Reversing Diabetes and Alzheimers with Dr Dave Jenkins

Lisa: Well, hi everyone, and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I have the amazing Dr Dave Jenkins with me, who has had a bit of a drama this week. Dave, tell us a little bit what's going on in your world.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Oh, we live in a beach called Makorori, a little outpost of Gisborne on the East Coast, and after eight days of rain we noticed that the door wasn't... we woke up and the door handle wasn't... the doors weren't closing properly. And sure enough, the house had started slipping down the incline. It wasn't really too much of a... but apparently six houses around us all had the same thing, and we've just been red-stickered and had to get out of the house very quickly. So I'm looking around... fortunately a friend of mine's beach house, bach, that they rent out was free, so we're now in their place.

Lisa: Oh man. Yeah, chaos ensues.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yes, yeah.

Lisa: I'm sorry about that. And despite that, you've turned up for the podcast today, which is really impressive. So thank you, because obviously your world's about to turn upside down trying to sort that mess out, I should imagine. So that you're still dedicated to your actual cause and what we're here to talk about today... all the best to you and Miki. Hopefully the insurance company will put things right, I hope.

Dr Dave Jenkins: We're hoping.

Lisa: We hope so. So, Dr Dave Jenkins, I had Dr Dale Bredesen on the podcast just... oh, was it last week? Yeah, last week. And of course he is the expert on Alzheimer's, and you and Miki have published with him together on a paper. And you're in New Zealand and you're trained in the Bredesen Protocol, and so I wanted to share your experiences and then also touch on some of the studies that you're doing in your area, and dive into all of this stuff about the Alzheimer's. But also we want to go and explore the concepts around metabolic health and pre-diabetes and diabetes and what you see there. So Dave, can you just give us a little bit of your background and how did you get to be involved with this area of medicine?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Okay, so I qualified from Otago Medical School. I had a large general practice in Katikati, Bay of Plenty, but I got very interested in training and ended up at Auckland Medical School postgraduate, learning about how to do good training for nurses and doctors, especially rural nurses and doctors. And then, long story short, I went surfing to a group of islands called the Mentawais, which is the Disneyland of surfing.

Lisa: Oh gosh, yeah.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And found a lot of children dying right near where my luxury charter boat was, you know. And so I started an aid organisation called SurfAid. That was 21 years ago.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And that's been very successful, and we now have about 90 staff operating in four countries. Our biggest donor is the New Zealand government. So yeah, that really began my interest. A lot of children were dying just because their mums didn't have some essential knowledge and essential practices like exclusive breastfeeding, or a mosquito net, or boiling the water before they drink it — just real basic stuff. And it started my interest in, one, how do you help communities change their fundamental health behaviours? And that's been a 20-year journey.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And I was very lucky to be given a social entrepreneur award, and part of that was called the Rainer Arnold Fellowship. They asked the real tough question: well, how do you design a model with the different parts working very eloquently together to get maximum impact for your return on your investment? So we had this return on investment strategy and it's been very, very successful. So I always wanted to set up an aid organisation run by the local people, and now we don't have any kind of white people coming in on a white horse saving the day. It wasn't like that. It was very much grounds-up, bottom-up, community-driven, and now we don't have any expat staff in Indonesia. I'm still involved, helping where I can.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So then I started saying, oh, what do I do now? That has been an incredible journey. And I started studying functional medicine, this medicine of how to reverse disease. And one look at our Western health stats — we all know. I just read another one: by 2030, 85 percent of Americans will be obese.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And then my sibling said, while I was in remote islands in Indonesia doing malaria programmes and things, "You better come home, Mum's not well, she's forgetting everything." So it turned out Mum had early Alzheimer's, and I'd been studying functional medicine. I thought, well, I'll go out there into the world literature and see if there's anything I can do to help my mum. And I found Dale Bredesen's first publication. So I emailed him and he got back to me and said, "Look, come over and I'll train you." And that was six years ago now. And we've been over twice and worked alongside Dale, and Miki and I have kind of been the lead practitioners in New Zealand and in Australia as well.

Lisa: Oh, great.

Dr Dave Jenkins: We see a lot of Australian people, see people from Italy and Singapore and Hong Kong and other at times, but mainly it's New Zealand and Australia.

Lisa: Yeah, and I was super excited to find somebody who's Bredesen Protocol trained here, because obviously I've done quite a lot of podcasts around brain health and Alzheimer's and dementia, and have a vested interest with my mum having this. So to find someone that's doing it in New Zealand was like, yay, you know, finally we've got somebody here doing something. So yeah, carry on your story.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Well, so that's the part we've been doing, the Bredesen Protocol. At one stage we were doing it full time, and then during Covid we decided to come back to New Zealand, leave Indonesia. And a friend of mine said, "Oh, they could really do with your experience," the iwi here, Ngāti Porou iwi, and he made an introduction. And long story short, I ended up being a GP again after a long period of not being, but also being their wellness director.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So we were looking, and we have run pilot programmes both for Ngāti Porou and the Tūranga Health iwi in reversing pre-diabetes and diabetes using a lifestyle approach that we can talk about in detail. But both those pilots are just in the process of finishing and they've been very successful. We've had a lot of success in reversing diabetes, bringing people off medication, and giving them a lot more energy and improvement in quality of life. And they will get a huge increase in their life expectancy as well.

Lisa: This is nice.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So now we're just asking the question, well, how do we scale this up so that we can make this offer available for at least the 25 percent of early adopters? It does involve a major shift away from current mainstream eating practices. So if you have lower carbohydrates, some intermittent fasting, but also looking at things like stress and sleep and those things that affect your blood glucose levels that are forgotten about, and the timing of movement and exercise, the timing of things according to our circadian rhythm. We've delved into all of that silent science, which does run parallel to the Bredesen Protocol and the functional approach, and what we call the KetoFLEX diet, which is what we recommend, which is not all meat, bacon and cheese.

Lisa: No, but it's still keto.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yes. We're not doing strict keto for the reverse diabetes, although people that can do it, do it — we teach them how to do it. But it's definitely a lower carbohydrate, getting below 125 grams a day, preferably below 100 grams.

Lisa: Well, that's still quite high.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, that's still... yeah, yeah. So we're still getting good results at that, and we think that's doable, and certainly in the first stages, and then bring people on to the keto diet in the second stage of their development. Because what tends to happen is people get very interested. They're kind of going along doing what everyone else did, eating their processed foods, getting fatter and unhealthier, and just doing what everyone's doing, mainstream, right? But this really sparks them up and they think, gee, I didn't know the mechanisms of how this occurs — which we teach them about, insulin receptors, just the basics with pictures — and they go, "Well, no one ever taught us why I had diabetes."

Lisa: I know, it's just like mind-blowing, isn't it? No one ever told us.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, and they said, "I can have my Weet-Bix and I can have my fruit." And so once you sit them down and walk them through why they can't lose fat, because insulin's stopping the lipase, the fat-burning enzyme, and they go, "Really? Oh, I've started to lose all my fat." Yep, because your insulin's dropping. And it all makes sense, and when they start to get results, then they get excited, and then they go, "Wow." And then people around them get excited. So we document... one of the questions we ask them is, how many of your whānau have started to make healthier behaviour changes just from you? And it's always a significant amount. One of our patients told me the other day, "Oh, my husband's 80 kilograms again, he hasn't been that since high school."

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And so that's what we're looking at, is asking those questions: how can we just put fuel under the scaling process, this viral spread of healthy behaviours? And there are real barriers to it, as you know. Vegetables — yeah, so expensive. Cauliflower, six, seven, eight dollars, and cauliflower rice is something that people love to have instead of rice. So we're looking with the iwi about teaching how to grow food. And that's what it comes down to: if you want to be healthy and you want it to be affordable, if you don't have enough money to buy decent vegetables, grow them.

Lisa: Yep, go back to the basics.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a real wholesome thing to do. Wholesome for the family, wholesome for your children to watch things grow and to nurture things and then to eat healthy food.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So I think ultimately it will get down to back to the old... I mean, I grew up with a veggie garden. Everyone had a veggie garden, and almost no one has a veggie garden now. Although we're getting to an age where my friends are starting to retire, and they're putting in veggie gardens.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So they can have organic veggies. So, better.

Lisa: I think a lot of us are. I grew up with a dad who had a huge organic veggie garden and he was always the one in charge of that for us, and we always had beautiful food. And he would go fishing and hunting, and I had a couple of sheep and a couple of cows on their little plot there when we grew up. And we were lucky because we had access to that. And you know, my dad passed away two and a half years ago and I'm like, damn, I didn't learn enough from Dad. Like, how do we go hunting? How do we go fishing? He taught us as kids, but we've moved on and forgotten and have to actually go back and try to teach yourself. And when you go to the supermarket, you see the price of things, it's horrific. And this is where we're getting this epidemic of obesity, and obesity leads to all of these things, the metabolic dysregulation, the...

Lisa: ...pre-diabetes and insulin resistance, then diabetes. And the diabetes has been the gateway to hell — that's what I call it, the gateway to hell — because that's where the Alzheimer's, the cancers, the heart disease, all of those age-related and obesity-related chronic illnesses that our medical system really doesn't do well with, the chronic sort of stuff.

Lisa: And what you're doing is really in the trenches. This is really getting down to behavioural change and getting people to go from a very high-carb diet — and let's be honest, it's cheaper, it's what everybody's doing, it's what all the advertising is pushing at you every day. Your Weet-Bix, your Nutri-Grains, your things that are apparently healthy, and yet we've got people with massive problems now. When you and I grew up, when we were kids in the 70s, there weren't many people that were overweight. There was the odd one, and now, like I say, it's just epidemic. And this is leading to all of these other things.

Lisa: And so what you're doing — you're reversing diabetes. Now in my little practice, what I do here, I've helped people reverse their diabetes. It's not rocket science. It just takes education. I had one recently, he'd been a diabetic, diagnosed something like 15 years ago, and no one ever took the time to explain all that stuff that you just mentioned there about insulin resistance, and what happens to the body when you have high blood sugars, and how it affects your cells, and how it leads to all of those other diseases. And when they understand that, they go, "Oh my God." And then it's a process of ongoing education as you get them to lower the carb levels. And you don't go cold turkey necessarily straight out of the gate, like you said, because you have to transition their body into this new way. And it doesn't even require you getting full keto sometimes, like you said.

Dr Dave Jenkins: No, no, it doesn't. It doesn't require that. You've just got to get that insulin receptor working again, the lock and key thing. And the lock — the insulin receptor on all our cells — actually changes shape molecularly, they can tell. So you've got this thing, you've got the lock in there and it won't open the door, right? So you can't get the receptor to work, the glucose can't get into the cell, so it builds up. And what I say to my patients is, it builds up and now you've got a situation where your body's got too much sugar in the blood, so it says, "Okay, I'd better store that for a rainy day."

Dr Dave Jenkins: So we explain to patients about the insulin receptor, that it actually changes shape and the key won't open it anymore. So now you get into a situation where blood sugar won't get into the cells, it's in the blood, and the body just stores that as fat because it thinks — we've got caveman DNA — we store that as fat. But also we've got three trillion cells which aren't getting sugar, glucose, we're not getting energy. So what does it do? What do three trillion cells do? It sends a message to the brain: "Hey, eat!" Eat, because I'm starving down here. Eat. So now you've got this vicious cycle that anyone who's been overweight experiences. They experience this hunger, and then the crash after a high-carb meal, and feeling sick, and the only way to eat is a chocolate bar and I feel a bit better. So they're in a vicious cycle.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So I think what's important is education, but it's how you deliver the education, it turns out, is really important. And we're dealing with two Māori iwi, and so there's specific ways we're learning how to do that. But knowledge has to be married with a change process, right? They have to go hand in hand. If you go into any coronary care unit in New Zealand, you'll find people who've had a heart attack who have smoked, knowing smoking was wrong. So it's not just knowledge. Knowledge is not enough.

Lisa: No.

Dr Dave Jenkins: You have to have knowledge and a behaviour change process, and then part of that behaviour change process is personalisation. So that's where we have this huge need now for health coaches. One of the questions — I just wrote the report for the iwi — how do we scale this up? How do we train kaiāwhina, health workers, who will act as health coaches but in the local context within a Māori health framework? It's a big question. I think we do have some answers, but it's definitely one of those things we're going to need to do to scale this up.

Lisa: Yeah. Have you talked to — it's just come to mind — Professor Grant Schofield?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Oh yes, yes. I was meant to speak at their Reversal conference but I couldn't do that. I was going to talk about reversing Alzheimer's. But yeah, there is a good group of people, but it's a tiny group compared to the massive need.

Lisa: Yeah. What do we need to do to influence the government to get the support?

Dr Dave Jenkins: I mean, on paper now there is genuine response in thinking and in strategy to reversing diabetes and pre-diabetes, but there's not — there's some research grants, so Grant Schofield, he's got a research grant looking into it, but we're beyond looking. We need to look into it? We know how it works. We have results from New Zealand, Australia, England, America. GP David Unwin has been reversing diabetes for years and has published hundreds of cases.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And we've got the Virta Health model in America. So that's a totally online virtual programme. The person can reverse their diabetes from their living room.

Lisa: Wow, that's cool.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So we're looking into that model and how to bring it into the Māori health approach. So there's a lot of questions around now, but it's going to get down to government support. A lot of us in this field just shake our head and go, how can a documented problem of obesity and diabetes and all that goes with it be such a prevailing disease, and the future of it looks really dismal, and the cost of it on the taxpayer? So PricewaterhouseCoopers just did a study with Otago University: the average diabetic costs the taxpayer $550,000 in a lifetime.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, so it doesn't surprise me. It only costs a few thousand dollars to go through a reversal programme, if we can get them at the pre-diabetes level.

Lisa: What is it with prevention? We just don't do prevention. I'm working with Dr Elizabeth Harris, who's trying to get a post-concussion programme — looking at people who've had concussions, getting them into a programme so that we can start to protect them from the get-go and be proactive in rehabilitating their brains, instead of waiting until they've got some major issues. It's just a wait-and-see approach, which is most of the approach at the moment. And you're just pushing the proverbial uphill. There's just no — and I don't know why this inertia. With the diabetes and things, is it coming from the big food industry? Are they pushing back, lobbying?

Dr Dave Jenkins: I don't know. You have to go out and look in, right from the outside, and follow the money. That'll get you a long way down the answer of how did we get here. Some bad science that was — you know, the last time. And that was promoted by food companies, especially Kellogg's. And if you go back through the history you'll see, you can name names, it's all there. And so the food companies promoted this low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet that most people eat now. Or most people, the trouble is, most people eat high fat, high carb.

Lisa: Both is high.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, huge calories. They're doing the worst of the worst. And so that was allowed to propagate without decent government scrutiny. The scientists were saying this is wrong, it took years. And so we're still there, we're still there where people think that their eggs are going to kill them with a heart attack.

Lisa: And the good things like eggs, versus your high-grain, high-sugar cereals — "oh, fortified with iron" or something ridiculous — and promoted by nutritionists on television.

Dr Dave Jenkins: The other thing is, I think there's a couple of other big factors. Our medical situation is that we are not rewarded or encouraged to take on lifestyle medicine, behaviour change, reversal programmes. We get 15 minutes to see a patient, and I cannot reverse diabetes in 15 minutes. I can diagnose it and I can treat it with drugs and I can monitor it, but it takes longer than that. So in the toolbox of the average GP is drugs. There are some things where that's changing a little bit, and like I say, we've started to work in our clinic, we now have someone training as a health coach, and I think a lot of clinics now do have health coaches, and that's a major, major improvement.

Dr Dave Jenkins: But medical orthodoxy — quite rightly in some ways — we're very conservative, and the only people that have got money to do these stage three trials are drug companies. It's rare — it does happen, but it's rare — to get trials up and running to stage three without a drug company. So you have the situation where the only proof of therapeutic effect is from drugs. So that's the only thing we have, or surgery, and that's the only thing we have in our toolbox.

Lisa: And that's where the money is, of course. And these are systemic problems. But let's go and actually have a look at some of the implications for this. If we go back to the Alzheimer's story with Dr Dale Bredesen and the protocol, he's got people now who are the first survivors of Alzheimer's. Now, why is Alzheimer's related to diabetes and insulin resistance and obesity? Explain that to people, because a lot of people don't even connect those two dots — that this leads to an increased risk, and cancer and cardiovascular disease as well, all of these things are increased risk. So talk to us a little bit about your work with some of the Alzheimer's patients and being able to reverse Alzheimer's, and share a little bit of that study and stuff that you do with Dale.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yes. So after training with Dale, we got around quite quickly — he wrote two books and people wanted to know what is this Bredesen Protocol, so we got contacted a lot — and we've developed a system for patients. What we do is just what he basically has taught: look at the multitude of factors, called perturbations, that are impacting on the brain, that are causing the brain to be inflamed. So inflammation is part of it, insulin resistance in the brain, so the brain cells aren't getting energy, and then toxicities as well. Those would be the three major things.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And so you therefore break that up. Let's look at inflammation. Why is someone inflamed? Well, when someone's overweight, they produce too many inflammogens, so they get inflamed. Or they may have problems in their gut, so they have what's called leaky gut. Most of us aren't eating enough fibre, or we've had too many antibiotics in our life, and then we get a leaky brain. When we get a leaky gut, we get a leaky brain, meaning those things the brain was able to keep out of the brain, things like mercury and...

Dr Dave Jenkins: ...mould spores are now getting in through the holes and inflaming the brain. So we're getting this gut-brain axis. It's huge, and not only in Alzheimer's, but in Parkinson's disease now, which is actually rapidly growing in itself.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And so we've got to look at the gut. So we do leaky gut tests and ask the question, what's wrong with your gut and how can we help you improve it? So gut inflammation, insulin resistance. As you know, if you're diabetic, you're three times more likely to get Alzheimer's disease. And even if you don't have diabetes, the disease process of Alzheimer's causes insulin resistance in the brain, so now the brain cells aren't getting glucose. They're starved. And when you starve brain cells, they go under stress and they start to die, basically.

Lisa: Yeah, and retract.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yes. So we have to look at all of those issues, and then we run some toxin screens usually, to see if there's toxicity. And we've found in New Zealand and Australia that mould is a very common cause. And there's a particular pattern of people who come with mould, and it's linked to mercury. We've talked to other practitioners as well — people in the tropics and remote places, they have mould, it's moist, but they don't get these mould illnesses. And somehow it's linked to perhaps the amalgams that we put in our teeth. There's some combination of mercury and mould together. We're not quite sure how it works, but I can't think of a case where we've had mould illness without mercury being involved.

Lisa: Wow, okay. So it seems to be combined.

Dr Dave Jenkins: They combine. And maybe they're overstretching the detox system. The people that get into trouble often have the genetic MTHFR genes, so we know that they don't detox very well.

Lisa: And also the GST family of genes. Looking into those ones, the GSTT1, P1 and M1, they're a big major factor too in that detoxification process, alongside the methylation genes.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah. So we're looking at inflammatory pathways, toxin pathways, genetic pathways, the gut, and then common things. And you'd be surprised, like vitamin D — how many people are low?

Lisa: Yeah, normal.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And vitamin D, the sunshine molecule. There are millions of receptors on brain cells for vitamin D, and it locks in and actually changes the DNA, changes the genetic expression.

Lisa: Well, okay, I didn't know that. That's a new one. I know vitamin D does literally a thousand different things in the body, but that's actually in the brain receptors?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yep, they have brain receptors for vitamin D. And what people don't realise is it's not a vitamin, it's a neuropeptide. It acts like a hormone, that's one of the ways it works. So simple lifestyle things like that. About 75% of us will be vitamin D deficient, or almost deficient, by springtime, getting through winter.

Lisa: Yep. And you talk to people — it's so cheap and easy to do. But you do have to make an effort. In wintertime you have to make a real effort between 11 and two o'clock to get out into that sun with your shirt off and your white, pale legs.

Dr Dave Jenkins: The other day we were laughing because we had a nice warm sunny day and we were throwing a frisbee around on the beach, and I looked down — look how white my legs are. And yeah, you have to make an effort. And it's better from the sun rather than a supplement.

Lisa: Yes, although I think there are genetic factors in there too. I had a discussion with Dr David Minkoff just a while back, and he's a doctor in Florida who's tested everybody for glyphosate, so Roundup poisoning. His theory, or one of his theories, is that — because he's constantly seeing people with vitamin D deficiencies, and they live in Florida. He's an Ironman athlete, he was deficient in vitamin D, and he's like, what the heck's going on here? I've got enough sunshine, that's not the problem. And there's the genetic receptors, there's three different things. But beyond that, he believes that glyphosate may be playing a role here and blocking the conversion of the inactive to the active form of vitamin D. He hasn't got conclusive proof of that, but there's something in the environment that even when we're getting the sunshine is stopping people converting into that active form.

Lisa: And I also import a high-dose vitamin D3 plus K2 supplement into my range. Vitamin D3 is available on every street corner, but it doesn't often have K2 in it, the MK-7 version of that. And I believe that we really need to be looking at the five to ten thousand IU range — getting yourself tested, being under a doctor, all of that sort of stuff. But that higher dose — the 1000 is just a drop in the bucket for a lot of people. I've got Mum on 10,000 IUs. That's anti-cancer, that's brain function, that's immune function, all of those sorts of things, especially in winter. She's on ten thousand, and even in the summer, because she doesn't get a lot of skin exposure. She wears long trousers and won't go out in her shorts at 80. So yeah, I think there's a little bit more to that whole problem.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Oh yeah. Well, I mean, I've done my genetics. I'm a very poor vitamin D activator and transporter and receptor, so I take the 10,000 IUs a day.

Lisa: Yeah, so it's understanding these things. And how does that play in the brain? What is it actually doing in the brain, the vitamin D?

Dr Dave Jenkins: So there are millions of vitamin D receptors on neurons, and it locks in and sends a message, what's called an epigenetic message, to the DNA to turn on what we call synaptoblastic activity, so the creation of new neurons, and helps to reduce inflammation. And then there's a whole lot of unknowns as to how it works. In fact, Dale probably would have been able to answer that, the molecular structure, because that's the domain of neuroscience. We can tell from the epidemiology that when you're low in vitamin D, like you say, there's a myriad of diseases that are much more common, including a lot of the common cancers, including diabetes.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So part of our pilot, we did measure vitamin D, and we had trouble measuring it. The labs don't want to do it, which is just crazy. And you have to pay if they will do it.

Lisa: Yeah, which for some people, you can't.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So anyway, we did find vitamin D deficiency in our Māori population, no surprise. So they have to get out there. And for them it's even harder, as you know, to get enough ultraviolet to convert.

Lisa: Yeah, because our brown, darker skins inhibit that.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, yeah.

Lisa: And this is why, even in the recent pandemic, wouldn't it have been great if the government had gone, "Hey everybody, get on vitamin D, and here's some vitamin D"? Hand it out. Test people's levels, get them checked, get them up there. Because that is one of the things that's easy, simple, doesn't cost a heck of a lot of money.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah. The last time I gave a presentation to a large corporate, the question was, what is the single most cost-effective thing we can do to help our people through winter? And it was vitamin D. Because you drop your viral infections down by 40%.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Your absenteeism from viral infections. And how simple. I was encouraging the company, get people tested, and instead of wine gums and chocolates in your cafeteria, provide vitamin D.

Lisa: Exactly. Yes. This is gold. Love it, love it. That's just so simple.

Lisa: Trophic support too, because that's one of the other things that goes south when you've got Alzheimer's, some of the hormonal support systems. Can you talk to anything that's a little bit more complicated? Obviously it is.

Dr Dave Jenkins: I think what I said was like the synaptoblastic activity — so that's trophic support, the ability of the brain to create new neurons, new neuronal outreaches, and to talk to the next neighbouring brain cell. That's the synapse, where the neurotransmitters are converting over and giving you help to create new memories. That needs trophic support, and that's hormones amongst other things, and vitamin D. That's how it acts as a neuropeptide. So that's one of the things that it's doing, or supporting the development, signalling your brain cells.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And with the cases that you published — I think there were 10 cases that you were involved in in that study that was a worldwide publication, 100 people who reversed Alzheimer's with Dr Dale — you and Miki were involved with 10 of those cases, which is pretty impressive. Well done. What were some of the results that you saw? People's lives changed. So for someone who's sitting out there now who's got a mum, a dad, a brother or sister, someone who's just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, what would you say to them? Can you give us some experience there on what can be done and what you've actually seen?

Dr Dave Jenkins: So the first thing is, get it early. When someone's diagnosed with Alzheimer's, if you take a detailed history, on average the family — beyond the person themselves — the family noticed something four years beforehand. So you have a four-year window. When Mum starts repeating herself in the same conversation, or she got lost once in a car park at the supermarket, which we can all do — but when you add it up, get very suspicious that there's something going on and get tested. That's the whole thing.

Dr Dave Jenkins: What we find is when we do tests, we find a myriad of problems. Always. Whether it's the vitamin D, the low zinc, the poor gut, and on and on and on. We always find a series of things. And the good news is most of them are correctable. The tougher ones, we can improve upon. As Dale says, we've got to just get the seesaw tilting back for the brain to start — take the toxicity away, support the trophic support of the brain cells, and you can get reversals.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So the number one thing was, get tested early. We get a better response with people if we get them early, in the mild cognitive impairment phase. That's consistent with every other practitioner I've ever talked to, and Dale. So get it early, don't wait around. And if your doctor says there's nothing that can be done, don't accept that. Read, learn, empower yourself, get Dale's book, and then get tested.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And it is complex, there's no doubt about that. So it takes a commitment. You have to gather what support you've got around you, the family. The ones that have done the best in our experience have a strong family support: the kids are on board, the partner's on board, they're all helping each other to achieve. Just the testing is quite onerous. You've got to do urine tests, a series of blood tests, vision tests you can put on the computer screen, you've got a cognitive test. So you have to make a commitment, get tested, find a practitioner. And I'm not self-promoting here, but I think there are only two or three, and that's a problem.

Dr Dave Jenkins: There's quite a few practitioners who have trained, but then they don't want to do it.

Lisa: Yeah, it's too much.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So we found that it was best to be dedicated. We have a dedicated Alzheimer's programme that we've worked out over the years, we have systems in place, and we warn people: look, this is what it will take, and it will take a large commitment of time, effort and money, unfortunately, because the tests are expensive and they're only getting more and more expensive. But for us to be able to help someone, we need to know, do they have leaky gut? Do they have high mercury? How can we target and personalise a programme without knowing those facts? So unfortunately it is getting down to people who have very good support from partners and family and friends, a good doctor who's well trained and experienced, and enough money to be able to get into the big things.

Lisa: Well, the things that make a big difference, a lot of them don't cost a lot of money. The keto diet, intermittent fasting, doing more exercise and brain training — those things are fundamental to good brain health. So that's maybe where people need to start, because if they're listening to this and they don't have the money and they don't have the resources, this is what you can do now and it will make a big difference. Yes, you will get more if you're working with a good practitioner and you're able to get all of that, and we can get much more nuanced. But if you are listening and you don't have the resources, start with the diet, start with the exercise, start with cold water therapies and saunas if you can get into them, more hot water or baths — everything that is going to support the detoxification process, everything that's going to support a healthy diet, metabolic health. Those are the places that we can start. And vitamin D and zinc. Zinc is another one. Explain actually why zinc is important.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Well, what's interesting, and a lot of even neurologists don't know this, the area in the body that has the highest concentration of zinc is the hippocampus, right in here.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And it's the area that is very important in the creation of memories. It's the area that we see start to shrink, usually first, and when you get the volume on the MRI scans, the hippocampus has shrunk on a lot of these patients.

Lisa: And that's just brain cells dying, right? It's just shrinking.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And zinc is essential for the creation of new memories. Absolutely essential. And the problem is that a lot of people have the APOE4 gene, which makes them more likely to get Alzheimer's, and that impacts the absorption of zinc.

Lisa: Oh, is that one of the mechanisms of why that's a problem?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yes. And then they have higher copper levels and that impedes the zinc, so it's actually the zinc-copper ratio that's important. We found — I had a patient the other day, even within general practice, if I do have someone who's super motivated — we checked her zinc levels out. She's got mild cognitive impairment, she had pre-diabetes, she's reversed it on the keto diet, she's making ketones again, and we've got her brain training. She doesn't have much money, and so we said, well, let's do these basic things. She was super keen. So I've just put her on zinc, and I can just prescribe zinc for her.

Dr Dave Jenkins: The basic things: the exercise is really probably the number one thing. If we look at the risk factors and the things that you can do — when they did a study on super athletes, it's very rare for a super athlete to get Alzheimer's.

Lisa: Yep, blood flow. We've got oxygen, blood flow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: That's the number one thing. If you've got a bad family history of Alzheimer's, or you've done the gene and you've got APOE4, be the fittest you can be. That's the number one thing, and then the chances are you can't be the fittest you can be without being a beast, so you're going to be slim, your blood pressure is probably going to be under good control, your blood lipids are going to be good, you're fit, you're healthy, you're energised, and your chances of Alzheimer's are very slim. They're still there, but then you add on top of that some basic testing. Because that person, the only way they could really get into trouble was if they've got high toxins — they could have mould illness.

Lisa: Yep, very high mercury. What test do you use to do the mould assessment, like for a toxicity panel? Which one do you use?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Right, so we're looking for a condition called CIRS — C-I-R-S — which stands for Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome. It's a syndrome that's now well described, and interestingly enough, well accepted by the Australian government, who just did a huge investigation a couple of years ago now. They asked, is this mould illness real? And it's not only mould, Lyme disease can cause it as well. So it's the body's overreaction to a couple of toxins, or in Lyme disease, an infection. But in mould it's the mycotoxins. It's not mould, it's the toxins inside the mould, and they are released into the atmosphere, we breathe them in, and if you're genetically vulnerable you will create this huge inflammatory response.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So when we're measuring it, we're measuring for mycotoxins in the urine and we're also looking for that inflammatory marker. So we confirm the mould in the urine and we confirm they've over-responded, and then we do a thing called a visual contrast sensitivity test, which is a useful test which is really just detecting the shades of grey, because the toxins and the inflammation in the back of the eye and the retina impact the ability to detect visual contrast, shades of grey. And if people want to do this test, they can at home. Just go — I think it's just VCS — but just go "visual contrast sensitivity test", Google that, there's a free one you can do online. You've got to set your computer up and be a certain distance from it. It pays to spend, I think it's $15 or $25, and do the paid version, because they'll send you a report and they'll analyse your results and it'll tell you whether they think you're at risk of CIRS or whether you've got toxins.

Lisa: Right, that's a brilliant thing.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And it's a relatively good screening device if someone's going, I wonder if I've got mould illness, I have got a bit of mould, and my brain's not working very well. People with mould illness have a different way of presenting. Their symptoms are often executive function, meaning they're having trouble planning and using this front part of the brain. Sometimes their memory to begin with is okay, but they get confused and overwhelmed with complex tasks and with planning. One of those ten cases was a woman in Christchurch. She was just 58, she had a big job as a project manager for the health board down there, she was running various projects. Her job was planning.

Lisa: Gosh.

Dr Dave Jenkins: And she said to me, my memory is okay, but these things have been happening. And I got very suspicious. It's often just after menopause in a woman, after there's been some stressful episode that has somehow precipitated it.

Lisa: Could it be, like, lose a spouse or a job, or lose your house falling down a cliff from too many rains?

Dr Dave Jenkins: It's usually a stressful situation, in the mid-50s, and this executive function loss rather than memory loss, though it will go on to get memory loss. Our last patient with CIRS presented with epilepsy — the wife actually — and vague thinking. Very smart man, just couldn't get his thinking together. He would describe it as, I just can't think. He was orientated, had reasonable memory, but just couldn't think, solve problems and plan. And he was fitting in the night. His wife sent me a video of him fitting and the neurologist couldn't explain it. He'd seen several neurologists, and they'd accepted it and put him on anti-epileptic medication. But he responded very well to the programme. He's no longer having epilepsy and his mind is clear. He had toxins and various other things, but his main thing was mould. Fortunately, they could afford it — they had to completely renovate their house, get rid of the mould, bring in expensive filters, but they did it all, and a very supportive partner. They did it all and he started to come right, and you could see his visual contrast sensitivity started to improve.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: You can see it in the tests.

Lisa: Is there any sort of protocol that you use to get mould out of the body? Because mould's an area I haven't dived into in my practice.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So yes, there are specific ways of getting rid of mould, but the first thing we say to people: here's your urine mycotoxin level, it's through the roof, here's your inflammatory markers, through the roof, you've got CIRS by diagnosis, by criteria. The first thing is to stop exposure, and that's the hardest thing. We've got someone at the moment, he's got two houses, he's got a reasonable amount of money, very smart man, he's only in his late 50s, and we keep saying to them, you're not going to improve until you get out of that house. They had a massive leak. They've only got a little bit of visible mould, and that's the other thing — if you don't have visible mould, it doesn't mean you don't have mycotoxins in your house. In fact, in the majority of cases you don't see it. But when we do mould swabbing of your house, you've got a lot there.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So that's the first thing: you have to reduce your exposure. We've had people who've had to sell up their houses and move houses. There are many stories of people living in camper vans and in tents until they can find a place that doesn't have high levels of mould. And then there are filters that you can get for your house that will suck up some of the mould and dehumidify your house, of course. And then when it comes to the body, the clay-like substances and zeolite substances that will bind the mycotoxins — bentonite clay and so on.

Lisa: Yes.

Dr Dave Jenkins: But again, just swallowing zeolite's not going to work.

Lisa: Yeah, you have to have a dedicated protocol.

Dr Dave Jenkins: The other thing that helps is a thing called the Dr Yu sauna protocol — there's a YouTube on this — using a near infrared sauna. What you do is take some niacin, enough to give you some flushing.

Lisa: And you've got to start small, or warn people.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, you feel a little bit of flushing. And then you do some vigorous exercise and get yourself in front of a near infrared sauna, a portable one.

Lisa: Yeah, I've got one here.

Dr Dave Jenkins: I've actually had mould illness myself.

Lisa: Oh wow.

Dr Dave Jenkins: My mycotoxins were through the roof. We had lived in a mouldy home and we had to get out. In fact, we've moved twice, because the next house, with the next set of rains, turned out to be leaky, so we got out of that.

Lisa: Yep, and now you guys are falling down the hill.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Now we finally get into a mould-free house and it's falling down the hill from the rains.

Lisa: Oh, that's good.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So yeah, you have to reduce your exposure, because the mycotoxins are recycling. What they do is they store in the fat and they're constantly recycling. They go in through your blood, into your bile, into your gut, get reabsorbed, recycle, get put back into areas of fat — your fat, and the brain is fat.

Dr Dave Jenkins: So you have to capture them as they're going through the gut. There is actually an old-fashioned drug, cholestyramine, that we sometimes use, but mainly it's bentonite clay and the zeolites and charcoal.

Lisa: Yep. So the Dr Yu protocol was niacin and exercise, sauna, and a binder, charcoal, afterwards, because you'll also sweat out the toxins in your sweat.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yep.

Lisa: So when you're having a near-infrared sauna, the red light is releasing the toxin and the mercury — it'll penetrate into your fat layer and release it, and those toxins will find their way into the gut, so then you bind them with the charcoal.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, yeah. It's been quite well proven. They did tests on poor old Iraqi soldiers coming back and they took fat biopsies, and then they ran a whole series of detox protocols, and they found this one was the most effective, Dr Yu's.

Lisa: Oh, I'll have a look.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah, there's a YouTube on Dr Yu's detox protocol. They'll find that goes through the whole thing of how to do it.

Lisa: Well, that's gold, actually. Wow. I mean, we've gone all over the show. I'm going to have to wrap it up and do a part two, I think, because we haven't got to some of the juicy parts, but this has been very valuable.

Lisa: So the takeaways from today, just to wrap it up: the mould thing, I think that's a huge thing that people probably don't even have on their radar. So go and do that test, that visual test, and then have a look at Dr Yu's detox protocols, because the cholestyramine is maybe the difficult piece, but the other things — the niacin and the exercise and the bentonite clay — they're all pretty accessible. And then the trophic factors. And we didn't get onto hormones, because hormones play a big role in the brain as well, and in supporting brain function. Maybe we can do that in part two.

Lisa: And then we talked about the keto diet — and not the bodybuilder type of keto where you're pounding bacon and butter and cream every day, more the, what did you call it, vegetables above the ground, lots of leafy greens alongside good portions of quality protein and some good oils, basically, and getting rid of the processed food, getting rid of the grains where possible, getting rid of the higher-carb foods, and easing your way into that, into understanding these processes. And then we also talked about the insulin resistance and what's actually happening there in the body and in the brain, and some of the problems that we've got in the system of how and why we're not picking this up and why we're not doing something.

Lisa: Dave, this has been absolutely astounding, and I just want to say amazing work on SurfAid International and the work that you've done there. You're a true humanitarian, a truly altruistic person who's really in the trenches doing the hard work, and now with the iwi over there, working and changing lives and reversing diabetes and slowing Alzheimer's and reversing Alzheimer's. All this is absolutely impacting people's lives massively. But you're one of the workers in the trenches, and [inaudible], and unfortunately that doesn't usually happen — it goes to the more high-profile people. But you're definitely one of those people that deserves all those types of things.

Lisa: So thanks for sharing your experience today. And I really hope that your house is going to be okay and that things come right for you there, because that's the last thing you need on your plate. And I'd love to do another session and finish the story on what else can we do, and what can we do at home when we don't have the practitioners, because there is a lack — there's a lack of people that are out doing the full Alzheimer's protocols, the Bredesen protocols. But there are things that we can do even if we don't have access to yourself or to Dale. But if people do want to reach out and do want to work with you, are you able to take any? Have you got bandwidth?

Dr Dave Jenkins: We do. It's limited, but we do. Our website: revitahealth.co.nz — R-E-V-I-T-A health dot co dot NZ. And so they can send us an email that way.

Lisa: Brilliant, brilliant. So if you're wanting to work with Dr Dave and Miki, that would be the best place to reach out. Get in quick, I'd say, before you run out of bandwidth. This is the problem I have — I work with lots of doctors and people all around the planet with different things, with cancers and Alzheimer's and brains, and each one of them just hits the roof and they're at the bandwidth, you know?

Dr Dave Jenkins: Yeah.

Lisa: And the scalability of these things is the hardest thing, because it takes behavioural change. And even in my own practice of what I do, I hit the ceiling constantly. There's constantly a waiting list, there's just not enough of you to go around to be able to actually make a big enough impact. I can share the knowledge, but this is why these platforms and podcasts are great, because at least people get to start researching themselves and start to take control, and the more they listen, the more they learn, the more they are able to take some action themselves. So that's really powerful. So thanks, Dave.

Dr Dave Jenkins: Key messages: Alzheimer's and many of the other dementias are largely — I would say not totally, but largely — reversible, and largely preventable, even better still, especially if you've got a strong family history. And yeah, let's structure the next podcast a bit more about what someone can do if they've got a family history of Alzheimer's or dementias, and have a bit more structure.

Lisa: Yeah, we've plotted that out. That's absolutely brilliant. Thanks, Dr Dave, for your time today. It's been absolutely...

Dr Dave Jenkins: Welcome. All right, bye-bye.