Max Lugavere

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.

If you're type two diabetic, your risk increases between two and four fold for being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

And many people in this country suffer from insulin resistance from type two diabetes, prediabetes.

You want to make sure that you don't have hypertension, which is high blood pressure.

It's one of the most powerful modifiable risk factors for

cognitive decline and dementia, vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

I think that people tend to have this sense of fatalism about their brain health.

Like if their parents or their grandparents had dementia, that it's something that's going to be in their destiny.

But ultimately, whether or not you have genetic risk factors for dementia, you can modify your risk.

Yeah.

Yeah, and we don't have all the answers.

I mean, when I wrote my first book, Genius Foods, which came out in 2018, 90% of what we had known about Alzheimer's disease had been discovered only in the prior 15 or so years.

I mean, it's a rapidly evolving field of science.

And again, like when I first started, it wasn't considered a condition that you could prevent.

And now we have all this data to the degree that like our most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals like The Lancet are now coming out every couple of years, every four years with new guidelines on how to, you know,

how to reduce risk.

So just to use the Lancet to illustrate, in 2024, they put out the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, which posited that 45% of dementia cases are attributable to these modifiable risk factors, which basically means, in other words, that 45% of cases are preventable based on these modifiable risk factors.

But it's a very conservative estimate.