Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of functional
medicine.
I identify conditions other doctors miss by doing tests that most doctors don't do, usually
because your insurance doesn't want to pay.
Health insurance is actually, there's no such thing as health insurance.
What is called health insurance is actually medical insurance.
It pays for when you need medical care.
It doesn't pay.
There's no insurance that pays to keep you healthy.
There's no insurance that will pay for your gym membership or drinking healthier water
or eating better food.
It's medical insurance.
It pays for when you need medical care, kind of like your car insurance doesn't pay for
you to change your oil or do anything to increase the longevity and maintenance of your car.
It pays for when you crash your car.
Car insurance is for when you crash your car.
Medical insurance is for when you more or less crash your body.
That's unfortunate, but it's the nature of the health system that we have in America.
You do have to pay a little bit out of pocket for my services, but it's far less expensive
than you might imagine.
It's really important, especially as our subject again this week, continuing on last week's
subject is Alzheimer's and all forms of dementia.
It's really important to start early if you want to avoid the devastating effects of Alzheimer's
and any other form of dementia.
The reason for that, of course, is you can't go by symptoms.
That's what we do.
As human beings, if something hurts, then we know something's wrong.
If we feel fine, then we assume that we are fine.
That just doesn't work for brain degeneration, for any kind of neurological degeneration.
You don't feel the effects of loss of brain cells until you've lost a whole bunch of them.
You don't feel the effects.
You don't feel the first signs of memory loss or all the most common signs of dementia until
you've lost about 30% of that very important part of your brain where memories are encoded.
We naturally experience that when we see something here, something there, when something happens,
it just automatically gets recorded and stored.
It's a two-step process, and that first step where a memory goes through the hippocampus
and your brain decides where to file that memory, that's the part that stops working.
It's devastating more for the people who are caring for someone with dementia, more so
often for the family members, than it is for the person experiencing themselves, experiencing
the disease themselves, because we're just used to automatically storing memories.
It's not automatic.
Well, it is automatic, but it's a two-step process, and that first step is what goes
when you develop Alzheimer's.
There's several other forms of dementia.
The pharmaceutical industry is doing their best to try and find some drug that will reverse
the damaging effects, but they've come up cold so many times.
Billions of dollars have been spent trying to find a drug that will reverse the effects
of dementia.
It is important to distinguish if you're in a place where you need medication, then they're
going to try to decide you have vascular dementia, or Alzheimer's, the most common, or Lewy body
dementia, frontal lobe dementia.
There's several different forms of dementia that have different physiological mechanisms
that maybe someday will respond to drugs.
So far, the record is pretty bleak.
But for healing your brain, for doing the best you can in whatever circumstance you
find yourself in, healing the nerves in your brain, as with healing nerves anywhere in
your body, also involves correcting and reducing your risk of and healing your blood vessels,
and your heart, the pump that supplies the nutrients and oxygen to your brain.
That's so critically important.
So if you do nothing else, anyone that's starting to notice the first signs of dementia, or
if you have family members who had dementia, then start early.
Start in your 30s, start in your 40s if you're not already.
Two simple things anyone can do to reduce their risk of cognitive decline, the early
form of dementia, is exercise.
When you exercise, you get your heart pumping, and you get oxygen and all the other nutrients
that you choose to consume flooding your brain constantly, and keeping the cell turnover
in your brain at a minimum.
You're maintaining the brain cells you have.
And I'm going to talk a lot more on the rest of this show about how to do that, and how
to regain brain cells, even regenerate a certain amount of brain cells, especially by focusing
on supplying nutrients and oxygen to your brain cells.
But before I get into that, it's also really important.
A lot of people have heard, oh, it's great if I do crossword puzzles, or Sudoku, or things
that challenge my brain.
Well, anything that challenges your brain is a good way to maintain the connections
between the brain cells that you have.
And there's different ways to do that.
But the most effective way of maintaining and even generating new connections between
the cells you have, and this is really important.
Your brain's going to shrink as you get older, no matter what you do.
Even no matter how good you take care of yourself, there is a certain amount of loss of brain
tissue that is pretty much inevitable.
It is actually possible to reverse that, but it's very complicated, and most people are
not going to do what it takes to do that.
But to maintain the connections between the brain cells you have, this is a little bit
controversial, but one of the most powerful things you can do to maintain the connections
between the brain cells you have is to do things that are uncomfortable, to do things
that get you outside of your comfort zone, like public speaking, join a Toastmasters
club.
Just Google Toastmasters in your local area to find out where Toastmasters clubs are.
I've been a member of Toastmasters for many, many years.
It's a comfortable, safe space to learn certain techniques that make you more effective as
a speaker.
But most importantly, some people say that the greatest fear in life is public speaking,
more fearful than things that cause certain death.
I hope that's not true, because it's really not that hard to speak if you just practice
it a little bit.
But also, the point is, anything that gets you outside of your comfort zone that makes
you think on your feet extemporaneously causes your brain to generate more connections, to
establish more connections between your existing brain cells.
So talk about things.
Basically get into arguments with people.
Talk about things.
Try to persuade somebody to your point of view.
There's so much division in our country right now.
I hesitate to even say this.
But meet with people, basically.
Just have conversations with people and talk about things that maybe are a little bit uncomfortable
to talk about, that maybe challenge you.
Take a foreign language.
There we go.
That's a lot safer.
Take a foreign language course that forces you to learn how to say things differently
than you've ever said them before.
Anything that causes you to think on your feet, have to respond in real time to a question,
or forces you to learn a different way to form your point of view, that is going to
challenge your brain the most.
That is going to heal your brain, establish more connections between your brain cells,
and make it strong and resilient.
Far more than doing Suduko.
Suduko, however you pronounce that.
I've never done it.
Or a crossword puzzle.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
This week we're talking about reducing the risk factors for, and sometimes even reducing
the effects of, dementia, especially Alzheimer's.
On most episodes of this show I like to share a case study, a patient of mine that I've
treated that's had dramatic results from a certain condition to illustrate what's possible
for you, perhaps.
And as I said last week, I don't have a lot of those for dementia.
No dramatic sudden recovery of memory.
And the reason is because people start too late.
If you wait until you have severe signs of dementia, it's very difficult to reverse
that.
But everyone and every situation is different.
So there are no guarantees.
I'm never going to sugarcoat anything or offer any false promises, which is why I always
start any discussion of preventing and reversing dementia with three things.
Exercise, just go for a walk, get a pedometer, see if you're taking 5,000 steps a day, 10,000
steps a day.
Know what you have some kind of metrics so that you know if you're getting enough exercise
and you don't have to do anything fancy.
Weight training, any kind of resistance training is the healthiest for anybody of any age.
But just going for a walk is going to keep your heart pumping and keep it flooding nutrients
and oxygen to your brain.
Drink number two, drink three to four quarts of water a day, even if you're not thirsty.
This is huge.
This sundowner effect that you often hear about.
You have if you've had anyone who's ever had a loved one who's in a facility with dementia,
they often find that they're lucid in the morning.
They can they seem relatively normal.
They seem much better in the morning and then get worse as the day goes on.
And by the time sundown, it's there.
They've lost it again.
And a big part of that is just dehydration.
When you sleep, the water that you are drinking is evenly distributed, especially because
you're lying down and your body always is going to prioritize your brain.
It's the most sensitive organ to any nutrient deficiency and it requires 20% of the oxygen
that your heart pumps throughout your body.
And it will be basically rehydrated because you're lying down.
And then when you set up all day, if you're not drinking enough water, it becomes dehydrated
and the effect can happen in a matter of hours.
So always, always drink plenty of water.
And most people don't drink enough.
And it's important to understand that when you're not drinking enough water, you won't
feel thirsty.
You have to just force yourself basically to drink more water.
Most people should drink three to four quarts of water a day or three to four liters.
Bottled water comes in liters.
I recommend getting a high quality water filter so that you're getting water that's free of
nutrients and also free of the plastic that's in most bottled water.
But that's a whole other conversation.
But three to four quarts of water a day or just take your body weight and convert that
into ounces.
If you weigh 150 pounds, then 75 ounces of water, half of your body weight in ounces
is another good metric.
Number three, get the gene test.
I talked about this on last week's episode.
Know your risk factors.
You need to start early.
And so you need to have some kind of motivation to start early.
So get the A-P-O-E gene test.
It costs seven or $800 to send you to the LabCorp request to get this test, which is
what makes it such a great deal, for $149 to just get the 23andMe Health Panel, which
has over a dozen gene tests, thousands of dollars worth of gene tests for only $150.
So there are other things that can be done.
And so what I do for my patients who have early signs of dementia or worse, there are
a number of things.
No dramatic cures, but a number of things that can get improvements.
And even a slight improvement is often hope and can be life-changing.
One of my favorite products is relatively new from Designs for Health, a company that
makes some of the best products available.
It's called Senolytic Synergy.
And you know, lytic means cut or reduce, and seno refers to senility.
And senergy refers to the fact that many nutrients have synergistic effects.
They work together.
And it's interesting because senolytic senergy has curcumin, quercetin, red grape powder.
We've heard of most of these things, ginseng, but also fisetin.
And fisetin is a flavonoid, a plant-based, a plant nutrient from the Eurasian smoke tree,
also known as the Venetian sumac.
So curcumin, quercetin, red grape powder, fisetin, ginseng, and dog rose fruit.
So age, the passage of time, always involves cell turnover in every part of your body.
But certain stressors can increase the destruction of cells that need replacing.
And nutrients like this have been shown in multiple studies to reduce the damaging effects
of this normal process, especially in the brain.
So senolytic senergy by Designs for Health is one of my first go-to products for people
who have dementia or risk of dementia.
An even easier one to understand that everyone, well, hopefully, has at least heard of is
vitamin B12.
So metabolic vitamin B12 deficiency.
This is a research paper published by J. David Spence in the journal Nutrition Research,
Vitamin B12 Deficiency, a missed opportunity to prevent dementia and stroke.
So this man has published 515 papers with over 36,000 citations.
And the link, email me, I'll send you the link to it if you're interested in it.
But it's, it was fascinating for me to see this published and linked directly to dementia.
So measuring B12 levels is insufficient, he says.
Elevated homocysteine levels are a much better way to identify deficiency of B12.
Most physicians know about this.
A lot of doctors do order homocysteine levels because deficiency in B12 can increase your
heart disease risk.
And it is that increase in heart disease risk, the same mechanism that increases the risk
of dementia.
So deficiency increases with age and it's strongly associated with cognitive decline,
the early form of dementia.
So in this author's opinion and in my opinion, a simple CBC is a much better way to identify
a functional level, a functional deficiency of B12.
A CBC is a complete blood count.
This is a standard blood test that measures your white blood cell count, the differential
of all the different types of white blood cells like neutrophils and lymphocytes and
monocytes, et cetera, and your red blood cell count and your hemoglobin and your hermetic
RIT and the MCV, mean corpuscular.
I know this is a little bit technical, but when you're, when you have functional levels
of B12 and folate and other B vitamin deficiency, sometimes even B6 deficiency, it causes a
form of anemia.
It used to be called pernicious anemia.
For hundreds of years, people used to get diagnosed with pernicious anemia and just
told to enjoy their last few months because they were going to die.
So the middle of the 20th century, they discovered that giving people liver cured, you know,
forgiving people, having them eat cows liver, fixed the pernicious anemia.
And then, you know, a couple, a couple of years, a few years later, they discovered
that it was vitamin B12 in the liver that was largely responsible with fixing this pernicious
anemia.
So pernicious anemia is diagnosed on a CBC when the average, the test that measures the
average size of your red blood cells increases.
So when your red blood cells live about three and a half months, and if you're not, if your
bone marrow is not getting enough vitamin B12 to generate enough new red blood cells,
then the existing ones as they age get bigger to try to take up the slack.
So the mean corpuscular volume MCV on your CBC, standard blood test, when that gets bigger,
that means you're deficient in B12.
What's the best way to measure if you're deficient in B12?
Don't, it's a waste of time for most situations to major, to directly measure serum B12 levels.
For one thing, if you're taking any kind of vitamins, then it's most likely it's going
to be elevated and that tells you nothing.
Really the only reason to do a serum B12 test is to see if you have some kind of liver or
kidney disease.
And it just makes more sense.
It makes much more sense to look at the CBC.
And most people after a certain age are deficient in B12.
And when they get to the point where their red blood cells are starting to get bigger,
approximately half of patients with enlarged red blood cells will have cognitive impairment.
So going back to this paper published by J. David Spence in the journal Nutrition Research,
he says an important aspect of preventing dementia is the prevention of stroke.
Because anything obviously that's going to cause a sudden loss of blood flow to any part
of your brain is sometimes catastrophic, but even minor strokes, mild TIA transient ischemic
attacks.
Have you ever had something that felt like a stroke and then recovered?
That's a transient ischemic attack.
That just means that your blood flow got blocked temporarily in a way that your body was able
to clear.
But B12 deficiency is a contributor to this stroke risk and it's easily treated.
So B12 deficiency raises the risk of carotid plaque, deep vein thrombosis, retinal vein
thrombosis, and cerebral vein thrombosis, which basically means it increases your risk of
plaque formation anywhere in your body, as well as stroke risks in patients with atrial
fibrillation.
People with atrial fibrillation where the upper chambers of your heart flutter, this
is a common reason people get put on blood thinners like Warfarin or Eliquis, your risk
is increased fourfold if you have deficiency of B12.
And functional B12 deficiency also causes neuropathy and myelopathy.
So that means it causes damage to your nerves and your muscles.
It's likely, this is quoting again David Spence from Nutrition Research, it's likely, he says,
that loss of position sense from this muscle damage contributes to the risk of falls in
the elderly.
So he hasn't proven this, but the research does clearly show that B12 deficiency damages
muscles, and if anything that's going to damage your muscles and your nerves, it's a pretty
reasonable assumption that it's going to increase risk of falls.
And there is some data to support that in other studies.
It's also associated with something called orthostatic hypotension.
So orthostatic hypotension is what happens when you stand up too quickly.
If you've been lying down or sitting and you stand up quickly and suddenly get dizzy,
that is the result of your body's inability to suddenly get, supply the oxygen that your
brain needs.
And normally, you know, it happens normally most of the time, but it does require certain
things to work.
It requires your blood vessels to constrict in your legs and lower parts of your body
and to open wide in your brain so that the moment, the instant that you stand up, your
brain is flooded with the oxygen that it constantly requires to work properly.
So if you have this thing that's not uncommon, where you stand up too fast and you feel dizzy,
B12 deficiency is one thing that can contribute to that.
Before I forget, the form of vitamin B12 you take is critically important.
So don't buy cheap B12 supplements from Costco or Rite Aid or most stores.
Read your labels.
Here's why.
Here's how you know if you've got the right B12 supplement.
99% of B12 supplements are cyanocobalamin.
Cyanol like cyanide and cobalamin.
That is the cheapest form of B12.
Your body has to convert that into methylcobalamin, M-E-T-H-Y-L, methylcobalamin.
So you want to take, if you're going to take a B12 supplement, you want to take the methyl
form.
So it's already in the active form that your body needs.
And in most cases should be combined with the methyl form of folate.
So methyl B12 and methyl folate.
There's another great study that just came out a couple of years ago in the Journal of
Alzheimer's Disease.
B vitamin supplementation slows cognitive decline in mild cognitive impairment, which
is the earliest sign of damage to the brain that causes Alzheimer's.
And this was specifically a study identified damage to the frontal lobe of the brain.
Atrophy, loss of cells in the frontal lobe of the brain, Alzheimer's can occur in other
parts of the brain.
But this one was specific to that.
But it was a 24-month trial with 279 patients.
And they took 500 micrograms of methylcobalamin and 400 micrograms of folic acid.
And again, as with most medical studies, they don't give sufficient doses to get the effects
that functional practitioners learn, see all the time in our practice.
500 micrograms of methylcobalamin is not enough for any condition.
The standard dose is double that, 1,000 micrograms.
So if you're going to get a folate and B12 supplement, two things.
You want to get the methyl form, methylcobalamin, the active form of B12, and methylfolate,
the active form of folate, folic acid.
And it also should be a sublingual tablet.
And so it's going to look like a little tiny, the size of a baby aspirin, little pink tablet.
And you hold it under your tongue.
You may have heard of people going in to get B12 shots, B12 injections, because it can
boost your energy.
And it can, I don't know, crazy people do all kinds of things to heal from a hangover
or whatever.
Most people do not need to get B12 shots because it does biped.
So the reason that it is useful for some people is because it's very difficult for a lot of
people to absorb B12 in your gut by simply swallowing a supplement.
But when you hold a sublingual, beneath the tongue tablet, it goes directly into your
bloodstream.
Where does the time go?
It looks like we're going to have to continue this subject next week.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions.
I'd love the opportunity to help you or someone you love feel better and resolve issues without
the use of pharmaceuticals.
Tune in next Friday at 4 p.m.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.