Latest insights on Alzheimers disease, cancer, exercise, nutrition, and fasting | Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.

Most people in the United States, they're not eating enough fatty fish; and they're not supplementing with omega-3, which is sort of an alternative. I think it was a 2012 study out of Harvard that identified low omega-3 intake from fish... as one of the top 6 preventable causes of death. So it was up there with smoking... blood pressure and obesity and being sedentary.

What it does to your risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease is actually why the death toll for type 2 diabetes is so grossly under-appreciated ... It's gasoline on the fire of aging ... I can't think of a process that accelerates aging more than type 2 diabetes.

During exercise and after exercise, the lactate that is generated from muscles that gets into circulation is consumed by the brain ... At the blood-brain barrier, lactate itself has been shown to be responsible for the production of what's called VEGF. It's a vascular endothelial growth factor, VEGF. And what it's doing at the blood-brain barrier is it is growing new vessels and repairing damaged ones.

Once you start getting down to a 20/4 or a 22/2, basically just doing one-meal-a-day... you're not going to get enough protein in; because even if you managed to scarf down 1 gram per pound of body weight in a single meal, you wouldn't be able to utilize those amino acids. You kind of tap out at about 40 to 50 amino acids per meal.

The blood-brain barrier, and maintaining that integrity, is very important; and both APOE4 and type 2 diabetes lead to permeability of that. And so, with type 2 diabetes, people have hypoglycemia ... And that, over time, leads to advanced glycation end products ... That basically damages the blood-brain barrier and leads to permeability.

In people aged 50 to 65, there was a relationship between protein intake and IGF—higher protein intake was associated with higher IGF ... In people over 65, there was no statistical difference whatsoever between protein intake and IGF-1. Again, this is taken as dogma that the more protein you have, the higher your IGF-1—and in people over 65, that's not the case.

Essentially, you can measure the permeability of the blood-brain barrier looking at a variety of biomarkers ... These have been shown... to occur decades before the onset of cognitive impairment. And it's, literally, you can find it in more than 50% of all dementias.

What sort of lifestyle factors and genetic factors do we know really increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia? Well, we know having an APOE4 allele... If you have one of them, it increases the risk 2-fold. If you have 2, if you got 1 from mom and 1 from dad, it could be up to 10-fold.

Somewhere between 50-80% of people with Alzheimer's disease also have type 2 diabetes.

It is another really important modifiable lifestyle factor that can affect Alzheimer's disease risk ... Basically, you want to be systolic below 130.

High blood pressure is associated with dementia risk, particularly when you have it before [your] 50s ... It really does seem like cumulative exposure is the key factor there.

This goes way back to my day as a graduate student when I first started using the sauna, I realized that if I would go over a talk... If I went over it and thought about what I was going to say in the sauna, man, did I remember it better.

For women, moderate drinking is like 3 drinks a day, or something like that. It's a lot. And that literally translates to a lifetime risk of breast cancer of 1 in 6, or something like that.

Higher protein across the board is going to save more lives than it would ever hurt in younger people—even if you could convince yourself that higher protein intake was associated with increased mortality.

The evidence is overwhelming that a person who exercises... If you're really doing the work, you're having a greater impact on the reduction of risk of Alzheimer's disease than any other intervention you can take.