YouSaid · the spoken record

Dr. Tommy Wood

lines on the record: 128
first: 2026-01-28
most recent: 2026-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A long period of time, I didn't have a gym and I was working from home and all I had was bands and BFR cuffs. And then it wasn't even the B strongs. It was like these really cheap ones that kind of look like something that somebody would use to kind of like draw your blood.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I travel, because I'm usually at work, conferences, I'm doing podcasts, whatever, I don't have two hours to go to the gym, which I like to have if I'm at home. So I might do 10 to 15 minutes and you put on the cuffs, legs and arms, I'll do some lunges, like body weight lunges, squats, presses, push-ups, and then bicep curls and tricep extensions. And that's probably it. a pretty standard protocol, which is essentially in three to four minutes you accumulate somewhere between 75 and 100 reps. So 30, 20, 20, 20 or 20, 15, 15, 15, 15, something like that with 30 seconds of rest in between, try and do one body part at a time, but you can superset them if you're kind of short on time. That's it. And kind of to your point, when we moved into this house, this was now eight years ago, I built my own gym here.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as my wife calls it, I have my gym in a bag, which I take. Everywhere I go when I travel. And it is a set of blood flow stricken cuffs and a set of bands. I use the Black Mountain products bands, which come with handles. I like them because they come with a lifetime warranty. Like I break them and snap them all the time and you just email them, but like, hey, this broke and they just send you a new one. And they cost 40 bucks or something. So super cost effective.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no affiliation with them other than I know some of the guys who work there, but I So it has leg and arm cuffs, but it comes with a Sigma manometer, right? One of those blood pressure things to kind of pump it up to get the pressure. The ones I”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's not the way to do it. So if you, for whatever reason, don't want to do sprints on a rowing machine, you can probably get up there with some blood flow restriction under low load and high rep. But no, I don't think there's anything that I would take to increase lactate. Okay.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you can make plenty of lactate yourself. So another way to do it, blood flow restriction is another great way to produce lactate with low load. There are some studies where, well, they have them do leg presses, but like sets of 20 leg presses wearing blood flow restriction cuffs.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, people have looked at exogenous lactate itself, right? Usually as lactate salts, just like people have looked at ketone salts, you can bump up blood lactate a little bit, but similar to ketone salts, you don't get nearly the increases you do with other compounds. You don't need to do anything to increase brain uptake of endogenous lactate because the brain will generally just take up as much as you've got similar to ketones, right?”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you're taking Criipure, creatine monohydrate, that's what most studies that have tested creatine have used. And there was actually a systematic review meta-analysis that just came out that found that across all the studies they could find compared to placebo creatine didn't have any additional GI side effects. But also those studies use high quality creatine. Also, not all of those studies use 30 grams. So you could certainly get to a point where you're going to start to have GI effects based on those.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, and a lot of people do mention GI side effects from creatine. I think some of that is due to the quality of the supplement that you're taking.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so if I take creatine later in the day, I don't sleep as well. It's very noticeable for me, but that's not the case for everybody. Some people take creatine and they don't notice a cognitive effect. It doesn't affect their sleep. So it's very different from person to person. So those are the reasons why I just take it all in one go in the morning, especially if you're going to take over 10 grams, 20, 30 grams, you're probably best splitting it up into several doses so that you absorb more of it.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I take it all in one go in the morning. There's some evidence that suggests that once you get above five grams, you probably start to saturate creatine uptrade transporters so you don't necessarily maybe you don't take all of it up. But the reason why I take it all in one go is because I remember to take all of it in one go. Another reason is that I find creatine to be quite stimulating, glycogenly stimulating for me. So you took your ketones, I took my creatine before. Got on this call”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get it from eggs and liver and some seafood sardines have some choline in, as do some whole grains, like oats have some, quinoa has some, so all of it kind of adds up. So I don't supplement the coding. I do supplement the creatine. I don't have the perfect trial that creatine is going to prevent dementia, but I think we've seen enough interesting data across depression, again, sleep deprivation. How many grams?”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aspects of cognitive function. And then again, after traumatic brain injury, there are meta-analyses that show that supplementing with CDP coling can improve some neuropsychological outcomes, in particular after TBI. So I think most of us can probably get choline from the diet, but in some of these cognitively degraded states, we might call them something like 500 to 1,000 milligrams a day of choline seems to be beneficial.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of cognitive function, then all the kind of antioxidant polyphenols are very interesting, particularly those that come from berries, but related ones and coffee, tea on the skins of roasted nuts and seeds. They have similar effects. And then you mentioned choline. And right at the beginning, we were talking about omega-3s. I think choline is critical because its importance is a head group for fats to be attached to in membranes. That's maybe one of the reasons why it's important for the brain. And various estimates suggest that we're becoming increasingly choline deficient as we stop eating things like eggs and liver, which are our richest sources of dietrocholine. But there are randomized controlled trials in two different settings that we've talked about already. So one in older adults already experiencing some degree of cognitive decline where supplementing with CDP choline, which is also called citicoline, seems to improve certain”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that the supplements that we have the best evidence for are really start with those core nutrients that we could get from the diet, but if we don't, then we definitely should supplement. So we've mentioned omega-3s, B vitamins, especially those involved in methylation, so that's vitamin B12, folate, which is B9, riboflavin, which is B2 and B6. Vitamin D obviously critical. Iron supplementation, particularly if people are anemic. So that requires a whole assessment for like why you're anemic in the first place, but often particularly more common in women. And many of the symptoms that women may experience around perimenopause are associated with inadequate iron status. So getting your iron status checked and addressed is really important. Magnesium certainly critical as well. If we're thinking about other things that do seem to have both an acute and long-term benefit,”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, they're working on continuous lactate monitors just like you would have. And some people do sort of have those. They're right near being commercially available. So some people do have access to those already. But equally, I would argue that it doesn't matter that much. Just like go and do something really, really hard for a short period of time and do that a few times over and do that relatively regularly. Like that's probably enough majoring in the miners that you need to do to kind of get that benefit.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That zone, it just requires maximum effort for even just like 20 to 40 something seconds, even with several minutes break in between, you're going to be hitting that.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there are lots of pros where you're doing relatively short sprints with relatively long rest periods that still generate large amounts of lactate. And so in studies where they've done this, you're talking about like 30 seconds flat out on a bike or a rhyme machine with several minutes of rest times six, eight, ten rounds. By the end you can generate a lot of lactate without having to do something continuously for several minutes at a time. I was just reading that one of the favorite training protocols for one of the like world champion rowers was 45 seconds flat out, like completely flat out on the rowing machine within six minutes of recovery, but doing that several times. And then at the end, you're generating several minimolar of lactate. So I think anything like that that's going to get you.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's definitely going to be misery related. So, if I think about a lot of the training that I did as a student, I was a rower, right? And this is something.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that anything that is regularly producing, you're getting above your lightsight threshold, you're generating significant several millimoles of lactate. I don't think people need to measure it. But if you're getting six, seven plus, something like that, right? You're definitely going to be in that range.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's generating more BDNF that then is associated with improvements in hippocampal structure and function. So as long as you're doing sports that have some high degree of intensity, so you're regularly producing lactate, and then either in the same sport or separately doing these sort of high skill, high reaction time open skill kind of sports, that's probably going to be beneficial from a exercise standpoint.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think a lot of this is driven by lactate. So when we talk about the various things that support the brain through exercise, we often talk about BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which has increased with exercise. But the BDNF that you produce that you can measure in the blood that's produced by the muscles during exercise doesn't really get into the brain very readily. Most of the BDNF we have in the brain is produced locally. And it's actually driven by things like lactate. So lactate does get into the brain. The more lactate you have in the blood, the more it gets into the brain. And then that acts as a histone deacetylase inhibitor that activates the blood of the BDNF. Ketones do the same thing. Osteocalcin, which is released when we sort of load the bones structurally, right? It's released from bones, seems to do something similar. So generating lactate seems to be beneficial because probably because one of the things it's doing is”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They saw significant improvements in hippocampal structure and function that were maintained for several years after the end of the trial.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, for anybody who doesn't know what this evolves, it's. Four sets of four minutes on a treadmill at 85 to 95% of your maximum heart rate. With four minutes rest, you do that four times. It is miserable.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This kind of aside, but just based on the physical activity component, when you're looking at more aerobic or even closed-scale unimodal running cycling kind of sports, the benefit seems to be intensity dependent. So yes, if you're not doing anything, then going for a walk and walking a certain number of steps a day is going to be great, beneficial, decreased dementia risk, absolutely. But looking at hippocampal structure and function, for instance, which you mentioned, right, you're talking about measuring your hippocampus on an MRI scan, higher intensity activities seem to be better. So probably the longest study where they ever did something like this, they had people, this was an Australian study where they had people do the Norwegian 4x4 protocol three times a week for several months”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Choked out too much. So beyond the physical strain that these exercises have, they seem to have an additional aspect of requiring reaction speed, challenging processing speed, learned complex motor skills. They seem to have an outsized effect in terms of cognitive function. Something else.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, probably right up there. Similarly, martial arts, also good as long as you don't get punched in the head a bunch or kicked in the head a bunch.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental health. Yeah. But in terms of both for mental health, studies in depression, as well as studies looking at different activities that people do and the risk of dementia and studies where they randomize people to different types of activity, including dance, dance seems to have the highest sort of effect size compared to other types of physical activity. But there's multiple components to dance, right? So you have to learn the steps, but there's also a social component, there's a music component, all these things are probably part of the magic source together. But open skills sports also include board sports or ball sports or team sports where you're having to react to the environment and other people around you.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both. So it basically has a greater amount of complex motor skill required. Some of it can be learned. So dancing is one example, right? So because you learn the steps of a dance.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But something that seems to be particularly beneficial is coordinative exercise or open skill exercise, plus or minus things that have a navigational component. And these are essentially sports or activities where you're constantly having to respond to the environment and adapt. That's what makes them open skill rather than closed skill or unimodal exercise like going for a jog or sitting on a bike or something like that. When they compare sports or activities that have the same amount of physical challenge but different amounts of cognitive challenge because of the open skill nature, you see greater benefits in terms of brain structure, improvements in cognitive function.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so when looking at this purely in relation to glucose uptake, those data don't exist. So I'm going to have to extrapolate further than that. And I think that's important because a decrease in glucose uptake is just a signal that that area of the brain isn't as metabolically active, which means Windows not using it as much at the simplest level. So then if you think about various activities that we could use to stimulate the brain, which do seem to be protective in various different ways, both they can enhance cognitive function in the short term and then protective against dementia in the long term. This ties very nicely into the comment that I was going to make about your physical activity routine, because this is where I think some things could be layered on. When you look at the different physical activities or exercise and how they affect the brain, different types of exercise affect the brain differently. So you certainly need a smorgasbord of all of them to kind of get a global support for the brain.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supply side, right? The energetic supply side, but I don't think we think enough about the demand side. How do we create energetic demand in the brain such that we are maintaining glucose uptake, maintaining energetic state, and then doing that also maintains all the metabolic machinery that you really care about in terms of long-term function?”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can take up glucose just fine so that you get into the range of a normal healthy brain in early outze. Once you get to like advanced stage dementia, it's too late. But at that early stage, I think part of the reason why we're seeing less glucose uptake is because those parts of the brain are less active because we're just not using them as much. And just like glucose uptake into the muscles, which is demand driven, you work your muscles, they ask for more glucose, they take more up. The brain seems to be the same, at least early on. So I think we think a lot about the...”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditionally come at it from the point of that glucose can't get in. There's some kind of metabolic disease, instant resistance. This is where the idea of type 3 diabetes has come from, right, insulin resistance in the brain, that glucose isn't getting in. But a pet scan cannot differentiate between the glucose can't get in versus the brain isn't asking for that glucose in the first place. There are actually some very nice studies that looked at brain activation and glucose uptake in response to cognitive stimulus in individuals' Alzheimer's disease. And what they see is that, yes, at baseline, there's less glucose being taken up into the brain of individuals with Alzheimer's disease. But if you stimulate that brain cognitively,”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the thought being here, there's a difference between what you find works really well for you versus what the listener thinks they should have to implement for themselves. And so I'm now going down the road of why I don't think we all need to be in ketosis to prevent dementia. So I think from a therapeutic standpoint, it seems to be beneficial overcoming this energetic deficit that we see in Alzheimer's disease, particularly early Alzheimer's disease. Or maybe it's easier to overcome earlier on. And one of the ways we look at this with something called a PET scan. So you do an FDG pet, you give labeled glucose molecule, you inject that, you see how much gets into the brain in individuals with Alzheimer's disease. Less glucose is getting into the brain.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first, a couple of comments on all the stuff that you mentioned about what you're currently doing. And so I think I've already mentioned that I think that there's a lot of promise for ketones. I'm not sure that ketones necessarily have to have a place in prevention. And I'm not sure that you would necessarily need them from a prevention standpoint. There are some reasonably good data. So the medium chain drug lister I work from Stephen Kanane's lab is quite compelling in early Alzheimer's disease taking MCT oil seems to increase the C2 acadate uptake into the brain. This is associated with improvements in cognitive function. And this is overcoming what looks like an energetic deficit in individuals who have Alzheimer's disease. And this is something that, again, it's one of those things that are pathogenic, right? We think that we see this and this is kind of like part of the picture of Alzheimer's. We see that like, this is Alzheimer's.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came in at the brain age of 20 years predicted, 28 years younger than your chronological age, but you can kind of beat the test. Like there's some gamification. So I don't know how heavily to weigh this, right? So Brain Age of 20 years, man, sounds great. There are certain aspects that are harder to game, like reaction time testing. Okay, so I had like 267 milliseconds basically versus 406 milliseconds. Okay, great. There could be some training effect, like learned training effect, but then there's like number span focus. I won't bore everybody with that, but word pairs, names and face pairing with mnemonic devices. If you train yourself, you can really sort of game the test. And TBD on like proteomics, I'm getting all sorts of stuff drawn to try to get an accurate baseline of where I stand now so that I can measure all of the effect.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advisors who I think are very credible, but have done Brain MRI. I've done the blood draws, the DNA tests, everything else. Some APOE three four and looking at the brain MRI, I mean, I'm a muggle, right? So I probably shouldn't be allowed to sort of grab the wheel when driving on the MRR reading, but I wanted to look at the data. It seems like, and who knows how defensible this is, but my MRI predicted brain age based on hippocampal volume, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is 46 instead of 48. So I wasn't thrilled about that. I'm like, well, all right, not sure what else I can do. Maybe a flood dose of ibagaine actually is pretty interesting data around that from Nolan Williams, but not something I would recommend to most people, including myself. So there's that, did a whole battery of cognitive testing. Through this startup. Now that”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm listening to a podcast or watching a Netflix miniseries or something. But probably doing two to three sessions a week of, let's call it 30 to 60 minutes, walking every day, lots of walking. And we'll come back to that because actually I can't resist. We probably will come back to it. But walking 4,000 plus steps a day reduces dementia risk 25% optimal, 10,000 steps daily, and then reverses hippocampal shrinkage 2% increase versus expected one to two percent decrease. That's the bullet that I highlighted. And then weight training a couple times a week. I could keep going. I'm not going to bore people to death with this Dr. Evil life story, but I will say that I've also wanted to get a snapshot of what things look like. So I'm going to be having a call. I won't mention the company by name because I haven't done all of my due diligence. They have some scientific.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Champagne have some exogenous ketones and off to the races. All right, so there's the ketone piece, which I think is non-trivial. There's the, for the most part, avoiding crazy glucose spikes all the time. Occasionally I'll have like Christmas, sure, at a bunch of cookies. Like, who cares? It's Christmas. It's fine. Had a bunch of pie. But I have a CGM on right now. I had a continuous ketone monitor on at the same time for about 28 days. I'm really interested to look at all of that. But I'm generally following like a slow carb diet or Mediterranean style diet. I am getting enough omega-3. I know that because of fish intake and also when needed, supplemental intake. I do seem to be a poor methylator. So I'm taking B vitamins, L-methylfolate, all of that stuff, tracking blood once a quarter. So I've got super comprehensive stuff on that side. Zone three training, I do find it as boring as watching Paint Dry even when”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's just say the process probably started what decades earlier, right? I mean, the cars have started to pile up. The machinery has started to break a lot sooner. So it would seem like the earlier you intervene with better lifestyle changes, et cetera, the better off you'll be. I've got the fasting and the ketogenic diet and all of that stuff, right? Which I do regularly. They've got the exogenous ketones, which like you, I use sparingly. I don't use them all the time because particularly like before this conversation, I took 11 milliliters of a ketone monoester, but I think once all is said and done, it's basically 51%, 13-butane dial, and I have some concerns around 13-butane dial specifically in chronic use or at sufficiently high doses, say 30 plus per day. So I tend to use it for special occasions like this, you know, toast have a glasses.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hanging fruit or reasonably accessible that are missing. So a few things. Lots of folks in my family currently who I'm caring for in one way or another deteriorating very quickly with what has been called Alzheimer's, again, kind of a tricky diagnosis. Not sure how much they're actually looking at, whether it's beta amyloid tower or anything else. Certainly in some cases, these blood relatives are APOE33. So I'm like, huh, also raises the question of is there an undiagnosed infection. Maybe it's an STI. Who knows, right? Like, I don't know what the answer is to that. It's kind of another line of testing, perhaps. So I've been trying to do a few things for myself, recognizing that if someone starts to really show obvious symptoms that can't be easily explained away in their 70s.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How they're behaving, what they might do differently, what they might add, what they might subtract. So let me tell you some of what I am observing and then some of what I'm doing. And I would love for you to identify or maybe speak to things”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not the same thing, we're talking about this stuff at the population level. And I have to say this because if I talk about physical activity or sleep or nutrition, and these are really important for dementia risk, somebody will always say, well, my family member did all that stuff and they still got dementia. So we're talking about probabilities. We're not talking about I can definitely guarantee that somebody will avoid dementia. But I think we can definitely say you can stack the deck massively in your favor through a whole variety of actions that should decrease risk long term. All right. So part of the reason that I make this very self-interested is because I'm Self interested. The other part is that I think the personal is very Easy for people to concretize, right, for themselves so they can interrogate.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“72% of dementias were preventable. If this was going to happen, this would require a complete societal overhaul because a lot of this risk comes from low socioeconomic status, low educational and work opportunities, like all these other things that are kind of baked into societal risk for dementia. But others are things that we have more control over, like level of physical activity, whether we smoke, whether we drink. Some is directly under our control. That's probably something like 15 to 20%, maybe more, and some is kind of driven by these maybe bigger kind of societal risk factors. But if you did all of that and we managed to completely change how everybody lives and all of these risk factors, the ideas that maybe even up to three quarters of dementia cases could be entirely prevented. Now, that's very different from saying that I could guarantee that you will not get dementia right.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Add up to 45%. So it's a couple of percent for smoking, it's 7% for low level of earlier education. It's like a percent for alcohol. Then there's hypertension, hearing loss, or sorry, high blood pressure, hypertension is the fancy medical word. High blood pressure, hearing loss, obesity, low physical activity, and all these different percentages add up to 45%. There are some things that are on that list or that aren't on that list that I think should potentially be included. So like sleep loss or poor sleep and insomnia is not included late life physical activity was discussed in the report, but was not included even though there seems to be some good evidence there. So actually that suggests that there may be more than 45% that are preventable and there are other studies like there was one big study done from the UK Biobank data by Professor Jintai Yu that estimated that up to”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 45% comes from the most recent edition of the Lancet Commission report on dementia prevention, which is overseen by Professor Jill Livingston and brings together all these different experts in dementia and its risk factors. And they sort of scour the research for observational studies and then as much as possible interventional studies. So a lot of it is epidemiological data. Looking at different risk factors that have a consistent relationship with dementia risk, and then you do these sort of statistical calculations to look at something called population attributable risk, which is essentially saying if I eliminated this risk factor entirely from the population, what percentage of dementias would I expect to no longer happen? That's essentially what it means. And all of these different...”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that can look very similar under a microscope, especially 100 years ago or more than 100 years ago when we were just sort of first starting to look at brains under microscopes. And then others have suggested that it could have been more sort of psychiatric nutrient deficiencies, certainly very common, could have been just like your other components of her environment. She was by all accounts sort of like a downtrodden housewife that maybe didn't get sort of much engagement or stimulation or wasn't particularly well treated at home and that could have sort of precipitated it. And we don't actually know, but many of these things kind of, it just seems interesting that it's probably quite likely she didn't have Alzheimer's disease at all.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some people think there have been some recent retellings of the story. Some people think that she may have had neurosyphilis and neurosyphilis actually causes amyloid accumulation. It looks very similar to Alzheimer's disease.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alzheimer's disease is probably somewhere between 95 and 99% of cases of Alzheimer's. And there is a genetic component to risk, but it seems to be much more tightly tied to lifestyle and the environment and other lifestyle factors that we have some control over, hopefully. And the reason why August DZA is interesting to me is because I don't think she actually had Alzheimer's disease as we would now think of it. There have been groups that have taken sections of her brain from like Alzheimer's old collections and they've done genetic studies and she didn't seem to have any of the genes that cause early onset Alzheimer's disease or any of the mutations that cause early onset Alzheimer's disease. She wasn't an APOE4 carrier. I think she was 3-3, if I remember correctly. So she didn't have any of any of the genetic risk factors. So what caused this and caused this so young, I think she was in her 50s, right, is still actually unknown.”
2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT