The Fastest Way To Alzheimer’s.... 6 Science-Backed Brain Fixes!

26:52It could also be this other sort of newly identified role that creatine is playing in sort of having an anti-inflammatory effect. And I don't know enough about that. I don't know that there's enough even known about that. But I do know that it exists. And it's fascinating because, again, I think where creatine really shines in the brain and it's been shown study after study is under some kind of stressful condition, depression or sleep deprivation. Or there's a new study that came out. It was published, I don't know, a month ago or so. showing that it was a very small pilot study, and I want to caveat this, there was no placebo control.

27:28But it did show that giving people with Alzheimer's disease creatine, I believe it was 20 grams a day, did improve their cognition. And so again, this is a whole new field where now we're looking at creatine in the brain, not just the gym bros and not just the muscular effects, but in the brain and how it's affecting the brain and being beneficial for cognition, for brain aging, for depression. Here's the fourth most replayed moment. One of the most inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity. because if the brain can physiologically change based on what I'm doing, then it means that who I am now, my identity, that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing with the ferret, isn't who I always have to be.

28:17I can literally change. We've spoken a little bit around what causes the motivation to actually change, but knowing that my brain will actually change, those two things are really inspiring for me because it means that whatever rut I'm stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one. Now, you said that the motivation to change comes from fear. Well, in my case, it took a fear circumstance, fear of becoming a permanent failure to motivate immense change. And that was that circumstance. I do believe, however, that the best work, our most creative and best work comes from a love of craft. but sometimes in order to find what you truly love you have to be scared into setting off on a path to find it so neuroplasticity is absolutely real but if the question is can a person change can you learn new thing can you unlearn certain patterns can you overcome traumas at any age the answer is absolutely categorically yes how well it's very clear that as a child until about age 25 more or less just passive experience will shape the brain for better or worse after about age 25 and again these are not strict cutoffs we can change our brain but what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens so one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered.

29:50Although by the way, you can remove some of the emotional load of that trauma does not have to be traumatic forever is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature, there's the release of certain, what we call neuromodulators, things like epinephrine, adrenaline, and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our body and brain. And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual. And as a consequence, in the subsequent days, there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again. This is why we have what's called one trial learning.

30:30You go to a certain location, something terrible happens there. You will forever associate that location with something terrible, but there are tools, therapy and other tools that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm, no fear whatsoever. The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn, provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment. This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused. We can't learn passively as adults.

31:04We can't just play, you know, a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room. And then it just, the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis. But if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention, there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention. What we call the catecholamines, it's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness, all which cause an increase in focus, a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field. So like cones of attention is one way to think about it. And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night, maybe the next night as well, there's reordering of neural connections so that that knowledge, that new experience is consolidated in your brain.

31:54You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience. So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing, everything that we encounter changes our brain, That's not true. Why would the brain change unless it needed to, right? As a child, the brain is basically a template for change. It's trying to understand the environment and make predictions. And so that's true. Neuroplasticity is a cardinal feature of childhood and adolescence and the teen years. Just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen. No other music will ever have as much significance. And that's because as a teen, your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators.

32:30The amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense. That song meant so much, and it's because of the neurochemical milieu it creates in you. But as an adult, it takes a stronger stimulus, as we say. The nervous system is very efficient in that way. It doesn't change unless it has to. And it always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe. This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to just interest in terms of what will shift our brain. But it's nice to know that love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimuli for changing the brain.

33:13From everything we know about neuroscience, it's clear that it doesn't matter if you're 90 years old, 70 years old, 50 years old, if you want to learn, you can learn. And that learning occurs through neuroplasticity, which is the reordering of neural connections, strengthening of certain connections, weakening of others, and in some rare cases, the addition of new neurons. But you absolutely can change your brain, but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain. You have to be alert while you do that. And then you absolutely have to go get some rest because it's during sleep and during meditative states and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs.

33:53You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a game changer. And I would say for about 35 to 40 % of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com. as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily and my team says that this company have been in touch.

34:27So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. In terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am, game changer. So if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com slash Stephen for 30 % off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment and now you can find Keaton IQ at Target stores across the United States where your first shot is completely free of charge. All I had to do was brain dump. Imagine if you had someone with you at all times that could take the ideas you have in your head, synthesize them with AI to make them sound better and more grammatically correct and write them down for you.

35:06This is exactly what Whisperflow is in my life. It is this thought partner that helps me explain what I want to say. And it now means that on the go, when I'm alone in my office, when I'm out and about, I can respond to emails and Slack messages and WhatsApps and everything across all of my devices just by speaking. I love this tool. And I started talking about this in my behind the scenes channel a couple of months back. And then the founder reached out to me and said, we're seeing a lot of people come to our tool because of you. So we'd love to be a sponsor. We'd love you to be an investor in the company.

35:33And so I signed up for both of those offers. And I'm now an investor and a huge partner in a company called Whisper Flow. You have to check it out. Whisperflow is four times faster than typing. So if you want to give it a try, head over to whisperflow.ai slash doac to get started for free. And you can find that link to Whisperflow in the description below. There are a few sports that I make time for, no matter where I am in the world. And one of them is, of course, football. The other is MMA, but watching that abroad usually requires a VPN. I spend so much time traveling. I've just spent the last two and a half months traveling through Asia and Europe and now back here in the United States.

36:08And as I'm traveling, there are so many different shows that I want to watch on TV or on some streaming websites. So when I was traveling through Asia and I was in Kuala Lumpur one day, then the next day I was in Hong Kong and the next day I was in Indonesia, all of those countries had a different streaming provider, a different broadcaster. And so in most of those countries, I had to rely on ExpressVPN, who are a sponsor of this podcast. Their tool is private and secure. And it's very, very simple how it works. When you're in that country and you want to watch a show that you love in the UK, all you do is you go on there and you click the button UK and it means that you can gain access to content in the UK.

36:40If you're after a similar solution in your life and you've experienced that problem too, visit expressvpn.com slash doac to find out how you can access ExpressVPN for an extra four months at no cost. Here is the third most replayed moment. For those people who have just clicked to listen to this conversation, can you tell them the mission you're on and why it's so important? yeah well thanks so much for having this conversation with me i think that illustrates the problem right someone as informed as you don't know anything i've never heard of nitric oxide so it's important for us to just make a distinction between um like nitric gas that people you know inhale and that you if you played like uh some of those racing car games you press a button and the car goes really fast if you that's nitrous nitrous these are two separate things.

37:28Yeah, very good point. So this is not nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is, I mean, in medicine, it's a dental anesthetic, right? It's a gas. It's called laughing gas. That's N2O. It's the chemical formula. What we're talking about is nitric oxide or NO, one nitrogen, one oxygen. This molecule is foundational for human health and longevity. So nitric oxide is a gas. It's a naturally produced molecule. It's a signaling molecule in the human body. And so it regulates things like blood flow and oxygen delivery, and it mobilizes our own stem cells to help us recover and repair and replace dysfunctional cells.

38:04It improves energy production inside the cell, and it regulates blood flow. So nitric oxide is a gas. It's produced in the endothelium. So the endothelium is the single layer of cells that line every blood vessel throughout the body. So the function of these endothelial cells is to regulate vascular tone and to regulate, you know, solute exchange and extravasation or transport of molecules across that endothelial layer. And so when your endothelial cells can no longer make nitric oxide gas, they no longer dilate, so the blood vessels become constricted, you start to get inflammation, you get stiff arteries, plaque deposition, and that's what starts cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis.

38:47So let me get this straight. I'll repeat back to you what I think I understand about nitric oxide. And you tell me if it's accurate. So this nitric oxide is a chemical that is in all the blood cells of my body. And it allows my blood cells to basically expand, open up so blood can flow through there. So if I - It dilates the smooth muscle. It's not affecting the cells per se, but it's dilating the smooth muscle that surrounds the blood vessels. Which is cleansing. That leads to relaxation and dilation. Fine. So my blood cells would then expand. and more blood would go through there. But if I'm deficient, that mechanism doesn't work and my blood cells wouldn't expand, ultimately expand through the relaxation of the muscles.

39:29That's right. And therefore I would have higher blood pressure, which can lead to a series of downstream diseases and consequences. And so when we look at the graph that I showed a second ago, where we're seeing, for anyone that can't see this graph because you're listening on audio, we're seeing nitric oxide levels in young people up to the age of roughly around 20 are optimal and then from about 30 to 70 there's this tremendous sort of 80 90 percent drop in terms of chronic disease that is downstream from me losing nitric oxide level can you give me a bit of a menu of chronic disease that is associated with this nitric oxide deficiency see yep we've touched on them so erectile dysfunction so when erections in both men and women are dependent upon dilation of the blood vessels to get engorgement to get increase in blood flow and that's what an erection is and we call that the canary in the coal mine because for years people thought it was a lifestyle disorder right well erectile dysfunction yeah but now it's recognized that it's a symptom of loss of nitric oxide and really an accelerated form of cardiovascular vascular disease.

40:38High blood pressure, metabolic disease, and diabetes. And then the other one is obviously Alzheimer's, because Alzheimer's is a vascular disease. And nitric oxide corrects every single thing we know about Alzheimer's. It improves blood flow to the brain. It improves glucose uptake, so it overcomes the metabolic aspect of Alzheimer's. It reduces inflammation. In fact, a number of my patents are on a method of reducing inflammation. It inhibits the oxidative stress we see in Alzheimer's, neurological disease, and it prevents the immune dysfunction. And when you do that, when you restore blood flow and you get nutrients and oxygen in and you take out the metabolic waste products, there's no misfolding of protein.

41:17So you don't get the amyloid plaque. You don't get the tau tangles. So this simple molecule, nitric oxide gas, I'm absolutely convinced will eradicate and cure Alzheimer's. Really? Because it addresses every physiological root cause of Alzheimer's. If you can get it administered therapeutically to patients early enough? No, I think that's a very key because the success or failure of any clinical trial, any drug in any clinical trial, is dependent upon the design of the clinical trial. And what patients, at what stage of disease that you enroll these patients. So what are the inclusion criteria and what are the exclusion criteria?

41:56And there's a stage in every disease, whether it's heart disease, kidney disease, Alzheimer's, where you've reached a point of no return. There's really no medical therapy that's going to reverse that disease because it's progressed to a state that's irreversible. So I think what we try to do is take patients early in the process, what we call vascular dementia, mild cognitive impairment, early Alzheimer's. Because what I want to be able to demonstrate is two things. Number one, can we stop the progression of disease? Once it's started, can we stop the progression? And then number two is we want to enroll patients far enough along to where we can show regression.

42:36So can you move the needle back? And so that's a very kind of a specific and finite patient population. When you design a clinical study, number one, at the absolute worst, we want to stop progression. At the absolute best, we want to show that we can regress disease. And that's the goal of therapy, is that you understand the mechanism of disease to the extent that you can treat it, you can prevent it, you can reverse it, and you can cure it. When I think about the role that food plays in my nitric oxide production, what should I be eating to increase my nitric oxide levels or to keep them at a healthy level?

43:16I think the same answer is for that too. It's not so much what we should be eating, it's what we should not be eating. Okay. So we'll cover those step by step. Number one, you have to avoid sugar and high glycemic index foods. Because sugar is a toxin, it's a poison. And let's think about what sugar is. So when we eat sugar or drink sugar beverages, right, whether it's sucrose, whether it's fructose, whether it's high fructose corn syrup, the end result inside the human is we see an increase in glucose. So elevation in blood sugar or blood glucose is diabetes, right? And now there's continuous glucose monitors that you can get anywhere.

44:00And everybody does this. So if you eat something and it causes an increase in your blood sugar, blood glucose, then you should avoid that. Because glucose, as the name applies, is glue. Right? It's sticky. And if you have a soda and you spill it on your countertop, you come back the next day, it's sticky. Right? That's what happens inside the body. That sugar sticks to everything. It sticks to proteins. It sticks to enzymes. And it lowers nitric oxide production. Absolutely. That's why diabetics have a 10-time higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, all-cause mortality. That's why they develop neurological or peripheral neuropathy.

44:36That's why they have non-healing wounds. There's no nitric oxide. That's why they're developing diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, pancreatitis. I mean, all of that can be traced back to a lack of nitric oxide production because the sugar is stuck to the enzyme. The sugar destroys the oral microbiome. It completely changes the ecology of the bacteria. It completely shuts down nitric oxide production, right? But I think to answer your question, what should we be eating? I think you've got to eat a balanced diet in moderation. You know, Americans are overfed. All you've got to do is walk around and see the epidemic of obesity.

45:13Good high-quality protein, good quality fats, and little or no carbs. And it's really that simple. Here's the second most replayed moment. When you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy at the moment, are there any that stand out to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain? Because I had a couple come to mind that I wanted to throw at you. I mean, one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle, which is kind of, I think you call it pickleball here. Good for my brain, bad for my brain. It's so good for your brain. Because it's working, your cerebellum, and I told you that because yours was sleepy.

45:59And as you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises, it then activates your frontal lobes. Does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue? Yes. Oh, really? And the more you do it, the better coordination you develop. them. And that's why coordination exercises for kids, so we talked about kids, is you want to do that with them early. Play sports, but not sports where they're going to get a head injury, right? I mean, we have to be smarter than we are. But when I was young, my mother, who's now 93, was the ping pong champion in the neighborhood. And she was really good.

46:51And she never let us beat her until we could. But she was always encouraging. I was looking then as you were speaking about different trends at the moment that are either good or bad for the brain. And one big trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training. Lots of people are doing games and using other things to, There's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps. Does any of that stuff work? Some of it. Some of it works. And if you're, so for example, if you're doing memorization games, do them while you're on the bike. Now, not in the street, but if you're on a stationary bike and you're doing those games, it's been found that exercise increases blood flow to the hippocampus, meaning you're more likely to remember it and you're strengthening your brain in the process.

47:53So exercise with new learning is stunning. So if I want to learn something, I should do it while walking or moving in motion. Right. So if you're listening to a language app, for example, do it while you're walking. Mindfulness and meditation, good or bad for the brain? Great. I published three studies on a kundalini yoga form of meditation called Kirtan Kriya. It's a 12-minute meditation. I always say it's the perfect ADD meditation because it's only 12 minutes. And for 12 minutes, you do this. Sa-ta-na-ma. Sa-ta-na-ma. Sa-ta-na-ma. It's two minutes out loud, two minutes whispering, four minutes silently to yourself, two minutes whispering, two minutes out loud.

48:42You're done. Sa-ta-na-ma. Birth, life, death, reborn. Birth, life, death, reborn. But the one we studied is sa-ta-na-ma. And so if they look it up, kirtan kriya activates your cerebellum, activates your frontal lobes, calms down your emotional brain. People who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks, their resting frontal lobe function was stronger. So simple. What the hell is going on there? I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination meditation.

49:34Loving your job. Good or bad for the brain? Absolutely great for your brain. If you're learning new things, people who are in a job that does not require new learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease. So if you're stagnant in your work, you have a higher risk of Alzheimer's. And like, if I just read brain scans all day, well, I know how to do it. I'm not learning anything new. So I do that, but I also am writing about something I don't know about. Or I'm learning something new. What if you're working with arseholes? I'm sorry? I love the job, but I'm working with arseholes. Bad for your brain.

50:22chronic stress increases cortisol. And I think everybody should sort of know their baseline cortisol level. And cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly. So that's two very bad things for your brain. Breath work, that's a big track. Excellent. Excellent. You want to break a panic attack? The 15-second breath. Four seconds in, Hold it for a second and a half. Eight seconds out. Hold it for a second and a half. You just do that four or five times, your whole nervous system will calm down. And the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in. That's why four seconds in, eight seconds out.

51:17It shifts your nervous system, doesn't it? Yes. It increases something called vagal tone. Okay, some bad things then. Social media usage, chronic social media usage. Good for the brain, bad for the brain. Because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real. What about workaholism and hustle culture? So, I love my work. Am I addicted to it? I don't know. But I love it.

51:49when they say people are workaholics and it's bad for the brain it's they're working with assholes or doing something they don't like or doing it for the money but without other purpose microplastics that's a big awful for the brain one of the major causes of hormone disruption and cancer. And other environmental... Thank you for not giving me a plastic water bottle. It's okay. Imagine if we did that. We spend a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are becoming more aware of now, which is good. Noise pollution. Bad for the brain.

52:37And if it hurts your hearing, hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's. Why is that? Because you're not getting input. And if you're not getting appropriate input, your brain starts to atrophy. And if you don't hear what other people are saying, and you have a lot of ants, you have a high negativity bias, is you can actually begin to get a bit paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity. I just bought some new Apple AirPods. And when I connected them to my phone, it said, do you want to do a hearing test? So I did the hearing test. And then I asked my girlfriend, I said, you should do this hearing test as well, because I needed something to compare it to.

53:25And I was a little bit shocked. It said I hadn't lost any hearing yet, but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers. and I remember thinking gosh you know this is but I didn't have any idea that it was linked to Alzheimer's at all so now I've turned down the volume for the first time in my life because I think you're hearing declines regardless really of what you do with age anyway but as you said earlier like starting from a better baseline when you're talking about the brain reserves is really the game I think with aging my last point is a my last question is a bit of a seems to be uncorrelated but the world is heading towards a world that's driven by artificial intelligence it's like all the all the rage at the moment if you log on the internet people talking about they're going to lose their jobs all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways when you think about the world of ai that we're heading into there's so many ways that i imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone who's doing scans of brains and so on.

54:28But do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad for our brains? I think in the short run, it's going to be bad because your brain is going to do less. And that's bad for the brain. I think it's fascinating to watch what's going to happen. And ultimately, in the words of my friend Byron Katie, Argue with reality, welcome to hell. We need to figure out how to use it to enhance our lives rather than to steal brain development. Here's the first most replayed moment. There was a study done in 2007 that showed curcumin, I can't even say it. Curcumin. That shows curcumin upregulates antioxidant defenses and downregulates oxidative stress.

55:24There was a study done in 2016, which is a meta-analysis of random control trials found curcumin comparable to ibuprofen in terms of pain relief. Yeah, there's a lot of work on curcumin and turmeric. As I said, a lot of people get confused because they think it only works if you absorb it into the blood. And I'm saying that actually you don't. What you do is you work with the microbiome to make it useful. And there's early preclinical studies taking place around the impact it can have with cancers. And there's promising but early studies showing the impact that curcumin that comes from tumeric can have on brain health.

56:03Yes, well, that's the focus of switching on to the blood supply to the brain, what we call the vascular effects on the brain. and there's something we used to call the blood-brain barrier, which you've probably heard of, which is seen to be the place where the barrier that stops a lot of stuff entering the brain and potentially upsetting it. We now know this blood-brain barrier is a very dynamic, interesting interface between the brain's tissue and the rest of us. It's now called the neurovascular unit, NVU, and it is so exciting. And the more we look at it so far, the more we find that the things that help the neurovascular unit, the blood-brain barrier, are plants.

56:54And we have green tea. And, you know, if you really want to help our brain health, regular drinking of green tea, you know, has been shown to be really useful. Not that, rather than the supplement, by the way, is the drink that you have. Oh, I put it in here. Right, so we can make it. So as you make that, can you explain to me why green tea is a good idea? Because it contains a number of, again, polyphenols. And polyphenols are those? These colours. These colours, yeah. In this case, it's green, obviously. And remember, green tea is just the smoked, unprocessed part of the tea leaf. It's a plant called Camellia sinensis.

57:48So this is a nice Japanese teapot. That's the sort of thing you'd have green tea in. And these are the mugs, but we've filled these off already with ginger and cinnamon. So let's leave it for a moment. But while it's sitting there for a while, there are a number of these polyphenols in green tea that seem to be particularly effective in modulating that barrier we talked about the neurovascular unit between the brain and the rest of us. And there's all sorts of reasons why regular consumption of green tea seems to be linked to less of this sort of trouble. What sort of trouble? The dementia type problems, cognitive decline as you get older.

58:30Do they find that in cultures where they drink a lot of green tea, they have less dementia? Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's a cause and effect. So you need a few other things to establish that. And what we're finding is that other plants have very likely powerful effects in this area. And I mentioned the rosemary. Now, all you need to do to appreciate rosemary is to press it and sniff. Oh, it smells so good. Really nice. That's not just nice, because what you're doing there is you're inhaling volatile oils, the things that give the smell. And when you're inhaling, they're literally going into your brain, because part of the brain actually reaches the outside world.

59:12It's called the olfactory lobe. And when you inhale something, it literally moves into the brain and from there into the limbic system. Remember, there's a line in Shakespeare play called Hamlet. Ophelia, the young lady, says, Rosemary, that's for remembrance because everyone knew that this improved cognitive functions. And when I was working on our campus in Maryland, we actually did a clinical trial with Rosemary in people struggling with their crosswords as they get older and found that although it wasn't a conclusive study, there were pointers to it improving cognitive or performance in those people.

59:55And there's been other studies since that reinforced that. I would say that Rosemary is one of the ones to watch in terms of long-term brain health. There's another remedy called ginkgo that a lot of people know about, which is used as a prescription medicine in Europe for cardiovascular problems. And that's been shown to be likely useful and using the same sort of mechanisms as we've seen here and with the green tea. I'll check it here. Yeah, that looks all right.

1:00:30You see it's more yellow than green. And this is flavoured with a little bit of mint to make it a little more agreeable. Sometimes people find green tea is not their favourite taste. Green tea is rich in polyphenols, which are linked to benefits ranging from heart and brain health to fat loss and cancer prevention.

1:00:55It's got a nice minty flavour. Yeah. You can live with that, can't you? Yeah. Yeah. My girlfriend, again, she's all over this stuff. She's always bloody right. Well, you know that or learn that lesson a long time ago. I know, right? Like, I say it all the time on this podcast, but she's always, like, two, three years ahead of what then someone really, really smart comes and tells me. And I spend those two or three years in denial. I'm like, what the fuck is she, like, doing over there? Don't get me started on cacao if you start talking to me about cacao. No, no, no, no, no. She's been telling me that.

1:01:24I'm going to nail this because there's a lot of people listening who will want to hear this. Coco. Yeah. Chocolate, dark chocolate, is a medicine. End of. One of the best medicines around is 50 grams to 100 grams of 75 % or more dark chocolate. Do you know what? I've just realised. My girlfriend, she's going to live till she's 150 because she eats 90 % or something, 80 % dark chocolate. She drinks green tea all day. She has the ginger and cinnamon drinks all day. She eats the full rainbow. She should be sipping in for you. I know, I know, exactly. No, Coco, seriously, brain health as well, cardiovascular health.

1:02:16I mean, they do studies where they've put Coco into volunteers, it means students usually, you know, so young kids. and they were able to show changes in the blood flow within minutes, certainly within an hour of eating cocoa. Beneficial changes in your blood flow. They call it the heart medicine. Yeah, heart, circulation, brain. So she's, my girlfriend's very spiritual. She runs a business called Bali Breathwork. Hashtag I had if I have to say that. But in her business, one of the things she does at the very start of the session with women all over the world that come to her retreats is she makes cacao for them.

1:02:59And you notice instantly how people change when they've had a hot cup of cacao. And she says it like almost brings out their heart. And I guess that's because of the circulation reasons. It is. But it also, of course, we know it contains a few other beneficial stimulating effects, sort of similar to the effects of the coffee, which incidentally, as I've already said, is a medicine as well. But cocoa and chocolate does have an uplifting effect, which is why we love it. And we have to be clear here, we're not talking about hot chocolate that comes from a packet or something necessarily. We would like it to be as dark as possible.

1:03:37Okay. The less sugar, the less fat. So we talk about 75 % cocoa solids, you know, so it's dark chocolate. And it tastes a bit more medicinal, doesn't it? It's not as sweet. but I'm saying to many of my patients take 50 grams a day it's a medicine damn she's right my fridge is full of dark chocolate I tend to avoid it but the drawer of my fridge has all of her dark chocolate in and she likes it 90 % if she can get it 90 % she'll take it yeah 90 % is quite bitter now yeah let me look at the green tea there was a study done in 2008 which supports how it improved cognitive function, memory, attention, accuracy, and long-term consumption is associated with lower risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, according to the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry in 2011.

1:04:34It's nice to have somebody else just say what you said. Yeah, exactly. I didn't realize. I had no idea. I had no idea. All those times I turned it down when she offered it to me. hmm you can't say sorry i've literally literally i've got a wow heart health brain function fat burning and metabolism cancer prevention early evidence blood sugar and insulin sensitivity gut and oral health if there's anything we need it is connection especially in the world we're living in today and that is exactly why we created these conversation cards because on this show when I sit here with my guests and have those deep, intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time and time again.

1:05:22We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've turned them into these conversation cards. And we've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards. This is the brand new edition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive question from me but I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards so get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone head to the link in the description below

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