Are Vegans With Quality Nutrition At Risk For Dementia?

okay the next three questions are one warrant humans originally hunter-gatherers who killed and ate wild animals to survive isn’t that what all people did until a few thousand years ago and if that’s the case then doesn’t a mean that was supposed to eat similarly the second one is explain what the seventh-day Adventist Health Study was and what its conclusions were and was this study an important study and the third is are there any negative Studies on whole food plant-based studies that show let’s say an increase in dementia sometimes I ask speakers off the record if there’s any you know what happens to people in the long run and I did once in the lobby of this hotel have a talk with Gabriel Cousins and he said that there was some plant-based people that did get to mention and I said are you concerned about this and you know he wasn’t he didn’t he didn’t say like oh you totally protected if he’d plant-based he was saying that there was a concern so are you concerned that we don’t have enough long-term data and maybe maybe there’s a concern about dementia that we don’t understand guess I don’t want to be confusing I guess the question to you is are there any negative Studies on whole food plant-based diets specifically with dementia I I’m gonna go first just to get out of the scrum that’s that’s going to ensue so I think the other two questions are a little fraught but I thought you know as Joel said I’ll go with veganism and dementia for $100 because uh the others are above my paygrade so III think there’s a there’s a huge glaring confounding issue here right first we really can’t talk about diet type and not consider diet quality you know it is possible to have a plant exclusive diet that’s really bad I’m aware of no evidence whatsoever showing any association between heightened risk of dementia with a high-quality plant predominant or plant exclusive diet quite the contrary lower risks of every major chronic disease lower risks of cognitive fine lower risk of dementia but the glaring confounding issue everybody knows about the b12 concern if you’re not getting b12 from animal sources not that it has to come from there it really originates in the soil this was nicely addressed in the game-changers documentary b12 does get into plants theoretically we could get it their animals or the middlemen but the fact is we’re not getting sufficiently concentrated doses b12 deficiency becomes particularly common with advancing age because to metabolize b12 that we ingest we need something called intrinsic factor secreted from the stomach the stomach’s ability to secrete intrinsic factor and make b12 absorbable declines with age and in particular people who have what’s called gastric atrophy that combination of nominal levels of b12 intake which were maybe just enough and declining levels of intrinsic factor can lead to b12 deficiency b12 deficiency produces a neurological condition mimicking senile dementia of the outside MERS type if you detect it early it’s totally reversible with supplemental b12 but if you don’t it actually becomes a permanent form of cognitive impairment so I think the only argument of concern about a high quality plant exclusive diet and either cognitive decline or dementia is the b12 issue it does become more of a concern with advancing age but provided you’re getting enough b12 and with advancing age are having b12 levels check to make sure you’re absorbing it properly there’s absolutely no reason why there should be any risk whatsoever [Applause]

okay let me just say a few words about dementia as David was alluding to we don’t have a quote-unquote gold standard definitive answer because no one has done a particular study to address just a TIF issue so the best we can do is make inferences from the data that we do have and I can tell you I’ve been to Loma Linda several times both for conferences and also because I am seventh-day adventists and there are not you know elderly people laid out in the street like speed bumps because they’re all demented so I don’t think there is a higher prevalence of dementia in that population which is the longest-lived population in the United States so now granted they’re not all vegans which is one of the reasons again we don’t have the definitive answer but if you look at the things that tend to cause dementia they are the same kind of factors that tend to cause heart disease high blood pressure strokes and so on so it if one may infer from that that by avoiding those risk factors you will lower your risk for dementia but again until we have you know a certain body of accumulated data we can’t say for sure but I tell you I’m putting my money on a plant-based diet