David Perlmutter

This is upstream of all of that.

And so it really allows us to understand that the first thing that's going bad in a brain to make it go bad are changes in the immune system.

And we've got to recontextualize how we understand the brain's immune system called the microglial cells.

So for the quiz, that's going to be on the quiz, the microglial cells for everybody who's listening.

Yeah, well, you have now.

So these are cells that can be friend or foe.

Normally we think of the immune system as that's the system that's involved to protect us against infection, to help us heal when we've had trauma, et cetera, and it does.

But the other side of the coin is that meanwhile, when these things aren't happening, well, they're not just sitting around waiting for the fire, right?

What the firemen do when there's no fire is they take care of their fire engine and they fix things.

And in a very similar way, our microglial cells exist in a form that's healing the brain.

And what happens is we do things that shifts them to becoming the evil twin, that then lets them degrade away our neurons, degrade away our synapses.

We get things like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

And it all depends on their metabolism.

When their metabolism is good and their mitochondria are working, they stay in what we call the M2 configuration and are loving and supporting and nurturing our neurons and synapses and the blood-brain barrier.

When they shift to becoming the evil twin, they destroy your brain.

And again, it depends on their metabolism.

And the empowering part of the whole story and what this book is about

is that their metabolism, in other words, what dictates whether they are friend or foe, mirrors your body metabolism.

So what did I just say?

I said that if you can get your body metabolism on track, your brain's gonna be really happy and resistant to decline.