Nutrition and Cognitive Decline with Dr. Alex Richardson

Dr. Alex Richardson is an expert in nutrition and health and uses a multidisciplinary approach to epidemiology. In this podcast, she connects food health and physiology, explaining to listeners

• How the classic paradigm for research studies fails to take into account how our complicated physiology processes food and other factors,
• Why common medications for stomach acid may decrease our ability to prevent cognitive decline, and
• What comparing the differences between the British Victorian diet and habits with our modern lifestyle tells researchers about food health.

Dr. Alex Richardson is the founding director of Food and Behavior (FAB) Research and is a Research Associate with the Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics at the University of Oxford. She has been a part of several seminal studies that involve connections between nutrition and brain health. In this podcast, she focuses specifically on the epidemiology of cognitive decline diseases and nutrition. She begins by describing the very limited approach historical studies have take thus far, commenting that the accepted model of research is incapable of taking into account how our body and nutrition work together. Specially, she identifies how the randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials only handle one nutrient or medication at a time and tells listeners why this is so inadequate.

She also entails several ways this study pattern has harmed our understanding of what medications can do and provides some recent findings of how proton pump inhibitors have a multi-pronged means of harming cognitive strength. In addition, she describes studies that show what's actually good for us, enumerating a study on the British Victorian Era's lifestyle and diet and resulting health and lack of disease. She then moves into a discussion about the harm in our modern-day diet and talks about how harmful sugar is, the importance of B vitamins and in what form, fatty acids, and other healthful choices and why.

For more about Dr. Richardson, see her profile at https://www.fabresearch.org/viewItem.php?id=7412 Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK