🤓 Smarty Pants
Understanding Dementia (and What You Can Do About It)
There aren’t many people who haven’t been touched by dementia — a parent, a grandparent, a friend, or someone close whose personality slowly faded long before their body did. It’s a devastating diagnosis, and for a long time we’ve been led to believe it’s largely inevitable.
The truth is more nuanced.
Dementia isn’t one disease. It’s an umbrella term for several conditions with different biological drivers — which means there are different levers we can pull to reduce risk and support brain health across life.
Here are the main types, in plain English:
Alzheimer’s disease
The most common form.
Characterised by amyloid plaques and tau tangles that disrupt communication between brain cells. Memory loss is often the first sign.
👉 This is where good-quality, regular sleep = a healthy glymphatic system quietly clearing debris from the brain each night.
During deep sleep, the brain’s clean-up system becomes highly active, flushing out waste — including amyloid — that builds up during the day.
Vascular dementia
The second most common — and often the most preventable. Caused by reduced blood flow to the brain from strokes, mini-strokes, or chronically damaged blood vessels.
👉 This is where heart health = brain health becomes very real.
Blood pressure, insulin resistance, inflammation, and circulation all directly shape brain function.
Lewy body dementia
Caused by abnormal protein deposits in the brain. This is where sleep, nervous system balance, and dopamine health intersect.
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD)
Often appears earlier in life and affects behaviour, personality, or language before memory. This is where brain resilience, inflammation control, and early pattern recognition matter.
Mixed dementia
A combination of the above — commonly Alzheimer’s plus vascular damage. This is where multiple lifestyle factors compound over time, not one single cause.
Dementia isn’t always random, and it’s not always inevitable. While we can’t control everything, we can support the systems that keep our brain healthy: blood flow, sleep, metabolic health, inflammation, movement, and light. The earlier we protect them, the more brain resilience we build for later life.
🔥 Deep Dive DL;TL
Dr Thomas Seyfried: The Metabolic Approach to Cancer
Today's TL;DL dives into a conversation that could change everything you thought you knew about cancer. Dr Thomas Seyfried is a professor at Boston College with over 200 peer-reviewed publications, building on the work of Otto Warburg, the famous German scientist who discovered that cancer cells ferment glucose into lactic acid.
Dr. Seyfried's central message? Cancer isn't a genetic disease—it's a metabolic one. And in a world where we need to question everything, questioning our understanding of cancer and cancer treatment should be high on our list.
Cancer: A Mitochondrial Problem
Here's the first game-changer: Dr Seyfried argues that it is very difficult to get cancer when your mitochondria are healthy. Why? Because cancer is fundamentally disregulated cell growth, and your mitochondria are the master regulators telling cells when to grow, how fast to grow, and when to stop growing.
When mitochondria become damaged or deficient, cells lose this regulation and start growing out of control. The origin of cancer, according to Dr. Seyfried, is a disruption of normal energy metabolism—a replacement of healthy mitochondrial energy with ancient fermentation pathways that existed hundreds of millions of years ago, before oxygen entered the atmosphere. In Dr. Seyfried’s model, if you keep your mitochondria healthy, you don't get cancer or chronic diseases for that matter.
The Two Fuels Driving Cancer
Cancer cells run on just two fuels: glucose and glutamine. Dr. Seyfried's research showed a direct relationship in brain cancer—the higher the blood sugar, the faster the tumour grew. When they used a keto-genic diet and fasting to lower blood glucose, tumours grew much slower.
Dr. Seyfried shows this pattern was repeated across all cancer types. Higher blood glucose means faster tumour growth and poorer survival in breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer. The tumour is literally sucking down glucose and glutamine, and those two fuels drive disregulated growth.
The Metabolic Solution
When you lower blood sugar through dietary intervention, your body starts mobilising fat. Your liver converts fatty acids into ketone bodies, which your brain and heart can use for energy. Dr. Seyfried explains that cancer cells cannot effectively use ketones because they lack fully functional mitochondria.
So lowering blood glucose and elevating ketones creates a situation where normal cells get healthier and tumour cells get weaker. Then, with strategic targeting of glutamine, you can manage the disease whilst actually improving overall health—reducing diabetes, high blood pressure, and other metabolic conditions at the same time.
Why Isn't This Standard Treatment?
Dr. Seyfried doesn't hold back: "Most oncologists have no clue that glucose drives tumour growth. The very people supposed to help you don't know the biology or biochemistry of the disease they're managing." Despite cancer remaining one of the leading causes of death worldwide, the medical establishment continues pushing expensive drugs that can kill as easily as they help, whilst metabolic therapy—backed by solid science—remains virtually unknown in cancer clinics and excluded from medical training and curriculum.
The Bottom Line
Cancer is a disease of energy metabolism that can be managed by targeting the two fuels driving it. The science is solid, yet nowhere on the planet is there a clinical trial simultaneously targeting glucose and glutamine whilst transitioning the body to nutritional ketosis.
Dr. Seyfried's message is clear: you actually get better and healthier when you do metabolic therapy—not worse. The tools exist. The biology is well understood. What's missing is implementation.
☀️ Sandy's Sunshine
When Conventional Treatment Feels Like the Only Choice
This year, my brother-in-law Chris passed away just days after his 60th birthday. A few months earlier, he'd been diagnosed with two brain tumours. By the time he died, there were nine.
Chris followed the conventional treatment plan—not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had no other choice. The doctors were clear: this is what you do. This is the standard of care. This is your only hope.
For Chris, it was overwhelming. Any prospect of a different path was beyond him. The information was too unfamiliar, too much, and when you're facing this type of diagnosis, this is completely understandable.
Presenting new information when someone is going through a life threatening situation isn't the best time. Nervous systems are already maxed out. The standard treatment timeline doesn't give you space to breathe, let alone research. Surgery is scheduled. Radiation starts. Chemo protocols begin. The machine moves fast, and you're just trying to survive each day.
Alternative approaches require research, planning, medical team buy-in, family support. They require bandwidth. You need to know what you'd do, before anything happens.
I share this with deep respect for anyone walking this path — and with the quiet hope that one day, people are given more time, more understanding, and more real choice.
Inside The Rise Circle, I go deeper into Dr Seyfried’s work — the metabolic framework he lays out, why he urges caution before disturbing tumours and doing biopsies, and the questions he believes families deserve the space to ask.
🔢 Number Crunch
20–30%: the reduction in dementia risk associated with regular physical activity. Movement feeds the brain. See you outside!
And that's a wrap my friends! I hope you have a beautiful week ahead and if you have any questions, comments or feedback, please hit reply. I read every email.
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