Supplements for Brain Health and Alzheimer's

When you talk about blood flow, it gets me thinking about ginkgo biloba.

And I know this is just one supplement out there and there's a whole wide range,

but let's talk about using things like that to help improve blood flow or

in separate realms,

supplements in general that can help the brain.

Such a good point.

And you know, people often say, well,

look, supplements aren't a cure for Alzheimer's. Of course they aren't.

They are by definition supplementary.

But when we talked about the seven basics, supplements,

one of them, targeting things.

And again, it helps a lot if you know what's causing your problem.

If you are a vasculopath

and your problem is your vascular disease,

then you want to focus more on that.

If your problem is that you've got pathogens,

maybe you have Lyme disease or maybe you have another tick borne illness,

or if your problem is you're exposed to specific molds that are making mycotoxins,

then you want to address those in the specific part of this.

But that will also tell you

which supplements are best for you.

Now, as you mentioned, there are some basics we can all do.

Things like omega 3s that

are help and multiple publications showing how helpful these things are.

They help with an anti inflammatory state,

but they also help with resolution.

So many of us have some degree of ongoing inflammation.

Now, again, it's not

just so simple that you just say, well, yeah, just get rid of the inflammation and

you'll be fine. No, the inflammation is there because you're exposed to something.

So you want to get rid of the

inflammation while you're also getting rid of what it is that's causing

the inflammation. Is it your oral microbiome? Is it a leaky gut?

Is it Lyme exposure?

What have you? You want to get rid of that.

But yeah, there are so

many targeted supplements you can use.

You mentioned Ginkgo, great for blood flow.

And again, by itself may not do too much, but with the rest of the overall approach

to optimizing your cognition is tremendous.

Curcumin, another wonderful one,

which actually, by the way, binds and interacts with amyloid and with phospho tau,

helps to lower these,

has a wonderful anti inflammatory effect as well.

And then you can think about things like propolis, another thing that also has an

anti inflammatory effect.

And then resolvins, SPM Active, for example, is a good one developed

by Professor Charles Searhan at Harvard, who spent his career looking at

what is this,

how does inflammation get resolved, looking at the

basic biology of this and making this important discovery of the resolvins,

which are related to omega 3s, by the way,

and realizing that we need to use these to resolve ongoing inflammation before

we then prevent future inflammation. So those are wonderful ones.

And then so many people low in magnesium,

and as has been pointed out by Dr. Guosong Liu when he was at MIT,

having some magnesium threonate, which he and his group developed, can be helpful,

and they've actually done trials on magnesium threonate, but separately,

it's also good to have magnesium, of course, for the gut,

things like magnesium citrate and things. So all of those can be helpful.

Taurine, I mentioned earlier,

things like creatine for muscular status, and also, by the way,

to tone down, give you a more vagal tone and tone down the sympathetic system.

Melatonin, another good one.

Many of us are low in melatonin as we're getting

a little older and don't get as good as sleep.

Now, again, if it's because of sleep disorder breathing, you gotta address that,

but melatonin can be in even small doses, half a milligram, a milligram,

three milligrams can be very helpful.

Some people take it at much higher doses because it also has an anti cancer effect.

So you could go into vitamin D.

There are just literally dozens and dozens of supplements,

and you don't wanna just take these willy nilly. You wanna know why.

So the problem

with Alzheimer's has been that people have been treating it blindly.

They get a small data set. They say, we don't know what causes this disease.

They say, we're gonna get rid of the amyloid. It doesn't work.

People get worse, unfortunately.

Now what we can do is look much more deeply. We can look at larger data sets.

We can determine why each person has the problem.

And there are, as you said, there are supplements to address all of these things,

whether it's vitamin D,

whether it's omega 3, whether it's magnesium 3 and A, whether it's Bacopa,

ashwagandha, ashwagandha helps to lower the amyloid as well.

Shank pushpe, all of these

things that can be very, very helpful.

If you enjoyed that clip, press here for the full episode. I'll see you over there.

We actually have a pro inflammatory state with ApoE4,

and so we have a slightly shorter lifespan,

and of course, a markedly increased risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Great, so we can address that.