Café dialogue at Vendome Wednesday May 8 and a good book

“You don’t need to succeed, you only need to persist.”

We’ll meet at Vendome this coming Wednesday May 8, starting at 6 PM, and persist with our secret plan to change the course of history.

Last Wednesday we talked a lot about empathy, considered creating an “empathy circle,” and shared other ideas. Daniel Dale Dunbar was a newcomer to the group, and we hope he’ll join us again from time to time. Nyabuoy was back, and with Zoe and others participating I felt a bit younger just being there.

The book share was on the topic of empathy, including its vast transformative potential for (YES!), changing the course of history. However, just to be clear, the author did not say that self-sufficiency and self-interest were not important – only that they were only one part of the story we need to be aware of if we want to create a healthy society.

I’ve appended a synopsis of another good book below that can help us create a healthy society.

Looking forward,

Arthur

Book: (Dean & Ayesha Sherzai) The Alzheimer’s Solution: A Breakthrough Program to Prevent and Reverse the Symptoms of Cognitive Decline at Every Age (2017)

At a recent café dialogue I called for anyone who was not getting older to share their secret with the rest of us. Exactly no one raised her (or his) hand. The good news is that with a large population that has (on average) grown older, there is a golden opportunity to tap into the vast resource of that growing wisdom. To think that old folks don’t have anything worth listening to is like thinking we can’t learn anything from an experienced mountain climber or from someone who’s lived in many parts of the world or who has raised children and seen them grow and succeed in life. And yet that way of thinking is one of the forms of foolishness of our culture! To reap the benefits of this golden opportunity, however, at least two things are necessary: 1) We must actively meet and learn from older people; and 2) we must (as we ourselves grow older) do the best we can to maintain our health, which includes not losing our marbles (going into cognitive decline).

This book by Dean and Ayesha Sherzai might help. The authors are neurologists who work with populations of elderly people near Loma Linda, California. Loma Linda is one of the five “Blue Zones” in the world, where an unusually high proportion of people are older than 100 years. As they established their clinical work (which focuses on Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia) they noticed that the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease seemed to be much lower in the Loma Linda community than in age-matched populations from other communities. The incidence of other age-related diseases also seemed lower.

The Loma Linda communities have lifestyle practices that include low consumption of such things as meat and dairy products. The authors became convinced that lifestyle changes could prevent or even reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. This conclusion was – to say the least – very controversial among health care professionals and scientists who study Alzheimer’s, who had long worked with the assumption that Alzheimer’s was – unlike such things as cardiovascular disease – not something you could prevent or treat.

Scepticism is as important as being open to new possibilities. There’s a tsunami of self-help books and dietary fads around, and they often say contradictory things. Yet from my perspective, this book is well worth giving serious attention.

So let’s say we’re approaching the age of 50 and we've decided to make our lifestyle changes right now. Is that too soon for a jump start?

No. As the authors explain, the inflammation, oxidation, glucose dysregulation, and lipid dysregulation associated with the earliest stages of Alzheimer pathology (amyloid and tau accumulation in the brain) begin even decades before the earliest signs of cognitive decline.

Okay so what are the lifestyle changes we need to make?

Glad you asked! In essence we should pay attention to our diet, our exercise program, our social network, our cognitive activities, and our patterns of sleep and stress. On pages 55 to 56, the authors summarize the game plan as follows:

• Eating meat is bad for your brain. A whole-food, plant-based diet rich in vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, and healthy fats is what the brain requires to thrive.

• Physical exercise increases both the number of brain cells and the connections between them.

• Chronic stress puts the brain in a state of high inflammation, causing structural damage and impairing its ability to clear harmful waste products.

• Restorative sleep is essential for cognitive and overall health.

• Higher education and other complex cognitive activities protect your brain against decline, even late in life.

• Social support and meaningful, constant engagement with your community has an undeniable influence on the way your brain ages.

Sceptical? I hope so because you need both that and open-mindedness to succeed in life. The authors emphasize the scepticism of the scientific community, and of course the pharmaceutical industry, who have devoted years to testing drugs that might help treat or prevent or even cure Alzheimer’s. The success rate after all that research has been close to zero. Meanwhile, published studies cited by the authors have gradually provided a body of evidence that diet and exercise and other measures are associated with healthy aging including healthy brain aging. We accept this for heart and vascular disease. Everybody knows about the dangers of high cholesterol, high salt intake, high blood pressure, and the importance of exercise. But that’s for the heart and blood vessels, not for the brain, right? Well, okay, of course the brain has blood vessels too, so maybe…

So what if we’re way past 50 years of age and we decide to give it a try. Maybe we’ve even passed 75 years of age (like me). Is it too late? What if we have already started to notice that we’re more forgetful, that we’re not as confident when we drive a car…. Jeez, maybe we’re already in the early stages. Is it too late to get started?

No. The authors emphasize that in those pre-dementia stages, and even in early, mid, and later stages of Alzheimer’s itself, following the lifestyle program they recommend can slow and even reverse those early signs of cognitive decline.

If you still want to stick to your old lifestyle of meat and late-night TV on the couch with beer and chips, you can monitor my own progress, because I’m convinced this strategy is worth a try. I intend to persist. I’ll give you a report from the field.