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Translator: Peter van de Ven
Reviewer: Denise RQ
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Thank you for joining me.
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On February, 8, 2012,
my father passed away.
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The truth is that was the day
his heart stopped beating.
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For all intents and purposes,
my father had died years earlier.
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It started with memory lapses,
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and as time went on,
his memory failed more and more,
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and it got to the point
where he didn't know
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his own kids who came in to see him.
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His personality changed,
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and his ability to take care
of himself was completely gone.
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And...
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If you could make a list of all the things
that could ever happen to you,
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the very last thing on your list,
at the very bottom of the list,
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the thing you want the least
is Alzheimer's disease,
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because when you lose your memory,
you lose everything.
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You lose everyone
who ever mattered to you.
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If you could look into the brain
of a person who has this disease,
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what you see is, between the brain cells
are these unusual looking structures.
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Beta-amyloid protein
comes out of the cells,
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and it accumulates
in these little meatball-like structures
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that are in front of you,
on a microscopic slide.
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They shouldn't be there,
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and they are a hallmark
of Alzheimer's disease.
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This disease affects about half
of Americans by their mid 80s.
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You could say to your doctor,
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"OK, I don't want that.
What can I do to stop that?"
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Your doctor will say,
"Well, its old age and it's genetics."
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There's a gene - it's called
the APOE-[epsilon]4 allele.
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If you have this gene
from one parent, your risk is tripled;
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if you got it from both parents,
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your risk is 10 to 15 times
higher than it was before.
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What's the answer? Get new parents?
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No, I don't think so. That's not it.
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So, I'm sorry: it's old age,
it's genes, period, that's it;
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there's not a darn thing you can do
just wait for it to happen.
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Or maybe not.
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In Chicago, researchers
started something called
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the Chicago Health and Ageing Project.
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What they did was they looked
at what people in Chicago were eating.
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They did very careful dietary records
in hundreds and hundreds of people,
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and then they started to see
who, as the years go by,
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stayed mentally clear,
and who developed dementia.
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The first thing they keyed in on
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was something that I knew about as a kid
growing up in Fargo, North Dakota -
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My mom had five kids, we would run
down to the kitchen to the smell of bacon.
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My mom would take a fork,
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and she'd stick it into the frying pan
and pull the hot bacon strips out
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and put them on
a paper towel to cool down,
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and when all the bacon was out of the pan,
she would carefully lift up that hot pan
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and pour the grease
into a jar to save it -
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that's good bacon grease,
you don't want to lose that!
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My mother would take that jar,
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and she would put it
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not in the refrigerator
but she'd put it on the shelf,
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because my mother knew
that as bacon grease cools down,
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what happens to it?
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It solidifies.
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And the fact that it's solid
at room temperature
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is a sign that bacon grease
is loaded with saturated fat, bad fat.
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We've known for a long time
that that raises cholesterol,
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and there's a lot of in bacon grease.
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And by the way, the next day,
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she'd spoon it back
into the frying pan and fry eggs in it;
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it's amazing any of her children
lived to adulthood.
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That's the way we lived.
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The number one source of saturated fat
is actually not bacon,
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it's dairy products,
cheese, and milk, and so forth;
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and meat is number two.
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In Chicago, some people ate
relatively little saturated fat,
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around 13 grams a day,
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and others ate about twice that much,
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and the researchers just looked
at who developed Alzheimer's disease.
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And can I show you the figures?
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Here's the low group,
and there is the high group.
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In other words, if you are avoiding
the bad fat, your risk was pretty low,
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but if you were tucking
into the cheese and the bacon strips,
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your risk was two,
three, or more-fold higher,
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Then they looked
not just at saturated fat,
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they looked at the fat
that's in doughnuts and pastries;
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you know what that is, that's trans fats
you'll see on the labels.
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They found the very same pattern
in there, too.
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So, the people who tended to avoid
the saturated fat and the trans fats,
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wanted to avoid them for cholesterol
and heart disease reasons,
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but they also seem to affect the brain.
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Then researchers in Finland said,
"Wait a minute, let's go further."
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There is a condition we call
mild cognitive impairment.
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You're still yourself -
you're managing your checkbook,
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you're driving,
your friends know it's you -
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but you're having mental lapses,
especially for names and for words.
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They brought in over 1,000 adults,
they were 50 years old,
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and they looked at their diets.
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Then, as time went on, they looked to see
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who developed mild cognitive impairment.
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Some of these people
ate relatively little fat,
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some people ate a fair amount,
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and then they looked
at whose memory started to fail.
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They found exactly the same pattern.
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In other words, it's not just,
"Will I get Alzheimer's disease?"
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but, "Will I just have
old age memory problems?"
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Well, what about that gene,
that APOE-[epsilon]4 allele
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the one that condemns you
to Alzheimer's disease?
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Well, they then redid the study,
and they focused only on those people,
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and some of these people ate
relatively little fat,
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some people ate more,
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and--
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...Exactly the same.
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In other words, if you are
avoiding the bad fats,
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even if you have the gene,
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your risk of developing
memory problems was cut by 80%.
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And this is my most important point:
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genes are not destiny.
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Let's take another look in those plaques.
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We know there's beta amyloid protein,
but there's also iron and copper.
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Metals in my brain?
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That's right, there are metals in foods,
and they get into the brain.
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Now think about this:
I have a cast-iron pan,
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and we had a backyard barbecue,
and a week later, I remember,
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"Oh...
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I left my frying pan on the picnic table,
and it rained last week."
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What happened to my pan?
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It rusted, and that rust is oxidation.
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Or you take a shiny new penny,
and does it stay shiny forever?
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No, it oxidizes too.
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Well, iron and copper
oxidize in your body,
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and as they do that,
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they cause the production
of what are called free radicals.
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You've heard of free radicals:
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free radicals are molecules
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that are swimming around
in your bloodstream,
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and they get into the brain,
and they act like sparks
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that seam through the connections
between one cell and the next.
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So, how is this happening?
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Where am I getting all this iron?
Where am I getting all this copper?
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How can that be?
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How many people have a cast iron pan?
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Let me see hands.
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If that's your once a month pan,
I'm going to say, "Who cares?"
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But if it's every single day,
you're getting the iron into your food,
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and it's more iron than your body needs.
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Or copper pipes. Who has copper pipes?
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That water sits
in the copper pipes all night long,
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and in the morning
it goes into the coffee maker,
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and you're drinking that copper,
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you get more than you need,
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and it starts producing
these free radicals that go to the brain.
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If you're a meat eater,
of especially liver,
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there's iron and copper
in those foods too.
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And we used to think, "Isn't that great?"
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until we realized
iron is a double-edged sword.
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You need a little bit,
but if you have too much,
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it becomes toxic.
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Vitamins.
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Vitamin manufacturers
put in vitamin A, and the B vitamins,
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and vitamin C, and vitamin D.
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And then they throw in iron and copper,
thinking, "Well, you need these,"
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not recognizing you're already
getting enough in foods,
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and if they add it to your supplement,
you are getting too much.
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OK, so what am I saying?
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What I'm saying is aside from the fact
that the saturated fat and the trans fats
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will increase our risk,
these metals will, too,
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and they are causing sparks
to form in the brain,
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free radicals to form
that seam through the connections.
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And if that's the case,
then I need a fire extinguisher.
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And we have one,
and it's called vitamin E.
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Vitamin E is in spinach,
and it's in mangoes,
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and it's especially in nuts and seeds.
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And in Chicago,
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some people eat a little bit of it,
and some people eat a lot of it,
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and the beauty of this
is vitamin E is an antioxidant:
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it knocks out free radicals.
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So, if what I'm saying is true,
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then the people in Chicago
who ate only a little bit of vitamin E
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would be at much higher risk
than people who ate a lot,
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and that's exactly
what the research showed.
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People getting eight milligrams
a day of vitamin E
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cut their risk of Alzheimer's
by about half
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compared to people getting less than that.
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Hmm, OK, how do I get that?
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It's very, very easy: run to the store
and just buy a bottle of vitamin E pills.
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No, I don't think so, and here's why not.
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Nature has eight forms of vitamin E.
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It's built into nuts and into seeds,
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but if I put it into my supplement pill,
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I can legally call it vitamin E
if it has only one form.
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And if you're eating too much
of one form of vitamin E,
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it reduces your absorption
of all the others.
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So, you want to get it from food;
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that's the form that nature
has designed for us,
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and that's the form
that we've evolved with.
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We can go a step further.
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Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you.
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How much should I have?
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If I put some nuts or seeds
into the palm of my hand,
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by the time it hits your fingers,
that's just one ounce,
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and that's about five milligrams
of vitamin E, right there.
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The trick is: don't eat it;
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because if you do,
you know what happens.
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If you have those diced salty almonds,
and you've eaten them:
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you fill your hand again,
and then you eat it again.
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There's something about salty cashews
and almonds, is it just me?
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There's something about them, they're
a little bit addicting in some way.
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So, don't do that, that's going to be
way more than you need.
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The answer is pour them into your hand,
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and then crumble them up,
and put them on your salad,
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or put them on your oatmeal,
or on your pancakes, or something.
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Use them as a flavoring
not as a snack food,
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then you're going to be OK.
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All right, researchers
at the University of Cincinnati
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went one step further.
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Not just saturated fat,
not just trans fats, not just vitamin E,
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but they said,
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"What about color?"
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Look at blueberries and grapes:
that color that they have is dramatic.
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And the colors of blueberries
aren't just there to make them pretty,
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those are called anthocyanins.
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They brought in a group of individuals
into a research study:
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average age: 78, and everyone
was already having memory problems.
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And what they asked them to do
was to have grape juice, a pint a day.
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A cup in the morning, a cup at night.
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Three months later, they tested everyone,
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and their memory was better,
and their recall was better.
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Three months?
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That sounds too easy. How can that be?
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Well, think about it:
a grape has a rough life.
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A grape has to sit on the vine,
all day long under the sun,
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and exposed to the elements,
and it has no protection.
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Or does it?
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That purple color, those anthocyanins
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happen to be powerful antioxidants,
just like vitamin E,
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but they're the grape form,
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and if you consume them,
they go into your bloodstream.
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And if that's true,
it doesn't have to be grapes,
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it could be anything that has that color.
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Like blueberries.
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So, back into the laboratory:
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a new group of patients, they came in,
they all had memory problems.
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And three months on blueberry juice,
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Their memory was better,
their recall was better.
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Now, the moral of the story
is not to have grapes and blueberries,
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and blueberry juice, and grape juice.
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No, the answer is color.
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If you look at the colorful foods,
there's an important lesson there for us.
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You walk into the grocery store,
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and from a hundred feet away,
looking at the produce department,
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you can recognize beta-carotene,
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lycopene, anthocyanins.
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Your retina can detect them
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because that's the orange color
of a carrot, or the red color of a tomato,
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or the purple color of a grape.
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And the brain also tells you
they're pretty, they're attractive,
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you can recognize antioxidants,
you're drawn to them.
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So, back in 2009, my organization,
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the Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine,
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went to the Department of Agriculture.
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We said, "This is important.
Let's throw out the pyramid."
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The pyramid was a nice shape,
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but it had a meat group,
and it had a dairy group,
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despite the fact that people
who don't eat meat or dairy products
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happened to be healthier
than people who eat them.
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And also, who eats off a pyramid anyway?
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We eat off a plate.
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So, we devised a plate that said
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fruits, and grains, and legumes
- that's the bean group - and vegetables,
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those should be the staples.
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Well, we gave this to the USDA in 2009,
and we didn't hear back from them.
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So, in 2011, we sued
the federal government,
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the Physicians Committee
filed a lawsuit against the USDA,
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simply to compel response.
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And did you see what the US government
came out with in 2011?
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I'm not taking any credit for this,
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but this is now US government policy,
it's called MyPlate,
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and it does look in some way similar
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to what we'd sent them
a couple of years earlier.
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Fruits, and grains, and vegetables,
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and they have this thing
called 'the protein group.'
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The protein group could be meat,
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but it could be beans, or tofu, or nuts,
or anything that's high in protein,
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it doesn't have to be meat.
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In fact, there is no meat group anymore
in federal guidelines.
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There's a dairy group there,
but to their credit, soy milk counts.
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So, things are improving.
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So far, what we've talked about
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is getting away from the saturated fats,
that's in cheese, and bacon, and meats;
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getting away from the trans fats
and snack foods;
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you're having the vitamin E
and the colorful foods;
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and there's one more step.
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It's not all food, there's something
to say about exercise.
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At the University of Illinois,
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researchers brought in
a large group of adults, 120 of them,
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and they said, a brisk walk,
three times a week.
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After a year, everyone went
into the laboratory for a brain scan.
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They measured the hippocampus
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which is at the center of the brain,
and it's the seat of memory:
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it decides what should be
let through into memory,
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and what should not be let through.
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It turned out that this organ,
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which is gradually shrinking
in older adults,
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suddenly, stopped shrinking.
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The exercisers found
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that their hippocampus
was a little bit bigger,
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and a little bit bigger,
and a little bit bigger,
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it was as if time was going backwards:
It reversed brain shrinkage,
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and on memory tests,
they did substantially better.
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So, I've devised my own exercise plan.
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I'd like to present it to you,
I do this three times a week.
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Arrive at the airport as late as possible,
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carry massively heavy luggage,
and just run for the plane.
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(Laughter)
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At the University of Illinois
they had their own ideas,
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and their idea was a little simpler.
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Do a ten-minute walk,
and do it three times a week.
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And then, next week,
let's do a 15-minute walk,
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and the week after that, 20.
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All they did was add five minutes a week
until they got to 40 minutes.
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And a 40-minute brisk walk
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- this is not a trudge,
but it's a good brisk walk -
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40 minutes, three times a week
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is all you need to improve memory
and reverse brain shrinkage.
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Very simple.
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What I would like to do
is to go back in time,
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and I want to sit down with my dad,
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and I want to say, "Dad, I found out
something really important.
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We can change our diet,
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we don't really need
that cheese and that bacon.
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There's plenty of healthy things
that we can eat.
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Let's bring in
the colorful vegetables and fruits,
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let's make them part of our everyday fair.
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Let's lace up our sneakers,
let's exercise together."
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It's too late for him.
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But it's not too late for you.
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It's not too late for me either,
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and if we take advantage
of what we have now learned
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about how we can protect our brain,
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then perhaps, families will be able
to stay together a little bit longer.
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Thank you very much.
