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Watch this interview on Reversing Brain Disease With Dr. Steven Masley to find out the root cause of brain fog or memory issues as well as what leads to Alzheimer’s(Brain Disease) and Dementia(Brain Disease). Simple tips to reverse brain disease/brain disorder/brain damage and make sure you have the best brain!
Steven Masley MD is a physician, nutritionist, trained-chef, author, and the creator of the #1 all-time health program for Public Television, 30 Days to a Younger Heart. He helps motivated people tune up their brain, heart, and sexual
performance.
Dr. Masley is a fellow with three prestigious organizations: the American Heart Association, the American College of Nutrition, and the American Academy of Family Physicians, and is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on the impact of lifestyle choices on heart health, brain function, and aging.
Dr. Masley’s passion is empowering people to achieve optimal health through comprehensive assessments and lifestyle changes. As a best-selling author, he has published several books: Ten Years Younger, The 30-Day Heart
Tune-Up, Smart Fat, and his latest book, The Better Brain Solution, plus numerous scientific articles. His work has been viewed by millions on PBS, the Discovery Channel, the Today Show, and in over 500 media interviews. He continues to see patients and publish research from his medical clinic in St. Petersburg Florida, and
he offers weekly blogs on his website, drmasley.com
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TRANSCRIPT:
This is auto-generated and may have mistakes. Please listen to the interview for accuracy.
[00:01] REENA JADHAV: Hey everyone, it is Reena Jadhav coming to you from the livelonger podcast. You know, being in kind of that late forties, mid-forties. I hear this from all my friends constantly like God, my memory. I cannot remember stuff. So we have today Dr. Steven Masley, who’s going to tell us all about how to fix our brain now. He is amazing. What I love about Dr. Masley is that, not only is he an MD, physician, nutritionist, author, creator of the number one health program for public television, but that he’s a trained chef, so we’re going to see if we can get a couple of recipes out of him on the podcast and be interviewed today. He is really dedicated and focused on motivating people to tune up their brain, their heart, their sexual performance. He is a fellow with three prestigious organizations, the American Heart Association, College of Nutrition, and the Academy of family physicians. He is all about empowering health through comprehensive assessments, lifestyle changes. His programs have been scientifically backed to deliver some great results where he is going to share and talk about. He has written a bunch of books, 10 years younger. The 30-day heart tune up and his most recent book, which is the better brain solution. Dr. Masley, welcome.
[01:21] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well I am delighted to be with you.
[01:24] REENA JADHAV: The fact that we women in our mid-forties starting kind of early forties to mid-forties to late fifties, end up having some serious brain fog issues. Why is it, what are the stats behind it?
[01:39] DR STEVEN MASLEY: It’s a really good question because brain fog is becoming more and more common. I mean we know the rate of dementia and Alzheimer’s is going to double in the next 12 years. It is already the number one most expensive disease in America today more than heart disease and more than cancer, so it is super common. It is increasing rapidly. It is like an epidemic and I think the number one cause for that is abnormal blood sugar control and people’s lifestyle choice so I really think our data shows that it is just five easy steps. Just simple lifestyle changes. People can really improve their brain function sharper, quicker, more productive, and they can prevent memory loss.
[02:22] REENA JADHAV: You talked about something very interesting in terms of the fact that there’s a link between having depression and Alzheimer’s. Talk a little bit about that.
[02:31] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, depression is you have depressed brain chemistry. It is not just. I mean there’s birth, there’s bereavement which is sad, something bad happen, your, you know, your parent died or your child was in an accident or you lost your job. Anyone should grieve over that, but depression actually means it impacts us. It impacts our brain biochemically and we lose brain performance and the same program I to help with memory has been shown in several other studies to help reverse and prevent depression as well. So if you have depression, you’re 300 to 400 percent more likely to get Alzheimer’s later in life and it makes it much more important to take steps to nourish and protect your brain. Yeah, depression is really common, especially in younger women, 30 to 50 years of age and it is really, there’s this big difference that we need to make about that.
[03:29] REENA JADHAV: What about the link between stress and brain function?
[03:35] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, brain function is its synaptic connections. We’ve got hundreds of billions of brain cells and hundreds of trillions of these connections and their nutrient dependent and if we don’t make our food and nutrient needs, our brain processing speed drops, our fitness impacts our brain processing speed and if you’d slow then we feel brain fog. So to me, I mean there is cognitive testing. You can do simple easy tests. They take about 30 minutes where we can actually measure how your brain is processing speed and we know that if you make changes you can improve that and when you improve brain processing, speed, brain fog goes away. I mean the symptoms, like you said, a couple, you walking into a room and you forget why you’re there, you’re in a conversation, you start forgetting names or words that like Awkward Julian, that everybody’s had that on occasion. But if it starts to be like regularly, okay, that is concerning, that there is something wrong with your brain performance. Uh, you know, other was. Others would be like; you have trouble finding your car in a parking lot. That is geographic memory or when you get interrupted, can you switch from one task to another quickly or when you get interrupted, is there a lag and it takes a while to get back? I mean that really hurts job performance. If you were kind of slow after you get interrupted finishing project, do you have to, when you read a paragraph in a book, do you have to reread it because you forgot what you read? I mean, so those are all important signs. I mean, so I mean there is questions you can ask just like that. Can you remember a seven digit phone number long enough to dial it? Those are all great symptoms of someone with brain fog, but the good news is we can do something about it and an average person can really improve their brain performance and that will probably save them from memory loss later in life.
[05:32] REENA JADHAV: Let’s talk about testing. So I always believed that you know, anything you can test, you can then map your improvement to those test results. And I’m often, and I’m no later on in this program, we’re going to talk a little bit about, you know, taking care of older parents, et cetera. But I know when you have parents and you say to them, Hey, you know, I feel like maybe there’s something a little off and this absolutely not. I’m absolutely fine. So it is easier to have an objective test that someone can take to really get a better sense of, all right, how is my brain function performing? What are the tests out there? Which one do you recommend?
[06:09] STEVEN MASLEY: Well there’s like I mean some people were looking at imaging to look at like Beta amyloid or blood sugar uptake in the brain. These pet scans and the challenges. I mean these things are thousands of dollars to do a test and they’re really more. They are looking at function and some to some disease. They’re looking at disease states and you could try to do something early on that 10 to 20 years before your brain scan is off. You could be doing a simple cognitive tests like on a computer- where they give you words and shapes and you you’re going through like simple all you have to push on a space key and the shift bar and you don’t even need to be able to type with 10 minute, 10 fingers to be able to do a cognitive test like we do on a. We use; it is called central nervous system vital science I do not have any stock or financial, it is in the company. I just used their test with my patients, so in 30 minutes we can look at memory, both verbal and shape, memory, attention span, brain processing speed, executive function, and get a really good idea of how someone’s brain’s functioning. You know, it’s a test that it could be anywhere from 70 to $150. It is not that expensive.
[07:23] REENA JADHAV: Wonderful and is it online or is it something that a doctor has to?
[07:26] STEVEN MASLEY: It is not online. Your company does not offer. You usually have to get it through a medical provider of some sort.
[07:32] REENA JADHAV: I see. Okay. Well, we are going to go ahead and put the information in the show notes for everybody else who is listening and interested because I think that is such a great place to start. All right, so we have established that there is a link between diet, nutrition and brain function. So let us talk about what is the ideal diet for great brain function.
[07:52] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, number one, we want to prevent elevated blood sugar levels because surprisingly enough, when your sugar levels go up, you turn off your brain. I mean you know this, but for your, for the listeners and viewers out there, insulin is the hormone that tells us to store energy. When we eat refined carbs like bread or potatoes or pasta or rice or blood sugar levels go up and then insulin pushes it into the cell to store that energy for later, but if you eat too many of those foods, your cells are full. You can’t store any more energy and they become insulin resistant brain cells turn off when the… That’s the… I mean, we have never had this problem in 100,000 years. We’ve never had too much refined carbs are too busy out hunting and gathering herbs, you know, we weren’t designed this way that we could just sit around and eat bread and potatoes and rice and Pasta all day.
[08:50] REENA JADHAV: Open it three times a day. That is exactly right,
[08:54] DR STEVEN MASLEY: And so not so your brain cells early. Shut up. We did a pet scan on someone who is insulin resistant. It looks like nothing. Whereas you healthy active, I would expect if they did a pet scan in your brain would light up like a Christmas tree. So not only do we turn the brain cells off, but we sadly, the brain cells start to die. They are not getting the energy they need and then your brain shrinks. So eating too much sugar and refined carbs literally makes your brain shrink and that’s really bad. So to me there is like 10, 12 foods that are essential for your brain. Things like green leafy vegetables, beets, dark chocolate, unhealthy fats like nuts and olive oil. Then we definitely want to get rid of sugar and refined carbs because those just turn our brain off.
[09:41] REENA JADHAV: That makes so much sense. What do you think of the Keto Diet by the way, because that I think would align with some of your recommendations?
[09:49] DR SREVEN MASLEY: So the Keto diet as you know, has recently become really popular but I have some major concerns about doing it properly, you know, and they, you know, it’s kind of an extension of a Paleo Diet, you know, but trying to be in ketosis all the time and meet your nutrient needs at the same time is super challenging and I would say less than 10 percent of people trying to do it are probably doing it properly and meeting their nutrient needs so it could be a great diet for someone with epilepsy or a major health problem like multiple sclerosis or an athlete who’s super motivated. But I actually don’t, most of my regular patients have trouble following that 24/7.
[10:33] REENA JADHAV: Absolutely I tried it for about two days.
[10:34] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Yeah. So I like the idea of partial intermittent fasting where you don’t eat like after 9:00 at night and you don’t eat till noon the next day at least 12, preferably 15 hours. And I have that on the data. I’ve been looking at it and we’ve shown in our clinic is that if you do it two or three days a week, get almost the same benefits of doing it, you know, all the time and it’s so much easier to meet your nutrient needs if you can eat more broccoli and black beans and have an apple or blueberries or other healthy foods, partial intermittent fasting two or three days a week, um, skip breakfast, stop eating after eight, 9:00 at night and don’t eat till, you know, late morning, noon the next day. I mean, that’s easy for my patients to do.
[11:24] REENA JADHAV: I’m so glad to say that because that’s what our health boot camps program is, right? So we say eat your dinner by seven and then we recommend that you don’t sort of have a breakfast, but you have a brunch of around 10, 11. That’s exactly right. And you’re right, people don’t have a hard time doing the first couple of days or just odd because you’re flick, you know, sort of moving away from sort of eating really late or eating really early. But within a couple of days they settled right into it and they say they don’t even that they’re pretty.
[11:54] DR STEVEN MASLEY: I actually, I find people could do it even immediately in their fine. I might take it the first couple times too. Real. I mean there might be surprised, realized, well I could go without breakfast and I’d be okay.
[12:04] REENA JADHAV: Yeah, exactly.
[12:07] DR STEVEN MASLEY: And I am a little just a couple of hours later. And you, I let them go till nine and they don’t eat until noon.
[12:11] REENA JADHAV: Exactly That’s…
[12:13] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Seven to ten, nine to noon, same timeframe. So really similar concept and I really liked them to load up on vegetables the night before. Especially for women. I find that when women do this kind of thing, if they’re eating like meat and grains the night before, which are acidic, they don’t feel nearly as well the next morning is that they load up on Greens, they add some alkalinity to it, and then they seem. I find they seem to tolerate it better the next day.
[12:43] REENA JADHAV: Oh, that’s a really, really good suggestion. Yeah, we do. We recommend soups pretty much vegetarian soups at night. But I liked the idea from them.
[12:51] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Yeah, exactly like beans and lots of vegetables and especially green leaf’s.
[12:55] REENA JADHAV: That sounds great. So, so you have one test that you recommend. You’ve shared some really good recommendations on what feeds the brain, what hurts the brain, what’s the worst? You mentioned sugar…
[13:06] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Sugar is number one. Resistant. And when I say sugar, I mean sugar. Any refined carb, whether it’s mashed potatoes or bread, I put them in the same category, but there’s definitely toxins out there. You know, there’s mercury and big mouth fish a third of which has mercury and all our patients when we test cognitive function, we’ve actually published in showing people who eat big mouth fish more than say three times a month. A third of them are high and it’s decreasing their brain speed. So grouper, tuna, snapper, swordfish, shark, obviously bigmouth fish they are high in the food chain and they’re higher in mercury. So, um, you know, all those Ahi tuna lovers, I get it. I do it. I wouldn’t, I don’t need it more than once a month. I just, I noticed if I check my mercury levels still behind. So, um, I try to be cautious about big mouth fish. I’m number two, another really brain toxin are nitrosamines and they’re super common, you know, a lot of people are doing paleo now and so they’re reading more deli meats and sandwich meats and hot dogs and bacon and most of those are sprinkled with nitrosamines to extend their shelf life, so they can make more profit off it. They don’t want the food to go bad. They don’t want to say you have to throw it out in 72 hours. So they sprinkle nitrosamines on them and now they’re toxic. They cause cancer, diabetes and nitrosamines. I was pretty surprised with the research to realize they’re neurotoxic. You can give rodents Alzheimer’s within a month by just feeding them nitrosamines like people would get from eating bacon every day. So, um, inorganic copper is another common toxin out there. So part of the better brain solution is to teach people about what are toxic foods out there and how can you easily avoid them.
[15:00] REENA JADHAV: What about Apple?
[15:01] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Injury your brain unintentionally?
[15:02] REENA JADHAV: Exactly. What about alcohol?
[15:05] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, that’s a real interesting one. And appears there’s like a J- shaped curve and now let me just clarify, I’m not asking any non -drinker to start drinking alcoholic drink. If you don’t drink, you probably have a good reason, but if you do drink the only alcohol, in small quantities, that I have shown that’s been shown to be helpful and that’s what we showed with the publication for my clinic. If people drink red wine, one to two servings a day, like with dinner tend, I mean they have better cognitive function, they’re less likely to get Alzheimer’s, sadly to say beer and hard liquor had no benefit. And if you drink more than three servings a day, I mean that. It’s delusional to think that’s good for you. You’re pickling your brain so they ship a little bit as good or people who can drink only that small amount in more is harm, clearly harmful. I’d definitely call excess alcohol more than three servings a day are toxin.
[16:06] REENA JADHAV: Got It. Let’s talk about the fact that there is a way to actually reverse Alzheimer’s and I’m now going to switch our conversation to some of us who may have parents that were concerned about or may have already had parents who’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Sort of dealing with that. If you can share what are your insights and helping someone who’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s reverse it.
[16:33] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, there’s not a magic bullet. There’s not a single pill or a single food you can eat. It’s a multifactorial thing, but like I think the largest study out today is the finger trial out of Finland where they showed that if you add bright food like a Mediterranean low-glycemic Diet, Act physical activity, mental exercises, stress management, people’s cognitive function right up and they had better memory. They had less Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss over time. So, but it wasn’t just any one of those aspects of the program by itself, just the food or just the activity or just the stress Management didn’t work. Right? So it’s a comprehensive and that’s where we have a five step program. Eat the right foods to eat, what you should avoid. What are the top five, six nutrients you can’t live without? What activity to add, how to manage your stress and like we talked on those key toxins to avoid when you add those together, you can improve brain processing, speed, memory, cognitive performance. You can help reverse memory loss. I don’t mean to say, and I don’t want to create an expectation. You’re not going to take someone from with Alzheimer’s and make them brilliant, a genius. We could improve their brain function and then stopped and slowed their demise. Um, I’m not. So the more the earlier you start, the better. It’s never too early and it’s never too late. So 30 year olds and 80 year olds can improve their brain function and help prevent future loss. Um, and we can reverse some aspects of memory loss, but everybody could have a better brain who wouldn’t want to be sharper, quicker, more productive, and prevent further memory loss. Even if you have a parent like that, we can help them with a multifaceted program. And that’s why we came up with our five steps
[18:29] REENA JADHAV: And how long is typically at the program life for. So how long should someone actually follow the program to start seeing results? And is this something you recommend them as a lifetime approach?
[18:38] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, yes, I don’t. I’m mean, this is not like a diet for, okay, my daughter’s getting ready, my, you know, my sister and my daughter’s getting married and I want to lose 10, 15 pounds to fit into a basic logan. This is not what I’m talking. I’m talking about if I could help someone feel mentally sharper, quicker, more productive, they probably lose weight, they feel better, it helps prevent heart disease and shrinks artery plaque and their energy and sexual function and sleep are all better. Why wouldn’t you stick with that? And that’s really what we find. It’s trying to. I’m looking to give people a lifestyle they could follow that improves their quality of life. It’s good for all aspects of their health, improves their brain function and hopefully they would stick with it.
[19:24] REENA JADHAV: And you had some statistics for us. How well does the program do for different people?
[19:30] DR STEVEN MASLEY: So we’ve tested this in 30 to 80 year olds. Um, we’ve done hundreds of patients and we’ve put them through our five step program and the average person improve their brain processing speed over 25 percent and their attention span went up to 40 to 45 percent better. So they can focus better, they can process information quicker. Um, I mean pretty amazing in a four to 10 week period that you could get that big an improvement.
[19:58] REENA JADHAV: That’s impressive. That’s very impressive. You know, who needs this the most are our teenagers, our high school juniors and our college students.
[20:09] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Yeah, that is…I mean a really good point. We’ve never done this study, you know, with the randomized trial on adolescents, but I would, it’s always been high on my list that you and I, this is how I teach parents to raise their kids. I mean this isn’t just a diet for your grandparents or your 40 years old for you, but how we should be feeding our children to improve their cognitive performance and attention today, especially if they’re a tendency to anxiety or depression or ATD.
[20:39] REENA JADHAV: Well, you know, a study just came out, I think it was released two days ago about the incredible rise in depression and suicide amongst adolescents and that was primarily focused on high school and college students. And I’ve got a college student, I’ve got a daughter in college and I can tell you the stress that these kids are under and the way they push themselves, so between, you know, sleeping very few hours a night, do the extreme stress of doing as many aps as they want to do, do of course incorporating parties into their life as well. Um, they, it’s just a storm of for brain function I feel. And of course they’re all living on junk food to some extent. So I think we could help tremendously the kids, the teens…
[21:22] DR STEVEN MASLEY: We have seen a lot of adolescents, parents will bring it through adolescence and we’ve definitely noticed that there will do cognitive testing on um, you know, it’s a small handful but we clearly knows even my own college son here who is in college, you know, he’d said, you know, dad, I tried just eating like everyone else, junk food. And I felt terrible. I couldn’t, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t do my homework. He’s in engineering school and he couldn’t think when he was eating this junk and so he’s actually eating better just because it helps him pass his courses. So…
[21:58] REENA JADHAV: He sounds very smart and clearly very, uh, thoughtful of a teenager. I think the challenge we face as a society, and this has nothing to do with just teenagers, this is adults, this is parents, this is everybody, is that the world we’re living in, we’re being bombarded with these tempting junk foods.
[22:20] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Absolutely right. I totally agree with you.
[22:22] REENA JADHAV: There is a dripping pizza or there’s that stack of pancakes or whatever it is. It’s all designed to convince us that we need that food right now whether its…
[22:32] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Addicting food, it’s addicting, it’s cravings, we got to have more of it, it’s like that concept you can’t eat just one chip. You are right, you can’t.
[22:44] REENA JADHAV: It’s designed that way. Have you found in helping people break those cravings as they start your program and those cravings kick in? What, what have you noticed that works?
[22:56] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well? We started with just a shopping list. You know, what foods should, when you go to the store, where do you put in your cart and what do you buy? I mean really basic simple stuff, you know. Yes. We want you to get colorful plant foods like green leafy. Um, if you eat one cup of Greenleaf is a day like Broccoli, Kale, your brain is 11 years younger than the average person who doesn’t eat them. Really blueberries, any of the berries, eat a cup of berries a day. Um, you know, nuts have one or two handfuls of nuts today and one or two tablespoons of olive oil and three servings of wild seafood per week, you know, like wild salmon or take a fish, good quality fish, oil fill and that, you know, green tea is really good for your brain. Yes, you can have, you know, red wine, you must have dark chocolate or cocoa, you know, every day for your brain. So it’s like giving them a shopping list of 12 foods to add that sound like, okay, that would, I could eat blueberries and cherries and dark chocolate and I, you know, that wouldn’t be that hard. And you suddenly realize they could do this with a shopping list to buy and then foods you can. And I think that’s a huge jumpstart to get people going on this. And then a nutrient lists. What are the key nutrients you’ve got to get each day? What are the steps to manage your stress? So I think those little, you know, that’s part of our five step program with the better brain solution. What, how do you actually get going and do these things? So it’s easy. Am I. What I realized is the easier we make it, the better people’s success.
[24:29] REENA JADHAV: Absolutely. We have to make it something that they can do without huge trauma to their current lifestyle because that’s what I’ve realized. If, if it requires dramatic changes, people just fall off. So it’s something that’s sort of neatly needs to fit in. And that’s sort of, what we’ve been trying to do with health boot camps of course. But this sounds incredible. You know, one of the things that I to have noticed is that if you give people a list of what to do as in go just focus on this. They forget about the stuff that they’re not eating anymore, so sort of, if you load up on the berries in the morning, your sugar cravings go down. I noticed that even for myself.
[25:07] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Exactly, have pancakes or cereals you starve by 11 o’clock.
[25:11] REENA JADHAV: Yes, exactly. So I love your idea of you load them up with what to eat and automatically their body resets and they’re not craving all the junk food that normally they would. So I’ve noticed this. If I don’t have my fruit smoothie in the morning, I’m absolutely rummaging around for sugar by around 10, 11 because my body is…
[25:30] DR STEVEN MASLEY: I’m glad you said the word cravings though, because that’s such an important concept that people think, oh, I just use will power. Well, no will power is not going to work when you have cravings. So if you’re feeling down, you eat a candy bar, your sugar’s going to shoot up and then it’s going to plummet and when it plummets, you’re going to have cravings. And Will power is not going to work. If that’s what you are counting on good luck. So yes, they are right foods, but that’s also, why I went back to chef. You know, this was an insane act in me, right. I’m a physician, I was doing research projects and I went back to chefs’ school. I did a year’s chef internship at the four seasons in Seattle, learning how to make recipes better. My goal was to how I could use these ingredients so food is easy to prepare, delicious. Your family and friends will love it and it nourishes your heart, brain and soul. That was kind of my goal in doing the chef internship and it really worked and that I learned a lot about cooking, doing the chef internship, you know the standard is, you know, white flour, you can make something taste good if you’ve got butter, sugar and white flour, well Duh, but it’s not that hard to concept to realize, okay, now if I have chocolate and greens and berries and nuts and olive oils, I can make an herbs and spices, especially Italian herbs and curry spices that have all these medicinal anti -inflammatory properties. Wow! You can make food tastes really good with them too, as long as you don’t try to make it low fat and they use the smart fats.
[27:08] REENA JADHAV: That makes a lot of sense. All right, so we are going to now go into the fun part of the show, which is recipes. So, so Dr. Masley, and what is your favorite recipe of all the recipes that you’ve learned and cooked?
[27:20] DR STEVEN MASLEY: I mean I’ll actually reach and grab my book, breakfast recipes, lunch, dinner, desserts. Where would you like to focus on?
[27:34] REENA JADHAV: Dessert of course.
[27:35] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Okay. I’ll pull up some of my favorite dessert recipes. Just as an example. I think the top two that probably come to mind would be. I mean, one of the typical things I make when we have company coming over, we’d be a berry smoothie. I would pick some fruit like blueberries or um, strawberries or a peach or something, right? That’s delicious. They can even be frozen so it can be less expensive and easier to find them and they don’t go bad. So let’s make it convenient and you take that and you’re going to simmer it in a saucepan. I’d probably had to get a little sauce going. I would use some lemon juice to it that get to go with a little tart to go with the sweet. I would add maybe a tablespoon of like some tapioca to just give it a thickener that doesn’t have a very high glycemic load sugar content. And um, and then I’m going to, you know, I’m going a little cook that for a little bit. I would definitely use some herbs like cinnamon, which helps lower blood sugar and maybe even a tiny pinch of Cayenne pepper that. Not that you would even ever do spicy, but just to you, you won’t even know. It’s, you’ll be like, there’s something missing and I can’t figure it out what it is. So that herbs and spices to go with those fruit that I’m going to bake and then sprinkle like with almonds. And then I would like toast separately, some chopped pecans or sliced almonds or something and put that on the top and then pop it in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes. And so that’s going to be like, oh. And I didn’t mention, I would usually put in port wine with that to at the alcohol comes off. We’ll get all that flavor and it’s going to thicken and add an along with the fruit and that little dash of lemon. And the cinnamon. It’s going to just… wonderful flavor.
[29:32] REENA JADHAV: It sounds delicious!
[29:33] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Second dessert, I would pick what? Chocolate Mousse. So one of my wife’s favorite dishes that I’m going to, we’re going to up, we’re going to take. And this is a to make. You can make a dairy version or you could go nondairy and use like soft tofu and put it in a blender with cocoa powder milk. Some dark chocolate. It’s got to be at least 74 to 80 percent dark, right? Don’t call it dark chocolate. And they’re a touch of grandma ne orange. This put it in a blender and oh my gosh, it is fantastic.
[30:13] REENA JADHAV: What do you use for a sweetener?
[30:15] DR STEVEN MASLEY: If I wanted to know no sugar, which is probably be the case. I mean for a holiday like New Year’s Eve, we might use maple syrup, but that’s still a glycemic load. I’d probably use Xylitol. You can’t really cook Stevia. It’d be like I’d use a half the equivalent of what they would normally cause for a recipe for sugar, I’d use half of that with Xylitol and because that’s a non. You don’t absorb it and add some sweetness and it’s really nice in the recipe and it punishes you if you overeat it, so if you over indulge on Xylitol, you get stomach cramps, so just have a small portion. It’s perfect. It’s fantastic. You don’t have any symptoms at all, but you can eat four servings at once or you’ll regret.
[31:01] REENA JADHAV: What about locater or monk fruit?
[31:02] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Monk Fruit is actually another option for sweetener I liked. I think that’s a good one or a fairly, you know, non-caloric sweetener. I think that’s a good choice.
[31:13] REENA JADHAV: Okay! What about a dinner recipe? What’s a good entree that’s also brain boost?
[31:18] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Vegetarian seafood, poultry. Let’s be like a mushroom, not pate.
[31:24] REENA JADHAV: Oh…
[31:26] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Super nice. And you want it dairy free, egg free,
[31:32] REENA JADHAV: Dairy free, eggs are okay but dairy free.
[31:33] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Okay, so a sauté mushroom So here’s my pecan nut, low recipe out of the book. So I’ll tell you an almond oil, some mushrooms, a sweet onion, little salt and pepper. Celery, Italian Parsley, oops… there’s goes port wine. I only have port wine is thinking through recipes and the whole book and I’ve already mentioned both of those. Um, if we can use eggs I would put in, but they’ve got to be cage free. Organically raised eggs, not the toxic pesticide in hormone enrich dates where they torture the chickens please. And then about a cup of Pecans or you could use walnuts or almonds, but I like pecan maybe walnut half-and-half. And uh, um, and then I would so that not in the mushroom and then, and it, if we don’t, you can make it dairy free. We would actually, again, I’ve made a dairy without any egg several times and it comes up with the egg, holds it together better. If you do eat eggs and it’s healthy protein, I would include the Yolk if they’re organic and cage free eggs. So that’s like one of my favorite vegetarian dishes. I’ve got to others like, you know, Thai stir fries and Italian dishes and Mexican dishes, you know, like stuff, Chili radio knows or I have to admit the Pecan nut loaf is my favorite vegetarian item.
[32:58] REENA JADHAV: I’m definitely going to be trying that. So what is your biggest insight from studying, researching, working with patients when it comes to brain health? What has been your biggest Aha moment? Like wow. I did not know that there was a connection there.
[33:16] DR STEVEN MASLEY: No, when I first started this out, I mean I was doing an optimal health center. We were associate aging and we were looking at um, you know, artery plaque growth and cognitive function and bone density in hormone levels and blood sugar and all these people were on oftentimes on all these meds. And we initially we started with, we were trying to predict which lifestyle choices impacted these and we pretty quickly identified there were foods in nutrient deficiencies and poor fitness levels increase your risk for everything to fall apart, your energy below you grow artery plaque, your brain speed would drop, and then we. So we started identifying from when people came in and we did these vows, what predicted optimal health and what predicted accelerated aging. And we started doing these randomized trials where we actually tried our five step program and why went whoa, those were better ways. I did not expect people to shrink their artery plaque by more than 10 percent in a year. Literally, their arteries would be 10 years younger in a year. I did not expect that. And in people whose brain got better, their heart artery plaque was shrinking. If they’re heart got back their brain got better. So it was like the same intervention, the right food, nutrients, activity, stress management and toxin avoidance would impact multiple aspects. You’re helping people felt dramatically different. They lost, I mean there. So the Aha was when you put all the right steps together, the results are big, better than one plus one plus one. They’re like two times, two times two, you know, it’s like suddenly it’s this huge benefit and it. And people stick with it.
[35:02] REENA JADHAV: Yes.
[35:03] DR STEVEN MASLEY: I mean, I keep seeing patients back. I’ve been doing this 15 years and after 15 years, my patients are still getting better over time. Almost every year we’re noticing by just tweaking it, they’re getting better and better over. They feel better than they did 10, 15 years ago. Wow. That’s pretty amazing.
[35:21] REENA JADHAV: That’s remarkable. That’s remarkable. And that’s unexperienced. I had. So when I got really sick and got better, it is because I did. I changed everything. And to your point, all the symptoms went away and they didn’t go away one by one. They sort of went in waves. It’s like, yeah, it’s, it’s the power of a good lifestyle is highly underestimated and just not, I think promoted enough. So I’m thrilled to hear you talk about the importance of this, that you know, do it all, do a comprehensive change. It’s not one thing. With that said, if there was one thing of the five, so between kinds of exercising more, sleeping more, eating better, reducing your stress. If I said to you, pick one, right? You have to pick one, which is the one that you would pick that has the biggest impact of all.
[36:18] DR STEVEN MASLEY: For me, it’s food, I mean, because if you put dirt in your gas tank it does matter what you do to the car, it’s not going to run well and that’s the easiest thing to change and that’s probably where the biggest toxic exposure is. I mean some, some people they just eat. Many people eat horribly and they don’t even realize that they think they’re following the standard American diet. They are, but it’s the sad standard American diet. It’s terrible.
[36:47] REENA JADHAV: The pyramid is wrong, you know that famous pyramid that they’ve been trying to sell us for the last couple of decades, that that pyramid is long.
[36:54] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, but you said it perfectly. They’re trying to sell us. They’re trying to sell agricultural goods. That is not a health pyramid. It’s a pyramid to sell US health products that we shouldn’t be producing.
[37:06] REENA JADHAV: Exactly and the wrong way, we’re producing them all the wrong way. So yeah, so we are here, you know, educating the listeners out there to say follow a better model of diet and we’ll see the huge results. You won’t need all those pills and medications and um, and won’t have that fatigue and exhaustion and dimension and the rest of it. Um, wonderful. So where can our listeners find you and do you, do you do consults directly? Are you on skype as well or do we have to come down to Seattle to meet with you?
[37:41] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Right now? I’m in St Pete Florida I moved from Seattle, so the better brain books available wherever books are sold, they can visit me on the website, dr. masley.dot com. I have a weekly blog. I send out weekly recipes. So Dr masley Dot Com. They can sign up, I’ll give him my shopping lifts just for opting in to see the blog. They can always dis-enroll at anytime, but yeah, between the books, they could come to St Pete Clinic for an eval or they could read the book or they could sign up and follow us online and all those are options. Um, my, my goal is to help serve people that feel better, feel fantastic and enjoy their life.
[38:23] REENA JADHAV: Thank you so much for the amazing work you’re doing. Any last parting advice to someone out there going, I need to get my brain back? What’s the one parting advice that you’d give them?
[38:33] DR STEVEN MASLEY: Well, I think a lot people procrastinate and they’re waiting to feel for something to be broken to fix it. Like people wait until they have a heart attack to do something for their heart. Well, that’s waiting too long, but with your brain it’s even actually a lot worse because by the time you notice you’re losing memory, you’re forgetful and all that, your brain is literally shrinking and it’s likely shrunk. So my. Don’t wait until you have a shrunken breading choosed. Just decide, hey, you know what? I want to feel better. I want to feel sharper, quicker, more productive. I want to prevent these problems. Take action. Start today. Don’t wait for you, your family, your loved ones. Get started right now. It’s time to feel better and have a better life and prevent some of the worst you know, Alzheimer’s, dementia. Those are the words that’s the worst disease on the planet and we can prevent it. So get started. That would be my best advice.
[39:30] REENA JADHAV: I love it! Thank you so much again for everything that you’re doing. For the rest of you out there, start now. Not Tomorrow, not later today. Start now. It’s easy. Check out the link. We’re going to put it on the video of course, and we’re for those of you who are listening to this as a podcast, check out the show notes. We’re going to have a length. You can get the shopping list as Dr Masley set up and of course this book and keep smiling. Life is beautiful. I’ll see you on another one of our shows. This is Reena signing off from health boot camps.
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www.drmasleystore.com
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