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Dr. Tommy Wood

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2026-01-28

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2026-01-28

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1. “Psychiatrist, or working with them as a psychiatrist after they died, he then looked at their brains under a microscope. So he was the first person to see amyloid plaques, tau tangles that are now sort of pathogenic. They're like what we consider to be sort of required as part of Alzheimer's disease. But it's just interesting that what we have now is not what he studied. So over time, people thought that the brains of individuals who had this sort of early onset Alzheimer's or these early onset dementias that Alzheimer studied and those who had these late onset dementia that we now call Alzheimer's disease, those brains looked very similar under microscope. So they've kind of lumped together. Although we do still have two kind of broad forms, the early onset, Alzheimer's, which is usually a single genetic mutation in something like a precedine or the amyloid precursor protein gene, that then creates a picture that's much more like what Alzheimer studied or the late onset Alzheimer's, which is what most people think about when they think about”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “So August DTO, or if you read some of the original papers, August D was Alzheimer's Index patient. So Alice Alzheimer, that Alzheimer's disease is named after was a psychiatrist in the early 20th century. And he took a particular interest in individuals who had sort of rare or unusual cases of pre-senile dementia. So what we now call, what now most of us call Alzheimer's disease, which is sort of a late onset dementia, was called a senile dementia, which just meant that it occurred after 65 years old. That was not what Alzheimer studied. He studied unusual dementias where people who were quite young sort of in the 40s or 50s experienced significant cognitive decline and dementia and Augustita was one of them. He then, after studying them as”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Those can be converted from one to the other. And in order to do all of that kind of biochemical attaching and placement requires methylation, it's very methylation dependent. So it's thought that in order for DHA to do its job, you need adequate methylation status so that all those processes can run. And if you only have one or the other, then you won't see benefit.”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “And they found in individuals with elevated homocysteine, so that was a level above 13, giving B vitamins to reduce homocysteine significantly improved rate of brain atrophy and cognitive function only in those who had an adequate omega-3 status. And the same thing was seen in the B-proof trial subsequently. And then the opposite, which was seen in the Omega AD trial, where they gave omega-3 fatty acids, but they found they only saw benefit in individuals who had a low enough homocysteine. It's thought to be because if you want DHA to be in a membrane, in a cell, in your brain, it needs to be attached to some kind of phospholipid, right? Fats don't just like float around. They're part of these phospholipids that sit inside the cell membrane. And that requires it to be attached to a head group. These head groups are usually derived from choline or ethanolamine, although”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “There absolutely seems to be this interaction between omega-3 status and B vitamin status, particularly the B vitamins that are involved in methylation, so they affect the level of something called homocysteine. And this is something you can get a blood test for. And those who have inadequate B vitamin status or inadequate methylation status, they have an elevation of homocysteine. There have been multiple trials that happen sort of two or three decades ago, maybe even in the last decade where people thought, oh, omega-3s are going to be the answer to dementia prevention or B vitamins and homicistic are going to be the answer to dementia prevention. And then they would give people B vitamins or omega-3s, and then they didn't see much of an effect. What we found out later, you know, the scientific we, was that both are required in order to see benefit. So this was probably first seen in the Vitagog trial, which was run by David Smith at Oxford.”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “You get two or three good servings of seafood a week or a reasonable supplement, that's going to be probably enough to consistently hit those levels. The other part of it is that your body will actively sequester extra up to a point. So when people are talking about different forms of DHA, right, should you take your omega-3s as a phospholipid form or a triglyceride form? And the triglyceride form is more common in seafood. The studies that look at these over long periods of time, what happens is if you consume a lot of the triglyceride form from seafood, your adipose tissue is used as a storage place. So it cycles through the adipose and then it gets released and the brain can use it afterwards. So that probably requires you to spend periods of time. We are accessing your adipose tissue, right? You're not constantly eating. So exercise or periods of fasting may help you access that depot. But that depot allows us to then use these other forms.”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Long term omega-3 supplementation. There was a study that was done in football players where they randomized them to different levels of DHA across the season and they found that those taking one to two grams of DHA a day saw less of an accumulation of a marker of brain injury in the blood called neurofilament light across the season, the thought being that all these small sort of sub-concussive impacts that the kids experience on the field is generating this sort of low level of injury that accumulates across the season and omega-3s or DHA seem to protect against that. So all of those to say that if you want to maintain brain function and we see if you're omega-3 deficient, you're at higher risk of dementia, cognitive decline, that's dependent on other things like methylation status. But it's going to be an important component of maintaining a brain structure and function. So I think that kind of level, you know, once two grams a day on average at least.”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “A lot of the various molecules that have various functions in our body activating receptors, turning genes on and off are derived from different fats. And so in this setting, the ones I'm thinking about are called like resolvins, maricins, protectins that are derived from these unsaturated fatty acids. And so neuroprotectin D1 is one that people are very interested in. It's being tested as you give it exogenously after different brain injuries. We're not at a point where I would recommend that people take it, but that's something that's being studied right now. And neuroprotectin D1 is derived from DHA. In the setting of brain injury, these resolvins and protectins seem to be really important for regulating the immune response, in particular switching off the immune response, right? The immune response is important, but we also need to be able to switch it off. And that's probably part of the role that they're playing. When you look at”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Or you could eat some fish. Optional third. Then we also know that DHA in particular, but also EPA, these are both the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. They're important precursors for various signaling molecules that are important as it pertains to brain function, but also recovery from brain injury”

   2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “And it's also why women in general tend to be better at converting shorter chain omega-3 fatty acids like ALA to DHA and EPA. It's thought that that's because that's going to be needed. More so than”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Couldn't fancy it up if you want. But equally, brain consumption is not required. So DHA tends to concentrate at the synapses of neurons. It seems to be really important for helping to regulate the release of neurotransmitters, like being part of the structural component of those synapses. It also tends to accumulate in mitochondria and the DHA content of mitochondria is like positively correlated with their capacity for energy production. Some of it could be due to some weird physical, as in physics properties of DHA, like how electrons move through it differently from other fats. But anyway, it seems that particularly for mitochondrial function as well as synaptic function, DHA is critical. And so it sort of preferentially accumulates in those areas. Very important during brain development, so much so that the mother will sacrifice her own DHA stores so that the baby gets enough if she's sort of borderline in terms of DHA.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Big part of that. And a lot of that fat is DHA. And actually brain, if you don't mind eating brain, brain is a great source of omega-3s.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Those two competitions were more than a decade apart, I will say. So in 2012 was when I did the world's first fully off-road Iron Man. It was initially called X-Man and then Marvel sued the company. So it ended up being called XTRI 24. So when I did that, I think I was probably something like low 80Q, 82, 83 kilos, so like, you know, 185 pounds, something like that. And then fast forward a decade when I was competing in Washington, the strongest man, I was in the middleweight class. And to get into that class, I had to basically diet down and then do a watercut to get under 198 pounds. So I was just under 90 kilos on the day. Although normally I'd hang out like 15 pounds higher than that.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “There's probably a few different mechanisms. And to be honest, I don't think anybody really knows. Again, the evidence is best in pediatric brain injury, particularly pediatric sports-related concussions. That's what they've done most of these, like randomized controlled trials. But there's a few things that are going to be happening. You're going to be improving stereoblow, probably going to get a whole bunch of myokines exocines that get released during physical activity. We know many of those can have a beneficial effect on the brain. And then you may also see improvements in sleep, right? We know that physical activity helps support sleep. So many of those could be going on at the same time as long as you're not doing a level of activity that's then making symptoms worse.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “And then there were a few other things that have an increasing amount of evidence for them. So there's some studies on some beavers mints, particularly riboflavin, branch chain amino acids, seem to be beneficial. And that seems to be by improving sleep. Then if you have sleep issues, melatonin has some evidence for it as well. I would avoid caffeine actually in this scenario. There's a little bit of evidence that says that, again, it's probably due to increasing brain metabolic rate in that sort of early window, similar to high temperature. So I would avoid caffeine particularly early on. And then probably the most important thing that we have evidence for is early return to physical activity. So low level of aerobic exercise as soon as you can tolerate it at a level that doesn't make symptoms worse and then increasing that over time as you get better. That's going to be an important part of recovery as well.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Creatine is probably more beneficial if you have it on board beforehand, but there's at least one trial in pediatric TBI that showed creatine-enhanced recovery. Omega-3 fatty acids, the same would certainly include those as well. And then the next thing is I would do is I would take exhaustion as ketones. I have them at home. There are things I've played with. I don't use them regularly, but in this setting, again, I think there's enough promise to suggest that they're worth taking. I didn't include that in this paper because we don't have good evidence for it. But if I had a brain injury, I would take exactly ketos.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “So you see, again, in multiple studies, and we have to do this experimentally. So some of this comes from animal models. But if you create diabetes or the hyperglycemic during the injury or immediately afterwards, and some of it is driven by the injury, if you have an acute injury, you're going to get higher blood sugar. So some is caused, some is effect. But it seems that these high glucose spikes are, again, stressful in that setting of an acute brain injury. So just minimizing that as much as possible, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't eat carbohydrates. But just like I would avoid refined carbohydrates when I sort of worked with athletes at high risk of concussions, like if you're being taken off the field, a low risk thing is just to not chug power aid as you're being taken down the tunnel. Other things that are going to become important with varying degrees of evidence, but still good enough that there's a high sort of positive asymmetry, right? High possibility of benefit with low risk creatine supplements.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Maybe even there are some devices where you can do some net cooling or head cooling. They probably don't have as much of an effect as some people think they do. But whatever you can do to maintain your body temperature. And so antipyretics, so things that help prevent fevers that are going to be helpful. I would then also manage blood sugar. The main thing being probably avoiding things that are going to cause large glucose spikes. So avoiding refined carbohydrates.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “What does seem to be beneficial is preventing hyperthermia. So if you have significant trauma, one of the things that happens is the immune system gets activated is you get a fever. And that fever increases this gap between the metabolic demand in the brain and the supply of energy because the mitochondria become damaged during the injury. So if you increase that gap because the higher metabolic rate, because you're hotter, that seems to make that injury worse. And this has been found in some animal models, but also in some human data. So the most important thing to do is to prevent fevers.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “There are a few things that I think we can probably do. And we actually wrote a paper about this, came out last year that covered various nutritional strategies, and most of the strategies will be nutritional supplements that I would probably lean on. And assuming that I didn't have any control over what happened beforehand, ideally I do lots of things to improve the health of myself, right? Because I think that's going to affect how my brain and body then respond to the injury. After that point, then there's a couple of things that I would do. One is I would manage fevers. So this goes back to the hypothermia that we talked about in babies. Lots of trials have tried hypothermia for traumatic brain injury in older humans and adults. And they haven't really shown any benefit.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “These babies alive and keep their brains in good shape as much as they can when they're in the intensive care unit. But actually, the home environment is where the biggest impact happens. And so then that means that even if you have an imperfect start to life, there's probably a lot that you can do as a parent to help that brain to develop and grow as normally as possible.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “When you do these kinds of trials, usually you follow those babies up to something like two or three years old. That's mainly because an NIH funded trial or NIH grant lasts five years. So if you're going to do a full trial in five years, then you have a year or two to enroll and treat and then you have two or three years to follow them up. And so they see significant improvement at that age, but then also going into childhood, which is ideal. You really want to look out as far as you can. Then there's now a renewed interest in caffeine in other brain injuries and babies, and that's something that we've tested in my lab. There are some trials now starting in other brain injuries. But beyond that, in both groups, really the biggest impact on later outcomes is the home environment that kid goes back to. So yes, my colleagues who are practicing the inatologists do a whole bunch of amazing stuff to keep.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yeah, caffeine is not given for neuroprotection. It's given because babies who are born preterm don't breathe as well. They have this thing called apnea prematurity. So they don't have like a normal respiratory drive. So you give caffeine to stimulate that. But the trials that used caffeine to treat apnea premature saw significant 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

24. “You Yankees out there. Although, even in the US, many of the cooling machines are made in Europe, so they still run on Celsius. So those babies get cooled down, and that's really the state of the art, although now we're starting to figure out that there are still a whole bunch of injuries where that doesn't help, including preterm babies. So if you're born preterm, cooling doesn't help, actually. It can be detrimental. In that scenario, one of the things that they found recently, which is probably most beneficial, is caffeine.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Exactly, not enough blood flow, not enough oxygen, get to the brain. Something happens usually during childbirth, and people think about, you know, the cord is wrapped around the neck, or you can get placental abruption, right? The placenta kind of tears off the inside of the uterus, or like the uterus can completely rupture. But sometimes we don't know what happened. The baby just comes out and like something has happened. In that scenario, the second one, HIE, as we call it, those babies are cooled down. So this is something that I studied a lot in my PhD. You take that baby and as long as you start within a few hours of birth, you call them down to 33.5 degrees Celsius for 72 hours. And that significantly reduces death and disability.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “There's two main brain injuries of babies that I study, and they're probably also the two main brain injuries that are most broadly studied just because of their impact. And so the first is preterm brain injury. So that's a baby's born early, the earlier you're born, the greater the risk of neurodevelopment impairment or some other kind of neurological disorder, cerebral palsy, other impairments later in life. The other is something that we call hypoxychemic encephalopathy, which is essentially you get to normal full term, something happens”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “But I think also later on in various states as an adult. And so in order to support that very hungry brain, which it is particularly in humans, we're born fat so that we can generate a bunch of ketones to support that brain developing for the first, especially for the first few weeks, but maybe even for months after that.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “If you look at human babies compared to pretty much every other mammalian species, we are the only species that's born fat, even compared to other primates. And it's thought that the primary reason for this is that fat is a repository for things that the brain needs in order to develop. And the two that are probably most interesting to you and seems to be particularly important are DHA, the omega-3 fatty acid, and fats as a source of ketones for the brain. When the brain is developing, in particular, and I think this is also very relevant to recovery from brain injuries and other states, the preferred synthetic precursor, as in the thing that the brain uses to make structure, like fats and cholesterol and that kind of stuff, which makes up a significant chunk of the brain, ketones are the preferred source, particularly in the developing brain.”

    2026-01-28 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #851: Dr. Tommy Wood — How to Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT