Dementia risk factors & how to avoid

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Okay, this is risk factors for dementia.

[00:00:02]My best books that I talk about risk factors for dementia include include food, mood, and IQ. I got a whole bunch of videos on this YouTube channel about it from that book and how to prevent and reverse chronic fatigue and Parkinson's. So now I'm going to go through them. There's a lot more than you'd probably expect. Okay, of course women have more dementia than men do. That's cuz women live longer.

[00:00:22]They also post-menopausal, their depletion of estrogen, they're more prone to becoming demented, they're more emotional. Um than men often are dead from a heart attack before that time.

[00:00:35]Uh just being older, of course, is increased risk of cognitive decline. The incidence of cognitive decline is dramatically increasing in the United States. See more and more people mentally slow, memory loss at younger and younger ages. It's pretty routine after 60. Most people in a Western country are cognitively slow. Um being sedentary, lack of exercise makes a person stupid. One of the easiest things you could do is just exercise every day.

[00:00:57]You don't have to do anything fancy.

[00:00:59]Walking upstairs, uh you know, lifting weights, walking on a treadmill. Just do something.

[00:01:05]Something that you like so you'll do it every day. Uh being fat, being fat makes people stupid.

[00:01:10]Eating a high-fat diet makes you stupid.

[00:01:14]Uh so, you don't want to do that. You know, best diet is a plant-based diet, low fat, you know.

[00:01:19]Uh ideally low-fat vegan. We talked about that a million times on this channel, so I'm not going to go into that stuff right now. So high-fat diets just make people stupid. You can see it in all the um Look up the rodent studies. High-fat diet rodent stupid. High-fat diet rodent stupid. High-fat diet animal stupid.

[00:01:33]It's well known. There's multiple reasons. I've talked about it in my other lectures, but high-fat diets create stupidity. Okay, processed food, it's full of toxic chemicals, full of mitochondrial inhibitors, stimulants, MSG, all kinds of bad things.

[00:01:46]Hypertension. Hypertension, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[00:01:50]Hypertension, when it gets real high, it's damaging all the arteries, causing intracranial atherosclerosis, going to lead to a of blood flow to your brain.

[00:01:57]Uh conventional medicine often over-treats it, drops blood to the brain, and then people are falling down, hitting their heads, and their brain's under-perfused. So, the best thing to do is just eat the healthy diet, then you don't need to take any of those pills.

[00:02:10]Diabetes. Diabetes causes insulin resistance in the brain.

[00:02:14]Glucose deficiency in your brain cells makes you stupid. It does a lot of other things, too. Microvascular apathy, intracranial vascular apathy. If you ask a neurologist, they'll tell you the three most common causes of stroke, atrial fibrillation, diabetes, hypertension. Okay? Um Atherosclerosis, including stroke, intracranial atherosclerosis.

[00:02:34]Uh cardiac disease, coronary artery disease, CAD, atrial fibrillation, you drop perfusion to the brain, you're like a mouse, mouse equivalent, congestive heart failure, aortic regurgitation, aortic stenosis. All of those things are like deleterious theory dementia, you under-perfuse the brain, lack of blood flow to the brain. Valve surgery, more dementia after valve surgery than after coronary artery bypass graft, open heart surgery.

[00:02:55]Uh cardiac surgery in general, the incidence of dementia's uh and cognitive decline is much higher than is widely publicized. I just read a paper recently that I presented on this channel, written in the cardiothoracic surgery journals, and they'll go, "Oh, it's about 40% or 45% post-op, but by 3 months it's down to about 3%."

[00:03:15]Yeah, right, it's worse than that, but don't get me wrong, there's a lot of other things causing it, and it's not necessarily the surgery, it's also the general anesthesia. General anesthesia increases your risk of cognitive decline and dementia. Okay? Uh general surgery also increases your risk, you know, I was reading 7% of patients had a stroke.

[00:03:31]Uh now, don't get me wrong, a lot of these strokes are real minor and asymptomatic, like after cardiac surgery, 55% of patients had a new lesion on their brain MRI, but most of the time they're subtle and they're and they're not even symptomatic, so they're not that big of a deal. I can tell you I look at brain MRIs and CTs all the time, multiple times per week, numerous times, and uh I almost never see a cardiac surgery patient coming for an emergency brain MRI or or even head CT. It happens, but it's not that common.

[00:03:59]Uh so, it's usually a minor thing.

[00:04:01]They're confused in the ICU and you know, then I'll then I'll get a CT that just says mental status changes. AMS, acute mental status change. Okay, cardiac surgery, we talked about that.

[00:04:11]Gen surg, psychiatric medicine.

[00:04:12]Psychiat- Psychiatry induced dementia is one of the most common causes of dementia that's not widely known. All psychiatric drugs cause a lobotomy, okay?

[00:04:21]You need to know that, okay? The public's so stupid.

[00:04:24]Uh they're all bad. They all damage the brain. This is not rocket science.

[00:04:29]Anything that's designed to change your brain is going to damage your brain.

[00:04:33]The I'm not aware of any exceptions to that in in terms of medications.

[00:04:37]The your brain's made by God. God's pretty smart, okay? Psychiatrists and the companies or drug companies, they just want to make money off you, okay?

[00:04:45]So, psychiatric medicines cause a chemical lobotomy, all right? Just look around. You You You study that a little bit, you'll be amazed. I especially write about that in my Food, Mood, and IQ book.

[00:04:55]Okay, and and they're all bad. The benzodiazepines, the antidepressants, the antipsychotics, they're all bad. Electroshock therapy, that's an electrical lobotomy.

[00:05:05]Psychiatric medications cause a chemical lobotomy.

[00:05:08]Brain surgery for any reasons is likely to diminish your IQ. Don't get me wrong, some are minor if you're just shelling out an extra-axial meningioma, but when they start going through brain parenchyma like to remove a tumor or something, you got increased risk of significant cognitive decline.

[00:05:22]Alcohol causes brain damage. You see these alcoholics, their brain's all shrunken and pickled.

[00:05:28]They look like crap.

[00:05:29]Uh smoking tobacco lowers cognitive function. Emphysema, COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bad bad bad.

[00:05:36]Uh marijuana is terrible for the brain.

[00:05:38]All these idiots think marijuana is okay or cool or good. No, marijuana is stupid. Uh quite often it's laced, and then the patient gets uh schizophrenia from that and then they treat the schizophrenia with uh antipsychotics, you know, in the Haldol category of drugs and the patient your IQ drops like that. Their ability to concentrate, maintain sustained attention for a task drops. Okay. Speaking of this this lowers uh attention span, excess social media. Doom scrolling, okay, that's not good for you either. Makes people stupid. Don't get your kid a cell phone.

[00:06:11]Avoid it as much as possible. As soon as the kid gets a cell phone, they just want to send text messages to their friend. They stop reading. They their IQ just starts going And then they start hanging around with a bunch of dummies instead of reading.

[00:06:22]Okay, stimulants. Amphetamines, attention deficit meds, aspartame, cocaine, they all lower IQ, okay?

[00:06:29]Um I talked about excessive psychological stress cuz then you get excessive intracranial glutamate and sleep deprivation does the same thing and caffeine does the same thing. I know all these corporate-funded studies tell you caffeine's okay, it's not. Coffee, caffeine, tea, they're all bad for the brain. Caffeine is a major brain toxin and drops blood supply to the brain, uh you know, 20 to 25% while simultaneously increasing metabolic rate of neurons.

[00:06:50]That's going to lower cognitive decline.

[00:06:52]There's no way around that. Okay, it's also prothrombotic.

[00:06:58]All right, now we're switching to the other side. Okay, here's a whole bunch more risk factors for dementia. Cancer.

[00:07:04]Uh quite often because they'll treat the cancer with chemotherapy and that also damages your your cognitive function.

[00:07:09]Very often it does. Neurologic diseases often make people stupid. Parkinson's disease or they they start getting cognitive decline. Multiple sclerosis, start getting cognitive decline. You know, the best thing to do is eat low-fat plant-based diet like Roy Swank's literature. He has the best results of anybody for MS, but almost no one knows about it. Neurologists do not know about it. I talk to neurologists all the time. They don't know about Swank. Okay.

[00:07:32]Um and there's good reason to believe there's a lot you can do for Parkinson's that's not being done if once you understand all the mitochondrial inhibitors.

[00:07:38]I studied mitochondrial inhibitors and I came up with 120 of them, okay? And many of them are very common medicines like tricyclic antidepressants, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, um not to mention beta blockers, statins, metformin, all these common drugs, most most antibiotic groups.

[00:08:00]Tylenol, glyphosate, atrazine, BPA, all the stuff you've heard of, cadmium, aluminum, lead, mercury, fluoride.

[00:08:13]All right, uh let's see what else.

[00:08:15]Autoimmune disease, leaky gut in general, just leaky gut in general, autoimmune disease treated with immunosuppressant drugs, they all are bad for cognitive function.

[00:08:24]Uh hearing loss, you kind of become socially isolated with hearing loss.

[00:08:27]Vision loss can also socially isolate you. Cataract surgery, I can tell you, most brains I look at where the history is dementia, the patient has bilateral cataract surgery. So, basically, to me, cataract surgery is a prelude to dementia. Um they usually have poor dentition. Dental amalgams, silver fillings are 50% mercury, it's a major brain toxin. I give an entire lectures on that. Um we talked about mitochondrial inhibitors a moment ago.

[00:08:50]Circ inhibitors, that's sarcoplasmic endoplasmic reticulum calcium ATPase inhibitors in the brain. Basically, anything that smells bad is probably a circ inhibitor. And air pollution uh lowers cognitive function.

[00:09:02]Uh also, high-fat diets are end up having a circ inhibitor effect cuz they cause insulin resistance, which leads to the same problem. EMF, electromotive force, holding a cell phone to your head, um and related exposures to EMF. Okay, social isolation, lack of religion, lack of purpose in life, people get the dwindles from that.

[00:09:21]Iron overload, all the fortified foods, the foods are fortified with iron now, the processed foods, so people become iron overloaded. Meat has a lot of iron in it, too, like red meat in particular.

[00:09:30]Then you get ferrous redox cycling in the blood, amyloid transformation of your fibrinogen protein, increased blood clotting. Same thing you get from leaky gut, uh uh bacterial endotoxins, LPS and LTA. Makes your blood prothrombotic, plugs up small arteries, produces amyloid clots, 2 to 200 microns.

[00:09:47]Uh Douglas Kell and Pretorius have written the most about that.

[00:09:51]Okay.

[00:09:52]Um lack of education.

[00:09:54]The less educated you are, the less cognitive reserve you have. And education doesn't have to mean a degree, just reading on your own.

[00:10:01]You can easily out-learn, you know, 99% of college graduates if you just keep reading on your own.

[00:10:06]Okay. It's such an easy habit. Plus, a great thing to do is read on a treadmill because you're too bored to just walk on a treadmill if you don't have a book.

[00:10:13]But you read a book, it's very easy to read straight for 2 hours, 2 and 1/2 hours. I've done it a million times. I like it.

[00:10:20]Okay, functional illiterate. You know, most people are functional illiterates.

[00:10:23]You know, they learn how to read in grade school, but they never read a book since freshman year high school when they burnt out on Julius Caesar, Great Expectations.

[00:10:31]Uh you know, and they just weren't ready for those terrible books, and then they they they hated it, so they don't read ever since then. Hyperlipidemia, which kind of goes with high-fat diets.

[00:10:40]Uh osteoporosis.

[00:10:42]Um and again, that's linked to high-fat diets, high animal protein diets.

[00:10:46]Postmenopausal loss of estrogen, I alluded to that earlier. So anyways, these are a bunch of risk factors um for uh dementia, cognitive decline. They're almost all controllable, so it's pretty easy to minimize almost all of these, so it's worth doing if you want to maintain your cognitive function.

[00:11:02]Hope that's helpful.