In this interview segment, Dr. Kristen Willeumier shares a vivid personal anecdote about appearing on the reality TV show "The Mole," using it as a springboard to discuss the brain's developmental trajectory and the inevitable shrinkage that begins around age 40. She emphasizes the importance of proactive brain care during the brain's highly plastic twenties. Drawing on her research, she describes a SPECT imaging study of professional football players that revealed severe global cerebral perfusion deficits and a heightened prevalence of dementia, obesity, and neurodegenerative disease among NFL athletes. Dr. Willeumier explains how simple dietary changes, nutraceutical supplementation, and exercise dramatically improved perfusion in a follow‑up cohort, underscoring the power of nutrition and vascular health. She then outlines three fundamental reasons sleep is critical: glymphatic clearance of misfolded proteins, consolidation of memories, and emotional processing, likening sleep to a free psychotherapist. Meditation is presented as a tool to sharpen focus and concentration, further supporting brain health. Finally, she highlights the role of wearable sleep trackers (e.g., Oura Ring) as biofeedback devices that keep users accountable and motivated, and she closes with a reflection on optimism and joy—exemplified by Betty White—as a mental state that promotes longevity.
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Back in 2008, I was on a reality television show on ABC called The Mole. Essentially, the backstory is the show picks 13 people to be on. The whole goal is you go through these challenges and you try to accumulate money. The total pot can be up to half a million dollars. You can imagine a young neuroscience graduate student always love to have half a million dollars to get their life started. So one person is selected to be the mole that thwarts the group's ability to be able to earn money. This happened to be filmed in South America, and I arrive night one in Chile, and they take all of us to this waterfall in the middle of the night. It's cold. I have to get in the water on this little raft. I literally felt like I was Huck Finn on a raft, no way to steer it except with my body. It's not like I had a little paddle in the early part of the rapids, right, that are about to go over. And there is a bag of money that they had dangling over the waterfall. And this is nighttime. At night. This is at nighttime in Chile. The little raft goes over the falls. You leap to grab the money. I don't even know the people that are next to me. I'm like, who are these people? What am I doing here? Am I crazy? Is it really worth half a million dollars to do this? From birth all the way till age 25, your brain is in this tremendous growth phase, right? And it's setting down all of the neural architecture. Age 40 is when the brain then starts to shrink in volume. By the time we hit 40, we really need to be very proactive about our brain health. If you start taking care of your brain in your 20s, you're actually ahead of the game because you're working with the brain in a time where it's very plastic and it's making all these connections and it's in this very active growth phase. We lose about 5% of our brain per decade. So that shrinkage keeps happening and we have to be proactive to help prevent the shrinkage and to help keep those beautiful neurons connecting with their neighbors. So back in 2009, when I started working there, we decided to do a brain imaging study in living professional athletes, just asking the question, does playing football cause long-term brain damage? It was severe global perfusion deficits throughout the brain, frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes, various regions inside of the brain. Your brain is an energetically hungry organ, right? It's 2% of your body mass, but utilizes 20% of the body's energy. If you have low perfusion in the brain and we do not correct that, you're going to lose those neurons. It's just what happens. In this particular cohort, and this is really fascinating to me, You know, half of the players were overweight or obese. So that's, you know, close to 50 out of 100 players. 19% of them had dementia. In 2012, a study came out in the Journal of Neurology by Lehman et al. And they asked that question, what is the neurodegenerative mortality of NFL football players versus the general public? And they found anybody who plays in the NFL has a 3 times higher risk of a neurodegenerative disease, 4 times higher risk of Alzheimer's or ALS. I had no idea that we could impact perfusion to the brain and restore brain function in such a profound way in these professional athletes. That's really exciting. With these very simple dietary and lifestyle modifications. So we found, you know, the first 25 players that came back, or no, it was the first 30 players that came back after 6 months on this product. Protocol and we rescan their brain. So we did the SPECT imaging and we gave them the neurocognitive assessments. And I will tell you, I was shocked to see how much we could improve perfusion to the brain. Things as simple as changing your dietary practices and including nutraceuticals could help make such a profound change in perfusion to the brain. I was blown away. There's a lot of power in the foods that we're eating, our ability to keep our blood vessels open, right? And healthy. Now, there's very simple ways to keep your blood vessels open, like a good exercise routine. But if we are restoring and rehabilitating brain function, you have to go the extra mile. I didn't realize how powerful supplements could be until I saw this with the neuroimaging. I look at sleep, there's 3 really fundamental things that I think sleep is important for. Number 1, clearing out the toxic accumulation of misfolded proteins. So if we're wanting to prevent diseases like Alzheimer's, which is really a protein aggregate disease, right? You get these abnormally folded tau and beta amyloid. And so when we sleep, you know, we have this extraordinary system called the glymphatic system. It's like a brainwash. It's your cerebrospinal fluid is actually able to move at a greater rate and help forcefully clear these abnormally folded proteins. And if you're in the biohacking world, the world of extending your lifespan, protein misfolding is one of the key elements to degenerative decline. So really think of your sleep as a way to help clear all the proteins. It's your brainwash and you want to get that, you know, 8 hours of continuous sleep. So that's one. Number two, for a sharp memory, you need to sleep because when we sleep, it's when we take all of those great things that we've learned during the day And our hippocampus is working to consolidate those memories and put it into various regions of the brain for long-term storage. So for all of those who say, I can get enough sleep when I'm dead, I'm like, if you want to preserve your cognitive function, you have to sleep. And number 3, sort of one of the most critical pieces that I don't think is talked about enough. When we sleep, we are able to process and work through all of the emotional events the emotionally reactive events that we have had during the day. So think of sleep as like your psychotherapist that you don't have to pay for. Yeah. Is meditation hones your power of focus. Mm-hmm. And concentration. And that is one of the most powerful assets you have in taking care of your brain. Mm-hmm. Always. It's being able to rein in your conscious mind and direct it wherever you wanna place it. And Circling back to fitness trackers. I know you love your Oura Ring and you track everything. One of the beautiful things about trackers in terms of taking care of your brain health and your overall health and longevity is it makes you maintain a focus on that. So every day you're looking at your sleep and we naturally wanna expand and learn like our sort of consciousness, our higher consciousness, our evolution. We're always, wanting to do that naturally. So by tracking, you're focusing on it and you're expanding naturally and you're going to keep learning better ways, right? Here's how I optimize my sleep. Here's how I get my REM, you know, to be 10% of my sleep instead of 5%. That's doing that sort of full circle, taking so the beauty of meditation and honing the, the power of focus of your mind, and then using that now in your everyday life. To benefit your health span and your lifespan. Betty White, the actress, she comes and visits somebody that lives in my building. I see her all the time. She just turned 99. The woman is glowing. She just looks gorgeous. What's her secret? Enjoying life and having the optimism of a young child, right? And bottling that. I think she still has that kind of optimism and she glows. So it's living life in that healthy mental state. And meditation is a way to get there.
