And we know that B12 deficiency even as an adult you can lose a percentage of your brain matter. The brain on the right is a 40 year old brain and you're losing 0.05% to 2% every year, you're damn right that's what your brain is going to look like at 80. Of course, it will. But with proper nutrition, it doesn't have to. And what I think is also striking here is that this one from an 80-year-old brain, huge improvement. But it doesn't look like a one-year-old brain. Why the hell not? Did they just lose out on their ability to develop normally? Maybe. But also they are replacing B12 lost via their vegetarian parents. What about the vitamin D? What about the choline, the creatine, the carnitine, the DHA, the EPA, the cholesterol, the saturated fat, I'll bet the LDL is pretty damn low. --Dr Anthony Chaffee
The average person is sick and malnourished.
80% of the calories consumed in America, Europe and the rest of the world really are from plants and plants don't contain B12, and so you have a vegetarian population basically. And you're checking their average B12, and you're saying, "O, everybody's in this average." Well, it's an average. Of course, they're in the average. But all those people are deficient because everyone is deficient, now no one is deficient because it's hidden in that average. But if you're below 650, 700, you can actually get demyelination. Oxford University published a paper in 2008, that showed that under 500 picomoles per liter, 600 picograms per milliliter, down to like 300 picomoles per milliliter, you know, 450 picograms and lower that people were getting so much demyelination of their white matter that their brains were shrinking by 2.5% to 5.5% every 5 years.
1:56. And that's my theory as well. Why do brains shrink? We accept that. We say our brains just shrink as we age even though no other animal on earth sees this. None. And so we just accept that our brains rot out of our brains. Okay but if we are losing half a percent 2% of our brain per year because we are in the normal reference range for B12, after 34 years your brain is going to be shriveled up. And you look at case reports. There's a case report in 1997 of a baby a 6-month-old baby who was a child of vegetarian parents who had severe atrophy to developed and so it was very very shriveled, atrophy. It looked exactly like an 80-year-old patient with Alzheimer's . . . dementia. Then with daily B12 replacement after 5 months, the brain swelled up significantly. It looked like basically a healthy 40 year old brain, but it didn't look like a one-year-old brain like it should have. And so you know it looks like an 80-year-old brain, a 6-month-old baby with severe B12 deficiency looks like an 80 year old brain. So why are we calling that 80-year-old brain normal? And then you give them B12 and all of a sudden it looks like a 40-year-old brain 5 months down the line. So I don't think that's age related atrophy. I think that's malnutrition over time. That is why I think people with MS are seeing a reduction in their lesions because they're just getting the basic nutrition that we need. And so working in neurosurgery, I have seen dramatic recoveries from a neurological perspective, more than I would have expected. Because normally we don't expect the brain and the nerves to heal all that well. It doesn't surprise me now, because we've been malnourished we don't have these nutrients like B12 that are allowing your brain to heal if your B12 is at a level that is so low that you are getting demyelination your nerves from MS. It's not going to happen; it's not going to happen. But then people do this and they're eating the fat, they're having some liver, they're getting the their B12 and vitamin D up and their DHEA and their and LDL and all that sort of, or DHA and EPA and LDL. They're getting all of those things up in proportion. Now the body can actually start healing which we don't think is possible as doctors and clinicians, because we just don't see it. And we think that the brain shrinking over time is normal because we just see it. It is the norm but it doesn't mean that it is normal. It doesn't mean that that is supposed to happen.
4:46. I think it's really dramatic so this is you know this but I'll say this for everybody's benefit this is very typical of a baby's brain. All the gray stuff is just brain. These little dark marks here are the ventricles. They're very small here as well. There's no space around the outside. Space in kids, that space is maxed out. It's pushing against the wall. That's actually how the skull grows. The growth of the brain pushes out on the inside of the skull and actually grows the bones of the skull so that's normal baby for a 20-month-old baby. This is that case report and when you zoom in like this and you didn't know that this was a baby you tell me if I'm wrong here but that looks very typical 4 and 80 year old on the right looks pretty typical for a 40 year old.
5:44. The big ventricles you look at the edge and you can see that would be called atrophy of the brain you can see this in and I don't read CAT scans of the head, but you can see it right away. That's not a healthy brain.
6:01. No, it's not, but if you put that in front of a radiologist and so that's an 80-year-old man, is that supposed to look like that he'd say yeah that's just a normal age-related atrophy the brain on the right would be a very normal for a 40 year old brain 35, 40 year old brain. Brain on the right of the child, there's no gap around outside the outside the ventricles are very small you can't even see the temporal horns. This one now you can start seeing that. It's already getting atrophied there is space around the outside the ventricles are a bit more pronounced around the brain stem pons and things like that. Now in the brain on the left it's much more pronounced much more atrophy huge ventricles big open wide temporal horns that's very typical for an elderly brain. But again this is a 6 month old girl of vegetarian parents with severe brain shrinkage atrophy due to B12 deficiency. This is a published case report from 1997. Retardation of myelination due to dietary vitamin B12 deficiency: Cranial MRI findings. Pediatric Radiology 27(2), 155-158. And so this is at 6 months old brain and it looks like an 80 year old brain on the right is 5 months later about a year old after daily B12 replacement so massive Improvement on that and if you flip those around and say okay that's a 40-year-old brain right and you would say yeah that's normal normal at age-related atrophy but we know this is B12 deficiency. And we know that B12 deficiency even as an adult you can lose a percentage of your brain matter the brain on the right is a 40 year old brain and you're losing half a percent, 2% every year you're damn right that's what your brain is going to look like at 80 of course it will but with proper nutrition, it doesn't have to and what I think is also striking here is that this one from an 80 year old brain, huge improvement. But it doesn't look like a one-year-old brain. Why the hell not? Did they just lose out on their ability to develop normally? Maybe. But also they are replacing B12 lost via their vegetarian parents. What about the vitamin D? What about the choline, the creatine, the carnitine, the DHA, the EPA, the cholesterol, the saturated fat, I'll bet the LDL is pretty damn low. It's not what you want. When you're trying to grow a brain that is predominantly made out of cholesterol. It's largely made out of it anyway. So I think that's why it looks like a 40-year-old brain instead of a 1-year-old brain like it should because . . . because it's not just B12 that she's missing. She's missing all these other things. So when we have MS patients, I have an MS protocol and we optimize B12 we get into reference ranges that are the studies have shown are optimal. We certainly get them to hell out of that "normal range" that can actually still cause demyelination. Because you're never going to regrow your myelin without [B12 and the other nutrients found in beef] if you're in vitamin B12, and things like that are so low that you'll get demyelination. It's never going to happen.
