Prevent Dementia: Julia Lundstrom’s Brain Health Plan

Julia Lundstrom

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure being back, and it’s good to see you again. Getting caught up with everything you’re working on is so exciting as well.

Heather Sandison, ND

I want to give everyone here just an action-packed, informative 20 to 30 minutes and all the updates on what you’ve been providing. You were just telling me about the client retreats that you’re running, and I’d love to dive into your pillars of brain health and how you help a typical client.

Julia Lundstrom

About 80% of our clients just need foundational help, and so we know, through your work and Dr. Bredesen’s work, the 36 reasons for memory loss. Of course, we’re all preventative. Everything we’re teaching and showing clients is looking at the science behind what can help prevent dementia. we’re looking at our ten pillars of brain health that incorporate everything from being social and having purpose to challenging yourself, using your memory, sleep, of course, diet, exercise, and all those things. Supplementation is all-encompassing in this. When we start working with a client, we come in, we help them do a memory assessment, and then we determine where they need help.  The biggest component of this is accountability, like a lot of people know so much of this stuff, everything. I’ve never had anybody do it 100%. There are a lot of people who do a lot.  But it’s accountability, so that’s where we focus a lot of our time. We’ve brought in last year; we talked a lot about CGM and looking inside people’s bodies. That’s continuing to be a part of  I spend a lot of money every year on testing and preventative things.  Had a stressful year. I wanted to test my cortisol and make sure that I was okay. doing that kind of testing to make sure that nothing is coming down the unforeseen line. that’s a lot of what we’re doing now. We were starting to do some functional DNA testing. That’s a lot. We have a geneticist now who helps us with that path. We’d like to say your genes load the gun and your environment and lifestyle pull the trigger. That’s what we’re looking at, and it’s great to see. Like, for me, I don’t know if you’ve ever done any functional DNA testing, but, I don’t process inflammations very well and don’t process toxins very well. I have to keep my lifestyle and all the things, but that’s inflammation. I need to be extra careful with inflammatory foods, stress, and things like that. I just think there’s so much individualized care that needs to be done and customization, which you do a lot of. That’s what we’re focused on because your body and my body are not the same.

Heather Sandison, ND

The genetics conversation is interesting. Some people are turned off by it.  They think there’s nothing I can do about my genes, so why would I even want to test them or not? Yet epigenetics or those inputs—where we eat, what we eat, how often we move, how much good quality sleep we get, and how we interact with others—are important. You mentioned socialization and avoiding isolation. Those things have a much bigger impact on how our genetics are expressed, and understanding them can be so empowering because, as you mentioned, if you don’t detoxify well or are prone to more inflammation, maybe you have the APOE e4 genetics. This is something that, if you are in your twenties, you can make different decisions than if you kind of put your head in the sand and pretend it isn’t there, so you can get ahead of it and do such. In the prevention world, it makes so much sense to understand your genetic rate. Later on, when someone with severe dementia is tested, it’s almost for prevention for their offspring, the people who share their genetics. It can become a tool for prevention and motivation.

Julia Lundstrom

It’s just fascinating to know. They even have it down now to absorb binder transport, vitamin B12, or vitamin D. I take a certain type of vitamin D, and I have to take it twice a day because if I just take it in the morning, I’m not absorbing it. It’s just getting it in the long run. It saves us a lot of money by not taking a bunch of stuff that isn’t working. I like to say expensive, but it’s this concept: Let’s look at the individual’s body and inside their body. We talk a lot about the creams and the functional testing.  You do a lot more in-depth testing, especially when it comes to the Recode program and things like that. But on the prevention side, that’s one of the huge things we’ve seen. Even as you mentioned our retreats, we’re putting everybody on EEG and we’re looking at their brainwave states. and from their brainwave states, you can see ADD and ADHD, you can see TBI, you can see all this stuff that’s in Parkinson’s dementia. You can see that in their brainwave states. we work with clients to get them not only congruent brainwaves but also looking at getting them into the Alpha Brainwave State, which is much more creative and where you should make your better decisions, but also a much more healing stage.  It’s just so individualized per person. Some people get there easily, and some people don’t. and to work with them and teach techniques, it’s thinking it through that’s going deep. We work on our retreats, individual retreats where it’s deep diving. Again, 80% of people just need foundational work. But it’s fun too to go to the next level with some of that stuff.

Heather Sandison, ND

When you see a new client, how do you decide which pillar? You mentioned there were ten of them. How do you decide where to start?  Or do you throw everything at them?

Julia Lundstrom

No, We have a motto. We make them where they’re at. people are busy, whether they’re retired or not. Some people are busier in retirement than outside. It’s important to get them. We do an in-depth memory assessment. we’re going through their lifestyle, their diets, their sleep habits, their social habits, and what their lifestyle looks like. give us a walk-through a day, and that helps us determine where they need the most help. If it’s sleep, we have sleep experts. so they can talk them through that. If it’s diet, we’ve got nutritionists, and we talk them through that. We like the first 30 days because that is where we can have the most leverage. We want people to get results quickly because that’s going to keep them motivated to do the harder work down the line. Then we do live interactive classes. If we say, we want you to start meditating because you have a fried brain or they work too hard all their lives and they’re just this scatterbrained, high cortisol kind of thing, We now this past year have started doing interactive classes where they can come. We say, Go meditate. We have a class once a week where they can, and it’s all online. They can come, and they can show up and do the work, and learn different techniques. We do breathwork once a week. We have brain-healthy cooking classes. They can come to join, ask questions, and be individuals. It’s fun. Memory classes teach you how to use your memory better. You get this interactive social component of accountability. All of that is inside the programs. That’s one of the biggest things because when most people come to work with us, they don’t know what the root cause of it is. Most of them have the same type of issue. They are just a little bit more forgetful. They’re not feeling as sharp as they used to, with a little bit of brain fog and sometimes nothing like screaming. You’ve had MCI or anything like that, but just not feeling like they did ten or 20 years ago. that. That’s where we want to look.

Heather Sandison, ND

Cognitive impairment is a luxury. When someone comes into my office and they’re like,  that thing shows up. I’ve got a perfect MOCA score of 30. I’m not testing as impaired on any of the quizzes or anything that I’ve done with neurology or my primary care provider. But my brain isn’t working the way it did ten years ago. This also happened for professionals. People who are very well educated have a lot of what we call cognitive reserves, and maybe they’re super sharp and quick, and they never forget a name, miss a word, or not be able to calculate something in their head. But all of a sudden, or maybe gradually, that’s more common. It’s like it’s not what it was before. That is such a luxury to be working with patients, then, because it’s pretty quick and easy to turn it around. It doesn’t take as much effort as if we’re talking to someone with more severe Alzheimer’s. Talk to me a little bit more about the psychology of the pillars of brain health and how they’ve helped people. If you have any examples of people you’ve worked with, it would be fantastic to hear some stories.

Julia Lundstrom

It’s a wide spectrum of people we worked with. But you talked about professionals. We see a lot of burnt-out brains where they’ve been working for 12, 14, and 16 hours a day for decades. All of a sudden, they come in, and their brains are fried. It’s because they haven’t stopped, their brain forces them to stop. we get a lot of that. We see a lot of professionals that come in. and then it’s a completely hostile overhaul for that. They don’t; maybe they’re working out but they’re not doing strength training, or maybe they’re not taking any time to meditate or slow down our breathing. Now, I  hear the meditation. It’s so boring. I can’t do it. Or my brain just wanders in, and that’s fine.

Heather Sandison, ND

Meditation—I needed that.

Julia Lundstrom

I like to say I heard it when somebody said it. It’s not very original, but if you can’t do it for one minute, then you need an hour.

Heather Sandison, ND

I went on a meditation retreat with my mom not that long ago, and she was like, I can’t sit still. I can’t just sit there. I was like, You need it more than anyone. It’s not meant to be torture, It’s so funny. In my relationship with meditation, it’s like it’s my sacred time to myself. I get it in the morning, and I get up. I’m so motivated to get up and out of bed because I want to race everybody else out of bed so that I have the house to myself. I have that quiet time, and my date doesn’t feel like it started until I get there, and it’s so different if I miss it for some reason.

Julia Lundstrom

And I’m with you. That’s just it. We had a woman who was in a car accident three years ago now, and she started working with us about a year ago. When she went in, the doctor said that there was so much that it looked like she was already on the path to Alzheimer’s after this car accident because she had a concussion and all this stuff. They said, You’re going to have Alzheimer’s within five years, and she’s six years old like this. She had nothing before. She had done a lot of work before that. Her whole face was before she came to us. She looked like she had had a stroke, but all that was kind of fixed before she came to us. But she was forced to quit, and we completely changed her diet around her health and lifestyle. We got her to slow down and start doing the work, using her memory again, or using cell phones, which are just some of the worst things. Or, using her memory, we just don’t anymore. She says that we just saved her life because she feels incredibly sharp. She feels healthy. She lost 25 pounds. That’s just it. When you put your brain health first, you just lose weight because you’re not worried about your waistline; you’re worried about your brain. She came to one of our retreats, and she was one of the more difficult ones because of some of the brain damage that happened with the car accident. But we were able to get her into an alpha-brainwave state where she could come to a calm, relaxed state. Now she’s continuing to do the work. That’s just it. It’s the continuing to do the work, the accountability. now important. That is because when you show up every single week to talk to somebody, a doctor says, Go, do that. You need to go to that for six months, it’s not giving people what they need to get the work done, but when you’re paying for something that you need a stroke weekly and say, I did do this when I had a client tell me that she’s a veterinarian and he gets home now that he does surgery late. Sometimes it gets him at 11:00 at night, and he says, But I go and do these exercises that my coach gave me, even if it’s for ten or 20 minutes, because I can’t see her face the next day and tell her I didn’t do it.

Heather Sandison, ND

That accountability. This isn’t rapid surgery. It’s the basics of diet, exercise, and stress management. The hard part is implementing these ideas. Is there a certain accountability you mentioned? Is there anything else that you use to help people implement?

Julia Lundstrom

When we talked about this last year, but I’d like to circle back to it like the continuous glucose monitors that we put on people that give them the instant feedback loop. Everybody thinks of food when it comes to glucose, but it’s sleep. also food, but it’s sleep, it’s stress, and it’s exercise. All those things affect it. Once people start to get used to it, we put everybody’s treats on it, and everybody’s sitting around a table. It’s shocking to see how they all react to diet, exercise, and the perfect brain-healthy meal. Some people are great with it, some people aren’t, and we have to figure out why that is. But what’s shocking to most people is the feedback loop on the stress. I had they’ll say something like, I had some raisins, a milkshake, or a candy bar, and my glucose went up 60 points. I got into a fight, and it went up 108. They don’t understand how toxic these relationships can be to your inner health, politics, or anything that gets you that riled up. How much is that affecting you on the inside? I love things that give them an instant feedback loop on what they’re doing. that’s something; they scan on their phone, and they’re able to see within an hour what happened. That is the biggest lifestyle change for most people.

Heather Sandison, ND

Are you a fan of the rings, the watches, or things that track sleep as well?

Julia Lundstrom

We do a lot of that. Everybody at our retreats gets some sort of tracker. We like the rings like the Oura ring is big. It’s a double-edged sword, and people get a little too obsessed with it. Or if they’re not a good sleeper and they put it on, they get so stressed out that they’re not sleeping very well. So there’s a fine line balance there. We’ve even had people get obsessed with the arms and want to wear them for six months or a year. It’s like you don’t need that much all the time. You need to learn and then adjust accordingly. Then, once you’re okay, stop with the data. But I do love the trackers because they are important. A lot of people will say, I sleep eight hours a night, and maybe they’re only getting five. They don’t understand what’s going on at night, they’re not getting any deep sleep, or they’re, so it is good to track that a lot. We do that for a lot of our clients that need it, especially on the sleep side.

Heather Sandison, ND

Where do you recommend people start at home to get on this track toward those ten pillars of brain health? With this great foundation, would it be one of these trackers or something different?

Julia Lundstrom

First of all, we put on a lot of free workshops so people could go. We gave you guys the link so they could sign up for one. It’s free; they learn for an hour, which is great. We talk about everything from how inflammation affects your memory to stress to diet, exercise, sleep, and all of that and how that affects your memory. But if they want to get started just on their own at home, one of the best things to do is to start looking at the ten pillars, look at your sleep a night, sleeping seven to nine hours. I play in bed for eight hours when I’m sleeping, because I’m reading or on my phone, and then that’s what you concentrate on. then we love telling people to do sleep journals. Write in your sleep journal what time you went to bed. Go to bed at the same time every night. You can’t make giant adjustments to sleep. You can’t go to bed at one and then also try to get about ten. That doesn’t work. It’s making small changes, and that’s the biggest thing. The biggest recommendation I have for people is that small changes add up. There’s a great book, Atomic Habits, and it talks about how 1% changes over a year dramatically affect your life, so most people try to make these huge shifts overnight, and it’s not sustainable. We say you’re not going to, especially if you don’t like it. We say it’s an à la carte menu. It’s not one size fits all. If you don’t like something, you’re not going to do it for life. Let’s find out what you like. If you wanted to work with us, of course, we would do your memory assessment. Look at all of that. But otherwise, just sit down and start writing where you think you’re lacking in life. Whether it’s the diet or the exercise, 

Heather Sandison, ND

Let’s go through those ten pillars you mentioned: sleep, diet, and exercise. I’m going to assume those are two and three.

Julia Lundstrom

You’re not going to forget one just because of this fact. But there’s supplementation, of course. that once we talked to a lot of people about how I’m on so many pills and all this stuff again, how do we know if we need it? You do have to do some testing for supplementation. You do. There are some things, like our minds. You say that you should just take calcium for prevention going forward, but it’s that you want to take calcium if you don’t need it or if you don’t have any calcium issues.  There are a lot of things people are taking, or they’re taking the wrong form. For supplementation, it is important to not only go crazy with it, but you also need to do some baseline testing to see what you need and also work with someone like yourself. Because if you don’t know, if you’re taking a supplement that’s blocking the pathway, that may be harming you somewhere else. There’s a lot of moving parts to go with supplementation. That’s one of the areas where people should invest in themselves and find out what they need. Then we have to be social. Being social is more important. At 85, your Harvard study is more important than diet and exercise.  Just getting out there. I have people who say, I talk to people on the phone all the time. That’s great. It’s not the same as one-on-one energy. It’s just you. We have energy fields. We need to be around people. the purpose and the challenge, we kind of lumped that into one, but we see people all the time saying that when you’re just sitting in front of the TV all day, your brain is going to die. My dad used to say that your eyes were going to turn square. Your brain is going to repeat itself.  It just isn’t getting the stimulation, or maybe it’s getting that stressed intuition because you’re watching the news or whatever. Then we have breathwork, and that’s not just breathwork for your lungs; that’s opening up your pathways and breathing through your nose as much as possible. There are lots of studies and lots of science around the importance of breathing through your nose and your mouth. As people get older, we see the mouth-breathers. We work with people on that, teach them breathing work techniques to start to use, breathe through their nose, even at night by the mouth, and sleep their mouth. Breathing at night is hard. We do talk about mouth-taping, but I’ve lost track. But then we have to use it. You have to use it or lose it. We talk about learning. A lot of times, people just stop learning. Our learning curve when we’re young is straight up and down, and then we get married and have kids, and it just kind of flattens off, and then it goes negative in our time. A lot of times we just stop learning, and that’s one of the biggest ones. We need to continue to learn and grow every single day. I don’t remember how many there were. I’m trying to think of eight.

Heather Sandison, ND

Let me see. I don’t when it comes to sleep number one, diet number two, exercise number three, supplementation, and socialization number four. Number five: purpose and challenge. Number six: BREATHWORK. Number seven is learning; number eight is meditation.

Julia Lundstrom

Number nine, I’m going to have to send you this.

Heather Sandison, ND

This is more reason for people to go to your website and know those ten pillars.

Julia Lundstrom

You’re going to make me look it up now because it’s going to drive me crazy. But meditation is a big one as well because this is something most people don’t think about and don’t think it’s that important. It’s about stress reduction. That’s another big one. A lot of times, stress reduction comes with meditation, but it also comes from, for a lot of people, changing their lives, changing their locations, changing their lives, and even changing their relationships. A lot of people don’t want to hear that. That’s something we work with as well. But we refer out to therapists, or we refer out to relationship experts. But it’s difficult when we talk to older people who have been in abusive relationships, and they’re never going to leave them. It’s creating safe spaces for them. and I don’t mean physically, sometimes physically abusive, but just not a growing or enriching relationship, and so it’s helping them with that if they’re not going to get out of it, to learn to create a safe space for themselves, to give themselves that stress reduction from it, or to manage it better. There’s a little bit of therapy in there, too. It’s a little bit of everything. A lot of them do go like this and conjoin. But people must start to focus on these lifestyle changes. It’s not just what’s inside the test; it’s the environment, the toxins, the mold, and the heavy metals. If you’re never getting outside in the Winter because it’s cold, you either need to force yourself or take some vacation time and go somewhere warm or move in. I have just lived in Denver for the last six months. Then I didn’t do Winter, so I moved. We’re warm, so it’s great. You have to know what makes you happy, and the environment has to be a peaceful, calm, and happy place. That goes for everything. we work with borders, we work with. Those are not relaxing, calm environments either, and help them get organized organizers to come over and help them get rid of them. It’s everything. It’s looking from the outside in and the inside out.

Heather Sandison, ND

There’s so much to this. It’s for a lot of people; they find it challenging and overwhelming. having a coach, having someone who can walk you through this, whether it’s the medical part of it, having a doctor run testing, or having coaches. If you feel like your gap is in these lifestyle places, accountability, as Julia mentioned, is what you need. It’s so important to work with someone if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Find a teacher, find a coach, find a partner, and establish accountability. Find someone who can help you get the most out of this approach because we see it work. The thing that keeps it from working is not doing it well. Get that support. I want everyone to know where they can find out more about you. We’re so grateful for your support of the summit and for you being here for all of your time and expertise. Please share where people can find out more.

Julia Lundstrom

As I said, the best way to just learn more about what we’re doing in general, about me, who I am, and what I teach is to sign up for one of our workshops. We do have a workshop on sleep information and how to improve your memory in 30 days or less. Just learn more that way. We have a link that they can use there. Otherwise, you can just go straight to our website at simplesmartscience.com and learn everything we’re doing, from our coaching program to our five-day intensive retreats. This year, we’re in the process of getting funding to now bring it to where people live in their homes and retirement communities and be able to give them food delivery based on their genetic base. What they can have is that your genetics also tell your food sensitivities. It’s crazy how much the functional DNA test can tell you these days, from hormones to sleep to what kind of exercise is best for you. To be able to create these environments and packages where people live in their homes so they don’t have to move and don’t have to go to facilities is so important. That, and we have all of that on our website, but I encourage you to reach out to us, talk to us, or book a call. You can get all that from our website, and we’re happy to help you and start the process of even doing a memory assessment so that’s the baseline of what’s causing this. 

Heather Sandison, ND

It’s so wonderful to have you here. We’re so grateful for how you support your clients and the amazing results that you get for prevention. Fantastic work. Thank you for doing the work you’re doing in the world and also for your time today.

Julia Lundstrom

Thank you so much, Heather. It is such a pleasure chatting with you again.

Heather Sandison, ND

Take it there.

Julia Lundstrom

Thank you.