Or is it the ketogenic diet? What's the kind of overarching answer from your opinion? So I would say the first step in even questioning whether you might benefit from changing your diet is a really basic assessment of your metabolic health markers.

57:40So what's your blood sugar like? Do you have prediabetes or diabetes? Unfortunately, 50 % of Americans now have prediabetes or diabetes. So one in two people are going to have to say, oh, that's a problem for me. I want to look at your lipids, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol triglycerides. I want to look at inflammatory biomarkers. I want to look at waist kind of circumference or abdominal fat. I want to look at blood pressure. And with those markers, and I will even take the inflammatory biomarkers out because they're not officially part of metabolic syndrome. But those general markers, so blood glucose, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, and abdominal fat, abdominal obesity, those five biomarkers are biomarkers of what we call metabolic syndrome.

58:47And right now, only 7 % of Americans have none of them. 93 % of Americans have at least one abnormality in those five simple biomarkers. And that means, so if you are in that 93 % category, it means that there is something about your lifestyle, so those six pillars of lifestyle medicine, that is off. More often than not, diet is one that you should at least consider. Now, again, you might be following the perfect diet and not sleeping well, or you might be following the perfect diet and be in an abusive relationship. And there's no way a perfect diet is going to overcome the adversity and the health consequences of being in an abusive relationship.

59:46So again, I don't want to make it simpler than it is. But barring those type of examples, for a lot of people, diet, nutrition is playing a key role. And increasingly, like in Western countries, such as the United States and the UK, increasingly the consumption of ultra-processed foods is being found more and more to play a harmful role in human health and human metabolism, including mental health, including depression, anxiety, but even bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. and unfortunately in the United States about 60 to 70 percent of people's calories now on average are coming from ultra-processed foods that's a real problem

1:00:42so if we put men and women under a brain scan is there much difference between a woman's brain and a man's brain because all I've got in my brain at the moment is men are from Mars women are from venus yes and if you opened up a man's skull inside is a blue brain and a woman's inside is a pink brain and they're completely separate that's not really how we think about things so the way i like to describe male versus female brains is and we need to get back to just quickly defining sex and gender so remind me to come back to that just so we don't get in a note right now don't get in ourselves in a quagmire okay is this idea that we contain multitudes and so do our brains so if you were to measure a brain and compare one brain to another brain what i mean you have said put it under a brain scanner but like what are you measuring even under a brain scanner you could measure a hundred different things you could measure like the entire volume of the brain or the size or the shape.

1:01:47You could zoom in and look at specific parts of the brain. How thick is the cortex? What is the volume of that sub nuclei? You could use a different type of brain imaging technology like fMRI, functional MRI, and you could look at how do different networks in the brain connect? Which parts of the brain become activated or deactivated while you're performing certain tasks? Or maybe just while you're sort of lying there thinking about nothing you could look at how white and organized is the white matter you could look at you could zoom on in and look at very very specific components of gray matter perhaps getting beyond the point of an mri scanner or an mri scanner you could take a brain out you could cut it up into little pieces and look at it under the microscope and count neurons or look at synapses or look at neuron number or look at receptors.

1:02:41You could, you know, there's so many different things. Yeah. And you could also then start going, well, what about perhaps risk factors for different types of diseases? So we could look at Tourette's syndrome or Alzheimer's disease or anxiety or depression or autism, a whole host of different factors like that. We could start doing different types of cognitive tests. So we've got hundreds of different types of measures that we could make of any one brain. And each of those measures, sometimes we might see a biological sex difference in that we might see a difference between a male brain and a female brain.

1:03:22Often we won't see a biological sex difference. Sometimes when we see a difference, it's not an enormously big difference. Now you'll be familiar, because you're a scientist, right? So if you've got like a normal distribution curve, a standard distribution, if you measure like a thousand male brains and a thousand female brains and you did start to see perhaps a biological sex difference, it's not as if the standard deviation curves are completely separate. Often there's a lot of overlap. We're looking at very, very subtle differences. We're only going to start seeing those differences emerge when we're measuring lots and lots of brains.

1:03:59There was this, there's one study which i haven't talked about a lot that comes out of work from a woman pauline mackie a neuroscientist psychiatrist women's health researcher who's looked at brain fog during menopause and this is like this big topic and again if you're told you get to 48 and you're going to get brain fog you're going to experience it like we can we do create our own realities but also it is real and it is measurable but not in everyone all of the time so they had a cohort it It was a small longitudinal study whereby they looked at a group of women and followed them the whole way through perimenopause and menopause and kind of out the other side and did tons of different cognitive tests on them at multiple times all the way through this sort of perimenopause transition.

1:04:43And the cognitive tests were designed to pick up different aspects of kind of memory and attention and thinking. All the sorts of functions that our brain does that we might feel aren't working as well when we say we have brain fog. And brain fog's a very big umbrella word, like a constellation of symptoms, a bit like baby brain where we might just like, my brain isn't working. But like people who haven't slept much might say they have brain fog or perhaps people with depression might have brain fog or, you know, we use it quite loosely. And it turns out that not every woman shows cognitive decline across this time course.

1:05:23machine learning was able to analyze this data and kind of come up with these like kind of four subgroups or buckets of women showing these different kind of trajectories across the menopause transition some women their cognition stayed the same did all these tests the whole way through and they just sort of stayed the same as they were there was one small group of women who showed a slight reduction in some of their test scores across that menopause transition and they were much more likely to have poor levels of education, have terrible sleep, and to also have lots of other kind of constellation of symptoms going through menopause.

1:05:59But then there was two groups of women who actually showed improvements in their test scores. Through menopause? And in a way that might not, well, probably shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise. Not every test score, but some tests of memory and some tests of attention actually improved. But when you do cognitive testing, multiple times your test scores get better. And we tell this story about brain fog, but that's not everyone's experience all of the time. And it's not until we've got really rigorous data analysis, we've got lots of data points, and then we use sophisticated ways to analyze it.

1:06:39We have these new stories starting to emerge that I think show that, again, we're not just reaching this reproductive life transition that automatically equals dysfunction and decline and instability and things going wrong, brains shift and shape and reorganize and respond. And, you know, be familiar with this word, even just this word brain plasticity, our brains reorganize and react and often show quite a great deal of resilience over time. But we're just not telling these stories. And I saw some types of stories emerge when we're talking about pregnancy and motherhood and baby brain and even just aging and memory across the lifespan.

1:07:31Data is starting to reveal some really new and interesting stories that aren't always about dysfunction and decline. I think that gives a case. There's one study that I read in your book. I'm jumping in the lifespans here. but listen, stay with me. We're now on menopause. I'm jumping as well. We're going everywhere. But it's, you know, that's the journey of life. Menopause. So I went to this Women's Health Summit in LA and I mean, for a woman in her 30s, being very much in the sphere, I'm informed about menopause now. You're probably petrified at the moment. But I'm petrified. Yeah. And I can see these images.

1:08:11Two years ago, you wouldn't have went menopause. I joke and I say menopause wasn't invented but yes. But I also really don't want to undermine women that are really struggling. I actually do have some friends who can call me in tears because they feel like they've completely lost who they are and they feel very alone. And so I guess I'm kind of in the weeds of kind of wanting to understand the science behind this. But I remember sitting in the Swim and the House conference only a couple of months ago with some incredible scientists and showing the decline of the brain on the screen and going, this is what happens when you hit 35.

1:08:44This is what happens when you hit 45. And the surface of the brain declining. So I'm obviously, naturally, as anyone who listened to the show and anyone who is very deep in the menopause space, pretty scared about what's meant to happen. And then I read this part in your book, which said the first brain image study tracking women from perimenopause to postmenopause came out in 2021. It showed that some areas of gray matter expanded, especially in the regions of the brain linked to memory and cognition. So I was like, it's not loss, it's adaption. Which I don't think I've had or heard any conversation that said that parts of our memory and cognition can actually expand in menopause.

1:09:40what are we wasting our money on when it comes to our brain vitamins

1:09:46nutraceuticals we did the reviews we look at the data the data i mean if you if you want the magical one thing first of all that's not going to get your help it's a comprehensive approach you're going to have to do the brisk walking studies have shown that if you do brisk walking you reduce your chance of dementia by 45%. Brisk walking, free in your neighborhood. You don't have to pay to some social media guru. So brisk walk 20 minutes a day. It's incredible. The operative term though being brisk walk. Leg strength. Leg strength. This is a good one. Yeah. We looked at the compared population that actually had MCI, pre-dementia.

1:10:27mild cognitive impairment pre-dementia two groups one did leg strength exercise the other one stretching exercises they reduced their chance of dementia by more than 40 percent by leg strength and by leg strength i don't mean you have to do squats and put weights on your mini squats in front of tv what about calf lifts if i'm sitting here now talking to you completely work absolutely Absolutely. So simple things like that are incredibly powerful. I want people to start moving towards that direction of many meaningful activities. So coming back to vitamins and nutraceuticals, there are a couple that are invalid and validated have been shown to be important.

1:11:10In US, about 40 % of population is B12 deficient. B12 is - Is it that much? Yes. Yes. Whether they're omnivore or vegetarian, it doesn't matter. 40, 41 % is not getting enough vitamin B12. So check your B12. Check your B12. That's essential. And even if you take B12, if you haven't checked it, B12 is water-soluble and most often it goes away. So check your B12. That's an important thing. B12 is involved in so many cellular processes, including DNA repair. B12 should be normal and a little bit on the higher side. The other thing about the brain is that this little organ, three pounds, 2 % of your body's weight, consumes 25 % of your body's energy.

1:11:54It is incredibly overwhelmed throughout life. But yet, at the same time, it's the most resilient organ in the body. It continues to grow as you get older. If you give it the right chance. it's the only organ that can actually get better as you get older if you give it the right chance that's the critical thing and it's just remarkable the reason that you sleep is because of the brain because it's during night that the brain needs to reboot it needs to clean it needs to reorganize So some simple measures can profoundly, profoundly help your brain grow and become better every single day. That's an incredible positive thing to know about your own brain.

1:12:44I think the fact that you said 25 % of our energy and 50 % of our oxygen, I think, if I'm correct. Correct. And this even happens during our sleep cycle. Especially during sleep. The brain does some of its best work while you're asleep. When you're asleep, the brain actually shrinks, which means, imagine we use the analogy of a city. Imagine the streets getting wider. All the traffic is gone. Now the cleaning crew comes in. These are glial cells, which are outnumbering the other cells by ninefold. Well, there are different kinds of glial cells, but let's say in general, ninefold. The cleaning crew is larger than the population of the city.

1:13:22Imagine New York City or LA. The streets are wider now. There's a flow of fluid that goes through the street to clean it. Not just a little truck coming around. A flow of fluid. That's the glymphatic system. And it cleans the brain. And it does that during the deep cycles of sleep. So you need deep sleep. You need four to five times a night where you get to the deep sleep. And that's an important conversation we can have is what you need to do to get to deep sleep. And when you do that, also that gives space for the information to get reorganized and put in the right file, folder, and cabinet.

1:13:58The one thing that helps memory the most, more than any trick, more than any gimmick, is sleep. So that dormant period, which you thought was just a wasted one-third of your life, is literally the part that actually grows your brain, cleanses your brain, and then reorganizes your brain to be better. If there is any detox, real detox, it's sleep. And how much sleep should we be getting on average night? Because this is a very big topic of debate. Some people say six hours, some people say eight to nine hours. What is the brain health? If we're literally thinking about our brain health, what is the optimum amount of sleep that one should be getting?

1:14:43And does it differ from men to women? Yeah, that's a great question. So based on the latest data, on an average, an adult needs about eight to nine hours of sleep, depending on their activity levels and some other needs. There have been some differences in the need for sleep among men and women, but it's not more than 30 minutes more than that. So say, for example, if it's eight hours for men, it's probably eight and a half hours for women. and it may change during the different phases of their lives, whether women are menstruating or going through menopause or through some recovery periods, it might actually be a little bit more, but about eight to nine hours is enough.

1:15:24Now, there's a perception that people need less sleep as they grow older, and that's not true. Whether you're in your 30s or 40s or 80s and 90s, you have to meet that quota. The sleep cycle and the architecture changes. So the number of hours that we spend in the deeper stages of sleep kind of shrinks for older adults, but the number of cycles of sleep that they go through remains the same. We typically go through four to five cycles of sleep when you look at the architecture, and I'd be happy to send you that picture. and we spend about 90 minutes in each of these cycles. And the first half of the night is usually spent in the deeper stages of sleep, stage three and four, and that's where all the cleansing and the memory consolidation happens.

1:16:20During the latter half or the second half of the sleep architecture is when we spend more time in REM sleep. And REM sleep is about dreaming where your mind is very active and that has been associated with creativity, with problem solving. And, you know, you hear stories from artists and from painters that actually come up with phenomenal ideas during those stages of sleep. So to come back to your question, it's about eight to nine hours of sleep and it kind of stays the same throughout our adult life. What is one of the main things that people could basically start doing today regarding all of this to help their brain health and optimize their brain health and our neuro concept used at the center unwind um unwind is not just sitting around and and relaxing on the beach which is great we live on the beach so it's fine unwind is identifying the stressors specifically i mean if you notice that's the running stream through this whole conversation whether it's nutrition and everything else spend a little time go go old old school get a notepad write down specifically measurably the bad stressors in your life specifically and measurably the good stressors what is good stressors things that have meaning in your life the direction you want to go in i mean as i said uh mine is you know one of the things is and there are several i mean And one of them is learning the guitar, learning several languages, Spanish and French, learning technology, learning about technology.

1:17:57So lots of things. And then the service we do in the communities. But very specifically, what did this project and so on and so forth. write those down then systematically build timeline around the good stressors and create a plan around bad stressors how to reduce eliminate and delegate the bad stressors systematically we don't do that it's management at the end of the day it's management i know that i'm a neurologist but i'm going to talk to you as a manager managing the good and bad stressors is critical because if you don't do that you will never get to good nutrition because it's going to be the diet of the day somebody on the internet said oh now eat liver this or a kidney that or or this particular kind of mushroom that's got a weird name or this or that they're gonna they're gonna pull you along all the nope it's a lifestyle it's more plants it's this and that needs a little organizing which means managing your stressors unwinding your your your your stressors into good and bad you won't be able to create a good exercise plan because it becomes a one-off but But if it's organized and within those good and bad stressors, then it becomes a life program.

1:19:07And that's, I think, where for me, that's central. A simple, old-fashioned list of good stressors specifically and bad stressors and working through those throughout the day. It becomes so powerful, so engaging, and so meaningful. And by the way, in there, add very important. The most important thing that that brain is made of, creative crazy time. things that just let your mind go free for half an hour. That creative time actually expands your brain. I love that. I was actually going to. So that's my element. And I'm very passionate about women's brain health. And one of the things that comes up is cognitive activity is ignored.

1:19:53You have a lot of lovely women who focus on their exercise and nutrition and stress and sleep, But there's very little emphasis on cognitive activity and building that situation where you can just deep dive into a topic and learn more about it. And that actually trains the brain to sustain focus and attention as well. Dean always says focus is the gateway to memory. when you learn to build information from one to two to three to four and maintain focus and attention, whether it's creating a body of information or whether it's in a conversation. If you, Sarah and I, if you sit down with me over a cup of tea and you and I start talking about, I don't know, history of Ireland and you start having a conversation and I will listen to you and I will maintain what you told me and I will add something to it.

1:20:51Then you add something to that and then I will add something to that. In one hour, both of us will come out of that conversation knowing so much about the topic. One of the ideas that one of our community members had was PowerPoint nights. You know, friends and family members, they do a deep dive into a topic and then they have a PowerPoint presentation to their family and friends and just give them an overview about that particular topic. I think it's so phenomenal for us to do that. It does two things. Neuroplasticity, connection between more brain cells, sharpening your focus. Well, I guess there's three.

1:21:24And the third one is that deep desire and curiosity for learning more and more. It almost becomes a habit. You kind of disconnect yourself from things that are bothering you, that are stressful in your life, and you hone in on something that brings you so much joy and pleasure. I love that you both love things of three, which is wonderful. um i the problem is when when you make lists of three and then you can't remember the third one yes there was a third one yes but i love that because now when i um read a book or do a podcast whatever it is i actually spend and i didn't used to do this because i used to forget and i used to try and do a review of the year and go i can't remember the conversation i had six months ago that i remember was incredible but i have no memory of what happened in that conversation is now I try and retake notes and bullet points.

1:22:15And that really helps ingrain for me what I did learn and what I did take away and what really stuck in my mind. Because I think sometimes we can just take for granted that our minds will have this incredible capacity to remember every conversation that we've had that's important. And actually now I found bullet pointing and kind of reverberating back to myself what I have learned has been such a powerful mechanism for my brain.

1:22:42Thank you.