The #1 SIMPLE Way To STOP Dementia Before It Starts I Dr. William Li

The food that we eat can sharpen our brain function and protect it from cognitive decline, from stroke, and from dementia.

Can be your secret weapon for a sharper memory and better sleep.

Researchers found that the people who followed diet most closely had a 16 to 27% lower risk of developing dementia or cognitive decline or Alzheimer's disease.

Men with a highest level had a 55% lower risk of stroke.

Eating lowers the risk of diabetes, lowers the risk of heart disease, lowers the risk of some forms of cancer as well.

What do you do on a daily basis?

What's practical? Here's a couple of simple simple tips.

I'm going to walk you through three clinical studies on foods that show that foods can improve brain health.

I'm going to show you how the Mediterranean diet can cut dementia by 27%.

And I'm going to talk about why matcha, the tea, can be your secret weapon for a sharper memory and better sleep. And I'm going to talk about how tomatoes can slash your risk of stroke by more than 50%.

I'm going to start with one of my favorite ways to eat, and that is one dietary uh pattern that's showing real benefit for overall health, but now for brain health.

And that is the Mediterranean diet.

Now, almost everyone recognizes the Mediterranean diet.

It's the food that you find in Italy and Greece and Spain, of course. But did you know that there are 21 countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea?

These are all Mediterranean countries that have Mediterranean diets, and they include countries that you might not naturally think of, like Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt.

Did you know that Egypt is a Mediterranean country?

France, south of France, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, Moroccan food is Mediterranean food, and Tunisia, Tunisian food, North African food.

They all surround the Mediterranean Sea.

And it's the way that people in these countries eat according to different cultures, different patterns, different ingredients, different seasons.

There's no single way to do it. And that's my point.

Mediterranean eating is not a strict diet.

There are thousands of delicious traditional recipes that are the key to eating this way that has been shown to be beneficial to your health and now as I'm about to tell you beneficial to the brain.

So what are the general principles of Mediterranean way of eating?

Well, people there eat seasonally.

They eat whole plant-based foods mostly.

They use healthy oils like extra virgin olive oil. They eat tree nuts and seeds and foods made with whole grains.

And they eat local seafood when they can get it and relatively small amounts of animal protein.

And the animal protein that they do eat grown regeneratively with natural organic style farming, very traditional farming.

So what I want to tell you is how this actually helps brain health. And how do we know it? Well, researchers from the Institute of Preventative Medicine and Public Health at SEO University in Budapest, Hungary, what they did is they looked at 17 long-term cohort clinical studies that tracked more than 81,000 men and women for up to 20 years.

So, this is a lot of people for a long period of time. And here's what they found.

They found that the people who followed the Mediterranean diet most closely had a 16 to 27% lower risk of developing dementia or cognitive decline or Alzheimer's disease.

And that's pretty significant that kind of decline.

All right? Because right now there are so few treatments for dementia.

And that's why the Mediterranean diet is actually important because it's so easily accessible.

Now, what I want to tell you as a scientist and a doctor is to break down what it is in the Mediterranean diet that is so protective.

Well, the first thing is that many of the ingredients in the Mediterranean diet have bioactives.

These are natural chemicals found in food.

Mother nature's pharmacy with an F that offer neurop protection.

neurobrain nerves uh protection and specifically neurovvascular protection meaning it helps the blood vessels in the brain and the nerves in the brain be protected from different kinds of stress that can damage them.

Now many people don't know this but blood vessels and nerves kind of grow together kind of like a road and the telephone wires that follow along with it.

So here's what actually happens.

healthy fats in a Mediterranean diet.

For example, from extra virgin olive oil, from tree nuts, you get these polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids.

And seafood, you get omega-3s.

They keep your blood vessels in your brain flexible and strong and resilient.

Better blood flow in the brain means better nerve function, which better neurons, which actually helps your brain stay healthier.

The other thing is that these bioactives in a Mediterranean diet offer anti-inflammatory protection.

So here's what we know. Chronic inflammation in the brain is one of the underlying causes of cognitive decline as we get older.

So the polyphenols in the Mediterranean diet in that's found in vegetables and fruits and herbs and extravirgin olive oil help to reduce brain inflammation.

Less inflammation, better brain health, better brain function, less dementia. The other thing is that these polyphenols that are found in Mediterranean diet, they protect our brain against oxidative stress.

Let me just tell you what oxidative stress is.

Whether it's from the environment, whether it's from physical or emotional stress, free radicals or from ultrarocessed foods, free radicals, which are dangerous particles in the body filled with energy cause inflammation and antioxidants found in the Mediterranean diet, help to neutralize those free radicals.

It's kind of like intercepting a missile um with an antioxidant. And what that does is that actually helps to lower the rate of cellular aging in the brain.

In other words, free radicals cause your brain's aging to accelerate at the cellular level.

Intercepting those free radicals with the polyphenols that are found in the Mediterranean diet lower the damaging effect of oxidative stress to protect your brain. One more thing I want to tell you about is that the Mediterranean diet helps to protect the gut brain axis. Gut brain axis.

You're going to be hearing a lot more about this because we know that the gut gut bacteria, the microbiome, that's the 39 trillion healthy bacteria in our gut um communicate with our brain and vice versa.

Our brain communicates with our gut.

And guess what? dietary fiber found in Mediterranean foods like legumes.

All right, uh beans, seasonal greens, vegetables in a Mediterranean diet and whole grains, they actually feed the gut microbiome and make them healthier.

So, better gut bacteria, better gut health.

And these healthy gut bacteria when they're fed, they release anti-inflammatory substances called shortchain fatty acids, sometimes called scaffas, SCFAs.

And these actually get into the bloodstream. And guess what?

They protect our brain. The other thing that good healthy gut bacteria do is they text message our brain and they cause our brain to release neurotransmitters that can actually improve our mood and improve brain function as well.

So healthy gut creates neuroprotective and neurostimulating compounds and supports the signaling between your gut and the brain and the signaling within the brain which then protects the brain health and makes our cognition sharper.

So having said all that, what can you actually do?

like what do you do on a daily basis?

What's practical? Well, so some of my easiest pro tips to help you get on a path towards Mediterranean style eating.

Here's a couple of simple simple tips.

Rather than use butter, substitute butter with extra virgin olive oil. EVO.

Now, just not regular olive oil, but extra virgin olive oil. And I encourage you to look for extravirgin olive oil that's made from one varietal of olives.

So you can get all kinds of olive oils that are mixed with all kinds of olives together.

Well, those you can't be sure that they actually have all the good stuff.

So a mono varietal olive oil, which you can actually tell by picking up the bottle with a can and looking to see if it's made with one kind of olive.

I like Greek olives, coroni, I like Spanish olive oil, pikuol, those are really high in polyphenols.

And Italian olive oil, morayolo, very high in polyphenols.

Okay. Uh maybe the easiest one to get is uh Greek olive oil with coronki uh olives. Use that instead of butter for your cooking. Going to make some scrambled eggs in the morning, use extra virgin olive oil. That's what I do rather than butter. Butter tastes great.

Extravirgin olive oil puts those polyphenols that are brain healthy right into your breakfast. Second, next time you go to the grocery store, go to the produce section in the grocery store.

Usually the first place you enter, right?

And what I want you to do is to look for vegetables that are used in Mediterranean cooking.

So what are these vegetables?

Well, I'm going to give you a cheat sheet. All right. Broccoli.

Everyone knows broccoli. Broccolini.

These are actually thinner stem broccoli.

Usually kept with the stems as well as the fuettes. Delicious.

Escarole. Escarole is often used in Mediterranean cooking.

Asparagus.

Uh go for your asparagus when it's in season.

Undive. Cabbage.

colorful peppers. You know those green peppers and red peppers and uh orange peppers and yellow peppers.

Eggplant that purple around an eggplant that is a polyphenol that gives that eggplant that color.

And how can you mention Mediterranean diet without talking about tomatoes, big tomatoes, small tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes.

All right, those actually are all part of the Mediterranean cuisine.

Onions, garlic, leaks.

pick some of those up, put them in your cart, take them home, and if you're not sure how to cook with them, what you do is you actually go to Google, you type in the vegetable, like leaks, for example. If you're not sure, type in recipe, and then when it calls up the search results, hit video and watch somebody show you how to cook an amazingly delicious dish with leaks, for example, and show you how easy it is and describe everything you need to do it.

All right. I do that when I'm shopping in the grocery store, when I'm looking for some inspiration or direction on how to use something I may not be sure how to cook with. All right. You can do that, too.

When you go to the seafood section in the grocery store, if you eat fish and if you have a seafood section, look for salmon or sardines or mackerel.

And by the way, you can actually get mackerel or sardines also in the middle aisle.

Supposed to be forbidden, right?

No, you can go in there.

There are treasures in the middle aisle, including tinned fish, tinned mackerel, tinned sardines, uh tinned anchovies.

Those are all really good. Uh they got healthy fats often used in Mediterranean cooking.

If you eat seafood two to three times a week, that actually can benefit your brain health. Now, of course, how can I forget about spices and herbs that you are used in Mediterranean cooking?

Now, you can get some fresh ones in the produce section, um but you can also go into the middle aisle again and get the dried herbs.

These are store for a long time.

You can keep them in your pantry, right?

So, rosemary, teragon, oregano, basil, thyme, sage. I know you've had these before and you certainly walked by them when you've been shopping.

All right, pick them out. Take a look at them.

All of these have brainhealthy polyphenols that when you sprinkle them and add them to your food, guess what?

Not only you making the food more delicious, more flavorful, giving more sophistication to the flavors, more depth to the flavors, you're also adding those polyphenols in so that when you eat the food and it tastes great, it also has those polyphenols added to the food that you're swallowing and it's getting into your body. Good for brain health.

You can also snack like they do in a Mediterranean on healthy foods like tree nuts.

Tree nuts have healthy fats, good source of protein. All right.

And dietary fiber. Tree nuts like almonds, walnuts pistachios cashews pecans.

When you eat them, not only you get protein, not only you got healthy fats, monounsaturated fatty acids, you're also getting that dietary fiber that feeds your gut microbiome.

Healthy gut bacteria that gets your gut bacteria to work to produce anti-inflammatory short- chain fatty acids. Gets into your bloodstream and now your inflammation goes down.

not only in your whole body but also in your brain which then protects your brain health. So next time you're thinking about reaching for one of those ultrarocessed snacks, ditch that.

Go for some nuts, fresh tree nuts that you can roast yourself, you can spice and flavor yourself.

That's actually the best thing that you can do uh for to lower your risk of disease overall improve your brain health, make your make you overall healthier.

Okay, what's true is that we can't control every risk to our brain. So, we can control the food that we choose and we buy at the store to put on our plate.

That's actually the easiest way, the tastiest way um to be able to um up your health defenses to give your brain uh and keep it in good shape uh as you age.

And by the way, it also lowers the risk against u dementia, Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, as well as a host of other diseases all at the same time.

Mediterranean eating lowers the risk of diabetes, lowers the risk of heart disease, lowers the risk of some forms of cancer as well and lowers the risk of brain disorders as we age. Now, I want to talk about the next subject, next food, which is tea. One of my favorite topics, certainly one of my favorite beverages.

Tea is what I call one of the holy trinity when it comes to healthy beverages.

What is what's the holy trinity?

Water.

coffee. Had my coffee this morning.

And tea. I usually have some tea in the evening.

So, today I want to talk about a specific kind of tea. You might have heard about it. It's called matcha.

M- a t ha. Matcha. It turns out that matcha can not only lower inflammation in the body, but it can actually sharpen your mind and improve your sleep.

And when you have better sleep, it's actually good for brain health as well.

First, let's talk about matcha. What is matcha?

Matcha is actually kind of green tea, but it's a whole leaf finely ground into this vibrant colored green powder.

You probably seen it in a Japanese restaurant, maybe at a sushi bar.

You get tea, it's really bright green.

It's dense. All right, that's you can't actually see through it. And this is made from shade grown tea leaves.

Traditionally, matcha was used in Japanese tea ceremonies. So, it's got sort of like a epic quality to it.

a very respected uh quality to it.

But you can actually find it almost anywhere now that you can actually find tea.

And matcha is super potent. All right, tea is good.

Matcha is super potent when it comes to the tea polyphenols because guess what?

When you're brewing regular tea, you're just actually steeping the tea leaves and waiting for the polyphenols to dissolve out into the water.

When you actually brew matcha, you are actually taking the entire leaf ground into a powder and mixing it up.

All right. So you get the full dose the entire dose of the bioactives of polyphenols that's found in the green tea leaf like elenine and kakans like EGCG.

That's epi gallocin 3 galate.

It's a tongue twister. I know. Leave it to people like me who does the research to be able to pronounce it. Now matcha also has caffeine.

Now, most tea also has caffeine, but it turns out that a little bit of caffeine is actually good to keep your brain sharp as well.

Caffeine isn't just doesn't just make you wired.

It actually can help keep your brain sharp.

All right? It's kind of like a knife sharpener so you keep on having a really really nice blade.

Little caffeine actually good for your brain.

So, but actually, you know, the thing about matcha, it doesn't cause you to be wired.

Actually, matcha is known to give you kind of like make you calm and give you focused energy. That's the key thing.

Mental clarity is what comes from drinking matcha.

That's what the Japanese have known for hundreds of years.

Now we know that matcha has even another function which is that because it's the entire tea leaf which includes dietary fiber.

When you drink matcha tea, it actually feeds the fiber feeds your gut microbiome. Again, that 39 trillion healthy bacteria that's in our gut.

And when your gut bacteria fed, what do they do? They release the short- chain fatty acids, gets into your bloodstream, lowers inflammation everywhere in your body, including your brain.

How do we know that this makes a difference for humans? Well, it turns out this has been studied in human studies trials.

Researchers from the University of Tikubu in Japan, they conducted a clinical study of older adults who already had concerns over mild cognitive defects. All right?

And what happened is that the they the researchers gave the participants two grams of matcha powder every day to dissolve it in some hot water.

So I always say, well, what does 2 grams look like?

Well, that's half a teaspoon.

Not very much at all. Okay, half a teaspoon dissolved in hot water and they gave it every single day for 12 weeks.

So that's three months of drinking matcha once a day.

So what's interesting and what the results were results from this research is that those people who drank the matcha had improvements in their cognitive function.

They also had better sleep quality when you're sleeping really deeply, really good sleep.

What happens is that your brain has a sewer system called the glimpmphatic system.

Good quality sleep allows that glimpmphatic system to open up the civ, open up the filters, and guess what?

It drains out all the toxins that accumulate during the day.

Good quality sleep drains those toxins from the brain and that helps you have better brain function.

And the people who had matcha also had better social engagement.

What does that mean? Well, listen, they were happier people when they were around other people as well. They were just generally good, friendly, more happy people socially, which is really important for longevity. And how do you explain that?

Well, the dietary fiber from the matcha help the gut microbiome.

And we know the gut is connected to the brain and can even help the brain release social hormones like oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a social hormone that your brain releases to make you feel really good.

When you see a friend at the airport when you're picking them up, um you give them a big hug, you feel really great about it or a family member that you like.

All right? Then you feel great about it.

That's oxytocin flooding out of your brain. Matcha feeding the gut microbiome can actually signal to your brain to do something very similar.

And by the way, this is re this is results from just drinking one cup of matcha with only half a teaspoon of matcha every single day. So it's powerful stuff.

Now I want to tell you what's in matcha.

Eltheanine. This is a calming amino acid that reduces stress, promotes focus, and smooths out that stimulating effect of caffeine, which is also good for the brain. Matcha also has kakans.

This is a potent anti-inflammatory that protects the brain from oxidative stress, improves your circulation as well.

better blood flow, better brain health, better brain function as well.

And dietary fiber is in the whole leaf.

We talked about this earlier.

You get the whole leaf fiber feeds your gut bacteria.

The gut brain access is activated.

And now you've got more better communication signals coming from the gut to the brain saying, "Hey, stay sharp.

Be friendly. Feel better.

" Okay, here's a couple of ways to add matcha into your life. First of all, you can look online to order it. You know, you go to Amazon or wherever you can order your tea and look for ceremonial grade matcha.

That's a cut above.

It's going to be matcha that's just more carefully taken care of. I'm a big believer in getting the quality of food.

So, ceremonial grade matcha is always going to be the best quality. Look for vibrant green color, smooth, rich flavor.

Should actually taste good. All right.

And every time you use the matcha, again, all you need is a half a teaspoon, not very much at all. Add it to hot water.

Um, or you can put it into a smoothie, blend it all up. You can make it disappear into a smoothie if you don't really like the taste of matcha.

I like it the taste of matcha, but put it into smoothie, just disappears. Do this as a daily habit.

Now, I like to drink coffee in the morning. I'll drink water all day long, but at night, I actually like to drink some tea. Relaxes me. All right?

And remember, the clinical study I mentioned from Japan looked at the brain benefits after um tea drinking matcha for 12 weeks, right? So this is actually a benefit you can get after just doing it, you know, day after day, week after week.

Just make it a habit in your life.

Now, like I told you, I can drink tea at night without bothering. But if you're sensitive to caffeine, just drink it in a in a morning then, okay? Or drink it during the day. Some people are more sensitive than others to uh caffeine.

You can even get a decaffeinated version of matcha.

I don't recommend it because it will take out some of the polyphenols as well.

But you know what?

You still want to get that dietary fiber.

you get you still get some of the uh polyphenol.

So, that would work as well.

All right, my third tip for you in this video is to talk about the brain properties of my favorite fruit.

That is a tomato.

That's right. Tomatoes are fruits.

They're not vegetables. They're culinary vegetables, meaning they're cooked in a savory way usually, but technically they are fruits.

Not only are tomatoes a staple of traditional Mediterranean cuisine, but actually tomatoes are found in traditional cuisines of almost every culture.

Now you can find it. And by the way, tomatoes did not come from the Mediterranean.

They actually originated in Latin America. You know, in Peru, the explorer, Spaniards discovered these tomatoes and they weren't red in the beginning.

They were kind of a golden orange and they looked like apples.

So they called them pomodoro.

Pom like apple doro, apple of gold.

All right, that's how you get the word pomodoro.

And so you know pomodoro from Italian, the word for tomato and that's basically where it came from originally.

But of course got it to the Mediterranean and it's very very popular in Mediterranean cooking.

First of all, tomatoes great source of vitamin C which lowers inflammation, builds your immune system.

Again, lowering inflammation always good for the brain. And tomatoes also have carotenoids, which I'm about to tell you about because one of the carotenoids can lower and cut your risk of stroke.

If you want to protect your brain, you definitely want to bypass, sidestep, dodge having a stroke. All right?

Now, there's many kinds of stroke. All right?

And I want to tell you a little bit about them, but all of them devastate your brain.

And when you have a stroke, your brain cells are killed off.

Um, and so you wind up losing brain power and sometimes your life as well. So the most common kinds of stroke are called emolic stroke.

And this is when a blood clot or piece of cholesterol or lipid breaks free from your blood vessels, gets sent up into the brain, shoots through the brain from the corateed artery.

And once it reaches your brain, it lodges into the small blood vessels, blocks blood flow, and then a bigger blood clot will form right behind it. And now the part of the brain in front of the blockage doesn't get any oxygen. And that part of the brain will start to be starved of oxygen.

and eventually it will die.

That's really one of the devastations of an emolic stroke, the most common kind.

So I need to first tell you what are the most common risk factors of stroke because it has to do with diet and lifestyle as well. The first one is hypertension.

High blood pressure that is by far the biggest risk factor for having a stroke. If you think about what normal blood pressure is, let's call it 120 over 70. Okay? So there's systolic and diastolic.

Two numbers with blood pressure.

120 is the top number.

Systolic. 70 is the second number.

Diastolic. Well, look. For every 10 units, 10 millimeters of mercury above 120 over 70, it raises your risk of having a stroke by 20 to 30%. Boom.

Skyrockets just with every 10 units above 120 over 70. All right.

Keep your blood pressure down. You might need medications, but an easy way to do this is to cut down the amount of salt or sodium you have in your food. Go out to eat in a restaurant, usually packed with sodium.

Take a look at how they're actually preparing foods behind the kitchen.

They're throwing a lot of salt in it.

And ultrarocessed foods like chips, all right, loaded with salt.

All right, so cook yourself.

You know exactly how much salt you put in there.

Don't put very much. If you spice it up, it's an alternative to actually using salt.

It'll actually make it tasty as well.

Another risk factor, diabetes.

All right. Another big risk factor for stroke.

Having diabetes risk raises your risk of stroke twofold, two times.

And one of the reasons is that diabetes, having high blood sugars and all this inflammation going on there and damages the lining of your blood vessels in your everywhere in your body, including your brain.

When the lining of the blood vessels are damaged, I I study this.

All right? So, I know a lot about blood vessels, okay?

I study androgenesis.

When the lining is damaged, it makes it more likely that you'll actually have a clot forming forms in a brain. Boom.

That will actually set you up for a stroke.

Some other ones, smoking.

All right, smoking doubles the risk of having a stroke compared to somebody who doesn't smoke.

So, don't smoke.

Atrial fibrillation. This is another um very common, increasingly common condition of the heart.

It's actually a rhythm problem of the heart where one of the chambers of your heart, the atrium, atrial fibrillation, atrium, that's the heart chamber near the top that falls out of its normal rhythm. So if you think about a heart having its normal rhythm, all right, but then it doesn't actually do that rhythm anymore.

I'm just having a table.

It is irregularly irregular a heartbeat.

All right, guess what? Clots can actually form in the heart. All right.

And that those clots can shoot right from the heart right into your brain. No good.

Atrial fibrillation needs to be treated and sometimes you need to be on a blood thinner um to prevent those clots from forming.

One more big risk factor, alcohol.

Heavy drinkers. All right.

Alcohol consumption, heavy drinkers.

Another risk factor for stroke of all kinds.

Really watch your booze.

Cut it down or cut it out. So that's stroke.

Those are the common forms. Those are the risk factors for the most common forms. So, what can you do to lower your risk of stroke? Well, this is actually something that researchers in Finland wanted to know. They wanted to know, is there something you can eat to do this?

And don't forget this section I was going to tell you about tomato.

So, researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and the Lapland Central Hospital.

They did a clinical study.

They looked at 1,031 Finnish men between the ages of 46 and 65.

And they followed them for 12 years.

Long term study for a thousand people.

And what they did at the very beginning of the study is they measured the blood levels of a compound that's found in tomatoes called lycopine.

All right, this is a carotenoid. All right, one of the natural bioactives in a tomato.

You can measure in the bloodstream.

And then what they did is they tracked over the next 12 years, dozen years. Which one of these people wound up having a stroke and how did it correlate with what their levels of lycopine from tomatoes were?

And what they found is that men with a highest like level of lycopine had a 55% lower risk of stroke compared to the people with the lowest levels of lycopine.

So in other words, high lycopine 55% lower risk of stroke.

55 that's half cuts it right in half.

That to me is very very significant.

Now what these research were looking for are the es schemic strokes caused by blood clots sent right up to the brain like the way like like I told you from atrial fibrillation okay or from atherosclerosis and it turned out that the risk was even greater 59% almost 60% for the people who had the most lycopine from an eskeemic stroke.

All right.

So, most common cause of lycopine uh in the blood, most common source, tomatoes, raw tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, tomato soup, tomato juice, all of them will contain lycopine. The question is, what makes lycopine so protective, right?

We always want to know why.

Lycopine is a natural pigment that gives tomatoes their red color. And it's found in other red foods, red tinge foods, too.

Watermelon's got lycopine.

Papaya, which has got a red flesh, it's got lycopine.

But tomatoes is is a good place to find lycopine. It is a bioactive signaling molecule that interacts with your cells. All right, so here's what lycopine does. It is a potent antioxidant.

It neutralizes free radicals before they can damage blood vessels in your brain or the neurons.

Lycopine also reduces chronic inflammation.

Lowering inflammation helps protect the brain and also lowers the risk of clot formation or blood vessel injury that can cause clots.

Lycopine also improves the circulation, keeps blood vessels healthy, blood flow good.

All right? Protects the arteries and capillaries feeding the brain.

I probably don't need to encourage you to eat tomatoes.

I mean, I love tomatoes.

Cook with them all the time.

But here's a few pro tips. If you want to get the most out of the lycopine in your tomato, what you want to do is you want to cook it.

It turns out cooking the tomatoes changes the chemical structure of lycopine just a little bit so your body absorbs it more avidly likes to absorb it better.

Roast tomatoes, simmer tomatoes like in a tomato sauce or use tomato paste that's already been cooked and you're going to get a lot more lycopine absorbed in your body.

Now you want to get even better absorption of the lycopine.

You know what you do?

You combine your tomatoes with a little extra virgin olive oil. Now why does that work?

Well, it turns out lycopine as a molecule is fat soluble, which means it likes to dissolve in oil.

So you give it a partner like extra virgin olive oil, which also has polyphenols.

The lycopine will dissolve right into the olive oil. Then when you eat it together, you'll your body will absorb a lot more of the lycopine. It's a simple flavorful combo.

Nona knew best by combining tomatoes with extra-virgin olive oil.

It's a great way uh to do this.

There's some serious science behind it.

But here's the great news.

It's been used in Mediterranean cooking and cuisine for generations.

So go ahead, follow those traditional recipes and get really good quality extravirgin olive oil.

Cook your tomatoes.

Mix them together. That's how I cook in my kitchen.

You might have seen me do some videos on using doing that.

You'll get the most lycopine, which is brain protective.

All right. Lowers your risk of stroke.

All right, let's do some recap on this. Using food as medicine for better brain health. Number one, eat the Mediterranean diet.

Eat Mediterranean style. Reduces your risk of cognitive decline and dementia by up to 27%.

Number two, have a daily cup of matcha.

Tea will help you think more clearly, sleep more soundly, and stay more socially connected.

What's not to like about that?

And matcha, if you like it, like I do, you'll drink it all the time.

You just need one cup. But if you don't like the taste, go ahead and put it into a smoothie.

It will just disappear into the background.

And eat tomatoes.

and especially cooked tomatoes when you want to add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil will protect you against stroke which protects your brain and also improves better brain blood flow which you're going to need for better brain function better cognition and lowers the risk for dementia.

You can eat foods to beat dementia, beat stroke, protect your brain for the future begins with what you put in your plates today.

Well, that's it for this video.

If you found it helpful, hit the like button, subscribe to my channel, and please share them with somebody who you think could use this kind of information, my food is medicine tips, and check out my other videos.

Till next time, Dr. Lee out.

Hey, if you like that video, then you're going to love this one.

Check it out.