Longevity Expert: "If You Avoid This, You're Protected From Brain Decline, Disease & Inflammation"

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   I think about the fact that you're a neurologist, and I think about brain health, and I think you're widely known all over the world now for advising people on diet and lifestyle, how they can better live their lives. Yet I still think there's a lot of people out there who don't see the link between the health of their brains and their lifestyle.

2. DPDr. David Perlmutter0:21

   Yeah, we, we still labor through this dichotomy between the health of the brain and the health of the body as if it is, uh... there's some division. And, you know, this gets back to Descartes and the whole notion of systems and, you know, looking at the body as a, a machine, the brain being the computer, the heart is the pump, the lungs are the bellows, and there should be no interaction. And, you know, the reality is the body functions as an integrated whole. Uh, the notion that there is a, in America they call it a heart smart diet, as if what's good for the heart might not be so good for the brain, for the rest of the body, might not be so good as it relates to cancer risk reduction. The reality is that we are still doing the very best we can to refine our messaging for the health of the entire body, including the brain. The brain is an, a fundamental part of the whole. And, you know, even the notion, taking it further, of the idea that bacteria live upon us and within us and are intimately related to, uh, our moment to moment health and ability to resist disease is difficult to embrace even with all the new, uh, exciting research coming out about the microbiome.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:35

   Yeah.

4. DPDr. David Perlmutter1:36

   We want to believe that body systems are segregated. We have the development of cardiologists and neurologists and pediatric neurologists dealing with the young brain, and, uh, we see higher, higher levels of specialization. But the reality is it's very important to take a step back from the forest and realize, uh, that even as it relates to our role, uh, on the planet, you know, man did not weave the web of life, he's merely a strand of it. That's a quote from Chief Seattle. So we're, you know... we've really got to realize that everything is integrated.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:11

   Yeah. Of course, food is something that you've written many books about what kind of foods help support our health, which kind of foods potentially take away from our health. In your view, with all your experience, is it more important for us to focus on foods to take out of our diets or foods to introduce?

6. DPDr. David Perlmutter2:36

   That's a tough question. A lot of my work these days is taking the fructose out of the human diet.

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:42

   Mm.

8. DPDr. David Perlmutter2:43

   Uh, I, I have put myself in a place in very recent years of focusing on the notion of evolutionary environmental mismatch. What does it mean? It means that our environment and what we expose ourselves to in the modern world in terms of food, in terms of other aspects of our day-to-day existence, is deeply in contrast to what our genome would best be served by. We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years under a fairly static set of circumstances. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, those circumstances have changed, and our genome has not had a chance, uh, to adapt. So we are living with a Paleolithic genome in a very, very industrialized type of environment-

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:34

   Yeah

10. DPDr. David Perlmutter3:34

    ... uh, and there's this, a huge mismatch. You know, I, I, I... and I say that's become sort of my watch word in terms of focus as of late, but I wrote a paper on this topic half a century ago-

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:47

    Wow

12. DPDr. David Perlmutter3:47

    ... publishing it, uh, in the, in, in the Miami Herald, our local newspaper, when I was 16. And I called, uh, at the end of that, uh, missive, uh, the question, uh, what about those of us living today with the outdated machinery? Meaning that we are more suited to a different environment. So we're not gonna change part one, the evolutionary part. We're not going to anytime soon be able to influence, uh, the, the code of our genetic legacy, but we can certainly look at the other side of the balance beam, the, uh, environmental part, and that speaks to your question about food. And I think that clearly the input, uh, of food in terms of that relationship is vast. As such, we look upon food not just in terms of the macronutrients of protein, fat, and carbohydrates or the micronutrients of minerals and vitamins, but we look upon food as an information cue. Food is a powerful indicator to our bodies as to what we should be expecting right now and, even more importantly, what is to come. Food tells our bodies to prepare for food scarcity, to prepare for winter. Uh, it tells our bodies that now it's time to stop storing fat and to activate various pathways, uh, that allow us to burn fat as fuel and stop making glucose. But that relationship, that signaling pathway, is now, uh, you know, facing an accelerator, the likes of which we have never imagined. Basically, what I'm saying is we are day in and day out stimulating a signaling pathway telling our bodies to prepare for food scarcity, uh, for winter, basically, but that winter will never come.

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:41

    The eternal summer.

14. DPDr. David Perlmutter5:43

    That's right. That sounds actually pretty good though.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:46

    You're right. An endless summer sounds good, right? For enjoyment, for sun, for heat, but actually there's a very detrimental consequence for our bodies, our brains, our whole physiology if we live in a state of eternal summer. You mentioned a couple of things which really, um, grabbed my ear. Food is information, right?If I think about the general public, whether it's in the UK, in the US, many countries around the world, food is still not seen as information. People think of food, as you say, as calories or, you know, how much fat is there? How much protein? How many carbs? And I think that's such a reductionist way to look at food. You've also mentioned fructose.

16. DPDr. David Perlmutter6:30

    Mm-hmm.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:30

    What is fructose? Where does it live? And why are you so keen to help people get it out of their diets?

18. DPDr. David Perlmutter6:38

    Uh, I, I don't think people are keenly aware basically about anything related to their foods when you, when you think about it. When you walk around London, as I did today, uh, and people are walking and eating, uh, there's no real connection with the foods that they're eating, that the next bite is being prepared while the, the current bite is being chewed, and there's really no connection. And, uh, we eat what we're told to eat and what becomes available to us, and, uh, marketing has captivated us, knowing full well that each and every person on this planet has a sweet tooth. While you, you know, Rangan would like to deny it, and David Perlmutter would like to deny it, we have as part of our hardwiring-

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:20

    Yeah

20. DPDr. David Perlmutter7:20

    ... a survival mechanism to trend towards sweet. Sweet tells us two important things. It tells us that the food is safe and that the food is, uh, good for us because it tells us winter is coming and basically allows us to make and store fat.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:36

    Why does it tell us it's safe?

22. DPDr. David Perlmutter7:38

    Uh, because basically there is no food on the planet that is sweet and is toxic, at least in terms of nature.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:44

    In nature [laughs] , yeah.

24. DPDr. David Perlmutter7:45

    In nature, that's for sure. Uh, that's ve- a very interesting paradox, isn't it?

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:49

    Yeah.

26. DPDr. David Perlmutter7:49

    That nowadays the toxic foods are in fact sweet. Uh, but it plays upon us because our hardwiring says, "Eat that food. It is sweet. It is safe, and it's the right color."

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:00

    Yeah.

28. DPDr. David Perlmutter8:00

    You know, in nature, by and large, red foods, for example, have traditionally been threatening. Nowadays, red dye added to things and, you know, the gummy bears are certainly, uh, perfectly fine seemingly. But we've totally lost our connection, which wasn't something actually humans ever thought about. Humans didn't think about eating particular foods because it would prepare their bodies for a type of stress like food scarcity. It just, uh, happened as part of our evolution and was a pow- a powerful survival mechanism.

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:34

    Yeah.

30. DPDr. David Perlmutter8:34

    And, and it takes us to a place of, of understanding how our evolution has cultivated those behaviors that we have that make us crave fat, salt, and sweet as survival mechanisms. Those ideas of adding more salt and fat and sweet to manufactured foods, what a concept, manufactured foods, preys upon us. It preys upon our hardwiring and makes us gravitate to, uh, to those foods, eat way more of them than we should, and explains, in my opinion, the global, uh, explosion in terms of rates of overweight and obesity and all of the metabolic downstream issues that we are now seeing.

Episode duration: 1:01:13