The fight for your brain starts in your heart

Your heart health and brain health go hand in hand — it’s a crucial connection I discuss with my patients all the time.

And for once, we’re not talking about a link that’s only recognized by the field of integrative medicine. Luckily, even mainstream docs understand what’s good for your heart is also good for your head.

Today, I wanted to share with you two compelling new studies that further solidify the importance of this well-established connection …

Outsmart dementia in 7 simple steps  

Let’s start with the first study. Researchers assessed the correlation between dementia risk and seven simple markers of heart health:

• A fasting blood sugar level below 100
• Blood pressure under 120/80 without treatment
• BMI under 25
• Eating a healthy diet
• Meeting minimum exercise requirements
• Non-smoker
• Total cholesterol under 200 without treatment

Not to point out the obvious, but these are all pretty easy metrics to meet. And they’re also potential game-changers for your brain, as this study’s results point out. However, these findings offer both good news and bad news…

The good news: Subjects who met five to seven of these metrics developed dementia at a rate of 7.1 per 100, compared with a rate of 13.3 per 100 among subjects who only met two metrics or fewer. That’s essentially half the risk to your brain, and all you have to do is meet a handful of basic heart-health goals.

The bad news? Well sadly, at baseline, only a measly 6.5 percent of the subjects were hitting five or more of these goals.

That means we’re doing a pretty miserable job of getting people to be even remotely healthy. Again, none of those metrics are hard to achieve. We’re talking about the bare minimum here.

And it’s not an all-or-nothing deal, either. In fact, for every extra metric you meet, you decrease your dementia risk by an additional ten percent.

But that’s just half of today’s story…

It’s never too soon to save your brain

The other study I want to share examined the relationship between lifestyle factors and brain health in young adults.

Researchers looked at brain images from 125 subjects without any sign of cerebrovascular disease. And they found that having a higher number of these optimal heart health metrics links directly to a higher density of cerebral vessels, higher blood flow to the brain, and fewer white matter lesions. (The last of which paves the way to stroke and dementia later in life.)

Translation: Your lifestyle choices when you’re young have a huge impact on your brain’s blood vessel and tissue health as you age. And making the right choices for your heart will carry a direct benefit in this department—potentially warding off dementia down the road.

If this doesn’t convince you that it’s never too early to start thinking about your brain’s health, I don’t know what will. But it’s also a good reminder that the choices that you make today matter where your dementia risk is concerned.

Just remember, the fight only ends in your head. It starts in your heart.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve spent the last several months combing through all of my research and patient files to create a comprehensive, step-by-step protocol for ultimate heart protection. I’m finally putting the finishing touches on it and will be releasing it very soon. I’m so excited to share this life-saving program with you, so be on the lookout for more details later this week!

P.S. In the meantime, you can learn about all the other strategies I recommend for preventing, combatting—and even reversing—Alzheimer’s in my Drug-Free Protocol for Reversing Alzheimer’s and Dementia. You can learn more about it or enroll today by clicking here.

Source:

medscape.com/viewarticle/901055