Staying Sharp As A Tac In your Golden Years

Jason Prall

Welcome back to the reverse brain disorder summit. Joining me now is Julia Lundstrom. She is a neuroscience and a brain health educator and CEO of simple smart science. She’s on a mission to not only make a measurable improvement in 10 million people’s brain health, but to have a 50% reduction in the amount of dementia cases by 2050 using her 10 pillars of brain health. Over the last 10 years. She has over 110,000 copies of her book. The brain owners guide three simple solutions to quickly boosting your memory in print and had over 11.4 million people attend her workshops on preventing dementia and getting optimal brain health today and now she is bringing it home to you, Julia. Thanks for joining me.

Julia Lundstrom

Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to be here.

Jason Prall

So I’m curious how did you get started in this thing that we call memory? I mean this is a deep rabbit hole that I don’t even think we fully solved and when it comes to brain science, but undoubtedly you have a ton of information. So what, what kicked you off on this gets bigger every day.

Julia Lundstrom

I still feel like I only know a speck on the wall of everything there is to know. Oh yes, Well it’s like many people’s stories. My aunt got dementia about 15 years ago and 13 years ago and she was one of the cases that rapidly declined. I mean within a year and a half, two years, she didn’t even recognize her Children and she was one of my favorite aunts and it was incredibly tragic to see at the same time, my brother who was at that time 44 had a heart attack and had to get on statins and heart attacks run rampant in my family. Especially on the male side and prescription meds, especially statins really ruined the memory and he had another heart attack about five years later. And so it’s just this, this kind of snowball. Now my mom got dementia about five years ago and luckily we’ve been keeping it kind of in check, but we like to say she’s in the funny stage of dementia where she calls you and says happy birthday.

Jason Prall

Yeah, it’s kind of funny, right? It’s kind of cute. 

Julia Lundstrom

It’s so for me it just became a very big passion project. I also was going through a very, one of probably the most difficult time in my life and depression is also one of the symptoms, one of the causes of having a very bad memory. And so serendipitously we met a scientist who was working on the tropics and back then in 2012, this was, you know, before alpha brain, I mean it was before new topics for a thing and we came out with our first supplement minders day and from there, it’s just been a giant snowball getting into all areas of holistic health and really starting to create my 10 pillars of brain health, which we have come to today.

Jason Prall

Beautiful. Yeah, well I’d love to get started on that because as we’re uncovering and I think as the evidence is showing us more and more each day each year we’re finding that there’s so many things that impact our brain health and dementia is now I think recognizably not this genetic thing that just happens to us haphazardly when we get to some certain age, but it can happen really young. Of course we may have genetic predispositions of constitution always plays a role in every case and yet there’s things we can do right, there’s unbelievable amounts of opportunities to correct some things and to prevent them, these, these type of cases, right? So what are some of these? Maybe you can just start off with some of the most, I think let’s say impactful of the 10 pillars, where do you where do you start people?

Julia Lundstrom

Sure. So what we do is we have a memory guru program that we put people through and basically we look at their whole life styles with the huge intake that we do with people and we decide where which one of the 10 pillars which is going to have the greatest effect, what’s going to be the greatest lover and as you know, everybody’s individualized, so it’s really different for everybody to say what’s going to be the most impactful, I will say we work with older people, typically 60 plus, not really a generation, a lot of people are working with on prevention. I like to say that the Betty Crocker generation, you know, they grew up, their parents probably homemade everything and then all of a sudden Betty Crocker put a cake in a box and put it on the shelf and there you go. 

The rest is living out of boxes and tv dinners. So it’s really teaching them and say food and nutrition is a huge one of course for everybody. But we really look at it as you know, a lot of people do have their nutrition dialed in and so we’ll look at the other areas on what’s beginning to affect their memories or a lot of times they just want to prevent dimension Alzheimer’s because they have it in their family, kind of like I do right. I mean it’s symptoms show up decades After all the damage is done. And so it’s really important to hit it earlier even though we do only typically work with older people. So it’s taking all the amazing information that your remarkable speakers have put together, like Dr. Bredesen, one of my heroes, you know, and he says there’s 36 reasons for that. We know of potentially a couple more um, probably a couple more, but not many more forgetting dimensions. Alzheimer’s and really memory issues in general. 

And so we’ve come up with the 10 pillars, which are really lifestyle changes and to solve the majority of those, we can’t solve all of them, you know, heavy metal poisoning mold, those are things that need much more detailed care, but we can solve a lot of them by just changing lifestyle and it’s a lot of things people don’t think about them, especially coming out of C0V!D, I would say one of the biggest things we hear from all of our clients is they’ve been stuck inside right there not being social, they’re not getting that social component. And for me, the social side is something, not a lot of people are talking about, but it is a giant component that actually there was an 80 year Harvard study done where they determined that being social and having a good family unit was almost twice as important as food and as diet exercise combined and so we really help people to get out there. And part of that is also purpose. Purpose is another one of the brain health pillars because you know, I can talk all day about sleep and diet and exercise, but those are really the common ones. We like to focus on, ones that we do focus on those, but we like to really drill down on other sides and you know, there’s, there’s two days of your life that you’re most likely to die. Do you know what those are?

Jason Prall

I don’t. 

Julia Lundstrom

Okay, so it’s the day you’re born of course and then the day you retire and in this country we have this mentality that we stop working and do nothing or go play until we can’t play and then we really do nothing. Whereas in Japan they don’t even have a word for retirement. It’s a change in purpose is their word. And so it’s getting people back to purpose. And I love, we had one of our clients say, you know, the best part of our program is that it brought purpose back into their life. They were feeling very purposeless and that of course challenges the brain, which is another pillar being able to challenge and learn something new and continually grow. So we focus on all 10. But a lot of the fun ones that people don’t think about using your memory is another great one. The cell phone, the biggest damaging modern technology to our memories that we have, right? I mean we don’t use our memory anymore and it’s like a muscle. You don’t use it, you lose it. So. Right. I mean, do you remember anybody’s phone number?

Jason Prall

Well not only the phone numbers, right? I mean because this is this is we joke we this is a common joke in our generation, right? Like the ones that, I mean I remember dozens and I I recall remembering dozens of phone numbers, right? And then not only phone numbers, but um I remember as a kid, I would ride my bike all around the city that I grew up in and I knew I knew how to get anywhere and everywhere. I knew seven ways to get to the same place, you know? And now I’ve moved into a new city and I’ve been here for a number of years, but still my memory is not as good. My directionality is not as good because I rely on google maps way too often, right? And it’s funny because I was in Europe recently and I didn’t have service. And so I actually had to. I had to get back into a mode that I hadn’t been in in a long time, which is okay, look at this thing here. Where’s the son, where’s this building? 

You know like what’s the street name now, look what’s near it. So I was actually having to do some spatial recognition and like, I mean it challenged my brain in a new way. Fortunately I grew up in an era where that was the case, right? And so I kind of remembered how to do it. But I can see this these new generations, they’re just not, they don’t have that wiring, so to speak and it has to be trained into them.

Julia Lundstrom

Yeah, I mean we have built in navigation into our system, right? Where we live and die by the sun for the most part and where it is in the sky. And I think that that’s something that’s really we’re losing as each generation just depends on their phone. So that’s something we actually talk to people a lot about. Do not use ways to not use google maps, try to use your memory. I tell the people in my company that just don’t use it, they all joke around.

Jason Prall

So, so yeah, yeah. So what do you do with them? Like you, do you recommend some specific exercises or some fun, some some fun games, so to speak, that we can use to sort of challenge our brain on a regular basis.

Julia Lundstrom

Yeah, so really what we’re trying to do is get them to use different parts of their brain that they’re not used to using. So, for instance, my husband is amazing at every musical instrument, right? But if it tried to put a spreadsheet in front of him and his eyes go boogie. So it’s trying to get people to use things that they’re not used to. So if they haven’t played a musical instrument, maybe they go play the musical instrument, learn how to read notes, learn how to paint you, learn a different language. Just even reading on a new topic, trying to learn about space, right? Become endlessly fascinating last couple of years with space and just using your brain to think about things that are much bigger than yourself. 

But then also driving them towards that using, challenging themselves to use that knowledge for a purpose as well. So the AARP has an amazing program called experience core and we have sent a lot of our people to them and what that does is take older individuals that go into elementary schools, retired individuals and tutor them and it has such a double bonus, right for the kids, their grades go up on average 20% and within six months we’ve seen a 20% increase in memory on the older adults because they’re challenged, they have to get there right, they gotta be on time, they gotta do curriculum, they got to be patient and they’re the best tutors anyway because they’re so much more patient. So it’s things like that, it’s not only challenging yourself but challenge yourself for a purpose because people do lose their purpose after they retire. It’s such an ugly word in my book.

Jason Prall

Yeah, no, I mean you’re hitting on something so fundamental and I didn’t realize our, our works um sort of crossed so much, but in the human longevity project and we went around the world, this is something I noticed over and over again in the people that I was, I was talking to, they were in their 80s, 90s and beyond. I met an 85 year old man in Japan and Okinawa named Fuji and he was running a huge construction business with hundreds of employees. He had another business that he owned. And he had no intention of retiring, that it wasn’t a thing, he just wanted to work, he’s gonna work till he died. Another man in Japan. He stopped working at his job and then he does his hobbies, which is like rebuilding cars and playing in a band, he was in his 70s, right? And then and then my favorite case was a young lady of 94. 

And I and I asked her straight up, I said look you know a lot of your friends and your family have passed away, you know like what gets you up every day, like what keeps you going? And she said well I have to learn this song for the violin on Tuesday and I thought what a preciously wise answer that was right, like she understands that like it’s the little things that we can, we can have, we can build purpose around and for her, she this violin she picked up when she was 92 I mean I used to play the violin when I was a kid and she was terrible, but it was unbelievable to watch her how skillful she actually was from going from 92 to 94 And she was going and playing with her, you know her music group and you know, I thought like that is somebody that has so much wisdom and understands life, right? And she was sharp as a tack at 94 and she figured it out.

Julia Lundstrom

Yeah, it comes with having that mental attitude, right? The optimism, and that’s a huge 12, and we work with our clients a lot on that, because of course, they fall into depression. They get sad when their body starts to fall apart and they don’t have purpose, they don’t have something to get up in the morning for. And I remember, I did a live long well summit about seven years ago, and I interviewed my dad who has since passed, but he lived to 88 he went through, I mean, he had both hips replaced triple bypass surgery when he was in his fifties for heart, and he had three heart attacks. They gave him 10 years to live at that time, right? And he lived till he was 88 pacemaker, all this stuff, and I just said, hey, dad, you know, and all of life’s adversities that have thrown at you, you’ve always just kept this amazing positive attitude and outlook, and everybody thinks you’re the happiest guy around, you know, How did you, how did you do it? What’s the secret? And he was like, I didn’t know I had a choice, right? It just that it’s being sad and depressed of all these thing, it’s not a choice for me, it just doesn’t come into my sphere. So, I always took that I remember that so specifically, and I love that I didn’t have a choice. Whereas most people think they do, and they a lot of times choose the sadness and the down. And I know that chemically that isn’t always a choice.

Jason Prall

Totally. And look, I mean, I think we all get it right. Like there’s certain things that when a phase of our life or or situation passes, right, there’s a certain morning sometimes that that can take place that’s over, and then oftentimes we don’t know where to turn to next, Right? So that’s where it gets a little tricky and things can get a little stuck and stagnant, but this and this is a fundamental challenge. I see in our culture, in the Western culture, and especially in the United States, is that after retirement there’s this searching of, I don’t know what to do and or so therefore, I’m not gonna do anything. I’m just gonna kind of just stop and sit and and and and I don’t blame that on the individuals per se. I think we actually lack the fundamental structures for that sort of next phase of life , to support that. And I love what you’re doing. Connecting people in their sixties, seventies and the retirement age with younger kids and the studies that I’ve looked at on longevity benefits, like people get older people get younger, like biologically speaking, all their markers start to improve, right? And I think that’s fascinating just by hanging out with the youth, right? So it’s something about that sort of youthful vibrancy that sort of restores that vitality in the older generation. Right? So there’s so much there, what are some other things, how do, how else do you maybe coach people that are because right now undoubtedly have a lot of people in their, in their fifties and sixties and kind of approaching retirement or or have passed retirement age, what are some ideas where they can kind of re engage with life if they’re not, not quite sure what to do next?

Julia Lundstrom

Yeah, so that’s one of the initiatives we’re working on right now, it’s been a year in progress, probably another couple before we can fully get it in, but we really want to go to where people live and a couple of years ago, heather who does some of your other interviews, she, I actually took my mom to her to help, you know, to put her into Bredesen protocol and I was there for the grand opening of one of her centers where she was taking people from around the world that have dimension Alzheimer’s and putting them in there to live for six months to a year. And it sparked the idea of, well let’s not make people move, let’s take this to where people live and so what we’re doing is going into retirement communities and basically taking with Dan Buettner, Buettner always shoulders is doing with larger communities, but bringing it down to the retirement community and we’re bringing it in. 

So not only are we changing the diets, I mean my mom and her retirement community, it breaks my heart, they serve a dessert for every single meal, donuts for breakfast, you know, it just, it breaks my heart and the exercise class, she lives in a community of 200 people and I think five go to the exercise class and they sit on a chair and with their legs up and down, you know, it’s just, there’s no weightlifting, there’s no muscle was such a big piece. There’s a direct correlation of how much muscle mass you have and the health of your brain, So that’s a huge piece. Right? So we’re going to go into the communities and certify the communities to be brain health communities, where the residents will have this opportunity to join the program. And the best part is we’re going to create these pods where each of the members that join this program will be part of a group And it’s up to them to create the memory exercises and have a memory class with the challenges. 

And so you get the social component which is huge and which is huge, right? Because a lot of them, I mean, my mom sticks to the same two or three people out of 200, right? So it kind of mixes things up a little bit where you can go on walks together, they can exercise together. They have this little pod, but also they’re going to be the ones teaching, they’re going to be the ones who are keeping each other accountable and learning and bringing this information in. So it creates this kind of upwelling where they help each other social and they’re challenging their brains and it gives them purpose and then what’s really cool, what we’re seeing in our current memory guru program, which is just, it’s a one on one coaching program. It’s spreading. So we had a teacher of an inner city school come in and take our program and now she’s going in and teaching the health and the diet and the purpose and and talking to the kids about it, right? Because that’s what we need, right, Jason, we just need more boots on the ground, We need more people teaching this. We have a serious problem in this country with education around health.

Jason Prall

Yeah, I agree. Especially in sort of the geriatric population, the elderly population, you know, I did the same thing when I, my grandmother, after my grandfather passed, she joined a retirement home and at first it was funny, it was almost like college. She was meeting all these people and everything was great and she had all these stories and I was like, this is hilarious. It’s like college for old people. This is amazing. And then over time when I noticed the same thing, it was, it was the food was absolutely horrid that they were serving um and then eventually, you know, because it’s a retirement home, so there’s a lot of turnover, right? 

I mean people pass on and new people come in and, and there was this kind of change eventually in, in her social kind of atmosphere, you know, when it was new, it was all exciting and there’s all these people and then same thing, there wasn’t a lot of social um engagement put on by, by the community and so they kind of left to fend for themselves, like here’s your life and they had something, so they had a couple of things, but it wasn’t exactly, but it wasn’t engaging in contrast to the retirement home that I went in Okinawa and they did karaoke, they had a dance thing, they put on a presentation, they had this amazing exercise program um like every day that would engage them, they had older people that weren’t living there, but they would come in and just, and either hang out or sometimes they would need a little bit of care, like maybe they would need a bath or whatever, but they weren’t even living there. So there would be, it was like a very engaged community with people from, from all around that didn’t even live there and so it was just a totally different environment. 

It felt like in Okinawa, they call it genki, which is kind of lively and vital. Right. And so it was, it was had that energy of vitality as opposed to, you know, at least the one that my grandmother was into was, was just kind of low, it was very, it just, it didn’t lack that sort of lively, kind of energy. And so I think about that and, and that’s probably why a lot of people don’t want to go live into a retirement home, especially if there may be a more introverted type. Right. And so I think your, your whole idea around purpose becomes massive because at that point then it’s like we can find something, whatever it is that excites us and pursue that, right? 

But I think that is perhaps an under discussed topic in terms of how important it is for brain health, for longevity, for overall health. Right? So, what other things can we sort of look to when we’re getting into our 50s and 60s because a lot of the stuff we would love to have known about when we were in our teens and twenties and living the optimal lifestyle and, and, and the optimal diet, but by the time we get in our fifties and sixties, maybe we didn’t make the right choices. Maybe we didn’t grow up in an environment where we knew some of these things, what can we do at that point to kind of put the brakes on, on any progression and perhaps even reverse some of the symptoms that might be showing up?

Julia Lundstrom

Absolutely. So I think one of the best ways we’ve actually expanded, We’ve started with just meditation and that has, you know, working with the older generation, um, that’s actually a dirty word to some of our clients. They think it’s, yeah, they think it’s um cultish or just anti Christian, what they don’t understand is that prayer does the exact same thing to the brain. And so we work with people, it doesn’t matter the syntax, I don’t care what you call it, It’s taking that space to grow your prefrontal cortex, right. We’ve seen the studies of practice meditators where they’re able to grow their prefrontal cortex by 20 and in the course that came over for six months or a year, but it’s remarkable what they can do. And so it’s bringing these practices in and enhancing them. Most people don’t know how to meditate. You know, they don’t do it because I think they just need to sit there. I went to Dave Asprey is 40 years and learned 50 different techniques and meditation. It was remarkable. And so in the next year we’re going to start retreats as well teaching people how to do more of that, but bringing in more of our 10 pillars, um, and breathing, I don’t know if you’ve ever read James Nestor’s book brad.

Jason Prall

I’ve done a lot of breath work on my own. Yeah. And it’s it’s for those who say they can’t meditate. I tend to direct them towards breath work because I can start here then because you can breathe. I know you can and it’s something you can notice right away. Right? Breathwork is unbelievably powerful, whether it’s a calming breath or an energizing breath or something in between. There’s so many different sort of pranayama is that you can explore in the Vedic culture too. Right? So I love that.

Julia Lundstrom

And it’s not just about the breath work though, right? It’s about how you breathe, we see these people sitting in their wheelchairs and their mouth breathers and how much science is around that we’re supposed to be breathing through our nose and the whole reason we have to is in case one gets blocked. But really it’s the nose and it’s about the nose and how much difference that makes in your heart health and your brain health and everything. Just breathing through your nose, even through exercise, which I’ll admit is very hard for me to do. If I start out breathing through my nose for exercise. I can depends on the level, but I can usually continue. And if I remember halfway through the other day and my girlfriend, she’s just like, I can’t, it’s too late, but it is right? It’s how you breathe.

Jason Prall

This is, you know what you’re touching on are things that anybody can do, right? That’s what I love. It’s not, there’s no limitation to this stuff. You know, again, meditation or prayer and then breath work. The nose breathing stimulates nitric oxide, right? Like this is this is the fascinating part is that it’s mechanical, right? It’s actually the breath coming in the nose hitting these little sensors that trigger nitric oxide production, parasympathetic tone, it calms us down right? Like there’s really, really important aspects to that breath. And then of course using the diaphragm, which is a massive muscle which controls a lot of different functions itself. Right? So instead of just breathing in the chest, that was a big one for me, as I was such a chest breather. And so for me it’s been learning really how to breathe in that sort of belly area, expanding the diaphragm. But these are massive and I think especially when it comes to 50, 60, 70, if we have limited mobility. Again, meditation and breathwork are not hindrances in any way right? We can do those things. What are some other things that we can include. What about some either supplements or foods that we might want to look to and stay away from.

Julia Lundstrom

Sure. So, I mean, nutrition, we typically start everybody out on nutrition just we gear the program towards them, that nine out of 10 people need help on the nutrition side and it encompasses a huge piece? And of course that’s one of the biggest levers, we all know that food is medicine, right? And people get put on these prescription medications and typically therefore acute problems and the doctors know to put them on and then they don’t know how to take them off. And so it messes with everything with the chemical balances with hormones with everything. And so we really work to get people more back in balance with their food. We fully believe in fasting. We typically have people do Dr. Valter Longo’s food based fast every six months. It’s a five day food based fast where you’re limited calories but you’re still eating so you’re not you know, water fast is incredibly doable for most people, but that really puts your neurons into kind of this ultra pro detective mode which they’ve seen with chemotherapy actually increase the results of chemotherapy because it protects the healthy cells and chemo can go in and kill the cancer cells. So we definitely talk a lot about fasting. We talk about hydration is a huge one where, You know, one of my favorite stories is a woman who came in with massive migraines and literally with just hydrating her over 30 days, her hide her migraines went down to once a week instead of once a day, which is I mean it’s some things are just that simple, right? But supplementation is a huge one. I know a lot of the people you talk to talk about why. So I’m not gonna go too into detail there with the poor soil quality and things like that. But really what we’re looking for in the supplementation it’s most people think of just taking a pill like reminders day. It’s great. It has amazing scientific studies behind the ingredients. We have a zillion testimonials over the last 10 years and it’s an all natural product. But what happens is if you’re just going to take one a day right you’re not really gonna reverse which is the protocol you’re not really going to reverse the damage. So if you’ve ever worked with a nutritionist if you’ve ever worked with the dietician what they’re going to do is have you up the dosage of the amount that you take for a certain period of time to really kick start and help reverse the damage all within safety measures. All within scientific studies. 

And then you can lean back and get back to where you’re just kind of this maintenance level. But that’s what happens a lot of times on supplementation. I mean I can go out and say you know go out and take your omegas right? Your fish oil is highly concentrated with D. H. A. Which is what you want. We typically say 1 to 1 but over 500 mg. Even 7 50 for the D. H. A. component which is really hard to find. We saw one but it is hard to find. And the people just we like to give them the protocol right? It’s not just about going and taking the two that’s on the bottle that we have to put. Let’s boost you up a little bit and see how you perform and kind of work with it a little bit and then we’ll get you to maintenance level. But if you’re incredibly inflamed too little you know capsules of omegas aren’t gonna do anything for you. So it’s that it’s building the protocol for people and working with the dosage is not just here. 

You should go take your CQ 10 and your probiotics. I mean obviously if I was going to say there are two supplements you should take it that you should look at your gut and your brain right. You need to have your gut health that’s so important with the probiotics. Probiotics. Even working with some immuno acids. And really looking at I mean I got to say when you’re talking about self months you’ve got to be talking about getting people off of prescription medications which is something we’re just now looking into hiring someone that can really work with our people, we’ve talked to a couple of specialist. It’s a specialty.

Jason Prall

Yeah. Yeah.

Julia Lundstrom

Yeah, no, doctors know how to get people on them and there’s very little follow up afterwards right? We’re in such a sick care system that I think is slowly changing but it’s, it’s going to take education and time and, and probably the whole system for, you know, the whole pill system, the pill popping system to break down. And that’s really what we’re about is this kind of encouraging that that new system to come up and working with the people. But when, you know, doctor puts you on anything and the antidepressant, for instance, there’s no protocol to get you off. They’re not talking about, they’re barely even following up with you except for when you call to make an appointment. And I think that’s such a tragedy because it’s, they are, they work, let’s not talk about antidepressants. But you know, a lot of these prescription medications are needed and they do work acutely, but there’s no protocol for getting people off of them and sleep medications are one of the worst we work with. We do a lot of work with people around their sleep. And that I think is, you know, I’m always like, well, nutrition is so important, but sleep is so important. You know, our very first client, I said Susannah, um, bless her heart. I love her to death. She’s still around and in our program very, very much involved. 

But she was taking care of mom who had Alzheimer’s and she wasn’t sleeping at all. Her mom was getting up about every two hours and so Susanna was just a train wreck and her every free moment during the day. she was sleeping, right? She was just exhausted trying to work, trying to sleep, take care of her mom. Her husband was taking care of her mom during the day, she had no time with her husband, no time to see grandkids, no time to do anything. And so we actually worked with the mom as well to get her sleeping better. And then once the mom started sleeping 56 hours a night, it completely changed Susanna’s life to now she could spend quality time with her mom versus just taking care of her mom in her final days and she then was able to go out and challenge herself and take classes and become social so that when her mom did pass, she wasn’t starting from down here having to come back up. 

She was already up here able to handle it right, able to just start accelerating your life right after her mom died versus having to come up from depression and anti anxiety pills that she was on that we got off of. And I mean all this stuff, right, It’s just creating this, this space for people that a lot of them know what to do. They just don’t have the accountability, which is huge. That’s really something that we focus on and giving them the execution plan for them, right? And it’s so important that it’s something that they’re going to do and a lot of times we teach them and then we let them tell us what they’re gonna do, it’s gonna be their idea, right? It’s got to be their plan otherwise they’re not gonna do it.

Jason Prall

Yeah. Well, I mean what you’re saying about sort of the supplement and pharmaceutical aspect I think is so huge. And I find this in my practice as well with all kinds of supplements. Right? So the pharmaceutical aspect, again, maybe it’s not worth even mentioning because you I think you said it so well, but it’s it’s it just becomes this downward spiral, right? Because drugs get piled on more drugs and more drugs and you know, it’s just prescription after prescription after prescription and you can’t unwind that unless you have somebody really understands how to do that safely effectively. And more than that. Like it’s the support angle, right? So it’s I’m not even anti drug as much as I am. Like where’s the support because the pharmaceuticals aren’t support there to suppress something to turn off some symptoms to that provide leaf. Like that’s kind of what they’re designed to do, so to speak. But there’s no support, right? And this is where the supplementation can really come in and be helpful. But your point is really, really important. Which is that oftentimes we see something on a bottle when we get a protocol from a practitioner and it’s a template protocol. It’s a blanket protocol and what I found especially with things like let’s say medicinal mushrooms like Maya Taki or turkey tail. 

These are supplements that I recommend. Often sometimes I find that people benefit from like eight or 93 times a day. And that’s that’s that’s in contrast to what’s on the bottle which is like 13 times a day. And so like that’s that’s ludicrous in a sense. And yet that’s what it takes for some people now. I don’t think people should be doing this on their own, especially with certain supplements. But your point is really well taken that working with somebody who can guide that process, find that threshold where they’re starting to actually notice benefit and then scale it back, right? Like that’s that really starts to become an important thing. And again that’s what I find. And I think to some degree practitioners and manufacturers of these supplements are cautious with the recommendations of how much to take. And I think that’s a good thing and what I find is that people are taking on these supplements and they’re not noticing indifference and often times it’s because they don’t know which ones are working, which ones they actually need and how much they need and when to scale them back.

Julia Lundstrom

And it’s when you scale it back, especially with prescriptions you have to replace it with something right? It can’t just be this, okay just get off your prescriptions. We had one client that before she came to us, she got off her antidepressants and sleeping pills all at the same time. She’s called Turkey. That you know I mean just creates this train wreck scenario. You have to replace it and a lot of times you have to replace it with even therapy, Right? We had someone that had been on Valium for 50 years and all of a sudden she’s working and we’re working with her doctor and her practitioners, right? It’s a group effort. This is not us them, it’s all of us together working on client care and you know, as she started to come off, she’s feeling emotions again, she’s been numb for 50 years and it’s it’s overloaded sensory overload and she feels like she’s a train wreck because she’s feeling much more deeply and that it’s you know, she wants to get back on it because she wants to be back to what she’s comfortable with this numbness. And so it takes a psychologist, it takes therapist coaches to help work through that progress process too. It’s not just, hey, go get off of these, right? I mean we got to look at the the effects it has and replacing amino acids I mentioned before is so critical when you’re getting off of even if you’re leaning back on supplements if you’re really used to them and you’re performing at a high level, but you don’t want to be taking you know 10 omegas a day or whatever it is and you want to win back to a normal level. It is replacing that too. And a lot of times that could just be with food.

Jason Prall

Yeah, absolutely. Well you’re painting a really a broad picture here, right? Because if somebody’s on pharmaceutical medication that’s kind of numb them or depress them and it’s hard for them to find a purpose or find meaning or really want to be social perhaps. Right. So to go do the things that are required for good brain health and longevity, you know, we may need to start somewhere over here. Right? So there’s a really complex picture I think sometimes that that you can face. And so again, I love the work that you guys are doing, working with individuals in this regard. Where can people find more of your work and how can they find more support from what you guys offer?

Julia Lundstrom

Sure. So right now we’re really concentrating fully on our one on one coaching program. We call our memory guru program. We have memory mastery as well where we will start to take some DNA tests that can show us the bigger picture of things. But they can, I sent a link to you, they can go and look at our website, we have on our website is simplesmartscience.com. We have our coaching program portion of that. They can go read about it and they can book their own call to talk to one of our memory strategists just to see if there is an opportunity to work with us if in one of our programs and if not honestly, we always send people resources or refer to other people depending on where their situation is. We’re 100% preventative company when we do get dimension Alzheimer’s cases, we usually send them to England Amos or Dr. Bredesen, you know, to put them into their programs because I do believe in what they’re doing is remarkable and truthfully we’re starting an academy, a lot of our people that have been through our program, which is another amazing thing. We get these older people who want to go out and teach this to other people. And so we’ve been working on our academy the last year where we’re going to help people that are health coaches and even get their health coach certification, board certified become memory and cognition coaches and go get more boots on the ground. So really for us were, you know, that’s one initiative, the academy’s another initiative and then of course going to retirement communities 55-plus communities where we can bring it to them, we’re really trying to bring all these out there, so we need people that want to be involved. So of course, if you want to work with us and get in the program, Fantastic talk to us if you want to get involved in what we’re doing and help us build this community, go to the retirement communities, build the academy to get more boots on the ground to teach this education in schools and everywhere you can go, you know, that in companies, that’s what we’re really looking to do and build partnerships and have the right collaborators to make this a reality, bring this information to everybody because that’s what everybody goes through the program sets, I can’t believe nobody knows this, I can’t believe this is something taught in schools, I can’t believe, you know, and it’s for you and I live it and breathe it every day. It seems so natural, but really Brain health is not even a topic of conversation so,

Jason Prall

Well and since it’s one of the things that people fear most right about getting older is losing the mental faculties, right? And and especially the connections with their loved ones and I think what you’re doing, I mean, I’ve got goosebumps when you when you mentioned kind of, that coaching mentorship program, I think, I mean, I’m thinking that right now, if there’s anybody watching this in the fifties, sixties that wants to prevent and looking for the next phase of their life, this is something you can go through not only get educated on how to improve your health and maintain good brain health for yourself, but then you can become the teacher and the coach on the back end, right? Like it’s kind of like going to college again for brain health and then teaching others right? And you get to work with peer groups, and help others prevent cognitive decline. I mean, I think that’s to me like, again, I get goose bumps talking about that fantastic idea. I love that you’re doing that. 

You get that out faster please. That’s what we need, right? Like, again, I think what has me so excited about that is the fact that you’re providing an outlet, an avenue for people to seek that next phase of their life. And my mom actually just got, went through that and she’s doing like voice over recording stuff. She found kind of the next thing. I was like, oh, that’s awesome. Like what a random thing, but it’s perfect and she’s really good at it and she’s having to figure out a little bit business stuff and develop websites and so I’m like, that’s awesome that she found that and I know so many other people maybe haven’t found that are looking, this is such a great avenue. So I love that you’re doing that. Please, please tell me what that’s called. You have a name for that yet, is it, 

Julia Lundstrom

Would you have a name and off the top of my head we’ve been working on for a year, but I think it’s a simple smart science academy as the academy and the certification for the retirement communities and going into those. We’re still working on that.

Jason Prall

We’ll go to simple smart Science right?

Julia Lundstrom

And just go to the coaching program if you want to talk to us individually about your individual health to create a plan for you. And like I said, everybody gets resources from the phone call, whether they join the program or not, we will definitely support them and give them something from that call that’s going to help them. We never let anyone walk away and they handed, we’re an education first company. So we educate. And then yes, if you want to reach out, you can reach out to our support of simplesmartscience.com. If you want to join the cause we love bringing on people.

Jason Prall

I love that. And at the very least join, join their newsletter and you can find out more information for the things coming out. Right? So you guys are doing amazing stuff Julia, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom.

Julia Lundstrom

Welcome. Thank you for having me, Jason.