Max Lugavere

Dementia may be a whole body disease.

The brain sits directly downwind of processes in the body, like inflammation, like insulin resistance.

And it can become in many ways victim of a body in distress.

And so that's why...

My work has really been focusing on encouraging optimal physical health below the neck because the brain is rewarded by a body that's metabolically healthy, a body that doesn't have excessive visceral fat, a body that is acutely insulin sensitive.

You know what that implies that there are ways that we can eat and there are ways that we can act behaviors that we can adopt that directly support brain health.

And when I first got started in this field, you couldn't mention dementia and prevention in the same sentence.

Why?

It just wasn't considered something that was possible.

Like dementia was something that was considered a natural part of aging or something that was largely hereditary.

But now we know that there are.

a significant proportion of cases of dementia, if not the majority of cases of, you know, conditions like Alzheimer's disease that are potentially preventable.

And the way to prevent these conditions is by making sure that we are reducing our risk factors.

And the risk factors in particular that we want to focus on are what are called modifiable risk factors, which is very empowering.

The term modifiable implies that we can modify our risk.

Many of the

modifiable risk factors for dementia are responsive to nutrition, which is sort of my wheelhouse.

I'm a big nutrition nerd.

When it comes to brain health, you want to make sure that you're not obese in midlife.

You want to make sure that you are not a type two diabetic.