Your path to a sharper, healthier brain starts here! This video is your mental wellness basket, filled with expert tips and learning opportunities to help you boost brain function, support emotional resilience, and protect your long-term cognitive health. Read on for powerful strategies to nourish your brain and strengthen your mind.
If you’re worried about dementia or cognitive decline, then this video is for you. In this video, we’re going to go through some of the most important first steps you can take to protect your brain. There are many things we can do, but I’m going to give you those things that I’m going to take and I’m going to provide you with the rationale as to why I would suggest them as well.
But first, let’s take a look at why I would want to make this video in the first place. I have an upcoming course on the leading edge strategies to prevent cognitive decline. And when we’re looking at the amount of people that are struggling with this, we have 6.7 million — that’s more than 12% or one in eight of Americans that have Alzheimer’s disease or dementia with 487,000 new cases each year. There are a lot of things that could be driving this and we’re going to go through in this course all of them and I’m going to distill them down into short videos so that you also have access to all of this information.
But I would start this conversation by looking at those things that are contributing to it and diminishing them or removing them as much as possible. And what do I mean by that? There’s a great book that I encourage everybody to read by Dr. Ray Dorsy called Ending Parkinson’s Disease. And in this book on page 200, in fact, he goes over some of the most important things you can do to prevent Parkinson’s.
And one of the things that he first mentions, and this really aligns with what I call the consumption theory, the things that we’re most abundantly exposed to and the things that we need most abundantly to stay alive, we have to start there. And so he starts with the air and making sure that we understand this. And he says that you should go to epa.gov/vaporintrusion and give yourself an idea of some of the levels of exposure that you have. Now, secondarily to that, I would also point out the importance of looking at the water because water is also one of those things that we’re heavily impacted by. And he says epa.gov. The superfunds search site here, I’m going to put all these links below, is going to give you a great place to start, but specifically even checking your drinking water wells.
I talked a lot about going to the ewg.org and looking at how your city water has these chemicals, and I encourage you to do that, and I can put that link below, or if you need that, I can get it to you. But also, the well water can be something that’s important. And this is all in light of something that Dr. Dorsy was looking at last year and luckily because — well I don’t know if it’s entirely because of his efforts — but because of the attention put on it finally in December of 2024 we had a ban on a chemical called TCE — that’s trichloroethylene. He talks heavily about that book and talks about in this book how you can avoid that so we definitely first want to reduce our exposure. We want to make sure that the water we’re drinking isn’t contaminated, that the air that we’re breathing is not contaminated.
And if it is, taking measures to help your body remove and get those out. And that’s the next step in what I want to talk about today. Because one of the things that I do three times a year is what’s called a purification. It’s three weeks where we really focus on helping our body eliminate and remove all of the things that we’re being exposed to over the time.
As I’m recording this, it’s May 5th and we are 5 days into our spring one. We do one the first 21 days of May. We always do one in the fall, right after Halloween and right up before Thanksgiving. There’s always three weeks there. And then of course in January.
One of the things that we give our body is something to support the organs of elimination and detoxification. So we’re reducing the foods and the things that would be adding problems and we’re increasing our bodies to get rid of it. And this is a beautiful blend of a lot of things. You’ve got, of course, your kale and your Spanish black radish and things like bock root in there.
And this product specifically supports healthy kidney, liver, and gallbladder function. Supports the process involved in healthy digestion and regulate the pathways in the body’s natural toxin elimination function. And that’s what we’re talking about is we want our bodies to be able to eliminate a lot of these toxins on its own.
So that’s one thing that you can add in as you’re removing things. So the more you remove, the easier it is for your body to remove things from your body because you’re not adding more junk into the body while you’re doing it. And I want to also share one of the other things that I would do because that in May also we focus — that is our month we focus on brain health.
We do this every three months because we find it so important to come back to it and bring us a reminder that we have to put focused attention on keeping our brain strong. And there’s one thing that I think that is overlooked when we look at the blue zones and the areas where people live the longest and they have the lowest rates of cognitive decline and cancer and all of these diseases that we’re struggling with.
And they do not mention enough exposure to a very specific nutrient I would qualify as one of the longevity nutrients and that is iodine. And so I take what’s called the thyroid complex. And I want people to rethink this because I think of it more as a brain tonic. And that’s what’s the beautiful thing about holistic health — just because these are good for the thyroid doesn’t mean they’re also not incredibly good for the brain.
Let me break down my justification as to why this is one that I include for longevity of the brain. This bladder, whole plant Bladderwrack provides you with a great whole food source of iodine which is in my opinion the safest way to do it — in foods. In fact, a decent amount which they would say 200%.
Now I would argue — and I can for a very long time — that this is a low dose actually. So there’s a lot of information we could talk about there but I want to talk about the bladder for the iodine and then I’m going to go back to Withania and the Bacopa and why those are also very supportive of the brain.
So when we look at certain studies in iodine, this is a great large Scottish older cohort study where they were showing the individuals reporting extreme or high versus low versus high or medium iodine consumption. It was small there and in these individuals the low iodine rich food intake was associated with increased brain volume shrinkage.
Okay, so we wanna — I know there’s a lot of words in there, but let me distill this down. The less the iodine, the more shrinkage of the brain. And obviously, if we want to keep our brain healthy for as long as possible, we can’t afford to have it shrinking. So, this is a very interesting study.
I’ll put the links in below. But also, there are other brain mechanisms that are affected by iodine. And so I want to go from this abstract and point out that many brain structures and systems appeared to be affected with iodine deficiencies including areas such as the hippocampus. Hippocampus being very important for memory, micro structures such as the myelin which is part of all of these protective levels of the cells and neurotransmitters.
So, I really want us to start thinking about iodine as a brain nutrient. Not just a thyroid nutrient, but the whole body really — every organ, cell, and tissue in your body has a receptor for iodine. But I think we’re not valuing enough the importance of it for the brain.
And the Bacopa in there I want to point out is also — many clinical studies have demonstrated improvements in verbal learning, delayed word recall, memory acquisition, and anxiety with the use of Bacopa. And it has been reported also for this to have specific healing effects on again the hippocampus. So you can see why I’m thinking of this as more of a brain formula because we have the Bacopa in there and we also have the iodine.
But the third thing that we have in there is Ashwagandha. Why is that something I think about for brain health? Well, one of the things that it does in helping with stress and anxiety is reducing cortisol levels. And you may ask me, what does that have to do with brain health? Well, cortisol. Research and animal studies have demonstrated that elevated levels of glucocorticoids can inflict damage within the hippocampus.
Again, that’s a part of the brain that we really want to be protective of. And even elevated cortisol levels have been associated with reduced hippocampal volume. So, again, shrinkage of the brain. So, this is an interesting way to think about this product in ways that you can be adding in things that are protected.
Now iodine can go much deeper into even the Substantia Nigra — the part of the brain that’s specifically affected by Parkinson’s — and there is a large portion of the dry weight of the brain that is iodine. So we know that the brain needs the iodine and another thing that a lot of times that people don’t realize is iodine also helps us — way back to the beginning — clear out chemicals that our body doesn’t need.
Things like mercury and chlorine and fluoride and bromine — things that we’re overexposed to. So, two simple ways and two first steps that you can do is just limit your exposure and secondarily help your body remove those chemicals and at the same time be nourishing your brain with those things that it actually needs. So, I hope this is helpful.
If you have more questions, there’s going to be a whole series and of course there’s a whole course coming out. I’ll be breaking that down for you piece by piece. But be encouraged. Know that there’s always things you can do — many things you can do. And if you’re looking for the next right thing to do, that’s what we’re here to help you find.
Have a good day.
Reposted with permission from Dustin Strong, Strong On Health.
