Lisa Mosconi on Eating for Brain Health

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Habits dot net to learn all about it. I've priced this program to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Again, that's group dot Spiritual Habits dot net. Or click on the link in the show notes and I hope to see you there. Health should not be a privilege of the wealthy, but it is. It's deeply unfair, especially because we know of all the negative effects that these foods can have. What not held welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the

importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort

to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Lisa Mosconi. Lisa is a PhD in neuroscience and nuclear medicine and is a certified integrative nutritionist and holistic healthcare practitioner at wild No Medical College in New York. She is both the Director of the Women's Brain Initiative in the Department of Neurology

and Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology and Radiology. She's also the author of countless medical journal papers and books. Today, Lisa and Eric discuss her book The x X Brain, The groundbreaking science empowering Women to maximize cognitive health and prevent Alzheimer's Disease. Hi, Lisa, Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I am really happy to have you on. You are a real expert in how to eat in such a way and other

ways of taking care of our brain. And we're going to get into all those details in a moment. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with their granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she

thinks about it for a second. She looks up at her grandmother and she said, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It really means a lot. Actually, is such a good story, and I have a similar version that I tell my daughter. I have a little girl who's

foot and a half. And I think there's an Italian version of that story about the wolves, and that you really have to make choices all the time, and that the choices you make and the language you use in your mind really shapes who you are in your future and in good part your health as well. And so it's really important to always ask yourself, well, what should I do here? What what kind of choices would really make me be the best version of myself that I

can possibly be? And that's how you notice yourself in so many ways, including a spiritual way that I think is really important. Yeah, I love that, and you you reference sort of our nutritional choices, and that's really the focus of a lot of your life's work is on the fact that the foods we eat really contribute to our overall health and in your case, very much brain healthy. You're very focused on neuro nutrition, So could you tell

us what neuro nutrition is? Sure, neuro nutrition is really the science of how to nourish our brains via the foods that we eat and the nutrients that we can glean from these foods, and there's a whole science to it. There's also a lot of marketing, honestly, especially internet and blogs and all these felt proclaimed experts that really contribute to creating a very difficult picture, and so with a

very complicated picture. But for me personally, as a scientist, I find that the science of nutrition is definitely complex, but also quite clear in its message and really the core principles are not as variable, if you will, as the marketing around food and health. So for me, I'm an autoscientist by training. I grew up in Italy, as I mentioned, um so it was born and raised in Florence in Italy, and my parents are both nuclear physicists,

if you can't imagine that. So I grew up in a family there was very heavily science based and science focused. But also in Eily, there's a huge attention paid to food, Like our our entire culture is really revolving around the food and the culture of food and just sharing food with the family, with their friends. There's a whole holistic

component to eating food. It's not just showing something inside your mouth and hoping for the best, but there's there's a whole lot of thought and thinking that goes into it. And so it was really interesting for me because I started to really appreciate the chemistry of food and physiology really.

And then I started studying neuroscience when I was eighteen, and at first I didn't really appreciate how the brain is just so specifically built on food, right, which is something that as a society, which is not made to appreciate really, because we're aware that we feed their bodies and that the foods we eat will have an impact on the way we look right, and what kind of clothing will fit and what you can wear and what you shouldn't we're really But at the same time, I

think we're much less aware that the foods we eat really impact the health of our brains and therefore the way we think as well. So that's really what is fascinating to me. How you have basically three chances every day breakfast, lunch, and dinner to make a positive choice for your health and for the health of your brain, or feed the angry wolf, right and just put a lot of poisons and toxins and bad foods into your system, and those same negative foods and bad foods will also

negatively impact your brain. Yeah. I became aware of your work after my partner's mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and she started really looking into like, Okay, well I don't want that to happen to me. What can I do? And I think we went into it with the same thing that a lot of people think, which is like, oh, well, it's it's genetic. It's you know, it's genetic. And so we were sort of led to your work as we sort of looked for like, well, what can we do?

And we became convinced by looking at your work and several other people's that yeah, jeans play a role, but they're not the whole thing. You've got a phrase you say, jeans load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger. Tell me a little bit more about that, sure. So one of the reasons that I've been looking at Alzheimer's disease pretty much ever since I was eighteen nineteen is that I also have a family history of us Czeimer's that

really hits the women in my family pretty hard. So my grandmother, like your partner's grandmother, developed Alzheimer's disease, and um that was Inedialy. There's very limited support for Alzheimer's care in Italy, so she really lived with my parents and with me at first until I moved to the United States and my mom was the primary caregiver and we were we were literally shocked by what kind of progression that really is and impact it has on the patient,

but also in the families. And so just a few years after my grandmother developed Alzheimer's, her two younger sisters also developed dementia, whereas their brother did not, which for me it was very scary and also was a big question mark because I really wanted to better understand the risk, you know, for my mother, but also for myself, and now since I'm a mother myself, I want to better understand how to protect my daughter and really have answers

and solutions and things that she can do like now to make sure that she keeps dementia at bay and really minimize any risks. And when I started, which is basically twenty years ago, I really can't quite believe that everybody thought of Alzheimer's disease as the result of either bad genes in your DNA or aging, or a combination of the two. And it turns out then neither one of these alternatives is necessarily the truth for most people.

It's not the universal outcomes. So the most important thing I think, in my opinion and for many of my patients, is to really appreciate how Alzheimer's disease is not nearly as genetically determined as we previously thought. Like back then when I started, it was all about genetics, Like my pH d thesis was about genetic mutations the cause Alzheimer's disease and how early on you can catch the active

the mutations. So it turns out that yes, there are some mutations in one of three genes that can cause Alzheimer's disease. But that is actually a very rare form of Alzheimer's that really manifests itself when people are in their thirties and forties and fifties, so at the very very very early young age. But this cases account for

less than two percent of the entire Alzheimer's population. So if you take all the Alzheimer's patients, you have only two percent have a genetic mutation that causes Alzheimer's disease. For the other ninety eight percent of cases, risk is due to a number of factors that include your DNA, because your DNA is involved in every aspect of your health, but not in a I'm going to make you sick

kind of way. It's just the some genetic risk factors increase your risk, whereas other genetic factors decrease your risk. And you have a number of those, and they work in synergy with your lifestyle, with your environment, and thoso with your medical health. So your medical report card is actually just as important as your DNA blueprint in many ways.

So a lot of this is our our genetics are our destiny, right, they contribute, But there's lots of other factors that contribute as much, if not much more, and those things we can affect, and one of the big ones is nutrition. And you have a line that says that there's a fast growing body of evidence showing that we might very well be eating our way to dementia. Right, Yes, and that's a good part of my work. I noticed as a scientist that my my work is really kind

of goose in chapters. I had this big chapter all about lifestyle and nutrition, and then I moved on to women's health, and I went back to nutrition, and now I'm looking at them overlap between the two. But yes, I do believe that. Mean, my research has shown that the foods you eat have an almost immediate impact on the health of your brain, and especially the way your brain ages. And when I started in this field, a lot of people did not take me seriously. Let me

tell that would be better than I was. Yes, it was considered really some kind of past time, almost like, oh, you're looking at diet. Yeah, yeah, I sure, good luck. But what we do. What I do there was very

new back then, was to use brain scans. Because when I started, one of the problems that we had in the field is that everybody was I mean, the few people who were looking into diet and risk of Alzheimer's would basically try to describe and quantify your diet today and then follow you clinically for ten twenty years, and then you know, you kind of diagnosed people who went on to develop a Czimer's and people who do not, and then go back twenty years and say, oh, I

see so if you ate this kind of diet, then you risk of Alzheimer's is lower than this other person's risk of Alzheimer's. And that's totally bypassing the brain, right. I wanted to see the effect of the diet on the brain. Like now you walk in the door to me and I am like, okay, let me give your brain scan and then we're going to talk about your diet.

And instead of just talking about your diet, I really want to measure your nutrients in your blood and plasma because it's a much more objective way to really measure that. You know, so many people will come to me in I'm like, okay, how often do you cookies? Never? How often do you do you pie? Maybe once a month? And you're like, lady, I see you. There is no way you're not in it any of those things. So we really try to make things much more quantifiable and

reliable and objective. And what we found is that people who follow a healthy diet, if you will, which is a Mediterranean style diet, show much healthier brain the minute they walk in the door at any age relative to people who follow a more Western style diet. And if you follow these people over time, those on the Western diet, their brains age in the rate it is like five times faster, it's compared to people on a Mediterranean style diet.

And so you can see these changes in the actual brain right, yes, And they're quite clear, and we can see these changes already when people are liking their tournism. For this, I want to also emphasize that we're talking about Alzheimer's here, but the eating this way or or or not eating this way impacts our brain in general and often other disorders like depression or anxiety or other things.

And that this way of eating appears to be a not only good for the brain, but line up very much with what we know to be good for the body. So it's sort of all works together, I believe so. And also I'm not the kind of person who would try and push any specific diet on people. But I'm really big advocate for common sense, and common sense means that you need to have a very diversified diet that is rich in foods. They have a function in your body and brain. Right, It's not just you not just

eating for pleasure. You're not just eating because you have to. It's not just about growing muscles or being able to perform. There's a whole science to nutrition where you really want to maximize in quote functional foods, like foods have a functionality.

Like right now, everybody is worried about infections and viruses, right, so something we should really consider is antioxidants because we know that they really support the immune system, and zinc because zinc is an anti viral that is really helpful as well to support immunity. If you were having a bad day, and many people offer from mood swings or mild depression, then it's really important to to follow a diet that is rich in foods that can support the

production of serotonin in the brain. A serotonin is the main feel good neuro transmitters. So I'm very interested in in how the properties of foods and nutrients can support people not just in terms of Alzheimer's prevention, but just for for brain health as a whole. So let's talk about some underlying principles. You've got two books worth of stuff, so we're not going to be able to cover that. But I do think there are some really big ideas that we could lay out that will point the direction.

And and one of the ones that you talk about then you say, one of the most important things we can do for our brain health. I knew that. I knew that what's coming. Yeah, I thought it was the most obvious thing, And instead it is what everybody wants to talk about. This water. I find it fascinating and it's great because it's such an easy thing to do. There are official statistics also, the CDC really explains how over fifty percent of Americans drink less than the eight

cups of water that everybody kind of frowns upon. People would always ask to me, like, is it true that you need to drink a glasses of water to day? Like some kind of myth, that's something silly, And they're like, well, that's the amount of water that the average person needs to really replenish all the fluids that you're naturally lose throughout the day. So I would say that's the minimum

amount to water that the average person needs. Now, if you're taller, bigger, stronger, muscular, older, younger, you may need a different amount. But ballpark, yeah, that actually makes sense. It's not something to make fun of. It's it's a very good starting point at least. And then I would always ask, but do you drink that a glasses of water to day? And the ends are very often it's like, I don't drink water at all. I don't like it. I don't like it. It's like, how do you know

like water? And then the answer is like, because it doesn't have any flavor. But that's the point, right, that's why you're drinking. Actually, to me, water has flavors, yes, and they really I think in Italy we we also have a little bit of a culture where it was slightly it is nutty when it comes to food and water. You know, we really want the best of quality foods

and water. So I like very specific type. But I'm always amazed how many people in the United States just do not drink water at all, and when they do is actually purified water, which is not exactly water. So I'm gonna take a step back and tell you why water is important and why purified water is not a

good Okay, great, Okay. So the brain, the human brain is eighty percent water, which means eight of the grain and white matter of the brain and the CSF, the cerebrospinal fluid surrounds the brain is really water, which is a higher concentration of water than in any other organ in the body. That also means that the brain literally needs water to be healthy and thrive because every chemical reaction that takes place in the brain really needs water

just to take place. Whether is the substrate for every single cellular reaction inside the brain, including energy production, which means that the brain is very sensitive to the hydration. Even very mild the hydration, like a two percent water loss, like between the two and four percent water loss can cause actual actual neurological symptoms from dizziness, fatigue, confusion, headaches.

I mean, the hydration is like one of the biggest reasons for for headaches and migrants and also brain scans, brain image and studies have shown that people who are chronically dehydrated, even just mightily dehydrated, show brain shrinkage. And we don't want that we don't. You don't want your brain to shrinking, and that can be easily reversed by just drinking water and really replenishing these fluids. So I think that's really important to know. And what our brains

and their bodies want is water that contains electrolytes. So it's not just fluids. It's not just something wet, right, it has to be a fluid h to oh, that contains specific minerals and salts. They have a rehydrated property, and that's what you find in water that is actually not purified. It can be filtered for toxins and impurities, but the electrolytes need to be there. Otherwise it's just fluids that can increase your volume and blood pressure, but

it's not the same as actually rehydrating your brain. So top water is better if it's clean and safe. Otherwise spring water is much better. And so if you take tap water and run it through like a Bridle filter for example, is that okay, it's a very good starting point. Brit Of filters are not as effective removing toxins, right, So there are some other filters that are a little bit They're more expensive perhaps, but they're a little bit

more accurate. And what I learned because I did a lot of research and this, of course, we had the kitchen redone, so I really wanted to have an under the sink filter that we could use for a really long time. I think it's a really good investment if you would, like me, really care about the quality of the water you drink. And so what I learned is done.

It's really housed by house or home by home, and the thing that makes the most sense is to go to the city and have the city come to the house and test the water and give you your own report. Because it's not just the water from whatever source outside the house, it's also your pipes that contribute to impurity. So you really want to measure both and then you get your own little report and you can choose the

filter that makes the most sense for your house. So, after water, what are some other, you know, really key things that we should be thinking about with eating for our brain health. So I think some of the most important nutrients are omega three fairy acids and and antioxidants and also fiber in a kind of indirect way, so omega three fair acids are perhaps the most important source

of brain fat. And see, the brain is mostly phospholipids, and phospholipids are a specific kind of fat that contains a lot of omega three's and the megazix fatty acids in a two to one proportions, so there's like two units or two molecules of omega six for every molecule of omega three. And it's really helpful if the foods we eat and our diet in general can reflect this ratio um so that these fats will enter inside the brain and really replenish the fat that's being utilized and

oxidized pretty much continuously during the process of aging. And I really want to point out that there's a good amount of confusion I think out there on what kind of fats are really important for the brain. And I've read a number of times that people should eat a lot of cholesterol because the brain contains a lot of cholesterol, and they really want to clarify I hear the cholestero from the diet actually cannot even get inside the brain.

So eating cholestero from food will have no impact on the health of your brain whatsoever unless it gives your heart disease, and then it has a negative impact, so it can across the blood brain barrier. That's right, which I was just going to say for listeners who may not be aware that the brain has a it's called the blood brain barrier, and it's a it's a specific way the brain says, like I'll lot certain things in, but I'm not going to let other things, and it's

a it's a way it protects itself. Right, And the fact that cholesterol cannot get inside the brain, I think it's a good indication of how much we should get in the diet, right, I mean, it's important for other body functions. Of course, it's never about excluding nutrients completely. It's just that there's so much disinformation where people are actively encouraged to eat a lot of cholesterol specifically for their brains. So I just wanted to point out that

that's not right. Instead, the brain really needs these mega three's and omega six fatty acids. However, the standard American diet contains a ton of omega sixes, right, and very little omega three's, so it's really important to focus on those. And these really come from nuts and seeds and healthy oils like extra virginalitive oil, and especially from fish. Fish is a fantastic source of d h A, which is

the most important type of brain fat. And there's a lot of research showing that if you have if you consume at least four grams of omega three's in your diet, your risk of dementia is seventy lower than that of a person who eats less than two grams per day. Well, yeah, se, so if I had a pill, right, they can lower the risk of the mansion by se, I would be rich and everybody would would just buy it instead. The

prescription is just eat fish. Actually, he was vegetarian for years and in the last year or so have started to add back in fish, uh to a certain extent, just simply because of a lot of the research that you're referencing. You know. The other thing I didn't mention is my my partner's mother has Alzheimer's and my father recently was diagnosed with it. So we're we've kind of got it. Yeah, yeah, we're swimming in it, so to speak. So you guys should come get a brain scan, you

should come together. Yes, yes, yeah, Is that is that a service that you are offering? Absolutely? I'm the director of the Women's Brain Initiative a World Cornel and the Women's Brain Initiative is an entire research program dedicated to really understanding how brain heald plays out differently in women

than in men. So we have we have an arm of the research that is dedicated to women, and then there's the other arm that is really for men, because we really want to understand which risk factors increased risk of dementia differently from men and for women, and then how we can prevent it. And as part of this research, we do brain scans on all our participants and no cost to participants. We cover everything with my research funds. Wow,

well let's yeah, Okay, it's a deal. Good And we're open to enrollment, which is well, right now we're stuck because the pandemic, but as soon as we're able to to have human contact again, then we're we're definitely open to enrollment. Yes, so eating fish is good. You can take Omega three fish oil. Is that good? It should? It makes sense to thinks that it would be perhaps not the same, but it shouldn't harm for sure. Oversay then expects the best thing. There isn't a lot of

research on supplement. There's a lot more research on getting these nutrients from foods, and actually there's quite a little bit of work showing that nutrients from food they are always superior to nutrients from eplements artificial supplements, especially for antioxidants,

which is the other nutrients that wanted to mention. Our brains are very vulnerable to oxidating stress, which is a sort of rusting effect that just takes place naturally over time, and it's like there's a lot of free radical production going on in the brain any any given moment just because of the way the brains are, and so it's really important that we introduce antioxidants from the diet and antioxidants.

The most important ones are vitamin C and vitamin E and they come from a number of fruits like berries and great source and um oranges, lemons, grape fruits, Almonds are a really good source extra virgin olive as so basically plant based foods, and research has shown that if you consume enough all these antioxidants that also reduces your

risk of Alzheimer's by a good solidar dy present. But in clinic cultur aisles they actually used the supplements, there was very little benefit and when people looked into that, they concluded that it's really because the foods contain different isoforms of the same vitamin. For example, vitamin E comes in eight different forms, and every form has a slightly different effect um in your body and brain. Like one type increases blood flow, the other type is better food oxygenation,

the other one it's more end inflammatory. So if you eat foods that contain all eight types, you have all different properties going on for you, whereas if you take a supplement is just one form or perhaps two forms,

but you don't get the full benefit. Right. There seems to be a lot of data that points to this that the whole food is preferable way to get nutrients, and then you start getting into things like phyto nutrients and all this other stuff that exactly it's really really important, and so that supplements might be an okay backstop, but

that we really should be folk as sing on food. Right, So supplements should be used to supplement a healthy diet or perhaps optimize it if you have like a specific health concern or maybe subclinical deficiency or an actual deficiency. But I think it's really important to have a really healthy diet first and then take your supplements. Whereas I find that a lot of people kind of bypass the

diet and just go for the supplements. Right. It's like, oh, well, it took my twenty five different pills, so I'm going to have pizza for dinner and then maybe ice cream because I know in a minute, right, right, And so I want to transition here in a second to women's brain health. But I think if there's one other sort of overarching nutritional principle that goes throughout your work, would be less processed food and much more whole food, you know, fruits, vegetables,

whole grains, all that. And so to move away from processed foods in general, can you just give us a minute or too on why that's so important? Tour sure, I think that that actually has a great sumbody of twenty years of work process food. We know that processed foods are really bad news for men and women, but

also especially for women. There are very large scale studies with hundreds of thousands of people showing very strong associations between consumption of process food to be clear on a daily basis, right, So, regular consumption of process food and then increased risk of every possible chronic condition from heart disease, to a busy and diabetes and Alzheimer's, and then mentioned all the way to breast cancer. So when I started in this field, the associations were not as clear or

as rigorously established. But I think at this point in time, we really have plenty of evidence that processed food is just not good for your brain. There are so many studies showing that even just assuming two grams a day or trans Saturday, the fats, which are the worst type of fat you can possibly eat, increases the risk of heart disease by over doubles the risk of dementia, and increase the risk of cancer by two fold. Also, processed food doesn't even taste good, So what's the point, right?

I think it's more cultural. It's like a cultural inclination. It is more marketing that makes it look appealing, but there's really no particular reason to go for it. Like you said, it's somewhat culturally set up. It's what's very very available, tends to in some cases be quicker. You

don't need to think as much about it, right. I think the problem is accessibility, Like it's literally everywhere, and sometimes it's the only way type of food you can get, which I find incredible, And the other problem is that is cheap. Right, Whenever I talk to people about trying to eat more healthy, whole foods, possibly organic, as much as you can, a lot of the concerns of really about costs. You know, if I go to McDonald's, I can I can get a full dinner for me and

my family for ten dollars. If I go to a health food store, I get nothing for ten dollars, get to apples. And that that's true. It is not my fault, obviously,

but it's very true. And I think it's really something that people should take up with the government because these are policies that need to be changed, because really, health should not be a privilege of the wealthy, but it is at this point in time, and it's really it's deeply unfair, especially because we know of all the negative effects that these foods can have one on our health. I agree, I think what we choose to subsidize in

foods in this country contributes to all that. But I also think that yes, to eat a fully healthy diet, you know, go all the way is definitely a lot more expensive. But I think we can make a lot of changes and can eat a lot more foods that are actual whole foods without breaking the bank. I think it can get set up as well. If I don't have a ton of money that I can't make any changes. And and I'm always a believer in life with kind of anything that we can take steps in the direction

of where we want to be. From wherever we are, there are steps we can take in the right direction. Yes, And it's really about thinking about it and planning and finding solutions, which is something that I try to really approach in Brain Food, which is my first book, and more so in my new book, The XX Brain. Because there's new evidence that pollutants and environmental toxins can have an anti estrogen effect, or actually they contain chemicals called

xeno estrogens or foreign estrogens. They really can mimic the facts of estrogen in the body, but in a very negative way, and they really really like a health risk. They're big concern, especially for women, pregnant women and children, and so it really tried to warn people to try and avoid these sources of chemicals as much as possible, which really speaks also to include more organic foods in

the diet. And so since I'm very mindful that the organic food is sadly more expensive than I have a lot of tips in the book to really help people make the right choices and find the right sources and products and really save some money in the process as well. You just made a great transition that I'd like to move to, which is really talking about your latest book called The XX Brain, The Groundbreaking Science Empowering Women to

maximize cognitive health and prevent Alzheimer's. And the main thing again to try and summarize is that estrogen is really a neuroprotective and neurometabolic hormone and that it plays a really important role in our brain. Yes, a huge role

in the brain. They were trying to really revamp some ways because women and hormones has always been a little bit of suspicion around what happens to you when when you're PMS or there's a lot of stigma around women and hormones, especially as part as their brains are concerned. But a lot of my research is really focused on women's health and women's brains. I really work at the intersection between neurology and women's health, which is a very

strange thing to do, but I love it personally. And whatever research has shown is that women's brains age differently than men's brains, and the menopauise and hormonal changes leading up to menopause really play a key role here for women because what people don't realize, what most people don't realize, is that the brain is in constant communication with the reproductive organs and the ovaries, and the ovaries are in constant interaction and communication with their brains, So the health

of the ovaries is really key to the health of the brain and the way that the brain ages and women, and a lot of the aging process is really supported by your hormones, especially estrogens, which are not just involved in reproduction but really play a whole number of roles and functions in the brain. First of all, energy production, so estrogens literally push your neurons to make energy. So if your estrogens are high, your brain energy is high.

But when your estrogens decline, your neurons start aging faster and kind of slow down as well, which we see

when we do the brain scans. And for some women, this slowdown has also been linked to an increased risk of Alzheimi disease and increase risk of accumulating Alzheimer's plaques, which is actually in a way it is good information, is actually very good important information to have, is not just scary, because it really gives us a timeline to start looking for these changes in women's brains, not when we're in our seventies and eighties, but already in midlife,

in our forties and fifties. So I strongly believe that Alzheimer's preventions should start as soon as the woman's hits forty and that my hope is that one day doing brain scans will become a really crucial part of the clinical world cup for Alzheimer's dementia prevention. The same way that women receives mammograms when they're hit in midlife, the same way that we get colonoscopy, is the same way that we get pop tests. You know, we should also

really start thinking about the health of our brains. And this is why the book is about right, and women account for two thirds of Alzheimer's cases, right, Right, So that we were talking about before. When my grandmother developed Alzheimer's and then her two sisters got Alzheimer's and their brother did not, I started asking questions. I was like, well, is it just my family, or is this something that

we should really look into? And it took a few more years for scientists to really figure out that that is indeed the global population, like you said, today, almost two thirds of all Alzheimer's patients are women, which means that for every men suffering from Alzheimer's, there are two women.

So it's not ever discounting the suffering of a male with Alzheimer's disease, but it's really about the knowledge in the fact that more women than men end up with Alzheimer's, which is really important to number one to recognize this because nobody talks about it, and number two to really focus on interventions that are specifically affect for women and

for men. However, most of the research has been done in men, so we kind of know a little bit better what what a male risk factor is, Like heart disease is a huge risk factor for Alzheimer's, but much

more so in men than in women. We now need to better understand what really provokes Alzheimer's disease and women, and my research points to metabolic and hormonal changes that they're not usually looked at when you go for an Alzheimer's prevention consultation, and so what sort of things can can women be doing specifically, particularly women as they as you said, is there as they're hitting forty and above and heading towards or beginning menopause, depending on where they are,

what are some of the things that they can be doing specifically that maybe it is a little different than what men should be doing. Right, So, there are many things that every woman can do today to really support her commons and their effects on the brain. And for many women it's a combination of a number of things that fortunately we can resolve for ourselves, which is really why I wrote the book to be a guide. So

I divided the book into three parts. The first part is really the science about not just out time it's prevention, but just how to optimize cognitive health in women. Then there's a part about questionnaires and how to understand what kind of tests are really valuable to women and what kind of information you really need to know. It's really know your numbers and the important numbers. And then the last part is really about accommendations and all the things

that we know could really help a woman's brain. There are many things, including hormonotherapy, which unfortunately we don't have time to get into right now, but it's something that I I am very interested in exploring more. But also other things like diet, which we talked about a little bit, there are some specific foods and nutrients that seem to be even more important for women's brains. Exercise, sleep, stress reduction, staying away from toxins. Right. We talked about that a

little bit. So it's really important to to focus on all these things because they're really in our control. And we can just talk about one perhaps if you like, I will talk about stress right now. Everybody is under stress, right and but also in general, pretty much every woman I know is under some stress, especially after age three, five or four. They But one thing we don't talk about enough is that stress can literally steal your estrogens

with negative effects for women's brains. And that is because our sex hormones like estrogens to stossed it and progester and they're working balance with the stress hormone cortisol. So the court is all this is high your estrogens go down. If you can't reduce your stress levels and therefore reduce

your cortisol levels, then your hormones go back up. And that is really the really important because there's a lot of research showing that chronic stress in your life is not just the trigger for heart disease, liver disease, anxiety, depression, but also for dementia. So I think this is something that that we really need to underline. You know, really, reducing stress doesn't just save your day if you will, it also really saves your brain for the long term.

So it's really important to to focus on stress reduction today. Wonderful, and I think the thing that's so great about this is that it points to things that we know in general are important reduce our stress, sleep well, exercise, eat well. Like. The thing I like about these things is that they

support me today in my life, right. They support me in my mental and emotional well being right now today, and they also really bode well for the future that's coming, both both in my body's how and in my brains health right. And I love that there's so much that we can do because a lot of times in the world, and this is one of those times, there's a lot that feels out of control, but there is a lot we can do that effects are are well being in

our health. Right. So I mentioned that to you before we started recording that we're now kind of in a barn in the middle of nowhere, and my daughter's foot and a half has just been homeschooled, which really is a challenge because I'm working full time stealing so it is my husband. And so I really tried to squeeze in you know, a little exercise, a little vegitation, and a little yoga. And today I was planking, and I

like to plank. It's you know, if you if you're able to do it for ten minutes, I think that that's a fantastic work out. So I was really trying so hard, and I had this little girl just like climbing all over me, and I was like, oh my god,

you're making it so hard for me. But I think it's so important to to really prioritize self care in a way and to really appreciate how in the end, healthy lifestyle is actually very strong preventative against the number of issues from hormonal issue all the way to brain

aging in the mania. I think we all kind of understand the benefits of a healthy lifestyle intuitively, but a lot of people have a hard time just incorporating these tips and in these principles in their data lives and that which just really encourage everyone to think of their brain more like a muscle. You know, there are there are things that you can do to make it stronger.

You can feed it properly, you can exercise it properly, you can really take care of it properly, and your brain will perform so much better for you at any age. So yes, it takes discipline, but really the benefits are for life. Yeah, wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up this conversation. Lisa, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Oh, thank you so much for having men with such a pleasure. Oh good, I'm glad me

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