The Alzheimer's Drug With a 25% Brain Bleed Risk - Dr. David Perlmutter

David Perlmutter (0:00)

Alzheimer's is an almost uniformly fatal condition, the third leading cause of death in adults in America.

Gary Brecka (0:05)

You know, there's a lot of theories around Alzheimer's and accelerated brain aging, but many of them point to insulin resistance and high blood sugar as one of the hallmarks of accelerated neurocognitive decline.

David Perlmutter (0:18)

90% of America's pre-diabetic patients don't know it because you get your annual blood work, you get a pat on the back, well, you're not diabetic yet, go home and hope for the best. I really reject that in the face of 7.6 million Americans now diagnosed with Alzheimer's with being pre-diabetic, being a huge entree to that event.

Gary Brecka (0:37)

I think there are a lot of people at my age that are dealing with aging parents, and I'm hell bent on turning this around for my mother and to the extent that I can prevent it for other folks, like my kids, that's a service that I think is well met.

David Perlmutter (0:49)

I'm hell bent on getting this message out that you could rewrite your destiny as it relates to your brain, and you absolutely can do it, and you just need the tools.

Gary Brecka (0:57)

In these conditions like Alzheimer's, patients are not losing their memory per se, they're losing access to their memory. What do we do now to try to restore that access?

David Perlmutter (1:05)

You know, ultimately, I think well beyond what I described here is...

Gary Brecka (1:22)

Hey guys, welcome back to The Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's podcast guest is a very, very, very special guest to me. He doesn't even realize this But. in the 300 plus episodes that we've done on The Ultimate Human, only one other time have I used this next phrase that I am sitting down with someone that I consider one of my early mentors in this space. The first time I used that was with Mark Hyman because I had read most of his New York Times bestselling books.

And in 2014, I read a book that this gentleman authored called Green Brain, and it entirely and permanently changed the trajectory of my career. So Dr. David Perlmutter, welcome to the podcast.

David Perlmutter (2:14)

Well, I'm delighted to be here today. It's very special to be here too. I love this area of the world. It has a lot of meaning for me.

Gary Brecka (2:20)

Yeah. You know, I learned something very special before the podcast today. I walked into my kitchen and he was FaceTiming with my father-in-law, and it turns out that my wife's father built your doc 40 years ago.

David Perlmutter (2:33)

That's right.

Gary Brecka (2:34)

That's a wild connection that we have, but the work has been in the neighborhood for a while.

David Perlmutter (2:39)

It's a small world though. Who knew?

Gary Brecka (2:41)

It's a small world. But I read Grain Brain.

I want to say you wrote it in 2013, but I read it in 2014

David Perlmutter (2:49)

So yeah, it was published in 2013, wrote it in 2012, obviously. And that book focused, I think, on something that's now pretty well understood and embraced, that eating a diet that features a lot of highly processed carbohydrates is a bad thing for the brain. That was my contention back then. And the book was a great success, but I got a lot of heat from my colleagues. I mean, what do carbs have to do with the brain? How could you make such a statement? We didn't have the term back then of ultra-processed foods. Now, of course, that's what we're talking about, and ultra-processed carbohydrates being under that umbrella. And now we see really great data coming out that higher consumption of these foods that are modified such that they're going to raise your blood sugar, threaten the functionality of your insulin, and at the same time are devoid of things that you need like dietary fiber to nurture your microbiome, that these happen to be really threatening for your metabolism.

And guess what? The brain is intimately involved with metabolism, either being supportive or being destructive.

Gary Brecka (3:57)

And you know, I'm going through this right now, I've been very public about this on my platform with my own mother. And you know, I'm upset with myself in a lot of ways because as I really peel back the layers of the onion, she was hyperglycemic or high glycemic, you know, insulin resistant and prediabetic for almost 20 years that we can go back and find.