In this segment of the interview, Speaker A outlines a framework for preserving brain function into advanced age, emphasizing the goal of aligning brain span with lifespan—potentially up to 140 years. He categorizes six key influences on neurodegeneration into three major drivers—energetics (oxygen, blood flow, mitochondrial health), inflammation (chronic infections such as Borrelia, Babesia, Porphyromonas gingivalis), and toxicity (environmental and lifestyle toxins including microplastics, COVID‑19 sequelae, mercury, air pollution, wildfire smoke, cosmetics, and ultra‑processed foods)—and three minor drivers (not detailed in the excerpt). The discussion stresses that optimizing these factors can reduce risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lewy body disease, and other dementias, and that neglecting them leads to cognitive decline well before the end of life.
Chapters
What the research has shown over the years is that there are basically 3 major players and 3 minor players when it comes to keeping your brain functional as you age. This includes avoiding Alzheimer's, avoiding Parkinson's, avoiding Lewy body disease, etc. If you focus and optimize those 6 things, you do better. Of course, our goal in the new book is to make it so that we can all have a brain span that is as long as our lifespan. If you're going to live to 99, you don't want your brain to stop at 60 or 70. You want it to be there just as long as yours. I often tell YPO members, who wants to live to 140? A lot of hands go up. And then I say, and spend half of that time in a nursing home with dementia? Of
course, you can't go back down.
We want to keep people sharp. The 3 big ones, as you know, are energetics. You've got to have the oxygen, you got to have the blood flow, you got to have the mitochondrial function. And that's what is decreasing in so many people. Second one is inflammation, whether it's from Borrelia, Babesia, P. gingivalis, whatever it is, if you've got ongoing inflammation in the brain, that is putting a greater load on the brain. It makes it harder for you to get that threshold. You've gotta bring your supply greater than your demand, and that's true for all of these neurodegenerative diseases. And the third one is toxicity. Unfortunately, now we're hearing all about microplastics and their compromise of brain function. COVID has been another big one. So many of the people that we see were doing pretty well with cognition until they got COVID, and now they're having more problems. Various toxins like mercury, air pollution has been a big one. And with the recent California fires, this is a concern for so many people. All the things that we're exposed to, from cosmetics to ultra-processed food that you've written so much about, these are all things that drag on what you're able to accomplish in your brain. So those are the big 3. Then the smaller 3 are—
