Note: This video transcript has not been edited. Please excuse any transcription errors.

Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Sandison. I’m gonna take you through the five worst things that you can do for your brain. The message, avoid this!

1. Highly Processed Foods

 The first thing is fast food or highly processed food. We see over and over again in the epidemiological research. There was in fact, a new study that just came out of the UK this week that shows that those who ingested highly processed fast foods, things like chicken nuggets and sodas, candies, things that come in, packages that have been highly processed that don’t look like the fruit, the animal, the vegetable that came off the tree, out of the ground or straight from the animal. The things that are highly processed and put into plastic packages typically, that are in the middle aisles of the grocery store. They’re associated with a 30% risk of dementia. Just that accumulation of those poor food choices over time is associated with that increased risk for dementia.

So again, it’s a 30% risk compared to the normal population that has a 13% risk of developing dementia. What they also found is that the people who consumed the least amount of highly processed foods, that means more of our unprocessed foods, things that would be typical on a Mediterranean diet, a paleo diet, and certainly a ketogenic diet. The people who consumed more of that, they had a 9% risk of developing dementia in the 10 year trial period that when they were studied, these were participants over the age of 50 and in the UK, and they were followed for 10 years and reported what they ate. And so what we know from this is not exactly causation, but we know probabilities and that your risk of developing dementia is much higher when you are consuming highly processed foods versus our whole foods. And so I would highly encourage you to give up the highly processed convenience foods and opt for whole foods.

2. Sitting

That can still be very convenient. The second thing that I recommend avoiding, if you are at risk for cognitive decline or looking to prevent it, is sitting. Sitting has been described as the new smoking. This increases your risk for metabolic disease, depression, anxiety, and cognitive decline, or dementia. So getting up and moving, using a standing desk, making it a habit to get movement wherever you can in your day and avoid sitting, is critically important to preventing cognitive decline.

3. Sleep Deprivation

The third thing to avoid if you wanna prevent or reverse cognitive decline or dementia is sleep deprivation. We now know that people who experience sleep deprivation over time in their thirties and forties are at higher risk of dementia later in life decades later. We also know that things like sleep apnea that interferes with the quality of our sleep, not the time that we spend sleeping, but how much benefit we get from sleep is a causal factor when it comes to dementia. So we wanna get not only good sleep, but we wanna get enough of it. We wanna prioritize it no matter where we are in our stage of life, even in the decades before we’re at risk for dementia.

4. High Levels of Stress

The fourth thing to avoid when it comes to dementia risk is high stress. So this is why torture doesn’t work. We understand that when we’re under a lot of stress that this is stage fright, right? When we’re under a lot of stress, we can’t remember, we can’t find words, we can’t put thoughts together. So the best thing to do is to modulate stress. We don’t want too much, and we don’t want too little, right? Too little stress looks like sitting on the couch and eating whatever you want and consuming, maybe indulging not getting exercise. We want a little bit of stress. We want purpose. We want motivation.

We want enough stress to get us out and doing those things that serve us, exercising, engaging and working, perhaps working out our brains and our bodies so that we get that optimal cognitive function. What we don’t wanna get stuck in is a fight, flight, freeze state, that sympathetic response that’s associated with high levels of cortisol and that’s associated with inflammation over time, we wanna make sure that that’s modulated or, or maintained and balanced in a way that we get the benefits of some stress. We get that increased ability to adapt to our environment, but we don’t overdo it to a point where it affects cognitive function.

The memory centers of our brain, the hippocampus and the amygdala are very connected, and a lot of our emotion runs through that memory center of the brain. In fact, we kind of know this experientially, if we smell something  that can trigger a memory and usually an emotion if we hear something when we have these sensory inputs, maybe you hear a song from high school or college that triggers a memory for you. And there’s an emotion associated. Emotions are highly connected to our memories and our ability to recall. So it’s important that our emotions are stabilized and maintained that they’re not extreme in one way or another.

5. Hearing and Visual Loss

The fifth thing that’s critical to avoid if you are at risk of cognitive decline is hearing loss or vision loss. And so not all of this is inevitable, and early treatment is crucial. However, also early intervention. So if you’re suffering with hearing loss and you’re delaying getting a hearing aid, or if you’re suffering with vision loss and you’re delaying getting contacts or LASIK surgery or glasses, I highly encourage you to intervene as soon as possible. We are essentially the collection of what, what comes into us, right? Whether it’s food or media or all of the stimuli that comes into our brains, determine how our brain works. And if we start to cut out or cut off one of our senses, our hearing, our vision, our taste, our smell, it’s possible our brains will trim back that area. It needs to be stimulated in order for it to be functional. And so making sure that your visual acuity and sensory acuity hearing sense of smell, sense of taste, that all of those are regularly stimulated and optimally functional. And if you need a prosthesis, some sort of support, then I highly encourage you to get it.