Parkinson's Is a Man-Made Disease: The Chemicals Linked to a 500% Higher Risk | Dr. Ray Dorsey

87% of Americans with Parkinson's disease, the vast majority of Americans with Parkinson's disease, have no known genetic cause or risk factor for the disease. Principal cause for this disease lies not within us, not in our genes, it's outside of us in our environment. So golf courses are huge consumers of pesticides, up to 80 times as much of pesticide per acre than agricultural areas.

Why are we spraying neurotoxins on the school grounds?

And speaking of smoking guns, this is like secondhand smoke.

Well, hey everybody, we're going to get right back to the podcast, but I want to share something with you that is very personal. You know, for decades I've been a practicing neurologist. I've been asking a single question and And what makes a good brain go bad? More importantly, obviously, what can we do about it? And that question has led me to write my new book, which is called Brain Defenders. It's now available for preorder. And in this book, I'm going to take a hard look at where we are today and offer up some challenges as to where we are today in terms of what we're being told. You know, despite all the attention on targeting proteins, misfolded proteins like beta amyloid for Alzheimer's, We still don't really have any meaningful treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease per se. And we certainly can treat symptoms, but as it relates to treating the underlying issue, we're falling short. Many of these approaches manage the symptoms at best, but without really addressing what's driving the underlying process. And this science is evolving, but what's really exciting is the emerging research on what I've called the microglia. I didn't call it. But that's what they're called. These are the brain's immune cells. And when they're balanced, they are protecting, they are repairing. Well, when they're dysregulated, and we can talk about why that happens, and we do talk about it in the book, they can drive inflammation and lead to brain degeneration, often long before symptoms appear. And here's the empowering part. These microglial cells are deeply influenced by your day-to-day lifestyle choices, your nutrition, your sleep, your environment. And in the new book, Brain Defenders, I share both the science and provide a practical roadmap that'll help you calm inflammation, support supportive microglia, and really ultimately take control of your brain's destiny. And if you preorder your copy today at braindefenders.com, you can receive some special bonuses like a sneak peek at chapter 1, the full glossary for the book, And curated offers from my favorite brain health products, many of which I've discussed here on the podcast. This is a new way of thinking about brain health, and I truly believe that this book hopefully is going to change everything. I can't wait for you to read it, and I think you're going to be as excited as I am about the information you're about to receive. That said, let's get right back to our podcast. Parkinson's is pretty much a preventable disease. Think about that. When you have the diagnosis of Parkinson's, you are given medication to treat the symptoms. We don't really have any meaningful treatment for Parkinson's as it relates to the actual disease, which is pretty much human-made. We'll leave it at that. Today we're going to be talking to Dr. Ray Dorsey, author of this exciting New York Times bestseller called The Parkinson's Plan, a terrific book. Dr. Dorsey has been on the podcast now 2 other times talking about the relationship of Parkinson's risk to things in our environment like pesticides, like herbicides, and importantly, what we can do to lower our risk. Let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Dorsey. Dr. Ray Dorsey is the director of the Center for the Brain and the Environment at the Atria Health and Research Institute. The center's mission is to identify the root causes of brain diseases from autism to Alzheimer's so that we can prevent them. With his colleagues, he wrote Ending Parkinson's Disease And the book we are going to talk about today, The Parkinson's Plan, which details a new path to preventing and treating this terrible disease. This is going to be an exciting and very meaningful program. We're going to learn a lot of information from Dr. Dorsey. Let's jump right into our interview. Dr. Ray Dorsey, it's great to see you again. How are you doing?

I'm doing very well. It's a delight and an honor to be with you.

Well, I'm very, uh, very excited about your book. Uh, it's a bestseller from what I understand, as it should be. And again, for those of the audience who have not seen our previous times together, you are taking a position that Parkinson's is optional. I mean, we tend to live in a world where we think pretty much everything is genetic. If mom or dad have it, I'm destined or likely. And you make the point that pretty much as it relates to Parkinson's, while we know there are some risk-related genes, like Lark 2, et cetera, that pretty much, at least in terms of what you're telling us, your messaging is that this is a man-made condition. It's an environmentally related condition. So let's start with that, and then we're going to get— our viewers love to get into the weeds, so we're going to definitely need to do that. Let's paint the broad strokes at first about Parkinson's being an environmentally related disease.

Yeah. So, um, First, let's think what a man-made disease is. Diseases come and go. Diseases aren't with us forever. We didn't really get infectious diseases until people started living close to one another after the agrarian revolution. And we didn't start getting chronic diseases, really many chronic diseases, until the industrial revolution. Even when you and I were in medical school, you know, type 2 diabetes was rare. Obesity was rare. Autism was rare. Ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease were rare. And Parkinson's disease, according to Dr. James Parkinson, when he wrote the major description of the disease in 1817, he said this is a disease that's not been classified in the medical literature. He writes what he in all likelihood thinks is a new disease. He describes 6 people with the disease in 1817 amongst the Industrial Revolution in London, the capital, with London fog obscuring his vision. And 200 years later, the global burden of disease says that 6 million people have the disease. So you go from disease affecting 6 people in London to affecting 6 million people in 200 years. Can't be genetics. And we'll talk about that in a second. And it's growing faster than aging alone could explain. So it's likely a manmade disease. And there are lots of these manmade diseases. Lung cancer in 1900 in the United States just simply almost did not exist. There was almost no lung cancer in New York City. There was no lung cancer. In the United States, and it was considered a once-in-a-lifetime oddity. All the doctors and medical students would gather around seeing a case thinking they would never see another case. Unfortunately, 25 years after cigarettes were introduced around 1900 in the United States, you see a corresponding rise in lung cancer. Smoking in the U.S. peaks in 1970. 25 years after its peaks, you see a corresponding decline. Even today, 80 to 90% of lung cancer in the United States. is in people who smoke. If you don't smoke, you're really highly unlikely to get lung cancer. The same is for Parkinson's disease. So a great study done by the Parkinson's Foundation, it's called PD Generation. It offers free genetic testing and genetic counseling, genetic counseling and genetic testing to anyone with Parkinson's disease in the United States. Your listeners can go to the Parkinson's Foundation website, pdgeneration.org. And they can sign up to participate. And they, in last year in a journal called Brain, which, you know, is one of the top journals in the field, they looked at the genetic testing results of the first 8,000 individuals with Parkinson's disease. Of that 8,000, 13% can carry a genetic cause or genetic risk factor for the disease. Said another way, 87% of Americans with Parkinson's disease, The vast majority of Americans with Parkinson's disease have no known genetic cause or risk factor for the disease. The principal cause of Parkinson's disease for most Americans, and in all likelihood for most people around the world and large portions of the world, principal cause for this disease lies not within us, not in our genes. It's outside of us in our environment.

We could end the podcast there. Obviously we're not going to. We're going to talk about what it is in the environment. Uh, that's leading to Parkinson's. But that was so important what you just stated. I mean, the fact that we're seeing so many more cases, that incidence and prevalence are both increasing, indicates this is not genetic. Let's be clear, because our genome isn't changing. Our genome hasn't really had any major changes in tens of thousands of years, but suddenly something has happened. James Parkinson talked about this. In 1817 that there's something going on here. And as you say, 6 million cases around the world, probably a lot more. It seems as if we are underestimating and have underestimated the prevalence of Parkinson's.

True. Yeah. And so that estimate was from 2017. In 2000, for 2021, it's estimated it's 11.8 million. My colleague Michael Anokhin and some of my other colleagues, we've been writing papers projecting the rise of Parkinson's disease. And every time we get a little flag from our colleagues who think we're being a little hysterical— might be a little strong word, but—

You know, here's my observation as a neurologist. I see Parkinson's everywhere— in the airport, at the gym. It's, uh, it really, uh, is, I think, much more prevalent than we want to admit. But having said that, you're relating it to exposures in our environment, which we, we will talk about. In our previous time together, and I don't want to spend that much time on it this time, we talked about trichloroethylene, TCE, a solvent used in any number of industries and also something that made its way into our groundwater from its use in dry cleaning. That said, its use is significantly curtailed, if not eliminated at this point, but nonetheless, it seems to persist in the environment. Is that true?

Yeah, so this is trichloroethylene. It's simple. Water's 3 atoms, H2O. Trichloroethylene is 6 atoms, 2 carbons, 1 hydrogen, and then 3 chlorine atoms in blue, hence its name, trichloroethylene. It's got a cousin, perchloroethylene. It's got 1 additional chlorine atom. If you're dry cleaning your clothes in the United States and you live outside of California, you're likely using it, a dry cleaning chemical. These 2 chemicals have been associated in a twin study with a 500% increased risk of Parkinson's. The EPA banned their use in 2024, calling for a 10-year phase-out for both of them. That ban has been frozen. The fate of that ban is a little bit unclear to me. We need to make sure that that ban goes into place because this chemical is known to cause cancer and likely causes Parkinson's. And

well, look, glyphosate is known to cause cancer and may cause Parkinson's. And yet what's going on with that?

Yeah. So glyphosate is associated with cancer, uh, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I think I'm not so sure about its relationship to Parkinson's. I don't even think all pesticides necessarily are contributing to Parkinson's. I strongly suspect that many are not, but these chemicals that are all damaged the energy producing parts of cells and neurons and nerve cells that called mitochondria. And as you know, they take energy and they take sugar and convert it to energy. So all the pesticides that have been linked to Parkinson's, many of the pesticides linked to Parkinson's disease, paraquat, chlorpyrifos, these chemicals and air pollution all damage the energy-producing parts of cells. And the cells that are most susceptible to disruption from mitochondrial toxins are nerve cells. And within, among nerve cells is those nerve cells in the part of the brain called the substantia nigra that are lost or damaged that are likely have enormous energy requirements. So these chemicals like trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene, dry cleaning chemicals, certain pesticides and air pollution, all damaging energy-producing parts of cells, all likely increasing your risk for Parkinson's.

You talk quite a bit about paraquat. Paraquat is an herbicide, and this specifically damages mitochondrial function and has been used in the experimental laboratory in animals to actually create Parkinsonism in experimental animals. So it can be studied. 72 countries or maybe more around the world have either banned it outright or significantly curtailed its use. But that's not the case in America.

Yeah. So I want to pick up on animal models and I'll tell you a little bit more about piroquat and what we've been listening, what we've been hearing. So Parkinson's disease is also not an inevitable consequence of aging. It is an unnatural consequence of aging. If you put a mouse in the laboratory and let it age, it does not spontaneously develop Parkinson's disease, nor for that matter does it develop Alzheimer's disease. The only way that mouse will develop Parkinson's disease is if you either, one, manipulate its genes, or two, expose it to toxic chemicals. And one of the first models, as you know, of Parkinson's disease was exposing laboratory animals to paraquat. And academic researchers did those experiments in the 1990s. According to reporting from The Guardian, uh, it appears that a manufacturer of paraquat did those experiments with 3 different mammals: mice, right, mice, uh, rats, and rabbits in the 1960s. So at least evidence from academics for 30 years and possibly from the manufacturer for 60 years knows that when you expose laboratory animals to paraquat, they develop the features of Parkinson's, including a tremor. Now, paraquat is widely sprayed in the United States according to reporting from the, from Carrie Gillum. I think tripled amount of use in the last 8 years according to the US Geological Survey, doubling the amount of use in the last 5 years for which data are publicly available. I've been on a listening tour tied to this book. I met 2 people, one in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one in Dallas, Texas, who has Teenagers, their job was holding a flag, telling crop dusters where to spray their pesticides.

Now it's drones.

Yeah, but this used to, you know, you know, 60 years ago, 50 years ago, how would a plane know where to, pre-GPS, how's a plane know where to spray its pesticides? You had people out there with flags doing it. And that was their job as a teenager earning a few extra bucks and usually from a family connection. Families don't know that this is, you know, putting them at risk for Parkinson's. And I think there's also another thing to that is that the seeds of these neurodegenerative diseases, the seeds of Parkinson's disease, the seeds of these adult-onset neurodegenerative diseases are planted early. So one thing we really highlight in the book is that early exposures are important. If you don't want your children, if you don't want your grandchildren to get Parkinson's disease, one great way to do that is to minimize or avoid exposure to certain pesticides, Avoid and minimize exposure to toxic dry cleaning chemicals like perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene, and minimize exposure to air pollution.

Well, you've made a point, I don't think it was on my podcast, on a different podcast that it's sometimes hard to make the connection between exposure and the ultimate development of the disease because it's many years down the line, much as cigarette smoking for 10, 15 years, nothing happens. Then, Ultimately, you get a chest X-ray that shows a mass. And I think you've made it very clear that a lot of the exposures happen in our younger years. You talked about how at Camp Lejeune exposure, the average age there, I think, was in the mid-20s, 26, 28. And these were young people. Yeah, these are young people who are—

Some were teenagers.

Yeah. And kids in elementary school, the children of these servicemen as well, that And you may not know right off the bat, but, you know, I think this, this connection is very clear. And I think that, let me just summarize what we've just talked about, that paraquat banned in 72 countries around the world because it's so damn dangerous, is still used in the United States. My last citation that I could find was 2018. I think data is coming out this year from the U.S. Geological Survey, but that was 11 million pounds. of paraquat used, more and more being used because crops are becoming Roundup resistant. So they're becoming— the glyphosate is less effective. Now they're having to switch over to paraquat, which is something used in the laboratory to create models of Parkinson's in laboratory animals. What is wrong with this picture? Hey everyone, we're going to get right back to the podcast, but I have an important message for you. If you're caring for somebody with Alzheimer's, any other form of dementia, or even what we call mild cognitive impairment, or maybe you've received one of these diagnoses yourself, or if you're focused on preventing cognitive decline, I want to speak directly to you for just a moment about some serious research that's going on looking at what we call 40 Hz light and sound simulation. We've been actually talking about that on the program. Here's the challenge. Not all 40 Hz light devices are the same. Most use what's called stroboscopic light. And that's the type of light that flashes, then you can see the flashing. And that can cause nausea, it can cause headaches. And if you can't tolerate that, you won't use it. So, there is a company called OptoCeutics. They've solved this problem with a patented technology that still gives you the 40 hertz light flashing, but through light that looks and feels quite normal. It's the device I actually have on my desk when I'm working. And that's why this company sees a 94% adherence rate and significant improvements across various metrics, including mood, energy, focus, sleep, and memory. And the light is called the Evy light, E-V-Y. You can use it as I do when you're working on your computer, when you're reading, when you're watching TV, eating breakfast, whatever. It becomes really part of your day, not just another burden. It's kind of passive in the background. So, uh, I recommend giving it a try for 90 days, and if, uh, you and your family don't see value in it, then you can return the device for a full refund. They cover the shipping, uh, both ways, and you can learn more about OptoCeutics, uh, at optoceutics.com/perlmutter. You can use the code to get, uh, $200 savings. The code is PERLMUTTER, my last name, 26. Uh, this is a device, uh, that really is risk-free in terms of, uh, getting involved with. 40-hertz stimulation. Important information. Let's get right back to our podcast.

Yeah. So I was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Ms. Mary Tidwell shared with me this map, and this is of 27th Street in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which these homes were built on top of a former corn field. And there was a cornfield still next to the street. And she, Ms. Tidwell, developed Parkinson's disease, as did 7 other or 8 other people on her street in South Dakota. 8 other people on a small street in Sioux Falls, South Dakota developed Parkinson's disease next to cornfields that I think are being— that are possibly being sprayed with paraquat. It's there. And not only have 70 countries banned it, but China has banned it. You know, the stories that I'm hearing are just— I got an email today of someone whose sister impulsively drink paraquat and die. And she was wondering, she, her sister developed Parkinson's disease and wondering if that was contributing to her Parkinson's disease. The stories, you just keep hearing the same story over and over again. And you wonder yourself, when are we going to stop spraying the seeds of Parkinson's disease? When is the EPA going to ban paraquat? Why can't listeners to your great podcast email EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin? And say, dear Administrator Zeldin, thank you for your service. Please ban Paraquat so we can stop the rise of Parkinson's. His email address is zeldin.lee@epa.gov. These individuals, they work for us. And this isn't a partisan issue. I mean, I was in South Dakota. I was in Dallas. These are not hotbeds of liberalism. And we have an increasing recognition in society that chemicals in our environment are fueling the rise of chronic diseases. And Parkinson's disease is nothing but the poster child for that notion.

Probably the biggest poster child there is. You know, when you're talking about the politics, didn't Cory Booker introduce a law that in the House about calling attention to exactly what you and I are talking about right now?

Yeah. So, Senator Cory Booker, whose father has Parkinson's disease, has long been an advocate for the Parkinson's community, introduced legislation that would effectively increase regulation of pesticides. And ban paraquat. And these pesticides aren't just contributing to Parkinson's disease, you know, that's my passion, but we're both neurologists. And these pesticides, many of them are nerve toxins and they're linked to everything from intellectual disabilities. Dr. Virginia Rao here in Columbia University showed exposure to another pesticide called chlorpyrifos was sprayed inside the homes of people in New York City to kill insects. She finds that pesticide in the umbilical cord blood of children. She then follows these children. The higher their level in the umbilical cord blood, the lower the IQ at 3, 5, and 7. And then last month in JAMA Neurology, one of the top journals in the field, she does MRIs of these children now 6 to 15. The higher the level, the more structural brain abnormalities on MRI and the worse the motor function. So these pesticides are contributing to a wide range of neurological disorders, whether that's intellectual disabilities, Whether that's autism, whether that's ALS, whether that's Parkinson's disease. If we get stricter regulations, demand more, demand that pesticides be demonstrated that they're safe, just like we demand medications to be proven to be safe before we use them, we prevent kids from getting autism. We prevent kids from getting intellectual disabilities. We prevent ALS. We prevent Parkinson's.

Well, I mean, I'm careful not to steer into any, uh, political quagmire. But, there's been some suggestion recently that acetaminophen or Tylenol exposure in utero or early in life was the cause, is the syndiquinone cause of autism. But, I think what you're at least likely indicating here is that these are what you're talking about, the pesticide exposure, they're clear-cut mechanisms related to mitochondrial dysfunction. Yeah. That might more easily, uh, let us understand relationships. In other words, why, uh, children who, uh, live near agricultural concerns, for example, during their upbringing or whose mothers during pregnancy live near agricultural concerns are more likely to have autistic or be somewhere on the spectrum.

The evidence is clear. Um, there's a study done by Dr. Kimberly Paul and Dr. Beata Reitz from UCLA showed that simply living or working near where parabens is sprayed is associated with doubling of your risk of Parkinson's disease. Think back to Ms. Tidwell and her experience in South Dakota. There's great evidence, very consistent story with what the evidence is found. Dr. Virginia Rao finding that chlorpyrifos, when sprayed inside homes to kill insects, it's associated with lower IQ the higher the level. And think, you know, how do pesticides work? These pests— some of these pesticides work by damaging the nervous system. So, if we think like to antibiotics, well, how do antibiotics work? Well, they work by exploiting differences between bacteria and human cells. And so, they ideally kill bacteria, but we know that antibiotics have side effects on human cells. Well, what are pesticides doing? They're trying to kill insects and not kill human cells. Well, humans are a lot closer to insects, share a lot more similarities with insects than they do with bacteria. So, it's not terribly surprising that when you give a chemical that's Seeking to damage the nervous system of an insect, that it might have some toxic effects on the brain. And we're still spraying these pesticides. We spray pesticides, as I found out writing the book, routinely on kids' schools and playgrounds. And we have the audacity to ask why 1 in 31 8-year-old children have autism. Yeah. Well, if you're spraying indiscriminately nerve toxins on kids' playgrounds and schools, what does that mean for children? What does that mean for women? And women who are pregnant, many of these pesticides can cross the placenta. Many are found in breast milk. They're fat, they're fat loving, they love the fat. And so there are pesticides in the breast milk of nursing women that are then passed on to their children. And as you know, we normally have a nice blood brain barrier that limits it, but that blood brain barrier is very immature when in a fetus and it's very immature for children still. And if you get this much exposure to you or me, that may not be a big deal. But if you get that much exposure to a 12-year-old, to a 2-year-old, to a 2-month-old, to a fetus, you know, that's a lot. And so I think we just need to be mindful. Rachel Carson told us about this in 1962 in Silent Spring. She's crazy. She wasn't saying that pesticides are all bad. Listen, pesticides, including DDT, saved lots of people from getting malaria in World War II. What she is arguing is the indiscriminate use of pesticide. Why are we spraying nerve toxins on kids' playgrounds and schools? Kids like weeds.

Why are we spraying neurotoxins on the school grounds? I got another one for you. Believe it or not, we're spraying toxins on the food we eat. I'm being redundant here, as are you. I'm asking you to be, that the use of these herbicides going on the very food that we then eat. Something is tragically wrong with this picture. I mean, people can get excited about red dye or who knows what next week's going to bring, but here's a case where we're spraying poison on our food. I mean, that's as, and it's related to a significant increased risk for Parkinson's, a disease for which we have no meaningful treatment. I've said that many times and raised a lot of eyebrows. And the reason I say that, because we have wonderful drugs, as you well know, to treat symptoms of Parkinson's. We can treat tremor, we can treat rigidity, we can treat even some of the psychological issues that accompany Parkinson's, the dryness of the mouth, you name it. But when it gets to treating the fire, not just the smoke, we're really at a bit of a loss. Although I have to admit, the recent reports coming out in the New England Journal related to GLP-1 treatment are kind of encouraging. But that said, You know, Ray Dorsey's, uh, mission is to prevent this disease in the first place. That's why you're speaking to us today and giving us the tools. And so maybe, uh, we should be eating as organically as we possibly can.

100%. The fire is raging, right? So if the, if you see a fire, what's the last thing you want to do to a fire?

Add fuel.

Add fuel to it. So one way perhaps to stop this fire, to slow this fire, is to stop being exposed to these chemicals. Perhaps that can modify the disease course. Perhaps if you stop getting exposed to pesticides, you might have a slower rate of progression of Parkinson's disease than if you're still getting exposed. Perhaps if you add a water filter, if you stop drinking from well water or test your well, make sure it's not contaminated, or stop using dry cleaning chemicals like trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, or stop getting exposed to air pollution, you might slow your rate of progression. And indeed, there are studies that have demonstrated that people who who already have Parkinson's disease who are exposed to the pesticides have a faster rate of progression. And there are studies that suggest that individuals who already have Parkinson's disease who are exposed to high levels of air pollution are more likely to be hospitalized for their Parkinson's disease. I think we're missing the boat that we can modify the disease course by stopping the fire, stop fueling the fire by stopping getting exposed to these chemicals.

You've said before that if a person has lung cancer, what's the first thing you say to them? What do they got to do? Stop smoking. And it's, it's a perfect analogy here that you have to ask yourself, what are the causes of Parkinson's? And now that you've been diagnosed, you need to stop fueling the fire, to use your words. So, um, let's get to some practical points then. Uh, you say you shouldn't dry clean your clothes. Well, you do. And, uh, you bring them home inside a plastic bag in your car, I might add. How can you change that, uh, to make it less threatening?

Yeah, so I didn't say stop dry cleaning. I said use dry— these dry cleaning chemicals. I don't want the dry cleaning industry after me. Uh, so, uh, I'm sure they're after you. Find a green dry cleaner or a dry cleaner that does not use perchloroethylene. It's often called perc, uh, P-E-R-C, in the dry cleaning industry. Call up the dry cleaner, do you use perc? Find one that doesn't. And then that— but if you do are using dry cleaning, these— the chemicals are still in the shirts or the pants or the dress. And they off-gas it. And so when you put it into your car, if you pick up your dry cleaning from a dry cleaner, you're now breathing in that chemical in your car on your way home. When you bring it inside your home, it's now inside your home and it's now inside your house. I spoke to a woman who was fastidious in her cleaning and she had rows of dry cleaning chemicals. And her boyfriend said, when I walked in there, I smelled like I was in a dry cleaner until I got Parkinson's disease. I can't say that's why, but, you know, these are just anecdotes. So if you do use one, you're going to use a green dry cleaner, one that doesn't use PERC. But 2, if you're still using one that does, take your dry cleaning, take the plastic off, let it off-gas in your garage before bringing it into your home.

And you're a huge proponent of eating organic food.

Yeah. So 20% of common foods have residues of pesticides. And when the federal government determines whether, uh, measures the residue of a pesticide, for example, in an apple, they do so after it's held underwater for 15 to 20 seconds.

These are oil-soluble pesticides though.

Yeah.

I eat fat-soluble.

Some are fat-soluble. So what I do is I get, I have a glass bowl. I put my apples in there and I put cold water and I put a little soap. Uh, so basically just like we take a bath with soap and water, I give my apples a bath with soap and water. I get a thing of vegetable wash for less than $4 at the grocery store. It lasts me 6 months, and I wash my, all my apples before they do to wash off not only the water-soluble, the water-loving pesticides, but the fat-loving pesticides, which might be more a concern when you're thinking about brain disease.

We're hearing a lot about so-called PM2.5s. This is the particulate matter that constitutes a form of air pollution, certainly after wildfires. There's been a lot of discussion lately about PM2.5 and Alzheimer's risk and Parkinson's risk. The fact that these particles, when ingested, increase inflammation in the brain. What can we do to protect ourselves as it relates to these particles?

So when you're looking at smog, what are you seeing? You're seeing little pieces of dirt and soot that are suspended in the air. Most are large enough that we cough them out or sneeze out. But some are so small, they're 2.5 microns, 1/1,000th of a millimeter. They're a 30th the width of my hair. And some directly penetrate the nerve responsible for smell. And they're like a Trojan horse. They're not carrying in troops, but they're carrying in toxic metals into the brain. Lead from gasoline, iron from brakes, platinum from catalytic converters. And many of these toxic metals have been associated with misfolding of proteins. A protein called alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's disease, a protein called beta amyloid in Alzheimer's disease. And the pathology for most individuals, the pathology of both these diseases begins in the nose with misfolded protein and then spreads backwards to the parts of the brain that control motor function in Parkinson's and backwards to the part of the brain that controls memory in Alzheimer's disease. And we know one of the earliest features of both these diseases is loss of smell. And which precedes the memory loss and tremor by years, if not decades. We have lots and lots of increasing circumstantial evidence and epidemiological evidence and laboratory evidence that air pollution is contributing to the rise of neurodegenerative diseases. If you want to live a short, unhealthy life with an impaired brain, breathe polluted air. If you don't, get really, really serious about clean air, air purifier in your home, like in your living room and your bedroom. Rolling up your window when you're in traffic, recirculating the air in your car. And let's get serious about cleaning the air in our society. I live in Manhattan, which has much cleaner air quality today than it did 8 years ago because they've taken steps around management of traffic. And these all things will have enormous health benefits for us, especially for our children and our grandchildren, and will save us tons of money. The economic burden of Parkinson's disease in the United States is $50 billion. I think the economic burden of Alzheimer's disease is $300 billion. Why are we wasting all our money on Medicare and Medicaid paying for conditions that we can prevent and prevent people from needing nursing homes, prevent people from profound suffering, allow people to enjoy their golden years, not only without these diseases, but not caring for someone with one of these diseases and let them enjoy and form great relationships with their grandchildren.

Back in 1982 into '83, Dr. Langston, a neurologist at Stanford, was confronted by individuals in the emergency room who had suddenly developed Parkinson's seemingly out of the blue. Detective work he engaged revealed that they had all gotten a drug that was synthetic heroin. And here's part of the story you may not know, and that is that he went to the Stanford library to determine how to make heroin synthetically. And the page that showed that, how to do that, was torn out of the chemistry book. Did you know that part of the story?

No.

Anyway, I just read that the other day. Kind of interesting. Anyway, so it turns out that they discovered that a contaminant, if you will, of the synthetic heroin, MPTP, induced Parkinsonism immediately in these people, and they seemed to respond to the standard of treatment in terms of medication. The reason I'm going there is This is a mitochondrial toxin, as is paraquat. Yeah. And, but what was interesting is 13 years later, one of the patients passed away and he examined the brain of this patient. What he found was an ongoing immune response by cells in the brain called the microglial cells digesting away the part of the brain that's the center of Parkinson's. the substantia nigra, that here were these immune cells that were activated, that had presumably been activated for 13 years now, but still ongoing even long after that MPTP had been— the brain had been exposed to it. So what do you think is going on that keeps the immune system in this pro-inflammatory, pro-destructive mode, the M1 microglia? Uh, that is induced by this, uh, event that threatens, uh, mitochondrial function.

Uh, so first shout out to Dr. Bill Langston, who's still living, a neurologist who was, you know, you know, just sitting there doing his everyday job. And he was just like Dr. James Parkinson. He was struck by something new, something novel, something that didn't make sense. And he went and figured it out, found the first environmental cause of the disease. So when, when we prevent Parkinson's disease, it's because of people like Dr. Bill Langston, Dr. Caroline Tanner, Dr.

Barry, and Dr. Red Dorsey. Credit where credit is due.

Who are, who are, uh, laid foundation for the work that we're doing. So I'm not sure about for NPTPs, the chemical that you were alluding to that damages. Let me say what I think might be going on. I'm not a laboratory scientist. What I think might be going on for traditional, uh, Parkinson's disease from environmental causes. I think it triggers misfolding of a protein. Uh, Dr. Heiko Brock in 2003 said that misfolded protein, he didn't say this, but he said misfolded protein spreads from nerve cell to nerve cell, which we now know. He says it's like a fall of a row of dominoes, and that process has been triggered and it's ongoing. The first thing we need to do is stop ongoing exposure so we stop fueling that fire, so we diminish or mitigate the damage that's been done. Just like you stop smoking a cigarette, within a year your risk of heart disease is down, within 10 years your risk of lung cancer is halved. Second, there's an activation of the immune immune system, microglia, and others. So I think the second thing you need to do if you have Parkinson's disease is you need to exercise and kind of combat that by releasing growth factors that protect the remaining nerve cells. Exercise, vigorous exercise, enough to make you sweat if your heart can handle it, talk with your doctor, likely to release growth factors that might have a beneficial effect on modifying the progression of the course because the pathology, the cell Inflammatory response, immune response is ongoing. We'd want to try to see if we can dampen it. People have looked at medications, largely not been shown to be helpful, but exercise largely been shown to be helpful. So that's the second thing that we can do. And I think it just argues that this is not a fait accompli, that we can still modify the disease course. This is ongoing, just like with a tumor. It turns out that exercise can help decrease your risk of recurrence of colon cancer in a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. If exercise can decrease your risk of cancer recurrence, what can it do for Alzheimer's disease? What can it do for Parkinson's disease?

Well, these activated microglial cells are pro-inflammatory. They're spitting out these inflammatory cytokines that influence neighboring microglial cells. And this becomes, you know, a bit of a feed-forward cycle. But I think primarily what happened was there was a mitochondrial injury. A mitochondriopathy was induced. Complex I of electron transport was damaged by this assault by this MPP+, actually, the metabolite of MPP. That said, there was interest—

Kudos to Dr. Perlmutter. He's not even a Parkinson's specialist, I don't believe, but he's got this down like—

I find it very interesting. And I find Dr. Langston's work, it's detective work and it's brilliant. That said, I think this is what motivated clinicians early on or researchers, then clinicians, to explore the idea of upregulating mitochondrial function with things like coenzyme Q10 and NAC and glutathione, et cetera. And, I think the results, at least with CoQ10, were initially somewhat promising, but it wasn't really the home run that we were looking for.

Yeah. And, The last trial showed no benefit. Now, that was at that dose in those individuals. But, you know, mitochondrial health is really important for brain diseases and likely others. And so, listen, Peter Attia was just on 60 Minutes last night, and, you know, things that can keep your mitochondria healthy is a good way to live a long, healthy life.

Yeah. You know, and the fact is that this may also explain why exercise is helpful in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are mitochondropathies, face it. Uh, because you're increasing mitophagy, the really getting rid of defective mitochondria, and you're, you're actually improving mitochondrial biogenesis and building better new mitochondria.

I think one thing to highlight for your audience is that nerve cells don't regenerate by and large. And so they're obligate recyclers. They, they don't have the option of dying. Like, you know, when I go like this, my skin cells die and it's fine. The liver cells, they can die. Kidney cells can die and they can get replaced. Brain cells largely can't be replaced. So they are very, very, very, very, very, very susceptible to the injury. They're really, really responsible. They have to be good recyclers and using the lysosome to recycle and mitophagy. So they're really vulnerable to toxins, especially ongoing exposure to these toxins. We need to help out our brain if we already have these diseases by stopping exposure, by exercising, by getting really good care. And we can, we need to protect our brains and be vigilant. If we want to live to have meaningful relationships with our grandchildren, like Dr. Peter Ortiz says, we need to be mindful of what we're getting exposed to today and what our children and grandchildren are getting exposed to today.

So this relationship, I think, to the microglia that Dr. Langston pointed out is interesting because, uh, do you think there's a relationship there between that observation And the idea that type 2 diabetics who have metabolic issues, presumably insulin playing an important role in microglial metabolism, uh, type 2 diabetics have about perhaps a 40% increased risk of Parkinson's, or maybe you have some other way of interpreting that statistic.

Yeah. So I'm not an expert, but, uh, on the inflammatory, uh, condition, Dr. David Standard at the University of Alabama Birmingham is studying The inflammation in Parkinson's disease is expert. Dr. Alistair Noyes has really been educating me about the role of diabetes. So, and this became the world's expert, one, one expert right here and Dr. Perlmutter. So diabetes unfavorably changes the course of Parkinson's disease. I don't think I could be wrong. I don't think diabetes in and of itself causes Parkinson's disease. I think it's a potent modifier of disease. And that high blood glucose is not good for the brain. We know that for Alzheimer's disease and dementia, and it's not good likely for Parkinson's disease. So one of our recommendations, we have 25 recommendations in the back of the book to lower your risk of getting Parkinson's and to modify, hopefully modify its disease course or slow its progression, is to avoid getting diabetes. If you have diabetes, manage it strictly so you avoid high levels of

So, you have a name for that 25 recommendations in the back of the book, and I didn't write it down. What is the name of that? Parkinson's 25.

Parkinson's 25. And so, if you don't like to read, you just go to page 237 of the book and you can do the Reader's Digest.

Responsive reading. Here we go.

I won't be concerned. I won't mind. Not everyone likes to read like David and I do. And, you know, like the first one is, as David alluded to, was wash your produce, even your organic ones. And number 5 is avoid or at least manage your diabetes. And all very simple, easy digestible, 150 words or less. And many of these things cost no money. Some cost a little bit of money and they can, you know, reduce your risk of getting Parkinson's and likely modify your disease progression. And we want everyone to know about this because If you have Parkinson's, for among the 1.2 million people with Parkinson's, why not slow that progression? And that's just in the US.

Well, I mean, you mentioned some very practical tips like washing your vegetables with soap, uh, what, whatever type of, you know, good soap, maybe vinegar

or salt. There's lots of the other options as well.

Okay. Now we've, we've talked about the literature that shows that if you live near agricultural, uh, agricultural concern, you have an, and they're using this Some various types of herbicides and/or pesticides. There is some literature suggesting living near a golf course might also be threatening. How does that work?

So golf courses are huge consumers of pesticides, up to 80 times as much pesticide per acre of land than a farm. And my colleagues, Dr. Brittany Krasnowski at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix and Dr. Rodolfo Savicka, Mayo Clinic, a neurologist like David and me. They looked at the incidence, number of new cases of Parkinson's in Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic is located, where they have really good data on number of new cases. And they found using sophisticated mapping of golf courses that individuals who lived within 1 mile of a golf course had a 126% increased risk of developing Parkinson's compared to people who lived 6 miles or more away. A doubling of your risk if you lived within a mile of a golf course. And they're not the first to do that. There was a report, a small report, case report panels of neurology, maybe a decade ago, found, 2 neurologists found about 18 people who lived around a golf course had Parkinson's disease, and 15 of them lived downwind. I really, really get concerned about what we're inhaling. I think the nose is the front door to our brain. We talked about that particulate matter that can penetrate the smell nerve response for smell and lead to misfolding of protein in the smell center of the brain. I really get worried about trichloroethylene or perchloroethylene being inhaled. And I really get concerned about pesticides being inhaled because as we mentioned before, you normally have this blood-brain barrier, but where's the weak point? I think the weak point is right underneath our nose. And that allows these chemicals to get into our brain. And damage nerve cells.

And let's be clear, as we age, our blood-brain barrier becomes less efficient in terms of screening things out. But, you know, there's an important message there that if you have a choice to live near the, you know, the 16th fairway, uh, which, you know, maybe for many people that's considered their goal of life or not. I mean, what you're telling us is that this is a situation in which huge amounts of toxic and potentially Parkinson's-producing chemicals are applied and are oftentimes aerosolized. And we're— you're going to breathe that stuff. And it's— who wants to increase their odds of this disease, as we mentioned, that doesn't have any fundamental treatment available for us yet? Hey, we're going to get right back to the podcast, but I do have an important message. You know, for decades we've been told that our genes are basically our destiny as it relates to health, and that everything's locked in place predicting even our future brain health. But let's be clear, your DNA isn't a verdict, it's a roadmap. And I'm talking to you today about 3X4 Genetics. I actually described them in the new book, Brain Defenders. And this is a company that helps you understand your genetics, what you've inherited, and I think more importantly, how your daily choices can influence how those genes are actually expressed. In other words, how you can control your own genetic expression. And you know, that matters for your health and it really matters for brain health, including things like memory and mood and cognitive resilience. You may carry genetic markers associated with cognitive decline, like as we've talked about APOE4, but possession doesn't equal expression. Your lifestyle, your nutrition and metabolic health, all the things that we talk about here on the podcast can powerfully influence which genes are turned on and which stay quiet. The 3x4 Genetics Test looks at how your genes impact brain function at a cellular level, and which then through the 3x4 Health Journey, which they provide you, guides you through a clear and a science-backed program focused on inflammation, methylation, oxidation, oxidative stress, things that we routinely discuss here on the podcast that are the key drivers of basically what makes a good brain go bad. And we have spoken with the team at 3x4 Genetics, and they were able to get a special offer for our podcast community. So, head on over to 3x4genetics.com/DrPerlmutter and get that special offer and start really your personalized brain health journey today. Let's get your genes working for you, and let's get back to the podcast.

Can I read you a little story?

Absolutely. I'd love to hear a story.

So this is on golf. Beginning at age 10, Carl Robb, a tech entrepreneur, lived in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina, right next to the 13th hole, not the 16th hole, but the 13th hole of a golf course. If it rained, golfers would cross his family's white picket fence and take shelter under their covered porch. As a teenager, Carl was looking for a summer job and joined the golf course's sod squad. Every morning, he'd up and redo the greens and repair divots on the course. He liked the camaraderie of the team and the opportunity to play tennis after work. At age 17, Carl's left foot started to twitch. Then he noticed that he dragged his left foot and that the wear on his tennis shoe was uneven. His voice became softer, and family members would tell him to sit straight. Carl was concerned. In the era before the internet, he started visiting the library. He read medical books and became convinced that he had a brain tumor. He saw 9 doctors over 6 years before being diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 23.

Age 23.

And this isn't a lot. This isn't the only story. Uh, remember I told you I was in South Dakota with Mary Tidwell and there were like 6 people in the room. One woman from age 0 to 20 was living next to a golf course, would play golf up to 3 times a day. She said that, you know, her shoes would get soaked with water and presumably pesticides because she was always walking on the golf course. And I've heard just story after story. Actually, the day that study came out about Dr. Krasnowski's study, I saw someone with Parkinson's disease and it turned— I always ask people how they might've got Parkinson's. He lived next to a golf course. And so I can't prove that that's why they got Parkinson's disease. I

can't prove it. Yeah.

But you get, you know, you get circumstantial evidence and you increasingly, and you get these scientific evidence. That study was published after this book came out that supports this notion. And it may not be the reason for one particular individual, but you hear the story enough and again and again and again, and it's getting really concerning. We're paying a high price so our clothes don't shrink with dry cleaning chemicals. And we're paying a high price for our greens to be super green, ultra bright green. If we If we used less toxic pesticides, if we sprayed less amounts, I'm sure golf courses— I highly suspect golf courses could get by with less pesticides. They could probably spray less frequently. They could at least do the courtesy of letting people who live or work near or study near where golf courses are when they're spraying, so people can take mitigating measures, shut their window, put an air purifier on, go out of town for the weekend. There's so many things that we can do that are very, very easy, inexpensive, and common sense and common courtesy to decrease our risk of getting brain diseases.

Yeah. So you're saying that living near agriculture, living near a golf course is associated with increased risk, at least in terms of the epidemiologic research. It's not a proof of causality, but beyond that, exposing experimental animals to these same chemicals causes them to get Parkinson's as opposed to the animals who were not exposed. I mean, it's, it's very much, uh, sounding like a smoking gun to me. And, you know, maybe you're wrong and maybe I'm wrong, uh, and it's really up to our viewers to make decisions. But, you know, we're doing the best we can to get this information out to people so they can think twice about, you know, some of these decisions that we make all the time about spraying our homes with pesticides.

And speaking of smoking, smoking guns, this is like secondhand smoke. We know the farmer who works with paraquat has 150% increased risk. And now we know that people who live or work near where that farmer sprays paraquat have 100% increased risk. We know from 3 studies have found that green space workers, like landscapers on golf courses, have increased risk of Parkinson's disease. And now we know that simply living near a golf course is associated with increased risk. Of Parkinson's disease. So you don't have to be the smoker to be at risk. You can be the secondhand recipient of it. You don't have to be the one applying the pesticides. You can be simply living or working or studying. There are schools that are located in agricultural areas near farms and be at higher risk. And we can prevent all of this. There are tons of things that we can do. We can use less toxic pesticides. Many of the pesticides that— paraquat's been around for 60 years. No one's putting their teenage daughter or teenage son in a car from the 1960s. Why are we allowing pesticides from the 1960s to be used when there are safer alternatives? If engineers can come up with safer cars, chemists can come up with safer pesticides.

Years ago, I had a patient come to see me. He was brought in by— he was the caddy to a very famous professional golfer. I don't really follow golf, but nonetheless, And he had ALS, the, the cat, he had ALS. And I, at that point, was researching then who gets ALS. Uh, it's actually, I think in many ways, some similarities to what we're talking about today. And I learned that one of the most highly rated occupations in terms of being, uh, related to risk of developing Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS was to be a professional soccer player. And the message wasn't to not play soccer. The message to me was maybe there's something on the soccer field and the golf course that could be related to increasing risk for developing, you know, this tragic disease. So, you know, there's, there's a lot there. Have you ever, uh, wondered or do you have any knowledge of what Michael J. Fox's risk may have been? Because he developed Parkinson's at a relatively young age as well.

So what Michael J. Fox has publicly said in an interview with Jane Pauley was one, that he thinks he got Parkinson's from exposure to some kind of chemical. And what's also been recorded in the New York Times is that he was part of a cluster of people with Parkinson's disease. 4 of the 100 people who worked on his TV show, the sitcom Leo and Me, Canadian sitcom before Family Ties, developed Parkinson's all at an early age.

Wow. I did not know that.

So 50 years after the first major description of Parkinson's disease came the first major description of ALS. And not until 1869 did Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of modern neurology, described ALS. It's hard to imagine to me that people with either untreated Parkinson's disease or untreated ALS would've escaped the attention of neurologists or physicians. It's, I mean, these are not subtle diseases. You know, you talk about seeing them, people walking the streets in airports and the streets of New York. I mean, ALS is almost impossible to miss in its latter stages of the disease. And then you mentioned the golfer. So there's, I told you there were 3 studies linking green space workers to Parkinson's. There's one study linking green space workers to ALS. And then as you mentioned, there are 3 studies, one in Italy, one in Spain, I believe, and one in Scotland linking soccer players to ALS. And they looked, I think the control group might've been volleyball players or basketball players who were not at increased risk. So what are these soccer players doing? Well, one, they're heading the ball, which obviously we know is not good for the brain, but they're also getting exposed to pesticides. And so they're getting exposed to pesticides on the fields by breathing them in, and maybe that's contributing to the upper motor neurons dying down. And then they're absorbed, then they're getting it on their skin, and some of these are fat soluble, so they get through the skin. And I wonder, I don't know, I wonder whether the skin's, these pesticides getting absorbed through the skin and killing off the nerve cells that go to the muscles, the lower motor neurons. So you're getting both damage. And ALS, 2 nerve cells are damaged. One, one that goes from the brain to spinal cord. We call that the upper motor neuron heading, inhaling the chemical, and one going from the spinal cord to the muscle, the lower motor neuron. So I wonder if soccer players are getting exposed to pesticides and contributing to loss of both sets of neurons.

I would very much agree with you. I think I would consider the heading of the ball to be a obviously a form of head trauma and would take us to a discussion of so-called pugilistic Parkinson's, uh, where, you know, people are familiar with Muhammad Ali, for example, uh, where repeated blows to the head, uh, sets up this feed-forward issue where these brain immune cells then become destructive. Um, so we see this with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, where Even though these NFL players are no longer playing football, they continue to deteriorate. It spreads. This inflammation spreads through the microglia like cancer. And interestingly, you know, it's a metabolic shift, much like in cancer we talk about the Warburg effect. The same sort of shift from mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation to glycolysis happens in these microglial cells once they're exposed to MPTP. Or other toxic exposure, or once they're challenged by trauma. So there are a lot of interesting mechanisms going on.

Can I just do one thing on pesticides and head trauma? Sure. So it turns out that exposure to paraquat increases your risk of Parkinson's. Head trauma, head trauma with loss of consciousness, increases your risk of Parkinson's. Together, they amplify the risk.

And then let's throw in some diabetes, a metabolic issue as well. Multiple hit hypothesis. So you had mentioned on somebody else's podcast, I don't remember who interviewed you, there were a couple of websites that you had said were very helpful for people. And I want to make sure that we get those up for people to go to, to get more information.

The organization that is doing a tremendous amount of work and doesn't get enough praise is the Environmental Working Group led by Ken Cook. Many of your listeners know about the Dirty Dozen, which highlights the foods that have the highest levels of pesticides on them. And I think it's the Clean or Nifty 15, which have lower levels. And they've done research, for example, showing that in a very, very, very popular cereal, one promoted for its health benefits, that they find residues of a pesticide in these cereals. And they just—

You're dying to tell me the name, aren't you?

I'm not. I don't name names. My goal in life is not to name the wrong people. My goal in life is prevent people from getting these diseases. But if these popular cereals are getting— have pesticide residues in them, what does it mean for other foods that might not be as health-oriented? And so they've done research study after research study. They look at your water, they look at your air, they give you recommendations for how to reduce your exposure to these chemicals in your water, how to reduce your exposure to getting it in your air. And they have research studies that are published in peer-reviewed journals. So if you want to go learn a lot about this, Ken Cook and Environmental Working Group are good. Kim Conti has Nontoxic Neighborhoods, which is trying to prevent use of pesticides on kids' schools and playgrounds. I mean, there are lots and lots. Vani Hari, the Fruit Babe, as she refers to herself, has some recommendations. You know, I didn't know about any of this stuff. Like, like you, we were probably not taught this stuff. We were quite frankly taught to be skeptical of it. And I'm saying to be skeptical, not, not to lose your informed skepticism. But I think people are out there trying to tell us that these chronic diseases, which were once rare or certainly less common than they are now, they're rising and diseases have reasons. Diseases have causes. If we find out what the causes of these diseases are, we take the first step to preventing these diseases. We take the first step to slowing them and we take the first step to curing them. We want cures for Parkinson's. We want cures for Alzheimer's. We want cures for ALS. The first step to curing a disease, at least medically, is to know what its cause is.

Well, I think that's very important.

We can cure where we don't know it's caused.

I think, you know, to be fair, in neurology school, we learned how to name a disease, what it looks like to make a diagnosis, and then what drugs to use to treat the symptoms, right? That's what we learned. There was at least, you know, I, I'm older than you and, 'cause I, I heard you mention that something was described in 1960. No, that about a certain pesticide. And you said you hadn't even been born then. So that said, the relationship I think was to Paraquat. So I'm, I'm older than you, but nonetheless, it was really, um, make the diagnosis and here are the handful of drugs that you can use to treat symptoms. There was never any discussion of preventive neurology.

Yeah, but one thing we neurologists really do for most neurological disorders is we ask why. So when someone has a stroke, we ask why they had a stroke, because that tells you how to prevent it and how to treat it. When someone has, has a headache, we Ask why. Because is the solution ibuprofen or is the solution brain surgery? It's entirely dependent on what the cause is. If someone has a seizure, we ask why, because we figure out, is this due to a fever or is this due to a brain tumor? I mean, we are really good generally in neurology about asking why. It's just for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS that we stop asking why.

We've got to count on you asking why.

Can we prevent, slow, And treat these diseases and get us faster, treat better treatments faster.

So in closing, I want to say I honor you for doing exactly that because, yeah, I think that you're motivated to some degree by curiosity as we are, but it's the doing right by your fellow man part that really is so important and is a bit rare. I mean, I think most of what goes on in neurology is treating symptoms. And there seems to be kind of a loss of that curiosity anymore. And I think your point is spot on about asking why, you know, Robert Kennedy, uh, senior, you said famously, some people see things as they are and ask why, and others see things as they could be and ask why not. And I think that's what you're doing. It's certainly, uh, you know, you're looking at that. That's what you're describing in this book is, uh, you know, why not give people the tools so they understand where this disease is coming from and what are those simple things that they can do? You know, a list of 25 things that people can be doing right now that clearly will reduce their risk for this disease that has no meaningful treatment right now.

And listen, what motivates me is what motivates you is that on our watch, brain diseases have become the world's leading source of disability. For 99.9% of human history, it has never been the case that brain diseases were the leading source of disability. And it's only in the last, you know, generation that this has come to be past. And there are reasons that 1 in 31 kids, American children have autism. There are reasons why ALS and brain cancer are increasing. There are reasons why Parkinson's is one of the world's fastest growing.

I didn't know that.

There are reasons why 1 in 3 85-year-olds, 1 in 3 85-year-olds will get Alzheimer's disease. That was never the case as far as we know in the past. There are reasons why dementia Lewy bodies was not described until 1976. Did we really miss dementia with Lewy bodies until 1976? There are reasons that these diseases are happening. If we find their root causes, if we clean up our air, if we clean up our food, if we clean up our water, if we listen to people like Dr. Perlmutter who says that Alzheimer's disease is not necessarily inevitable, it actually might be preventable. And the Lancet Commission says that 45% of Alzheimer's disease is potentially preventable. We can take steps to have us all live longer, healthier lives. Free of these terrible, terrible brain conditions that are plaguing us.

Yeah. You know, that Lancet report was actually quite interesting because they identified 14 modifiable factors and really, and most of them dealt with our metabolism. And I think metabolically, you know, about 6% of Americans, adults, is metabolically intact. Means about 94% of American adults has at least one issue related to metabolic syndrome. And that's That's a worrisome proposition right there.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much. As I said to David before he came on, he asked the best questions. He's the most prepared of all the interviewers. I have some fantastic podcasts I've been on, but no one reads more. No one's better prepared. No one asks better questions. And I think this is the 3rd time I've been on your show. I think probably together there's a million views on YouTube alone. So thank you very much for helping us spread the word, and thank you very much for helping us create a world with less Parkinson's disease, with less ALS, with less Alzheimer's disease.

Well, what a way to close. That was awesome. So great to see you again. I hope I get to run into you at a meeting. And, uh, you know, I clearly will say keep up the good work because we need you so desperately. Uh, we need your voice out there, and, uh, and it's, uh, it's very much appreciated.

Thanks very much, David.

Okay, bye for now. Well, that was a very interesting and, yes, an empowering, uh, interview with Dr. Ray Dorsey. Again, the book is The Parkinson's Plan. I would urge you to get this New York Times bestseller. We're all at risk. You know, it's not a genetic issue that we need to worry about because mom and dad did not have Parkinson's doesn't mean we're in the clear. As Dr. Dorsey made very understandable and very clear to all of us, the risk of Parkinson's is substantially increased when you are exposed to a variety of different toxic elements in the environment, many of which most of us are actually exposed to. Not infrequently. We talked about the relationship between living near a golf course, between being exposed to dry cleaning chemicals like trichloroethylene, and more recently, PERC, perchloroethylene. So these are things that we need to be thinking about. And again, it's not a genetic issue. If it were, then it wouldn't be increasing in its incidence and prevalence around us. So again, a very important book, and there were some very important websites mentioned in the podcast. Yeah. I would certainly take a look at these websites. And, you know, this program is all about empowerment. So thank you for joining me on this podcast. I'll be back soon. Bye for now.