Dr. Majid Fotuhi

Second is proper sleep.

people who sleep fewer than six hours a night have a high possibility of shrinking the brain by about 50%.

The hippocampus can go to half its original size if they've had chronic insomnia for 20 to 25 years.

poor diet people who eat a diet that's high in trans fats and high processed food on average have smaller brains and those who eat a mediterranean diet have a slightly larger brain especially the campus people who eat a mediterranean diet can keep their brain up to 18 years younger

Yeah, so the other two are meditation, slow breathing, and brain training.

So those five pillars of brain health have been shown to increase the size of your hippocampus in a dose-dependent manner.

You're asking the great questions, Mike, I must say.

So there are things that can reduce and mitigate the abnormalities that have happened to the brain due to what we call Alzheimer's disease.

Let me just step back and explain something a little more clearly.

So there are two basket of things that can shrink your brain.

One basket is the disease process, the Alzheimer's disease footprints.

And the footprints are the collections of these proteins that aggregate and form these things called amyloid plaques.

tau tangles you can think of them as a little piece of gum or pebbles that become insoluble inside the brain they attract inflammation and that shrinks the brain and then there's another basket of life-related factors that shrink the brain for example when you have insomnia the natural rinsing

and cleaning that usually happens in the brain does not happen.

And so as a result, these chemical byproducts accumulate and that causes a problem.

Similarly, when you have obesity or you have poor diet, there is increased inflammation just because of the food, and that inflammation can shrink the brain.

So the two baskets are Alzheimer's pathology and life-related pathology.

And every person has a mixed bag of these two things, which I call a soup of problems.

So for example, I, I'm doing everything to prevent the things that will shrink my brain, because I know

all the factors, all the 14 things I mentioned and other things.