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, board certified non-force doctor of chiropractic and practitioner of
functional medicine.
Functional medicine means using standard diagnostic tests to identify conditions that other doctors
have missed.
The last couple of episodes we were talking a lot about the microbiome.
This is something that actually affects today's topic, but the focus is going to be, and it's
kind of complex, but a lot of people are concerned about dementia, cognitive decline, cognitive
impairment, Alzheimer's disease, etc.
So the title for today's talk is Dementia, Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease Inextricably
Linked.
You can't have one without the other.
They go together.
And the sad thing is most people wait until they have severe signs of cognitive decline,
memory loss, dementia, before they consider doing anything about it.
So how do you know if you really need, you know, ideally everyone should start doing
something about it in their 30s.
And that's just probably never going to happen.
You definitely don't want to wait until your 70s or your 80s, especially if you already
have a familial history of risk for, you know, if one of your parents had severe dementia,
then there's a hint to start earlier identifying risk factors, things that can be mitigated
in advance.
Here's something that anyone can do.
The APOE gene test, apolipoprotein E gene test.
There's three different versions that are the result from the test, two, three, or four.
And we have two, we have a pair of each.
So the results are going to say that you have, you know, APOE two and two, three and three,
four and four, two and four, two and three, three and four, et cetera.
You get, you have two and they're, each of them is either going to be two, three, or
four.
So it's a little tricky, but the thing, the takeaway is folks who have APOE two, fours,
two examples of the APOE four gene test are at the highest risk of dementia.
So it's really important to know if you're one of those people, because your risk is
dramatically increased and it would behoove you, hopefully motivate you to do some things
earlier to reduce your risk.
So that test used to cost seven or $800.
I just checked today, it's down to $340 now through LabCorp, which is still pretty expensive
for one gene test.
Some people are a little reluctant to do 23andMe gene testing for a host of reasons, but you
know, I figure, yeah, you've got to worry about how they're going to protect your data,
but they've done a pretty good job of it so far.
And I think if they ever abuse it, that someone could run and win a Senate campaign to crack
down on any transgressions they might have made.
So that's a little bit of diversion.
23andMe, what's great about this health test, not the hereditary, where do your ancestors
come from, but 23andMe offers for $149 a whole slate of gene tests that individually cost
hundreds of dollars each.
So it's thousands of dollars worth of gene tests that are really useful, including the
Alzheimer's gene, blood clotting factors, hemochromatosis, iron overload, a whole host
of other genes.
You can look them up on their website.
And it's just a huge bargain for $149.
And when I test people, when I do people's blood tests or when they come in with certain
conditions, I often ask them, have you done the 23andMe gene test?
Because that can provide some information that we can use.
Is this a genetic condition for you or just the result of your diet or your lifestyle?
So that's really helpful.
And one of the reasons that's helpful is outlined in a study that just came out last week and
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showing the benefits of taking
fish oil supplements to reduce your risk of brain damage that causes cognitive decline.
So this was just published August 1st in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association,
older adults with lower intake and tissue levels of these two main omega-3 fatty acids,
EPA and DHA, that you can only get from fish oil.
The people they tested that had, they gave a certain amount of this, and I'll get back
to that, had more, who didn't have adequate levels of this, had more white matter, brain
white matter lesions, which is associated with small vessel ischemic disease, basically
loss of blood flow to the tissue of the brain so that it can heal and repair itself.
And that is a major contributor to the development of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.
And this study showed may be preventable through treatment with omega-3 fatty acids from fish
oil.
So the people who tested with two APOE4 genes, carriers of that gene pattern, had significant
reductions in neuronal integrity breakdown over three years by supplementing with fish
oil.
And these were participants with an average age of 81 years old that already had white
matter lesions on their MRI, the early signs that you can see on a scan of the damage to
the brain that causes dementia.
And it was a pretty modest intake of fish oil that this study used, 1.65 grams, a little
more than a gram and a half, a little more than 1,650 milligrams specifically, of combined EPA and DHA,
the two important omega-3 fatty acids that you can only get from fish oil.
You can't get any significant amount of EPA or DHA from any vegetable source, from chia
seeds or flax seed oil or any of these other vegetable-based oils.
You can get it from algae, but it's very expensive, two and a half times the cost of getting it
from fish oil.
So the easiest way to get EPA and DHA, these brain-protective omega-3 fatty acids, is from
eating fish, oily fish like sardines and chauvis, salmon and tuna.
But the problem is with salmon and tuna, eating too much tuna, unless you're getting small
pole-caught smaller fish that are tested to be lower in mercury, which you can get in
a can.
The brands that you can get in cans in stores, vans or standard stores, Wild Planet and Safe
Cats you can get tuna, which is a great source of omega-3s and has lower mercury than eating
tuna in a restaurant or getting the chicken of the sea canned tuna or basically any other
kind of tuna.
Even fresh-caught fish, if it's a big fish, it's going to be high in mercury.
And so salmon also has a lot of omega-3s in it, but unfortunately most of the salmon that
we eat is farm-raised and that has a host of other problems as well.
So if you get fresh-caught salmon, which you can often get frozen in stores or some restaurants
serve wild-caught salmon, that's also an excellent source.
It's always great to get everything you can from food, but it's so difficult for most
people to get enough omega-3 fatty acids from ocean-based foods that I recommend almost
everyone supplement fish oil to get the omega-3s they need to protect their brain, also to
protect their heart and a whole host of other inflammatory-based conditions.
For years it's been difficult to tell if you have early onset dementia or document the
state of your brain as regards the degradation that causes dementia and there's a new blood
test out from, it's called the Perclivity A-D2 blood test, which includes an algorithm
that measures your level of the damaging tissues in the brain, things like amyloid plaque and
neurofibular tangles.
It's a little technical, but basically it measures these things in the blood and several
things and then measures the level of them compared to a standard.
And this is a test that's been out for a while and the results of its use was recently published
at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference, a study presented by Oskar Hansson,
MD, PhD from Skein University in Sweden and it was also published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.
So this blood test had a diagnostic accuracy of 91% compared with 61% diagnostic accuracy
after standard clinical evaluations by primary care physicians and compared to 73% accuracy
after evaluations by dementia specialists, usually neurologists.
So this is a very exciting test.
It is available now at Perclivity Labs by C2N Diagnostics.
I just went on their website earlier today to find out pricing.
I haven't heard back from them yet, but I hope to have pricing for this soon.
It's probably not cheap, but like all tests like this, they become less expensive as time
goes by.
And just based on the fact that it has a diagnostic accuracy of 91% compared with 61% to 73% with
standard methods that most physicians are using now and the amount of money that could
be saved by potentially treating this earlier, argues that it could probably become a standard
test that's available through insurance eventually.
But things like this can take a few years for that to happen.
So stay tuned.
I'll let you know as soon as I know what the pricing is on that.
Here's another really exciting test.
Intermittent fasting may improve memory and executive function.
So these are measures, obviously measures of things that have to do with dementia.
So what is intermittent fasting?
Intermittent fasting means usually trying to avoid eating more than a certain number
of hours per day.
So there are lots of different kinds of fasts where people don't eat all day, sometimes
even for days at a time.
This is not that.
The intermittent means regularly not eating for 16 hours a day, for example, trying to
get whatever meals you're going to have in an eight hour period, sometimes a little bit
longer.
For example, just eating breakfast and lunch.
Unfortunately, it's more common for people to skip breakfast and only eat lunch and dinner.
But the one meal that you need the least is the one that you eat right before you go to
bed.
So if you're eating dinner at five o'clock and lunch at 12, then that's not a bad way
to do it.
But if you're eating lunch at 12 or one and dinner at eight, that's not such a great way
because you don't need food to sleep.
So there's lots of information available on the internet about intermittent fasting.
And this trial that's exciting because of the effects it has on improving memory and
executive function.
These are two markers for brain health.
It was an eight week randomized clinical trial, a small trial of 40 overweight cognitively
normal older adults with insulin resistance.
And they basically did one of two things.
Half of them were on a quote unquote healthy living diet based on portion controlling calorie
restrictions.
So basically just on a low calorie standard weight loss diet.
The other half was on the same diet for five days a week and just two days a week.
Only two days a week they did two meal replacement shakes, 480 calories a day.
And the rest of the five days they did the same diet as the other group.
So just two days out of a week doing this calorie restricted meal intermittent fasting
to two meal replacement shakes per day had a significant difference in improved executive
function and memory.
And the intermittent fasting showed better results on cognitive measures.
This test was done by the by a reported by Demetrios Kapogiannis, MD of the National
Institutes on Aging and John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and presented
at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference.
It was also published in Selmitasinolent Tabulism.
So it was a small study and then obviously, well I would imagine lots of other studies
have given us reason to believe that a more typical intermittent fasting program where
you're most days, not just two days a week, but most days restricting the two meals a
day that you eat or you know a number of smaller meals to an eight hour window and then not
eating for 16 hours to let your body break down and digest and assimilate all of that
food has a huge impact on your health including your brain.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You've been listening to safe effective natural solutions to almost any health challenge.
Today we're talking about dementia, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and how these three
are inextricably linked.
You can't have one without the other.
So you know we're all familiar, hopefully we're all familiar with the causes of diabetes,
eating too much sugar, not exercising enough, obesity and you know the causes of cardiovascular
disease are pretty familiar to most people.
Not enough exercise, not enough healthy food to keep your heart strong, some of the lesser
common causes of cardiovascular.
One of the things that most people hear about for cardiovascular disease is high cholesterol.
Everyone needs to take a statin drug to keep their cholesterol down.
Not true.
I've talked about that over and over and over again but these three things are linked and
there are some uncommon causes of heart disease and diabetes that you may not have heard of.
So just recently this came out in the medical literature, the effect of heavy metals predicting
risk of heart disease.
So cadmium, tungsten, uranium, cobalt, copper and zinc.
Increasing levels of these six metals on urine testing were associated with 29% more cardiovascular
disease and 66% all cause mortality after accounting for demographic lifestyle and other
clinical risk factors.
And cadmium and copper showed a direct relationship with both cardiovascular disease and mortality.
This is reported by Irene Martinez Morata, MD, PhD of Columbia University and the School
of Public Health in New York City.
Reported in the journal Circulation.
So quote, this is her quoting, our findings support the fact that urinary metals are a
robust predictor of cardiovascular risk and all cause mortality and these associations
with these clinical events, heart attacks, etc., are consistent with a previous finding
that these same six metals were associated with higher levels of coronary artery calcification,
supporting the idea that atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, is a major underlying
pathway explaining the association between metals and heart disease.
So let's just review that again.
This is a major journal.
Circulation is a very prestigious journal for cardiology and they're finding that these
heavy metals that we're all constantly exposed to increase cardiovascular disease, all causes
of mortality and specifically coronary artery calcification, the hardening of the arteries
that underlies most heart attacks and can cause strokes.
So these heavy metals, cadmium and uranium, are two really common toxic metals that have
been known, the effects of these are well known, have been tested.
Four years prior, studies have established that arsenic, cadmium, and lead, are contaminant
metals and exposure to them, are now considered a cardiovascular risk factor by the American
Heart Association.
Functional practitioners like myself have long known that the big five heavy metals
we're always looking for when we test for heavy metals are lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium,
and uranium.
So we're all exposed to those to varying degrees and most of us never test for those things
and have no idea how much of those we're carrying in our bodies.
The only way you know is to test.
They don't necessarily cause any symptoms until they get really bad.
So it's important, it's really a good idea for everybody to get tested for heavy metals
and the test for that is either a hair test or a urine test.
Check out my past episodes.
If I haven't already, I should remind everyone that all the past episodes of this show are
available as podcasts.
You can listen to them anytime you want.
You can find them on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
They're right on the homepage, easy to find.
If you use Apple podcasts or Spotify, they're there.
Just Google my name, Binkley, and they usually come up or the title of the show, Safe Effective
Natural Solutions.
The past episodes are also on YouTube.
If you search for my name or Safe Effective Natural Solutions.
They're not always in order on YouTube and there's no video.
It's just they make a little video of a bouncing this or that, but you can listen to them there
as well.
So anyway, previously I've talked a lot about heavy metal toxicities and this is a relatively
new study that just came out talking about the connection between our exposure to toxic
heavy metals like cadmium, uranium, and cardiovascular health.
So they also mentioned cobalt, which is in vitamin B12, copper, and zinc.
So these are essential minerals that we depend on for life, but like iron, you can get too
much of them.
And these are also urine tests without any kind of a provocation or a chelating agent
to draw them out.
And again, that's a little technical, but the authors of this study are saying in this
study, they say, well, it's right here, the copper, zinc, and cobalt authors explained
that these essential metals are tightly regulated in the body and elevated levels in the urine
may just represent early cardiometabolic dysregulation.
So they may just represent a diseased state.
Your body's increased amount of these things being flushed out is a result of disease,
not necessarily the cause.
Whereas toxic heavy metals like cadmium, uranium, and arsenic are well known to cause these
diseases.
One of the most common sources of cadmium, which is a known carcinogen, is smoking.
Smoking tobacco is full of cadmium, but it's in ceramics and certain industrial chemicals.
There's Google sources of cadmium.
It's in a lot of things.
It's possible to avoid all of these things.
We're exposed to them to greater or lesser degrees.
Cadmium also affects the kidneys and the liver and the lungs.
So I was surprised to hear about tungsten.
So tungsten is on the test.
It's not something that's been in the research for a long time, but similar evidence of harm,
according to this article, is some things that are commonly exposed.
People in the US are commonly exposed to all of these from drinking water, food, air pollution,
and indoor dust.
So heavy metals are an lesser known contributor to cardiovascular disease that is becoming
the significance of which is becoming better known and better documented.
And anything that causes heart disease causes dementia.
There's several different types of dementia that have been identified by neurologists
and pharmaceutical companies that are trying to come up with different drugs to attack
these different various types.
Maybe it's important to make the, well, it's apparently important to make those distinctions.
Louie, do you have Louie body dementia or frontal lobe dementia or classical Alzheimer's
or vascular dementia?
For the purposes of healing yourself and providing nutrients to heal your brain, the solution
is the same.
Anything that helps prevent heart disease helps prevent brain disease.
All forms of dementia are in part, if not mostly, vascular disease.
Your brain loses, tissue is damaged, cells are lost, scar tissue builds up to replace
that damaged tissue from inflammation and lack of nutrients because of vascular disease,
the same vascular disease that cause heart attacks and strokes.
The calcification that builds up and clogs the arteries and prevents adequate nutrition
to the brain is mainly what causes the slow decay and loss of brain cells in the tissue
that leads to dementia.
So anything that causes heart disease will contribute to loss of brain cells and neurodegenerative
diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and any other neurodegenerative disorder in
the brain.
Here's another unusual, so most people know the causes of diabetes, eating too much lousy
food, especially sugar laden foods, but artificial sweeteners are often used by some people as
an alternative to sugar.
Here's an article that just came out.
Do artificial sweeteners really help people with diabetes?
A recent review led by researchers in Mexico concluded that sucralose, which is Splenda
is the brand name, is associated with various adverse health effects.
Despite being considered safe in previous studies, the recent research suggests possible
links to systemic inflammation, metabolic diseases, meaning diabetes mainly, disruptions
in the gut microbiome, liver damage, and toxic effects at the cellular level.
Quote, it is crucial to highlight the persistence of sucralose Splenda in the body and its ability
to cross the placenta and its presence in breast milk, raising concerns about prenatal
and neonatal exposure.
Well, this is really important because a lot of women get gestational diabetes.
They get diabetes when they're pregnant and they may be using these, using sucralose and
these other alternative sweeteners that are not healthy to reduce their sugar intake.
So there's better ways to do that.
We're going to run out of time here to get into all of those things.
But there's a whole other article here that I'll come to.
I thought I had it here, but I'll have to come back to that.
But xylitol is a sugar alcohol that is in a lot of alternative sugar-free things.
It's in toothpaste.
The small amounts in toothpaste are not really a big deal, but I'll try and find that and
talk about it on another episode.
Xylitol, you don't want to consume lots of that either.
So the takeaway is anything that causes heart disease, diabetes contributes to heart disease.
Alzheimer's is often now being called type 3 diabetes because the high blood sugar that
damages blood vessels to the brain also dramatically contributes to dementia.
So send me your questions about this and any other subject that we've talked about or any
other health concern that you have.
I really appreciate you tuning in.
And you can reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes and dementia by eating better food,
getting a little bit better exercise.
If it's hard for you to exercise, get the relief from pain that you need.
Contact me about that as well.
I am a non-force chiropractor.
I can help with pain as well.
And I'd love to help you or someone you love get back to feeling the way they should.
See if you can do something this week to be healthier than you were last week.
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.