Aging With Brain Power: How to Boost Your Mental Acuity and Cognition (Performance & Longevity Series)

< Full Episode

Transcript: Aging With Brain Power: How to Boost Your Mental Acuity and Cognition (Performance & Longevity Series)

Season 11, Episode 20  | October 2, 2025

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome to Life Time Talks in our series on performance and longevity with MIORA. I’m Jamie Martin, I’m here with Jim Lavelle, lifetime’s chief science officer, and in this episode, we are talking about brain health and mental acuity and cognition. And just like our bodies, our brains undergo many changes as we age and experience various health issues. In this episode, we’re exploring the key factors that affect our cognitive health, the various biomarkers that can tell us about our brain health, and strategies for optimizing our mental acuity.

Hey, Jim, how’s it going?

It’s going great.

We’re diving in on this mental sharpness piece.

I know, and we both remembered each other’s names. This is a great start.

[LAUGHTER]

I have been known to maybe say the wrong name from time to time, so I’m glad we started on a good note.

[LAUGHTER]

So brain health and cognitive health, what does it mean to have mental acuity? What does that mean? Why does it matter for health?

Well, mental acuity could be different for different people. I mean, all of us have maybe a different capacity, like an IQ or maybe you can learn something quicker. When you think of mental acuity, is it, am I performing my tasks easily? Remembering what I need to do? Am I focused, and, of course, that brings into the whole aspect of well, what about people with attention deficit? A little bit different, so we can cross into that, but most people understand when their brain is sharp, meaning they’re thinking clearly.

They’re remembering what’s on the list. They’re not processing slowly, that foggy brain that a lot of people talk about. So mental acuity and focus is how we should be even if we have attention deficit. I mean, it’s just another category where your neurotransmitters might be off a little bit and therefore you can work towards re-establishing that balance, but focus and acuity, it’s hey, I’m alert. I can respond to things. For example, reaction time, I would put as a part of brain health, and so those are the key components to it.

I love it. So what are the factors that can affect it? Maybe not for the better.

Well, I mean, so there’s two ways to look at it. So just like problems with glucose regulation is probably the number one thing that causes a problem with brain health in the future. Dementia, Alzheimer’s considered type 3 diabetes, and there’s a reason for that we’ll get into. So making sure you’re regulating your blood sugar is a big part of mental health, and the other components would be, well, where’s my immune system functioning at? Because neuroinflammation, so you have an immune system that’s driven by what’s called microglial cells or the big immune cells of the brain, when they’re triggered and activated, you create more inflammation.

Inflammation destroys neurons, basically. The neurons get broken down, and so that part is important to keep in mind. Hearing loss is incredibly important, and that’s now being tied to risk for dementia as well. Stress, once again, what can you do to maintain good mental acuity? Manage your cortisol curve. Understand your stress response, because it turns out that as you’re under chronic stress and your cortisol levels are higher, it stimulates more of that neuroinflammation, but more importantly, what cortisol does is it blocks the ability of your stem cells to grow into mature neurons.

Oh, interesting.

So you can’t renew things. It blocks it. So usually you’ll grow a neuron and it takes about two to four weeks from a stem cell. It’s called a progenitor cell. The problem is that cortisol sticks to that progenitor cell and says, you’re not growing. And then the other thing that happens when you’re under stress, because your brain’s the commander-in-chief, if it feels a threat, like too much cortisol coursing through the brain, literally you’ll get something called dendritic retraction.

The neurons will retract in and you’ll lose surface area of those neurons being able to communicate with each other, and so that stress component is really big. And then there’s other things that can affect cognition. I mean, we’ve all heard about lead and lead lowering IQs. So children in lower income areas have leaded paint on the walls, and they would eat lead chips, for example. It’s actually a lot of publication that’s directly related to environmental burden like lead having an impact directly on just your IQ, your ability to process and problem solve, because that’s a part of it. Acuity, focus, problem solving, that’s where we want to be.

And so environmental burden could do that from a variety of sources. An infection could do that. A lot of, for example, COVID long haulers complain of being cognitively foggy, and that’s because increased inflammatory cytokines triggering the neuroinflammation in the brain, losing mitochondrial capacity in the brain, and the mitochondria, the powerhouses of every cell. And that can generate the problem of yeah, I’m thinking foggy headed.

Too much glutamate, too much histamine. I’m not clearing it, so probably one of the things that a lot of people don’t know about, because it really wasn’t even discovered until about seven or eight years ago, maybe a little longer than that, is the glymphatic system. So glial, microglial, glial lymphatic system. What role does that play?

Well, just like every other tissue in your body, your brain has waste products of its metabolism, and it has to get rid of those. It has to transport those out and clear the brain out, so that when you go to sleep at night and get that restful sleep that I know we all get, you’re basically refilling the pools of those neurotransmitters and resetting the brain for the next day.

How does your glymphatic system get optimized? Well, one is sleep, so sleep is incredibly important for the glymphatic system functioning, but the other piece that’s important is exercise. It turns out that exercise is incredibly important in glymphatic function, and when people travel a lot of time zones or you hear about night shift workers. Night shift workers have higher all-cause mortality. That’s because our brain’s circadian rhythm, we talked about the master slave clock in a previous episode, our brain’s circadian rhythm — it’s supposed to have that repair process going on at night when you sleep.

Well, if you’re awake, the natural rhythm of what your body’s signaling to do is disrupted.

It’s out of sync.

Exactly. It’s out of sync. And so those are just a few things that can cause a problem. Obviously, just being under excess sympathetic duress will also lead to problems. As we all know, when you’re under long term stress, most people will start to see a change in their short term memory.

And that makes sense. One thing that’s hear a lot about is that we can build those neural pathways. There used to be the thinking that it was at a certain time in your life that you’re building neural pathways. That’s been debunked. We now know that you can build neural pathways as you learn new things. What I heard you say, too, is when you have cortisol or that other — now, I’m not going to remember the exact thing you said, but that can get shut down based on certain stressors, things happening, some of these different factors that may affect it.

No, that’s exactly right. You should be able to continue to build neural pathways and be sharp as you’re aging. That’s what we should be doing. You just have to remember that the more neuroinflammation, and that can happen from a head trauma — when people get over the age of 65, for example, the older in life and you fall and you hit your head, that can cause real acceleration of neurologic damage because when you have a TBI — and that can happen from a car wreck. That can happen from hitting your head on a cabinet.

Obviously, it can happen from a fall, and it doesn’t always have to be — it’s called the shearing force. It doesn’t have to be, oh, I hit my head directly on a concrete block. It could be at the angle that it hits triggers that microglial activation, and it’s interesting when you hit your head and have a traumatic brain injury like a concussion. And look, concussions, think how common those are. In tweens, teens, sports, it’s very common right.

Your gut gets permeable within two hours of hitting your head. So then what you have, as one of your strategies to think of, is you have a nervous system that connects the gut to the brain. And there’s been literature saying that, hey, is dementia a problem sourced in the gut? Well, it’s a two way communication system. So it could be that it’s sourced from the gut, and you just have to remember that the gut-immune-brain connection through the enteric nervous system that connects the gut and the brain directly is in a bidirectional communication.

So if the gut is bad, the brain’s getting signals that are in pro-inflammatory, and if the brain is pro-inflammatory, it’s sending those signals to the gut. And so we don’t think about gut health for the brain, but if you look at all the literature that’s been coming out — there’s been so much coming out about that really in-depth connection between the gut and the brain — so that’s one of those areas that a lot of people don’t think about. They always think, hey, it’s about the brain. And somehow or another, your head is disconnected from the rest of your body. When we think about it, that’s how it was for a long time.

Now we’re understanding more and more that, you know what? It’s just another vital organ, commander-in-chief, that is connected to every other organ system in your body and is influenced by that.

The body is a fascinating thing. You always hear things like, oh, things can’t pass through the blood-brain barrier, but then you hear things like this, like the enteric nervous system that you talked about, that connection and how it’s — you think about the vagal nerve and those different ways that that’s connected all the way down into every piece of your body, every area.

And we now know that the blood-brain barrier does get permeable, and things like lipopolysaccharide, which gets derived from the gut microbiome dying off and the particles off the bugs are lipopolysaccharide, and they can go across the blood-brain barrier. And actually, that’s the current thought process is to what’s going on with Alzheimer’s dementia is that lipopolysaccharide, which is going up due to your gut being off — people with diabetes tend to have higher lipopolysaccharide, so that creates that connection between people with diabetes and developing more dementia.

So when lipopolysaccharide goes up, that triggers a response. Your brain says, wait a second. We need to regulate that inflammation signal. And so it makes a compound called galectin-3. And galectin-3 is supposed to quell the inflammation, but the problem is if it’s ongoing, the galectin-3 actually ends up, because if its unopposed it just keeps being released, it accelerates the inflammation and creates more damage.

And so there’s really good research out now. Actually, there’s a investigational drug out that blocks galectin-3, and they’re finding out that it’s reversing the mild and moderate dementia and getting people’s memory back. So it goes back to that whole thing of understanding that all of your body systems are connected and brain health — yes, we could talk about ginkgo and we can talk about SPMs and fish oil and ginsenoside R3 and all sorts of things that can help, but you still have to get back to, how am I managing all my body systems?

Well, because, to that point, you can’t separate anything.

That’s right.

So what are some of the cognitive issues that people may experience? What are the solutions that are available to them? When people aren’t functioning at their best, whether it’s a neurodegenerative disease or it’s just, in my daily life, I’m walking through life in a fog, what are some things that we can do to start moving forward down a healthier path?

Sure so the first one is get your blood sugar under control, because people that have swings in their blood sugar will feel foggy and crash mid day. Same thing will happen with inappropriate cortisol response. People will feel more foggy headed, short-term memory loss. Get your sex hormones evaluated. Estradiol, in women in particular, incredibly important for brain health. It actually helps the two hemispheres of the brain communicate.

One of my institutes that I was in, I had an OB/GYN there. We would talk about this a lot and I’d see a lot of women patients, and I would talk to a woman who enters menopause and they would say, it’s like a switch turned off in my brain and I became a different person. And then you restore their hormone balance and they’re, oh, I’m back to feeling more calm. I’m back to having a restful night’s sleep. I’m not as agitated anymore.

So one of the strategies is depending on age stage of life. Thinking of hormone balance is important. Glucose and cortisol is important. And then it’s, well, what can you do to help quiet that neuroinflammatory signal? And one of the big ones is managing that stress response. So things like theanine, which is really good for managing anxiety, really helps because what it does, it blocks glutamate. And glutamate is what’s called an excitotoxin.

It’s an excitatory neurochemical, and glutamate is one of the things that helps prevent those progenitor cells from progressing to new neurons and making new neural networks. And so theanine, really valuable. The other one, relora, very valuable because if you can manage stress, your brain will get calmer. You’ll think more clearly. When we start to get into, well, what can you take specifically? One of the things that we did research on, we actually did it with Corvette race team to improve their reaction time and cognitive focus when they were racing around a track, was we developed a ginsenoside called R3.

So ginseng has a bunch of different ginsenosides. One of them is R3. It’s very small. When we gave it to Corvette race drivers, because we measured their brain coherence as they were running around the racetrack, and we found out as their core body temperature went up, their reaction times got worse. And that’s why they weren’t winning Le Mans and they weren’t real happy about that. And so the bottom line was we found out that, you know what? When we give this to individuals, their core body temperature stays normal.

Their reaction time stays intact. Well, then we’ve since been doing that research on looking at people with TBIs, folks that get a concussion that are maybe in a professional sport, and it turns out that when you look at all the research on ginsenoside R3, that it helps to quiet microglial cell activity. So pretty impressive. The other ones are specialized fish oils called SPMs. These fish oils help with improving what’s called resolvins in your brain, so that helps to quiet the inflammatory rush that occurs when you first get a head trauma or your brain is just under a chronic neuroinflammatory state. So SPMs can be valuable.

You hear a lot about certain mushrooms, like lion’s mane, same thing, supporting immune function, reducing that neuroinflammation. Something as simple as magnesium has a dramatic role to play because it improves circulation and helps with the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces that inflammatory signal. And then the standbys that a lot of people go to, things like ginkgo, rich history of helping cognitive support. Why? Because it improves circulation.

And so, circulatory effects, I know a few of the things that we utilize at MIORA Kyolic aged garlic extract helps with blood flow, so it helps to improve the pliability of your arteries and blood vessels. And so you see improvement in circulation. ReVasca, another combination of glycosaminoglycans, and I know I love saying those big words once in a while.

You see my eyes get big?

They just come off so easy, just, like, glycosaminoglycans. I just want to say it three times real fast. But also, it has seaweed and some nitric oxide-producing compounds. Basically, what that is for is to help improve microcapillary blood flow, because it’s all about getting oxygen to your brain, and it’s all about utilizing glucose efficiently in your brain. So when I have people get on a ketogenic diet and they go, I can’t believe how much better that I’m thinking. I’m so clear, for a period of time. It works for a while, and that’s because when you’re on a ketogenic diet, you’re no longer feeding into your insulin resistance, and your brain can run on those fats and run on ketones.

And for a while that does a really good job, but then it has its limit to its benefit. But whenever people say that, I go, oh, we really have a lot of work to do if you felt that dramatic of a difference. The brain’s one of those things. We can’t open it up and look at it. It’s not the easiest thing to assess, but certainly things like qEEG, putting on the helmet and mapping out the brain, that’s a way to look at it. And obviously, these markers that relate to the various aspects of what’s going wrong with your chemistry could point you in the direction of hey, are you having trouble or are you at risk for cognitive loss based on where your chemistry is at right now?

Well, and that really takes us into testing. I want to have one other thing I want to get to before that though, because you mentioned earlier that exercise plays a really important role in cognitive health, and I think it’s worth spending time there because you also just said need to open those capillaries, get more oxygen to your brain. Exercise is one way that happens. And there’s something called BDNF that I wanted to bring up as well, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or what role that plays.

Well, I mean, BDNF, when you keep your progenitor cells moving and you don’t have neuroinflammatory responses, you’re decreasing the impact on tubulin, you’re decreasing the inflammatory compounds and that allows for the expression of BDNF. And, of course, I mean, when we look at the future, now there’s peptides that stimulate brain-derived neurotrophic factor that I think will we’re going to see more and more of the next five years. That’ll be coming out. So BDNF is intact when you’re not in a neuroinflammatory state. So that’s the important aspect to that.

I love that, BDNF. I’m like, oh, I know that one. We can make we can talk about that for a second.

I thought they made tapes or something. No, I don’t think it’s BDNF though. I think that’s BSF.

Probably. So testing, because, like you said, you can’t open up the brain and look at that, but what are those specific biomarkers that you mentioned that you would be able to indicate? Is that part of the comprehensive testing that we do at MIORA.

So there’s a couple of things that are going on in the research right now, and I’m on the advisory board of the lab that’s working with Harvard and Yale and doing this metabolomics research, where we’re looking at markers of the metabolism. So when your genes get transcripted and they get turned on or suppressed, what is the byproduct? And very shortly in the next year or two, you’re going to be able to look at markers for, does this look like dementia? Does this look like Alzheimer’s? Does this look like Parkinson’s? Because we can look and find those markers in the epigenetic set. So for one, that kind of advanced testing is not ready for prime time yet, but it is in the pipeline.

And, obviously, I’ve been very blessed to be able to work with a lot of the companies that are doing leading edge lab research and looking at markers in this area, so pretty excited about that. But I always go back to this core principle of you need to look at what are the baselines of my labs? So for example, if you’re hypertensive, you’re more at risk for dementia because hypertension means your blood vessels are stiff and you’re not getting oxygen to your brain. And that’s why we talk about getting your morning and evening blood pressures.

And I know a lot of people that just have modestly high blood pressure, and they’re like, oh, it’s just a little high. And they don’t take action on it. And so blood pressure, really important as it relates to cognition. Glucose and insulin, that’s a biggie. I mean, it’s really big, and all the things that influence glucose and insulin, what you eat, how you exercise, how much stress you’re under, how much sleep are you getting, all of those are important. Sleep apnea, incredibly important.

Say you live alone, so you don’t have a partner that says, hey, you stopped breathing. You can actually get an app that will listen. You put your phone next to your bed and turn it on and it records your sleeping sounds. So if you listen to that and you’re choking in the middle of the night, you probably ought to go get a sleep apnea test.

Go get checked out, sooner than later.

Score heavy, don’t do that, but it’s really important. These are things that you can start to do. Don’t act on your own. Go get checked out, really important. And then things like bad actor lipids or dyslipidemia, so looking at cholesterol not just because of, oh, is your cholesterol good or bad, but what kind of cholesterol are you making? Because those subfractions show that you’re under metabolic inflammation.

Now, excessive iron, so a lot of people, oh yeah, I’m eating a carnivore diet. I’m eating a lot of meat. You should have your iron levels and ferritin levels checked because iron damages tissues, including the brain, can cross the blood brain barrier. And then you have things like vectors, so viruses. So what does that look like in terms of labs? Well, what’s my CBC with differential look like? We had mentioned neutrophils and lymphocytes and monocytes and eosinophils on a previous episode relating to the immune system, so we could be looking at that.

And then, once again, thyroid hormone is important because people don’t feel cognitively as sharp if they’re low thyroid. And then another piece to that puzzle would be sex hormones for men and women both. It can play an important role in how cognitively sound you feel. And then if we want to complete the puzzle, because we’ve talked about the gut and we’ve talked about all these other areas, organs of detoxification like the liver, the kidneys, play a role in filtering out the byproducts of our metabolism and what we get exposed to.

And when that’s not in balance, we’re going to throw off more inflammatory compounds, which can lead to more neuroinflammation, which leads to the damage. So this is exactly what happens. Microglial cells get turned on. They release oxidative compounds, superoxide anion, peroxynitrite, all these different free radicals. The free radicals damage the neuron. The neuron shrivels up and dies, breaks apart, and releases parts of the neuron into your brain.

So you release, because you hear these terms if anybody’s reading about Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, laminin, neuro laminin alpha synuclein, all these compounds get released and guess what they do. They activate your microglial cells more.

So it’s a cycle that keeps happening. That’s exactly right.

What you just described really is the foundation, from a testing and looking at the entire system, it’s the basis of the metabolic code. Because when you can look at all those pieces, identify and say, you can make connections like you said and say, OK, these things could be affecting cognition and your brain health overall.

That’s exactly right.

So what next then? What are the strategies that you then offer somebody for taking care of their brain health and cognition next? How do we stay sharp?

Well, I love people doing games. Work with puzzles, read books still. Remember, primitive nervous system, modern world. We have a lot of screen time these days, and I think managing screen time, activating your brain in different ways, whether it’s through exercise, is important. Balance and stability sends a signal from your muscles to your brain, so those types of exercises can be invaluable.

Obviously, working your brain can be invaluable, whether it’s sudoku or puzzles or whatever you want to do. I just did an IQ test. I’m not going to tell you what it was, but the IQ test was all about basically these puzzles and different symbols and how they flip and work into a grid. That’s the way they test is your ability to three dimensionally, spatially, look at things in order them correctly, so working that is going to help you maintain mental acuity and mental focus, so really important that we do that.

Look, when you go to MIORA and you get a metabolic code test, it’s looking at all these systems of the body and looking at the relationships between those systems and pinpointing, where do you need to work? Because where Jamie might need to get started on working could be different than what Jim needs to do, and so therefore work at what’s important to you. Remove your metabolic roadblocks so that you can protect brain health.

And then obviously, I still go back. Make sure that your home is clean. Make sure that you have good air quality. Try not to use toxic things in your home. Those are really important too for brain health.

It really does come down to, what’s our environment? And then what are the daily habits and behaviors that we’re doing to support our health and well being?

That’s true.

Again, our pillars.

And if I was going to say one thing is get out of living angry.

That’s pretty important.

There’s a lot of folks that have a lot of stored anger, and that creates more sympathetic stress. It’s really hard on your heart. It’s really hard on your brain. And once again, since I came on as the chief science officer for Life Time, you want to know what’s really amazing to me? The importance we place on the Aurora Group.

Our healthy aging.

Our healthy aging group. I mean, when our CEO was saying we need to create events so people don’t feel isolated, so they feel part of a group and they’re wanted, that is so crucial to brain health as you’re aging. Because when you look at centurion cultures, where there’s high amounts of centurions, people, as they’re aging, are connected into a community. They feel relevant, they feel heard, their mind is still active. And I think that was one of the most exciting things for me was seeing that importance.

It’s not just for the young, fit person, it’s at every stage in life, and that’s how you really support brain health all the way through your life.

Well, I think it’s the importance of connections, real social connections, also those connections that are happening in our brain, but those connections support those too. So let’s maintain those, and make sure that we have a place where people can come and do that for one another and create a space. Jim, did I miss anything? Anything you want to add as a final thought?

I don’t know. I’m getting old. I might have forgot something.

Oh, come on now.

[LAUGHTER]

I think we covered it pretty good.

[LAUGHTER]

If people want to learn more, they can visit miora.lifetime.life to learn more. Not just about brain health, but about all these other facets of health and well-being that can influence our longevity and performance. Thanks, Jim.

[MUSIC PLAYING]