Dr. Majid Fotuhi

All the curtains are really good about keeping the room dark.

These are simple interventions that can really help people sleep well.

So if you have sleep problems,

Talk to your doctor or if you have access to a sleep specialist, see a sleep specialist.

This is a fixable problem.

You can't just have poor sleep on a regular basis for a long time because that shrinks the brain by a lot.

Let me give you one study.

They looked at people who have been sleeping fewer than six hours a night.

Some people had only like one or two years of not sleeping enough.

Other people had 20, 25 years of sleeping fewer than six hours a night.

And when they did MRIs and they looked at hippocampus, it turns out that people who have chronic insomnia has a hippocampus that's almost half the size of people who sleep normally.

I mean, that alone is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease because Alzheimer's disease eventually means that your hippocampus has shriveled a lot.

That's what Alzheimer's is.

And so if your sleeping is poor for years and years, you're creating your Alzheimer's disease.

Let me start with don'ts.

There's a lot of controversy about different types of diet.

And some people wonder is a keto diet better than a vegan diet and so forth.

But there's something that nobody argues about.

I don't think anybody ever said that highly processed food are good for you.

Nor has anyone told you that sugary drinks are good for you.