Dementia Is Optional
Following up on my recent post Out Over Our Skis, I find it interesting that Iovance Biotherapeutics had to cancel a drug trial for a possible cancer remedy in December after ONE subject died. And yet somehow, 40 deaths in Pfizer’s mRNA trial didn’t rise to that level? Is this just a lesson learned too late, or evidence of corruption? With cancer, it is expected that 100% will die without specialized treatment; with covid, it was less than 0.1%. Just one more reason to take care of your health, so as to minimize or eliminate prescription drugs from your future. Trust your local organic farmers, not Pfizer! Remember about 99% of drugs only treat symptoms.
What would you be willing to do to make yourself safe from Alzheimer’s Dementia? If I give you a list of best practices, will you make use of them? I was tempted to call this “Advances in Gerontology Pt 3,” but felt the emphasis on dementia would be more eye-catching.
With the advent of western allopathic medicine, it is a common but erroneous belief that pharmaceutical and nutritional advances of the last 150 years have been a massive boon to western civilization, resulting in dramatic increases in life expectancy. And yet there has been a cataclysmic increase in heart disease, cancer, and perhaps the scariest of diseases, dementia, including a variety called Alzheimer’s Dementia. These undeniable statistics stand in stark contrast to assertions by government health officials, pharmaceutical companies, and bureaucrats who would have you believe that it’s all getting better and better. It isn’t. We have better surgical techniques and can save more folks in the ER, and fewer babies are dying, due to technology, but for the rest of us, the news isn’t good. And who wants to live to 100 if the last 25 are spent in a fog? One of my tips below takes only minutes a day and will improve both sleep and blood pressure, as well as reducing one of dementia’s precursors, sleep apnea.
A few years back a semi-family member (an in-law, actually) passed away at the age of 97 after spending about 20 years sitting in a rocking chair, rocking and humming. Uncle Purdy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Dementia long before I met him. Although I visited the house where he lived on several occasions, Uncle Purdy never knew who I was. Neither did he recognize his niece, who had lived with him as his principal caretaker for twenty years. He just sat, rocked, and hummed. The man was in otherwise excellent health and though he typically sat in his rocker all day, he would occasionally get up and leave the house, thinking that he needed to report for work at the cannery just down the street, a company from which he had retired nearly thirty years earlier.
He had worked for the cannery for close to fifty years, walking the four blocks to work every day. Even though the cannery had been razed and replaced by a townhouse complex years earlier, Uncle Purdy remembered where it had been. He would walk there, then become confused and agitated. For him, it was like being dropped into a Twilight Zone episode, where nothing made sense. Once he got to the place where the cannery was supposed to be, he behaved erratically, and soon enough the police would come get him and deliver him back to his house, where he had lived for over seventy years. As soon as they brought him home, he would calm down, because his house still looked exactly as it had looked the day he moved in.
Imagine how you might react if you awoke, like Rip Van Winkle, into a completely foreign world. A world where 1955-1960 automobiles had been parked in front of all the houses, and where the area four blocks away had consisted of several factories and large commercial buildings. But on this day, all the cars were strange in appearance, with no tail fins and no whitewall tires or hubcaps. They were all sleek and strange, like something from a science-fiction movie, and all the factories were gone, replaced with condominiums and apartment buildings. Would you understand that your advanced dementia had made you forget the intervening years, or would you go into a strange paranoid panic, wondering who had changed everything, who had created this strange world?
Expecting this, but… finding this!
Western allopathic medicine has quite literally spent trillions of dollars researching, unsuccessfully seeking to find the mechanism of action (MoA) of this strange disease that metaphorically erodes the human mind. Over the course of years, more than twenty-five anomalies have been found, strange alterations to the physiology of the brain of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Western medicine can never create a drug to cure Alzheimer’s because it would require at least 25 drugs, each targeting one of the many metabolic errors that come together to cause it, and yet the research goes on. And of course, if they were to give you these twenty-five miracle drugs, the list of potential adverse effects might be thirty pages long. Why is there no research targeting the origins of this disease and how to prevent it? Rather than spending countless dollars attempting to design a multi-faceted fire extinguisher that can never work, why not instead just hide all the matches?
The reason is simple if disgusting: There is no money in teaching you how to prevent Alzheimer’s Dementia, Heart Disease, Cancer, or type 2 Diabetes. There are literally trillions of dollars to be harvested from various government agencies and tax-exempt NGOs to study these diseases, allegedly looking for but not finding a cure. There is virtually no money to be made in telling people the things I’m about to share that will go a long way to preventing these illnesses. I’ve worked with dozens of clients who were type 2 diabetics but have overcome the affliction with simple dietary modifications, modifications their doctors didn’t offer. And if you’re a type 2 diabetic and your doctor prescribes insulin or Ozempic, find a new doctor! Type 2 diabetes is not a shortage of insulin as in type 1, it is a failure to properly metabolize insulin due to excessive sugars and starches in your diet over a period of years. I believe that many of the same methods used to reverse type 2 diabetes will also work on cancer, heart disease, dementia, AND erectile dysfunction! I include that last one because it’s such a popular cause, but also because Alzheimer’s and ED are called type 3 diabetes in nutritional circles. Thus, what reverses diabetes should also reverse or at least forestall dementia and ED. And once you understand how this dovetails with cancer and heart disease, the application could move three of the four leading causes of death completely out of the top ten.
Dr. Dale Bredesen has done significant Alzheimer’s research and published The End of Alzheimer’s, but his work isn’t getting nearly the praise and publicity that it deserves. You see, while your doctor and the pharmaceutical industry can make an absolute fortune both getting paid for fruitless research, and marketing ineffective “cures,” they cannot make one thin dime by utilizing Dr. Bredesen’s findings. His protocols have demonstrated something never seen before, reversal of dementia. While he has yet to have a patient come all the way back from advanced dementia, he has shown dramatic improvements, especially when started early. Perhaps if these protocols are followed before symptoms begin to show, the decline could be completely averted.
In recent years it has been discovered that several of the symptoms by which Alzheimer’s Dementia is recognized, the amyloid plaques, the tau tangles, and many of the other peculiarities found at autopsy are simply protective mechanisms by which the body attempts to eradicate the underlying conditions. In other words, these are symptoms and not causes. These symptoms, which generally cannot be seen prior to autopsy but only recognized by their effects, are not the problem; they are simply your body shutting down systems that have ceased to perform their designated functions. Something else has gone wrong to cause the deterioration, so that these malfunctions are virtually required in order to keep you alive. 95-year-old Uncle Purdy was in perfect health, from the neck down. He didn’t need a cane or walker until his final year. Somehow, everything worked except his memory and his hearing.
I am in the process of writing a more detailed analysis of the errors inherent in western allopathic medicine, but perhaps no evidence that we’ve gone wrong can be more stark than the 1.3 million people who died last year from heart disease and cancer, two diseases that barely killed anyone 200 years ago, and nothing is more terrifying than the thought of being one of the 120,000 who die each year from Alzheimer’s Dementia, after living any number of years or decades in a state of total confusion, not knowing the names of the people around you and not recognizing the world outside your door. It doesn’t have to be this way.
While I strongly recommend that every person on earth should read and heed Dr. Bredesen’s work, there are more things afoot that can help you not only prevent dementia, but also cancer and heart disease. Several of his recommendations follow my own, regarding nutrition, exercise, natural light and improved sleep. You’ve heard what I’ve had to say, now go buy The End of Alzheimer’s and read Dr. Bredesen’s discoveries.
Here’s one top tip: During autopsy, significant quantities of aluminum have been found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients AND autistic children. And the aluminum in the children’s brains was far more than that found in Alzheimer’s patients, despite the huge difference in their ages. So how did this happen? Further to the point, the Weston Price Foundation offers this analysis, or see this one from GreenMedInfo.
First of all, you need to understand that aluminum is not “organic;” it is not found in nature. It is compounded in ore, but prior to the discovery of smelting processes to refine it, there was virtually no “free” aluminum anywhere on earth although acid rain was said to have freed a small amount of it. Today it is ubiquitous. If you cook in aluminum pans, use aluminum-based anti-perspirants, aluminum-based sunscreens, and aluminum and magnesium hydroxide as a heartburn remedy, you are exposing yourself to toxic hazards. Aluminum in the soil blocks the absorption of minerals into food crops and has the same effect on your body once ingested. So again, there was no aluminum in soil 200 years ago, but it is there today because we use and dispose of so much of the stuff. Plants, however, have developed a means of chelating aluminum and holding it as aluminum phytoliths, rendering the aluminum harmless to the plant. But this aluminum is released into our bodies when we consume these plant foods. Plants that are grown in aluminum-poisoned soil will also be higher in oxalates which can lead to kidney and gall bladder stones and gout.
Aluminum poisoned soil is no longer a rarity, which is also true of acidic soil, which absorbs aluminum, making it easily assimilable by crops. Many commercial farms have acidic soil, as well as significant amounts of glyphosate (RoundUp) which also readily transports aluminum to the cells of both plants and humans. Thus if you are eating food items that have glyphosate, your body will more readily absorb aluminum, much of which will find its way to your brain. This is one more reason to supplement with glycine, in order to protect against glyphosate. Organic farmers keep their soils basic, which is far less conducive to aluminum being absorbed into their crops.
More significantly, for the autistic children, the dozens of vaccinations they receive, including at birth and in the first year of life, expose them to amounts of aluminum (the adjuvant in vaccines) that are clearly unsafe, and the FDA knows this, but claims vaccines are safe, despite there having never been a single study to support that position. A rat study was undertaken to determine a safe level of aluminum exposure, and it was determined that 25mcg was the maximum safe dosage for oral administration of the aluminum salts used in vaccines. But the amount in a typical childhood vaccine is 150-250mcg administered intramuscularly, not orally. Aluminum is quickly destroyed in your stomach, due to the strong acidity therein. Injected aluminum is not subjected to this. And quite often, children are given multiple vaccinations in a single visit. Gee, what could possibly go wrong? By the way, 1.5ppm of aluminum in water is known to be hazardous to aquatic life, and the EPA’s limit on aluminum in drinking water is 0.1ppm, and even this amount is dangerous as ingested aluminum will likely end up in your brain.
Now, before anyone accuses me of being a rabid anti-vaxxer, let me share more facts. First of all, I’m not against vaccines, generically, but I am adamant about informed consent. I want to know ALL of the facts about any drug that a good doctor thinks I need. The Informed Consent Action Network’s (ICAN) lead attorney, Aaron Siri, deposed several top doctors, including three of the authors of Plotkin’s Vaccines, the industry’s textbook on vaccines, including Dr. Plotkin himself, and all were adamant that vaccines don’t cause autism, and yet all admitted that the necessary clinical trials to prove the point have never been done. The alleged safety of vaccines is a matter of faith, not science. “Trust us…” based on zero science. But how to explain that since the 1986 Childhood Vaccination Act (The Act) autism has virtually exploded, going from 1 child in 10,000 in 1950, to 1 in 2500 in 1986 to currently 1 in 38. This while the vaccine schedule was increased dramatically after The Act indemnified vaccine manufacturers, from the three shots I received to seven in 1986, to 72 in 2022. The “good news” is that the addition of the twice-a-year covid jabs into the schedule in some states may well give your child myocarditis and autoimmune conditions, but they don’t contain an aluminum adjuvant, because they’re not actually vaccines.
Do you find that shocking? You should. What the doctors testified was that it would be immoral to leave a cohort of children unvaccinated in order to do these tests, because the vaccines are too important. Interestingly, that was the same logic used by Pfizer in unblinding the covid jab tests three-and-a-half years prior to the proper endpoint of their study, and then offering the alleged but unproven shots to the control group, thus ensuring that there would not be a control group to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the jabs, nor the excess mortality. Except that there are several million of us that simply said “no” to the shots, and a few billion in third-world countries, and the evidence is piling up to the point that even the WHO is beginning to warn that children and expectant mothers should not take it. On top of that, a study on childhood vaccine safety was done, by Dr. Paul Thomas, an Oregon pediatrician.
Dr. Thomas was perhaps the only doctor in Oregon, or anywhere else, who actually followed the rules on informed consent, by giving his patient’s parents the full disclosure of potential adverse effects of vaccines, thus prompting more than half of them to decline them. After more than ten years went by, Dr. Thomas looked at the medical records for all of his patients and published his findings, showing that the unvaccinated were significantly healthier. As a reward for his fine efforts and scholarship, the Oregon Board of Internal Medicine revoked his license to practice. And this despite there not being a single complaint against him from any of his patients. No one contested his study; no evidence of deceit or malfeasance was introduced. For the simple act of publishing what should have been welcomed as groundbreaking evidence, Dr. Thomas was professionally assassinated, removed from the playing field. Similarly, Dr. Andrew Wakefield received the same treatment, and for the same reason, from the medical boards in the UK. Both men produced unassailable research, but Google their names and you’ll find that the Internet thinks these two are worse than Hitler, because they are alleged “anti-vaxxers.”
Meanwhile, as I pointed out above, autopsy results are showing massive amounts of aluminum in the brains of deceased autistic children. And these results are being suppressed, when they should be front-page news. How could significant amounts of a metal that essentially didn’t exist 200 years ago get in there? I don’t know, maybe the 72 doses of 250mcg, each ten times the allegedly safe oral dose? The dose makes the poison, and that’s a dose of up to 720 times the safe oral dose.
In the 1950s, babies didn’t get vaccinated. These days you get your first vaccines right away, and not because you need them, but because vaccines are a massive cash cow for Big Pharma. It is theorized that vaccinating newborns interferes with the natural development of their immune systems and could be part of the reason that chronic illnesses have grown dramatically. And as perhaps the most glaring example, newborns are given a vaccine against type B hepatitis, a disease known to be problematic for drug addicts as it is transmitted through dirty needles and unprotected sex. Since hospitals regularly test expectant mothers for this disease, the vaccine is virtually unnecessary for 99.99% of babies, and even the .01% won’t benefit, because they’ll be born with the disease, so the vaccine is too late to help them.
Here are some ways to detox, to extricate aluminum from your body, as well as understanding the danger and avoiding exposure. In terms of avoidance, the first admonition is to filter your drinking water. The gold standard is reverse osmosis, followed by activated carbon. I’m a fan of AquaTru, but there are other good filters out there. If you don’t own your home, AquaTru makes a countertop model. Aluminum-based deodorants should be avoided, as should all sunscreens. If you’re one of those who burns easily, try minimizing time in the sun and covering up, rather than slathering on the Coppertone. Meanwhile, for the benefits of vitamin D, you should get some sunshine on as much of your body as possible daily. For most folks, doing this, and then gradually increasing sun exposure as the weather improves will obviate the need for “protection.” Tanning isn’t harmful and is, in fact, beneficial. It is burning that we need to avoid. So don’t fly to Hawaii in February, after being indoors for four months, and go lie on the beach! It's common sense, but it’s astounding how many people think that with enough sunblock it will be OK.
Vaping: Perhaps the greatest new danger is vaping. Cigarette smokers are told that they can avoid the tar and other carcinogens from tobacco smoke, and marijuana smokers often find vaping THC to be more comfortable and more convenient, but every vaping gives you significant amounts of aluminum. If you need the nicotine, go with the patches. Nicotine (essentially vitamin B3) has benefits and has even been found to be helpful with long covid.
Next up, it has been shown that toxic metals, lead, mercury, and aluminum at the top of the list, can be chelated, which then puts them into circulation, where they can be removed by your liver and kidneys. However, insufficient chelation can result in simply moving the toxic substances to a different place, potentially your brain. The key is to maintain the level of chelation so that the contaminants remain in circulation in order to be eliminated from your body. While there are some doctors who will do IV chelation, the track record for these treatments is less than stellar, because they are short-term chelations, which will not keep the toxic metals in suspension long enough.
Glyphosate (RoundUp) is another “excellent” chelator. I put that in quotes, because it is so toxic. Glyphosate will bind to aluminum and transport it across the blood brain barrier, so the many cautions I have given regarding glyphosate, and the need to supplement glycine to protect against it, apply here as well. During any attempted chelation, I would suggest 15-20mg of glycine daily for that time period.
Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) is an excellent chelator and you can find it without a prescription, but it perhaps works a bit too well, as it will chelate good minerals as well as bad ones. So if you use it, be sure to supplement calcium and magnesium, as well as iron, but only supplement iron if your iron levels are typically low. Most Americans have too much iron in their blood.
A better, aluminum-specific, chelator is orthosilicic acid (OSA). Although you can find this in its raw form, the easiest way to get it is from high-silica mineral water, specifically in the western states, Fiji brand. I’ve mentioned this a few years ago, but I want to update that recommendation. If you are at all concerned about aluminum, and all of us should be, high silica mineral water will, rather slowly, chelate aluminum. The key is to consume one to two liters daily, distributed throughout the day, and for several months uninterrupted. The OSA in the water will keep the aluminum suspended so that you can gradually eliminate it. Without any scientific basis to say this, I would expect that using EDTA along with high-silica water might improve the process.
For anyone with a family history of dementia, or if you are prone to toxicity, which is to say you don’t eliminate toxins well, a steady “diet” of Fiji water could work wonders and has exactly no adverse/side effects. For those familiar with the concept of Blue Zones, those geographic regions where the majority of centenarians can be found, most or perhaps all of those areas have significant amounts of OSA in their drinking water. For anyone beginning to show signs of dementia, 90-180 days of Fiji water is a great place to start, while you’re perusing Dr. Bredesen’s book. You can also find parts of his protocol on the Internet, but it’s only $10 in Kindle format, so why not get your news from the source.
So the question that arises is this: Will chelation of aluminum “cure” autism? There is no data and there have been no tests or clinical trials to determine this, and I really don’t expect any to be undertaken for the simple reason that only the bottlers of Fiji water would profit from it. Pharma isn’t interested unless they can make a proprietary chelator that they can sell. My instincts tell me that if I had an autistic child, I would give them OSA in any form I could. It may not help, but I’m inclined to think that it will, even if it doesn’t create a complete reversal. And most importantly, there is no downside risk to consider.
Did you see earlier where I mentioned sleep apnea as a precursor to dementia? While I don’t have a mechanism of action, and the reports could be anecdotal, the connection is mentioned in the literature, so…
Sleep Apnea and Ayurvedic meditation. I absolutely hate it when I get an email promising some terrific health benefit that goes on for pages without getting to the point, so before continuing the story, here’s something you should add to your regimen today, that can help protect you from another one of those problems that our ancestors didn’t have. Sleep apnea has been shown to be a contributing pathway to dementia and, like cancer and heart disease has exploded in the past few decades. The disturbed sleep patterns minimize the restorative activities that should take place at night, including a process by which your brain cleans itself nightly, eliminating senescent brain cells and growing new ones. In addition to putting a significant gap between your last meal and bedtime, a few minutes with a special meditation technique can improve sleep quality, including correcting tendencies towards apnea, a condition that affects almost no one in India!
The distinctive vocal patterns in Indian dialects come from several letters in Sanskrit and numerous Indian dialects that sprang from it, like Hindi and Gujarati. It involves tapping the soft rearward area of the palate with the tip of your tongue, which causes a forward projection of the mandible when pronouncing several letters giving the distinctive Indian sound of the letters d, n, s, t, and a special sound called anusvara. The Hindu practice of chakra meditation involves chanting a special syllable for each of the seven chakras, phonetically, lum, vum, rum, yum, hum, ōm, and aum. In each of these sounds, intoned in the pitch of each chakra, beginning with D above middle C, then E, F, G, A, B, and C, the “secret ingredient,” is the anusvara sound of the letter M, made by curling your tongue back and placing the tip against the soft palate, creating a resonance up into the brain and pineal gland. It takes a little practice.
While performing the full chakra meditation takes time and practice, just the act of curling your tongue back to make these sounds, as well as the distinctive Indian, d, n, s, and t sounds, will repattern your jaw, strengthening a sort of embouchure, or posture of your mouth and jaw that can potentially eliminate snoring and apnea, as well as relaxing you for a better night’s sleep. So a few minutes a day, and better at bedtime, repeating the sacred aum, or the simple chant of “om, mahnay, pahdmay, aum,” (Indian) or “om, mahnay, pudmay, hoom,” (Tibetan) where the tongue curls back for the m in ōm, the n, d, and final aum will, with repetition, give you more restorative sleep with less snoring and potential reversal of apnea. Use deep breathing (which will also help you relax) and hold the final anusvara m sound for as long as you comfortably can.
Rather than constructing our treatment of these diseases based on autopsies, we should be looking to see what has changed, in terms of nutrition, lifestyle, and exposure to toxins, compared to the prior centuries when these diseases were virtually unknown. The majority of heart issues in the past were the after effects of whooping cough. It is a popular myth that these diseases were just as prevalent in the past but were simply unrecognized. In actual fact, they were quite rare. Heart attacks and cancer were largely unknown, and dementia was just something that seemed to happen to very old folks, who were likely bedridden anyway. Today we have “early onset” Alzheimer’s Dementia, striking down younger and younger victims with a disease that seldom used to hit anyone under 80.
These conditions, cancer, heart diseases, and dementia, didn’t used to kill 0.5% of the population each and every year as we’re seeing today.
The search for a cure via pharmaceutical intervention against any of these three killers is a fool’s errand, a bottomless pit into which untold trillions have been thrown with exactly no improvement. This is true of cancer and heart disease as well as Alzheimer’s, all of which are ascendant. Sure, your doctor has pills, stents, chemotherapy and lots of other tools to employ, but the number of those dying just keeps increasing. Do you really want to extend your life by three to five years if you’re suffering with cancer or losing your mind? We’re losing the battle, and badly. In fact, the number of people who contract these diseases has increased exponentially over the last 60 years, and while we can replace valves, insert stents, decimate your body with chemotherapy and radiation in order to give you an extra year or two of painful convalescent life, these diseases are making remarkable headway, while medical science continues to lose the battle. And medical science will keep losing this battle, because the underlying theories on which they have been operating are simply false.
People aren’t “catching” cancer, heart disease, and dementia from germs, viruses, or insect bites. These are lifestyle diseases. We’re developing these maladies in the most natural way possible: by feeding all the underlying mechanisms and failing to feed or improve their terrain. While we sometimes think that healthy people can have heart attacks, contract cancer, or develop Alzheimer’s, the plain fact is that they can’t. Heart attacks, cancer, and dementia are simply signs of poor health that were hidden. You can run five miles a day, spend an hour at the gym, and take Ozempic, and seem, to all appearances, to be as “healthy as a horse,” all while various chemical are building plaques slowly diminishing your blood circulation, stimulating the erosion of your brain, and encouraging the development of cancerous tumors. The problem is that the causes of these diseases are a lifetime of smoking or breathing polluted air, ingesting strange chemicals that have been added to your food and water, stress, inadequate sleep, and a sedentary lifestyle. While correcting that last item, by hitting the gym, may make you appear much healthier, and is a good start that may push back the date when the accumulation of all the other effects land you in hospice care, exercise alone is not the answer.
Also not the answer is a DNA test looking for oncogenes (genes associated with cancer) or the APoE3 and E4 biomarkers errantly believed to be the major cause of Alzheimer’s. While certain genetic markers may indicate a greater likelihood of these diseases, they are only a tiny portion of the problem. A much bigger problem is that average Americans are poisoning themselves and failing to do anything to eliminate the various elements that pollute their (your) personal ecosystem, which would include better sleep habits (and eliminating apnea).
Some major contributors to the quiet erosion of your health are: mercury amalgam dental fillings, massive increases in sugar consumption, up from a pound or two a year two hundred years ago to a pound or two a week today. You may not realize it, but you have sugar added to most of the packaged and processed foods you innocently buy at the grocers. Even the ketchup and relish on your Big Mac are loaded with sugar. Some companies advertise their “healthy” offerings, based on incorrect assumptions, like fat being bad for you and polyunsaturated omega six fats being good for you. Next comes the pollutants in your drinking water, and if your beverage of choice is a sports drink, do yourself a favor and just drink Coca-Cola; it’s horrible, but the various sports drinks are far worse. I would exclude some of the better electrolyte-only formulations like Nuun and LMNT as those aren’t in the same universe as Gatorade, Rock Star, and Monster.
I always admired Jack LaLanne, and I live by something he said, “if it wasn’t food 200 years ago, it isn’t food today.” If you’ve been reading my articles for any length of time, you’ve read that before. And that goes for the food that is fed to things I plan to eat, including the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that are destroying the nutritional value of the produce you find at the supermarket, as well as what is fed to the domestic cattle, pigs, and chickens that you eat. Perhaps the biggest contributor is the oils, artificial flavorings, and shortenings that go into your prepared foods, and don’t even get me started on fast food outlets.
When looking at cancer, heart disease, and dementia, we can find that the incidence is considerably higher in countries that are allegedly more advanced. This is your first clue that we’re doing it wrong. Not enough exercise and a diet consisting of large amounts of nonfood.
One problem is that the “organic” label on produce can’t always be trusted. I recommend finding out who supplies your local stores with organic produce and do a little investigating to find out just how organic they really are. This caveat also applies to your farmers’ markets. As to animal proteins, you should never eat farm-raised fish, and look for pastured, grass fed, or wild sources for beef, chicken, venison, bison, and other meats. Terms like “free range” and “cage free” don’t mean what you think they mean. One very disturbing thought is that your protein sources, beef, pork, and chicken, are being fed GMO foods loaded with glyphosate, and even pastured chickens are eating bugs that may be “polluted.” We’ve gone pretty far down the road with our chemistry experiments, and no thought has been put into how to turn this runaway train around.
A diverse gut microbiome is a major factor. While diversity in employment practices is foolish and destructive, yielding a group of employees that may not work well together and are obviously not the most qualified, unless by a highly unlikely accident, diversity in nature and ecology, be it the seas and forests or the dietary habits of people and livestock, yields positive results. It is natural to have a diverse diet and natural to eat differently at different times of the year.
Probiotics are generally a poor way to help your gut microbiome because most of the products available do not include a diversity of bacteria. They also, contrary to popular opinion, don’t colonize in your gut, for the most part. I have a few products that I use in rotation, because each has its own contribution to diversity, and my research says these are good ones. But prebiotics are more important, because those feed your gut bacteria and keep it healthy, which is a bit like saying they colonize, even though that’s not exactly how they work.
Excess iron in the blood is a major cause of “oxidative stress.” While that terminology is incorrect, much of the deterioration associated with aging falls under that rubric. Donate blood regularly, to keep your serum ferritin between 40 and 60 ng/ml. Just as vitamin K2 acts as the traffic cop to direct calcium to your bones and away from your arteries, copper performs a similar task regarding iron. While excess copper can be problematic, 2mg a day should do the trick, BUT… you need vitamin A to properly metabolize copper — true vitamin A (retinol or retinyl) not beta carotene, which is what you’ll find in most vitamin pills.
The true culprit is not oxidation, but reduction, the other half of the redox paradigm. The human body operates on something akin to nuclear energy. Energy is generated and operates within the body by the exchange of electrons. Calcium, for example, does not enter cells via calcium channels to be destroyed to produce energy. It simply crosses the cell membrane exchanges a few electrons and then returns to find new electrons via metabolic processes. The explanation of the four complexes of electron exchange within the body, or even the mechanisms of the Krebs Cycle are the basis for hundreds of books and years of post-graduate study. You don’t need to know the details of how a motor works (internal combustion, steam, electric, or nuclear) in order to operate the vehicle or machine to which it is attached.
Reducing the reductive stress on your body is a matter of balancing the various reactions and feeding the appropriate systems. The human body operates by a collection of cyclic reactions, much as the calcium channel. While the mechanisms are dizzyingly complex, we really don’t need to know the minutia. Various hormones need to cycle in rhythms, including the circadian rhythm, but going far beyond that. Just as your heart goes through cycles of contraction and relaxation, just as your blood constantly exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide, the redox reactions within the body are essential to life. While it has been said that humans consume or use their bodyweight in ATP daily, that is a false model. ATP is rarely consumed or destroyed, it simply exchanges electrons and is reduced to ADP or AMP and then restored to ATP again. The key is not in stopping oxidative reactions, because that would mean instant death. The model we want is one of redox balance and of proper elimination of metabolic waste products and especially autophagy.
Autophagy is the process of your body identifying senescent cells and breaking them down, either recycling components or eliminating them. The process of autophagy is thwarted by insufficient activity, by dietary toxins and by the natural process of aging, as well as inadequate or interrupted sleep.
Looking to your diet, anchovies, sardines, mackerel, herring and wild-caught Alaskan salmon are examples of healthy fish rich in omega-3 fats that offer neuroprotective benefits. Cruciferous vegetables and leafy greens contain brain-protective nutrients such as folate, vitamins E and K, lutein and beta-carotene. Pastured organic eggs, particularly the yolks, are a good source of choline, which is needed for your body to make the brain chemical acetylcholine that is involved in storing memories. While all of these are available in pill form, and supplementation is helpful, getting your nutrients from food is your best practice.