The REAL Causes Of Dementia

We've been told that dementia is just bad genes or getting old. But that's wrong. For over two million years, human brain has grown exponentially. But in the last few thousand years, it has actually shrank by 10 to 17% for both men and women in a parallel shift away from eating meat and animal fats and leading to a more grain-based diet. Domesticated animals show the same related pattern where grain-fed pigs have 18% smaller brains than wild boores. Dementia and neuro degeneration are not inevitable. They are largely the predictable result of starving and poisoning the brain and therefore that can be 100% preventable. So what fuels the brain? Most people say glucose but that is incorrect. When ketones are available just like glucose is available your brain will only run on those ketones and fat until and unless you run out and then and only then will you start running on glucose. So that is a preference. That is the first choice energy source for your brain. Some of your cells and some of your brain will run on a bit of glucose, but the vast majority of your brain will exclusively run on ketones as long as you have them available. Even PET CTS where you're looking at glucose uptake in different cells, looking for cancers and other such maladies, we actually see in dementia Alzheimer's patients that glucose uptake in the brain actually falls. So on PET scans when we're looking for glucose uptake, we actually see when someone goes into deeper ketosis, the glucose level drops significantly in the brain and ketones supply up to 60 to 70% of the brain energy even though glucose is still available at at normal levels. Now that the ketones are there, the brain switches over and prefers the ketones. So that has been proven in humans with rigorous scientific studies. This shows up in development as well when the neonatal brain is built for a ketogenic environment. When we knock out ketones or the ability to use ketones in animal studies actually shows catastrophic energy failure despite normal amounts of glucose in the brain cannot develop, grow or function in normal ways while it's developing. Pregnancy has also been called accelerated starvation where women who are pregnant get into ketosis far faster as pregnancy advances. So, when women are in the third trimester, it's actually very easy for them to get into ketosis, even when eating carbohydrates at levels that would normally kick other people out of ketosis. And that's because those ketones freely cross the placenta into the developing fetus because the brain requires those ketones to function normally and also reconstitute into fatty acids that make up the physical building blocks of the brain. And in the third trimester especially, the brain is growing exponentially. And so the baby really needs as much ketones and fat as the mother can provide. Breast milk also does this as well cuz breast milk is deliberately ketogenic. Even children that are on breast milk, even though there's a high level of lactose in it, they are still producing ketones because their brain requires it. And studies have shown that formulafed babies have far less ketones than breastfed babies. I just want to let you guys know about an event I'll be at in Bosezeman, Montana for July 4th with Bella Steak and Buttergal that if you can make it will be a great time. So, there's going to be fireworks, a panel, and other sorts of events that you can take part in. And of course, we're all going to be there interacting and hanging out with people. And obviously, there's going to be a lot of meet specifically from Macafferty Ranch right there in Montana. From what I've heard, it's absolutely fantastic. So, I'm really looking forward to that as well. There will be people such as myself, obviously, Bella, Dr. Baker and my fiance L and many others. So, if you're able to make it down, it would be great to see you there. And you can get your tickets at sbg.events and hopefully see you there. So, the default, the human brain is designed to run on fat and ketones and be built from cholesterol and saturated fat, not from constant dietary glucose and seed oils that are very poor substitute for what your brain is requiring. So, your brain is actually built out of cholesterol and animal source nutrition. Cholesterol works as structural components. The brain is roughly 2% of the body weight but contains over 25% of the body's cholesterol. Cholesterol is a rate limiting step for myelin which is white matter insulation and synapse formation. So this makes the signals in the brain run faster and connect to more cells. So that makes your brain and nervous system more powerful. Lower cholesterol means fewer synapses, fewer connections with different cells and impaired brain growth and development of this myelin which slows down the conductivity of these signals from your neurons. Statins have even been shown to be iatrogenic meaning that they are man-made medicalbased cause of harm and can cause neurodeeneration. So fats soluble statins can cross the bloodb brain barrier and blunt the brain's cholesterol synthesis. So it prevents the brain from making its own cholesterol which it's made out of. Whatever you want to say about cholesterol in the arteries and whether or not that leads to atherosclerosis which I believe the evidence shows very clearly that it does not. You cannot say that the cholesterol made in your brain has anything to do with that because it's past the bloodb brain barrier. It does not get into the bloodstream in the first place. It's not able to cross from the brain into your bloodstream. So, the only thing you're doing while taking a statin and slowing down your brain's production of cholesterol is actually slowing down and damaging your brain. And this is why the FDA has required warning labels on statins saying that it can cause memory issue cognition and other sorts of neurological conditions as well. There was also a withdrawal and rechallenge study in Alzheimer's patients back in 2012 where they took 18 patients who were on statins who had Alzheimer's and tested their cognition score then stopped their statins and tested them 6 weeks later without doing anything else and they found that their cognition scores improved across the board and then they rechallenged and put them back on the statins and test them 6 weeks later and they dropped by the same degree. So it was a reversible effect on cognition from these statins. Now, that's a preliminary study and we need more of them, but this goes directly against the idea that cholesterol is bad for you in all circumstances. And like I said, the FDA has added cognitive warning labels for statins based on memory loss and confusion that often reverse when the drug is stopped. Also the nutrients that we need only come from or mainly come from animal foods and these are necessary for the brain's development and function and maintenance so that you don't get neurodeeneration. So things like B12, D3, vitamin A, choline, creatine, carnitine, DHA and yes even saturated fat and cholesterol are all necessary for the brain to grow and function properly. So these are not nice extras. These are core construction materials for myelin synapses, cell membranes, neurotrophic signaling, mitochondrial function, and methylation. If you remove the animal products, you're not just cutting out a food group, you are removing most of the raw materials the brain is made from. And this can only lead to damage and neurodeeneration if it continues. So, we also have to think of these animal-based nutrients such as B12. B12 is the canary in the coal mine. Severe deficiencies in infants cause brain atrophy on MRI, delayed mileelination, seizures, and often permanent cognitive damage even when the structure improves when they supplement B12 back in again. But the problem starts long before any obvious deficiency. Elderly adults with lower B12, but still in the normal ranges predict faster brain atrophy and shrinkage as they age. Higher B12 predicts slower loss or even no loss. The current normal ranges are actually population-based averages where the average person is actually on a more plant-based diet. 70% of the calories consumed in America are from plants. Most of that from carbohydrates and plants don't contain B12. So the average of a vegetarian population is going to have a low average B12. And so now we're hiding deficiency in those averages. But Oxford University published in 2008 a study that showed that B12 even in the normal ranges actually led to two and a half to 5 and a half% brain volume loss over 5 years. So this is clearly not an acceptable range or not a normal range. It is clearly such a deficient state that people are getting brain damage and brain shrinkage. So this also affects development because if you don't have enough B12 to maintain your brain, how could you ever possibly have enough B12 to grow the brain? And there's a link between maternal B12 during pregnancy and intelligence and standardized test scores in their children later on. So women in the bottom 10 percentile of B12 during pregnancy, but still in the normal ranges actually showed that their children had worse scores in vocabulary, speech, and math performance than other children for another 14 years. And that's only how long the study went. So we don't even know if it corrected after that. Children raised on vegan also called macrobiotic diets even if later switched to omnivorous diets show persistent cognitive deficits and marginal B12 status. So if we think about aging and neurodeeneration from that standpoint where we know that not having enough B12 and other nutrients can lead to brain shrinkage. Why are we thinking that the brain shrinking over time is normal or that these are normal age- related atrophy? Because the thing is is that we don't have any examples anywhere in nature of any other animal besides human having their brain shrink as they age. There's even a study in chimpanzees where they looked at 99 different chimpanzees over various ages and over time took various brain scans of them versus a large swath of humans of varying ages. And they found that while human brains predictably shrank over time as we age, chimpanzees do not. These are our closest genetic relatives. So this doesn't make sense. But the chimpanzees are hopefully eating what they're designed to eat unless they have a, you know, a bad keeper. But humans were not eating what we're designed to eat. So we're not getting the nutrients we need. And we're also getting things that harm and starve our brain at the same time. Then some critiques of this data says, well, chimpanzees don't live as long as humans. Therefore, if they kept living longer, their brains would start shrinking. But that doesn't make sense either because we have other animals like whales that can live up to 200 years. They don't get this neurodeeneration. We have no recorded evidence of any animal that has shrinkage of their brain over time when in the wild on their natural diet. So we need to reframe what normal aging looks like. We call this normal age related atropy and brain shrinkage. But this may well be what chronic multi-deade malnutrition looks like in the brain. So realistically modern diets not only starve but poison the brain. So we get the wrong inputs in the wrong directions. We have fructose driving uncontrolled ATP depletion, inflammation and TLR4 and NFCappa B, mitochondrial dysfunction, advanced glycation, insulin resistance in the brain. And we have excess omega6 seed oils and linoleic acid promoting oxidative stress and chronic neuroinflammation. And we're missing very key protective inputs. We lack sunlight and avoidance of fat and cholesterol or even taking statins can impair vitamin D synthesis and vitamin D deficiency is linked to altered brain development and increased dementia risk. Plant-only diets lacking DHA and EPA, carnitine, creatine, pre-formed vitamin A, etc. undermine brain development and repair. There's also sugardriven gum disease. The different bacteria in the mouth breed for different foods breed for bacteria in the mouth that cause cavities and even gum disease. And some of these things like perfamonus gingalis can get into the body, can damage the heart, can damage the brain. And in one study out of Stanford from Professor Anelise Baron, who I've interviewed, and you can see that whole discussion on my channel, found that the vast majority of brains of patients that died from Alzheimer's when they took biopsies of the brain, up to 96% of them had that mouth bacteria, perfume, gingalis, in their brain. and that GBM glyobblasto brain tumors which unfortunately are not only the most common the but the most aggressive primary brain tumor that we have they took core biopsies of these and found that in 89% of the GBMs they found also evidence of perurommonus gingalis this bacteria that only exists in the mouth if you eat carbohydrates because they can't live in the mouth without candida and candida can't live in the mouth unless you eat carbohydrates so we are feeding the brain the wrong things in toxic amounts and failing to supply the things that we cannot live without and our brains are suffering as a result of that. So what is the evidence that changing the fuel changes the disease? Well, we have things like epilepsy which we've known for 100 years improve on ketogenic diets. This has been the standard of care for decades and probably the only thing that we had and really the only thing that was effective at treating seizures for decades before we discovered some medications that helped and are still used in drugresistant epilepsy patients today. Randomized trials show that over 50% of seizure reduction in about half of patients studied. And this is still something that's used today in the top neurology and neurological centers in the world such as Johns Hopkins University. Alzheimer's disease, this is now being called type 3 diabetes. And they've actually had PET scans show that there's a decreased uptake in glucose in the brain in Alzheimer's patients, but preserved ketone uptake. So the brain can still run on ketones, which is why randomized control trials actually show that going on a ketogenic diet is actually better for Alzheimer's than every medication ever trial. Parkinson's disease are also randomized control trials with Parkinson's disease, showing that ketogenic diets improve non-motor and motor deficits in Parkinson's significantly and improve non-motor symptoms even more than things like a healthy Mediterranean diet, which also showed improvements in motor scores as well. So even just cleaning up the diet generally can improve things like Parkinson's, but ketogenic diets improve it even more. In multiple sclerosis, we've been seeing a number of people not only improve their symptoms, but actually even shrink down some of their lesions, something that has never been shown to be possible to that extent with any medications. And we're actually getting ready to publish a case series showing near miraculous recoveries of people's symptoms and on their scans and MRIs, even things like autism as well. There's early data that suggests that ketogenic diets like a carnivore diet with a lot of meat and animal fat in a ketogenic state that it's ample in carnitine and other sorts of essential nutrients for the brain, the neurons, and the mitochondria have been showing improvements. There even clinics that use ketogenic diets for their autism patients as a mainstay of their treatment. And we even have a case report in Huntington's disease that shows that motor scores and functional improvements exceeding drug therapy for ketogenic diets. So these are not different magic diets for different diseases. This is one correction of the same upstream metabolic failure applied to different neural vulnerabilities. But all these neurodeenerative processes both developmental and in the elderly all show significant improvement with the same intervention which is providing the essential nutrients and eliminating things that can cause harm. So realistically this is a preventable brain crisis. The modern epidemic of dementia is not nature turning on a timer at 70 years old. It is what happens when for decades we starve the brain of ketones, cholesterol, and animal nutrients and drown it in sugar, seed, and seed oils and then blame genetics when it falls apart. We even see this in people that are predisposed to getting Alzheimer's and dementia like Appleo E4 carriers as there are new data that came out that shows that people that eat higher levels of meat actually the highest quintile of meat over 800 gram per week they were actually protected against the genetic effects of appleo E4 and they had no increased risk in dementia at least in that study. So having a proper diet can even neutralize or offset. So diet either right or wrong can either neutralize or amplify these genetic risks. And the strongest genetic risk often disappears when people eat a highfat meat-based ketogenic species appropriate diet. So if dementia runs in your family, your genes are not a confirmed sentence. Your diet is either the loaded gun or the safety catch. In other videos, I go into deep dives about how to feed the human brain so that you don't get these problems. And I have an entire playlist on how to do a carnivore diet properly so that you don't run into these issues. And if you're getting started, watch my video on carnivores for beginners. And look out for my book later on this year. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next time. Hey everybody, as you know, I don't usually take sponsors, but I've been working with Carnivore Bar for a while because they genuinely care about quality and the carnivore movement. Obviously, whole food is always best just making your meat at home and taking it with you. But if you are traveling, camping, hiking, or at the airport, or just need something on the go, these are really great. They have the traditional carnivore bar, but now they have the new everyday bar, which is smaller, but it's also a lot cheaper. It uses grainfish beef meat. However, it also uses grass-finish talis. You get all the omega-3s and vitamins that you would want from grass-finish cows. And of course, if you still want the full Cadillac carnivore bar, they still have the grass-fed finish versions as well that you can get. So, check out the link below and use code Anthony for 10% off. Thanks everyone.