Dr. Majid Fotuhi

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.

So I eat right, I sleep right, I train my brain and all those things.

Now the question becomes, which of the factors, which of those five pillars of brain health can reduce the pathology

uh which of them can increase brain resilience and which can do both exercise does both exercise reduces actually exercise reduces the plaques and tangles in the brain incredible and exercise grows the bicampus so exercise good for both insomnia is treating insomnia sleeping well actually works more on reducing the pathology

It sort of improves the rinsing in the brain and reduces the collections of these plaques and tangles.

A healthy diet does both.

When you eat healthy, you have, for example, fruits and vegetables that are high in antioxidants and that reduces inflammation in the brain.

So even if you don't have any pathology in your brain, your brain is going to be healthier.

And if you do have pathology, then it reduces some of the inflammation.

As I mentioned, people who eat a Mediterranean diet have brains that are up to 18 years younger in terms of collections of these plaques and tangles in the brain.

And then stress really works on reducing pathology.