Dr Chalmers Path to Pro - Dementia Explained Chemically
Dementia isn’t just about memory loss it’s often connected to deeper issues in the body, especially insulin resistance. When the brain can’t use insulin properly, it affects areas responsible for memory, thinking, and mood. Low cholesterol and long-term use of certain medications can also play a role by limiting what the brain needs to stay healthy and repair itself.
Supporting brain health means looking at the whole picture. That includes eating a high-fat, low-carb diet like keto, improving sleep (especially if there’s sleep apnea), balancing hormones like testosterone, and encouraging regular movement. Taking care of these basics can make a big difference, especially when caught early.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:04 - Dementia and Insulin Resistance
01:35 - Brain Regions Affected by Insulin
02:58 - Cholesterol is Crucial
04:11 - Keto Diet and Brain Health
05:24 - Testosterone & Growth Hormone
06:39 - Sleep Apnea and Oxygen Deprivation
07:56 - Movement and Brain Regeneration
09:21 - Rebuild Before Rehab
10:43 - Act Fast—Early Intervention is Critical
11:53 - Holistic Approach to Dementia
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:04] All right, so yesterday we went over insulin resistance and diabetes and that type of thing. So we wanna carry the idea forward with dementia because while dementia has other factors with it, dementia has a lot of insulin resistance issues with it. So first couple things. One, the blood is supposed to be between 80 and 100 sugar. So your blood glucose is supposed to be 80 to 100. Your cerebral spinal glucose is suppose to be 55. And the receptor that moves sugar in your cerebral spinal fluid is a glut one receptor which listens to insulin. So if you've got high insulin all the time, we're gonna end up having higher cerebrospinal glucose than we should. That's one of the issues. The other thing is, is that remember you get this insulin resistance. So it's not just that your pancreas is insulin resistant or your heart or your gut, everything in your body is now insulin resistant, including your brain. This is a bigger issue for the brain than it is for anything else because your brain actually uses insulin, your brain makes insulin. So it is not just your pancreates, your brain also makes insulin, but it uses it to communicate. Now, the places that you use, this is always interesting, the places in your body that create and utilize insulin as a messaging system, one of them is your hippocampus, which is in your temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:35] One of them, is your cerebral cortex, which is your frontal lobe which is a responsible for higher executive thought, you know, this critical thinking, that type of thing. Here's the other fun thing. Your frontal lobes, when it's firing properly, suppresses temporal lobes as well. Which specifically suppresses the amygdala, which is fear, hate, anger, terror, anxiety, that type of thing. So you're going to have more escape of the amyglar function, so you're gonna have more of those emotions. The hypothalamus is also responsible for insulin functionality, which is gonna be mood, it's gonna be purpose driven, it's going to be eat, that kind of thing, and then your olfactory bulb, so your smell and your taste is gonna altered as well, which are all things that you see with dementia and Alzheimer's. So. It definitely has a big function with insulin resistance, and this is why people call it type three diabetes, which whether that's the right term or not, it is what it is. It is what happens at the later stage of insulin resistance is really what it does. You're going to have insulin resistance in your body long before you have dementia style issues. Now, if you start looking at dementia patients, you're like, all right, so is it just the insulin resistance? I would say no. One of the things the medical system has tried so hard to do is destroy all of the things that make your body and your brain work.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:58] So one of the most important chemicals for your brain to function is cholesterol, specifically LDL cholesterol. Which the medical community has done everything they can to convince you is the bad cholesterol. People literally ask me, is that the bad cholesterol, is the the bad one? There is no bad cholesterol, it's all fantastic for you. Your body makes it on purpose. God made your body make it on purpose, all your hormones are made from it. Your brain is made from, it your primary fuel source. We talk about your body running on fat, what do you think it's running on? It's running cholesterol. Your body make these things for a reason. So it's very, very important. We can go to the cardiovascular functionality of cholesterol and what's really going on later, but your cholesterol is super important. What are half these guys on? Half the dementia patients I see are on statin drugs, which is actually more than that, the vast majority of them, are on Statin drugs, keeping your brain from getting the fat it requires to heal, regenerate, and repair. So that's a problem. You got to make sure that we're getting the cholesterol in, which is why we also go back to the resolution of insulin resistance. One of best things for the brain. Is a keto diet. Ketogenic diets have been shown to reduce or if not completely eliminate things like epilepsy.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:11] So if we have some of these dementia, we wanna remove that insulin resistance, but we also wanna radically increase the fats that are going to the brain. There isn't a better diet than a keto diet for that because a keto diet is specifically a real keto diet is specifically three to four times the amount of fat for the amount of protein with zero sugars and zero carbohydrates. When is it happening? We get zero functionality, zero production of insulin. So our insulin resistance starts going away. We have giant amounts of fat, not only for energy, but to rebuild the brain with. So yeah, keto diet's going to be chemically. Not medical advice, a keto diet walks through properly, is probably gonna be one of the best things you can do for this. And then obviously you gotta get them off statin drugs. Now here's the thing, most of these people are old. This dimension of Alzheimer's isn't typically something we see in 20 year olds. So what else is going on? The vast majority of the people, I've never, I say the vast majority because I can't say all of them because I haven't seen every single person. With dementia, but every single patient I've ever seen or I've ever talked to is low on testosterone. What does testosterone do? It's your healing hormone. If you're trying to heal your brain or any other piece of your body, you're going to have to make sure your testosterone levels are where they're supposed to be.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:24] So you got to bring the testosterone levels up so the body will heal. Now caveat to that, I would also like to add in any other regenerative function like peptides that cause your body to produce more human growth hormone, which is also extremely therapeutically healing. Plus it's made from your brain to get the brain to do what it's supposed to do, but anyway, so growth hormone will also be something we'd add in. The testosterone is mandatory, the growth hormone we can discuss. Uh, the other thing is that these guys have to start sleeping, but here's the other thing we've got to look at their sleep because most of the guys that I've seen, guys say guys, guys and women I've, I've seen with this have sleep apnea. So they're not getting enough oxygen in during the middle of the night. So what ends up happening effectively is because of the insulin resistance, we're not giving sugar in the branch. The brain can't make any ATP out of sugar and we don't have enough ketosis going on. We don't know fat in the blood. So the brain can make any, any ATP, out of, out any fat. So basically your brain is starving to death. Because it can't create enough ATP and it doesn't have the function to rebuild and if you're not breathing properly at night, you don't have enough oxygen. There is nothing more damaging to nerve tissue than hypoxia or low oxygen.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:39] And so half these guys, I'm the first person who's like, have you done a sleep study? They're like, no. Like I can sleep, people are like, they can sleep. They just don't, you know, they sleep all the time. They have dementia. I'm like, well, let's do the sleep study. You find out that these guys are not breathing properly throughout the night. And so you've got to fix that. In fact, caveat to the dementia thing, you have to fix the sleep apnea issues before the body will get over insulin resistance. Just a little caveat there. There's a whole pathway of sympathetic escape. And anyway, you got to fix the sleep apnea before diabetes or any of the insulin resistance issues will actually fully calm down a lot of people. So just make sure you check that. And so now we got oxygen. If you fix the sleeping problem, they have oxygen back to the brain. But here's the thing. You don't have to tear a muscle. You're like, Oh, I tore my bicep. And then you're like I'll just never use it again. And it'll rebuild. No, it won't. You've got to actively rehab it. You got to regenerate it. You got go with PT. You gotta lift. You go rebuild that muscle. Same thing with the brain. So you have to start sending the information to the brain for it to process, deal with and kind of grow with. Now, the best information it can come from is from the body. You're like, sit down and do Sudoku. Not really. That's not how the brain was developed. It's not the brain that was built from the ground up.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:56] Like when you're when you were a baby and you're laying there like a like a water doll at first. What made your body gain tone? What made it start being able to function? What made you brain start growing? Movement. So you've got to start getting these people to move again. Now, I'd highly recommend neurologic exercises like cross crawl stuff. But one of the biggest things you can do is take these people to a chiropractor and get them adjusted. Because if there's one thing that we have research on that we've seen is that the chiropractic adjustment radically increases information to and from the brain. Now this information to the brain, the afferent information, helps the brain grow, re regenerate and become what it's supposed to be. So get them adjusted and then go have them do exercise. And the exercises that we do are all neurologic and based. So there's cross crawl, there's single arm motion that's going across the body and coming back. We're doing things, full range of motion stuff, lots of activation of the muscle spindle fibers, the Golgi tendon organs, things like that. So we get this massive barrage of information in the brain that goes to the cerebellum, cerebellums to deal with, pushes the frontal lobe. Frontal lobe then deals with, pushes out all the way back. So. This exercise is going to be a big, big, big piece of what you're doing. But that has to come after you've done the dietary stuff, after you done the sleep stuff, after you're done the testosterone stuff, you've got to give the body all the things it needs to rebuild, then tell it to rebuild.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:21] This is one of the things I see like, oh, it's probably been paid to you. Are you kidding me? With his trash diet, his no testosterone, his poor sleep, you're gonna make the problem worse. I mean, if you tear, the way you make things better in the body is you tear them down and then you give the body the ability to rebuild them. Well, if the body doesn't have the ability, to rebuild and you tear it down, it just gets worse. This is what happens with a lot of people who go to the gym for the first time in a long time. I haven't fixed their diet, haven't fix anything else, haven't t fixed their testosterone. Their sleep is trash. And you know, they go in and they work out and they're like, I'm more tired, I'm sore after I work out. Yeah. The point of diminishing returns is really short. You didn't do anything to expand your point of division returns. And so now whenever you do pretty much anything, you, you tear yourself up. We see this all the time with chronic fatigue and lines and celiac and things like that, where they're just not bringing in the nutrients and the body's just overwhelmed. So we see this a lot. So a lot of these guys who are doing rehab, a lot of these older guys who were in the gym doing the rehab, doing the PT shouldn't be there. Like they should be doing. Nutritional work, chemical work, getting this stuff in their body requires to heal, regenerate, repair, then they should go to the place that forces the body to heal regenerate repair. Like this. It seems obvious to me, maybe it's not obvious to everybody else. But so that's kind of the path that we take with dementia.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:43] The problem with dementia is that by the time you've got it, you're way further down the road than you think you are. So let's say that like think of it this way. You're in a bathing suit, and you're out for a long walk. Then you're two miles away from your house, and you realize, oh, I'm getting sunburn. I should go home. You have a two-mile walk back. You're going to get a lot more sunburn along the way. So by the time you guys are like, oh. This person definitely has dementia. You better jump on that the second you figure it out and start trying to walk it backwards because you're out in the middle of a big lake and you kind of swim a long way back to get all the way back. So this isn't one of those things you're like well we'll work on changing the diet sooner or later we'll look into that testosterone thing and you know we'll think about doing the sleep statement you got to do it all like today Get your blood pulled, get everything ready to go immediately. But the sooner you get on this, the better your chances of walking it out. So, you know, if you guys are seeing this stuff and your parents and your, your friends, you, whatever, get on it now and, you know, a lot of this, like, well, I'm having memory issues. Great. That can be parasitic infections. That could be anything else, which obviously you have to return these people to baseline.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:53] So you're going to kill their parasites, kill their yeast issues, restore the probiotic function in the gut. All of that as part of something that you do while you're working on diet to reset the gut. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff, but this is what happens when you start looking at the body holistically. Like, okay, let me see all of the things that are going on, and then we'll start addressing all of things at once. And that's what holistic means. I mean, it takes you take care of the whole body at once, the nutrition, the exercise, the psychological, of the spirits, all of it. So that's really where we're getting into when we start talking about holistic care. But this is how you holistically or chemically look at dementia. And then you go, all right, here are the things that are associated with dementia. Let's go through systematically and just make sure that we've topped each one of these levels off. And then once you've done that, the thing starts kind of walking itself back. But if you guys have any questions, hit us up.
Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:46] Again, I would not try to walk through this without working with somebody who knows what they're doing metabolically. And statistically, that's not gonna be a medical doctor. So get ahold of us, get a hold of. I don't know who else would be able to do all this. I guarantee there's lots of people who could. I just don't any yet. Hopefully I'll meet them soon. But anyway, if you guys have any questions, hit us up at questions@chalmerswellness.com or drop them in the comments or just keep DMing me. You guys seem to love the DM thing. So I will talk to you guys later. Have a fabulous day. Thanks for your time.
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