Food as Brain Medicine: Plants, Inflammation, and Cognitive Decline with Joshua Helman, M.D.

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]You got depression, obesity, and hearing loss.

[00:00:05]So, what are if if you were to go to your primary care doctor with dementia or your neurologist, what are some of the traditional treatments that are going to be offered?

[00:00:17]One might be a prescription drug called aerosept, which is a colonsterase inhibitor, meaning it in increases the amount of acetylcholine in your brain. Acetylcholine is one of the key neurotransmitters and it's like turning the gain up. Um, so we also have a question here. Oils lubricate the joints. Yes, oils definitely lubricate the joints. And I would refer you to an amazing video from Dr. from Michael Greger that just dropped within the last week showing that olive oil not not by mouth but topically over a joint or arthritic joint is really good at stopping the inflammation.

[00:01:05]Okay. So going back to aerosept or uh dinepazil coness inhibitors that's one category another category are called NMDA inhibitors an example is mantene or nmena and and these definitely help with some of the symptoms and then there's a third category recently brought to the market within the last few years called lembi has way too many side effects and I'll I'll go over uh the problems with with uh these new antibodies against amalloid.

[00:01:41]I'll do that in a little bit.

[00:01:44]All right. So, so again the three categories that are prescription drugs that are normally offered are the colonestase colon eststerase inhibitors, the NMDA antagonist and the monoconal antibodies and medications like aerosept they can help but they're definitely side effects things like nausea, insomnia, weakness and cramping.

[00:02:13]So the antiolinergic medications have been linked. So this is the opposite. So instead of increasing acetylcholine in the brain, what happens if you take a medication over the counter or prescription that lowers the amount of acetylcholine and and when I see a 70-year-old patient, often they're on 10 different medications and maybe four of the 10 are antiolinergic, meaning they're decreasing the amount of acetylcholine.

[00:02:40]And in in this busy I couldn't even fit all the ones on this slide but one of those is called benadryil or dipenhydramine and I'm not which is a great drug for allergies for an acute allergic reaction. My concern is you don't want to be on a drug like benadro or dipenhydramine chronically because what happens is it increases your risk of getting dementia.

[00:03:08]All right. So another category is the NMDA receptor including mmentine.

[00:03:17]Um and that can help but you get side effects like headache, constipation, dizziness and feeling sleepy.

[00:03:32]All right. So another medication class associated with Alzheimer's are statins um which can cause CoQ10 deficiency.

[00:03:41]CoQ10 is an important co-actor in mitochondria and so some of the patients that get started on statins u develop uh dementia and sometimes it's reversible meaning if they stop taking the statin for the cholesterol medicine the symptoms will go away but not all I mean I I gave this lecture a couple months ago And there's a gentleman in the back who who had been a professional banjo player. He started the statin. He lost his memory for playing the banjo.

[00:04:22]He could no longer play professionally.

[00:04:24]He stopped the statin, but he never got that memory back. So for that reason, I I tried to uh stay away from statins for my patients.

[00:04:36]and um became famous on Tik Tok and Instagram. I I did a video on this on this topic with Robert Love. We had 1.6 million and 2 million views talking about three prescription drugs that increase the risk of Alzheimer's.

[00:04:55]And then it was covered by the Daily Mail. It's interesting how it works these days. The the Daily Mail basically said um they never interviewed me. They basically watched my Tik Tok and wrote an article about it. So, I guess these days it's cool to be a reporter because you don't actually have to interview anyone. You could just go on Tik Tok.

[00:05:15]All right. So, here's some more medications associated with dementia.

[00:05:20]Uh, opiates, things like heroin or morphine. proton pump inhibitors like omerazol which increases amaloid in the brain and can decrease vitamin B12 an important B vitamin for neuro neurologic and brain function and next are bzzoazipines like Xanax and Valium I'll talk about those more on the next slide triccyclic antid-depressants like amatipptalene or elev can cause dementia with chronic use and that's what I'm saying about all these. I'm not saying never take them. I'm saying you don't want to be taking this every day of your life. And then SSRIs like Prozac, Paxel, and Zoloft. I'm not a fan certainly long term of those medications because of the long-term brain damage that we see.

[00:06:12]And so, specifically going back to the benzoazipines, things like Adavan, if you take them for 3 to 6 months, they raise the risk of developing Alzheimer's by 32%. But they're often taken for anxiety or to help with sleep. Now, if you take them for more than 6 months, it it boosts the risk by 84%.

[00:06:30]And then if you take the benzo for over a year, it can result in cognitive impairment that can continue after you stop the medicine for up to 3.5 years.

[00:06:42]All right, so that was bad news. What about some good news? What are some medications that actually prevent dementia? And this is what I'm thinking about. Men who take Viagra have lower odds of Alzheimer's and I bet you the same is true of women. So what why in the world would Viagra help with the brain?

[00:07:02]Um it's been shown to reduce the amaloid plaques.

[00:07:08]It enhances blood flow via nitric oxide.

[00:07:11]Nitric oxide is a gas. It's one nitrogen and one oxygen atom together that open up blood vessels.

[00:07:22]And it's neuroprotective meaning it protects neurons.

[00:07:27]Um it reduces tow tangles which are often seen with Alzheimer's.

[00:07:36]All right. And these are prescription drugs. Here are the recommended lower doses I recommend you start at. So for example, Viagra or Senaphil would be 25 milligrams and Seialis or Tadalaphil would be 2.5 milligrams. And Lori is asking what are our alternatives to help with anxiety? I mean my favorite is lavender essential oil but there are many others. Okay. So what are the problems with the existing therapy uh today? Um specifically this new antibbody against amalloid lembi um the side effects that are seen in a third of the patients are frequent brain bleeds and brain swelling to the point that if you want to take this drug they're they are going to insist that you get a monthly brain scan to make sure that you haven't developed a brain bleed or brain swelling.

[00:08:33]And but but the drug companies have a solution to this. Instead of calling these side effects, they call them arya.

[00:08:41]Doesn't that sound like a song? It's just a nice don't worry, it's just an ara. What's an ara? It's amaloid related imaging abnormality imaging because again, if you want to take these, you have to get imaged every month. All right. So again, yeah, not a fan of lambi or drugs of that class.

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