Welcome to the Future of Personalized Medicine Summit. I'm thrilled to be hosting this incredible event where top experts in health and wellness share their insights on optimizing performance, longevity and proactive healthcare. This summit is all about equipping high achieving professionals, CEOs, entrepreneurs, doctors and leaders with personalized strategies to take control of their health and thrive. And today I have the privilege of speaking with Laurel Brennan, an expert in brain health and so much more. And so let me we'll get right into this. We’re gonna share Laurels background.

So let me tell you a little bit about Laurel and I'll have you unpack some of these initials. Okay. Laurel, she is an MOT R L, a CHC and an RY T. And we'll get into that. Is the founder of Root Causology and helps women optimize their brain health and reduce dementia risk by creating therapeutic partnerships and addressing root causes.

She pulls from professional and personal experience to address brain, body and spirit and tap into each client's own healing abilities. She's a functional medicine practitioner, an Apollo Health Recodde 2.0 practitioner, and a health coach, licensed and registered occupational therapist and a registered yoga teacher. In all areas of her work. Her focus is to create an environment with a just right challenge for clients to move at a pace that is just right for them. She has a love for people, a passion for lifelong learning, and feels honored to walk hand in hand with others on their health and wellness journey.

Laurel, wow. Welcome to the summit here and I'm really excited about learning about your background. Steve, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here as well. Oh, you're welcome.

Well, you know, before we dive in, I'd just love for you to share a bit about your background. What led you, Laurel, to specialize in brain health, especially for women in this really well defined area of preventing dementia. You know what inspired you to jump into your journey in this field? Yeah, well, like many people I think who are in personalized and functional medicine, they have a personal story and I'm no different. So I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006.

And at that point I was actually waiting for approval from my insurance company to see if they would pay the tens of thousands of dollars for this injection that my doctor had recommended. But I wasn't really feeling good about taking a daily injection anyway. So during that window, I got lucky and had a conversation with someone, a mom at the bus stop. And she said, you know what, I know Ms. And autism aren't the same, but she had two kids who had done really well on the spectrum, had been diagnosed with autism, had done really well with diet change.

She said, maybe you want to talk to this nutritionist, said great, let me do that. That was life changing. Actually. I left that four hour appointment full of hope to the point where I went back to my neurologist and said, hey, can I just try this thing first? He said sure.

And I haven't looked back. And actually I was retested recently with a new neurologist who wasn't sure I had Ms. Because he said, you really, it's almost 20 years. You don't have the brain of somebody who has had Ms. For this long.

And they confirmed the diagnosis. But I'm just so grateful for so many people that were put in my path. Sort of introduced me to the other way of thinking to look at root causes instead of here, let's try this drug to see if it'll help these symptoms. Yeah, Tiger Medical is, you know we have two very high level, highly trained by the way Dr. Bredesison certified doctors as well and recode.

They're actually in pre codes but they do and the, you know, they talk about and again I try to, I'm going to say this in all the presentations and I know you feel the same way. You know, traditional medicine has a place in our society and when someone is sick that's their lane and they do well in it. But when people have these complex cases or they're trying to get ahead of things, it's a challenge for the system because if they can't directly diagnose something, it's a top down approach. Look for pathology and then treat. And what you're talking about and what we do at Tiger Medical is you go from the bottom up and you're looking at underlying mechanisms that are driving the condition.

And if you address those drivers then like it's like a plane with lift when it gets going fast enough, it works every time. You have to trust the process. What's amazing to me is this was 2006. I mean that was really early in this know this root cause medicine type thing. So did you go ahead and get training as a functional medicine, you know, doctor or practitioner after that?

Well, I went back that far because that was the beginning of my journey. About that same time my mom had recently gotten a dementia diagnosis and I said, hey, maybe you want to go to this nutritionist. She had had 20 years of chronic fatigue syndrome. And when she also kind of implemented similar things, we both went gluten free and dairy free and like supplements that were gonna optimize, give us what we needed. She stopped having to go back to sleep after breakfast.

Like, it was life changing for her. So what I think, you know, she was my first case study. Basically, her dementia was slow, very slow. The only thing we really changed was diet. I didn't know there was anything else that we could do. She wasn't really into supplements, but she just took away some of the inflammatory foods that had been daily part of her life. So then after she passed away in 2019, and I decided, you know, how can I help people? It was challenging for our family and we were from the health. In the health field. My brother, who's a physical therapist, I'm an occupational therapist.

My dad's a psychologist. We had resources and it was still hard. We're like, how do people do this? You know? She was in memory care for the last two years of her life.

And anyway, I wanted to see how I might be able to help. I did a health coach training, which was great, but it wasn't enough. I was like, oh, I need more. So that's when I did the functional medicine training. And the last module of that training, the instructor was sharing new research about how dementia might be preventable and reversible.

Then I was like, oh, let me learn more about that. I didn'T. Know this before. Right. And that's when I found Dr. Dale Bredeson. And they were just in the process of like, redoing the training at Apollo Health. So as soon as that came in, I was in the first class. And I mostly do pre code as well. Do their coaching track.

Is that what you did? There's two tracks. So I did the coaching track and the practitioner track. As an occupational therapist, they allowed me to be on the practitioner track. Right, yeah.

Because you're licensed. Yep, yep. That's fantastic. And so. So in your practice, because you're licensed, you have the ability to draw labs, look at labs, work with people, get data.

Okay. I'm just trying to understand your whole skill set. I'm going to jump onto another document here because I want to look at you if you're listening. It's not easy to do these interviews. And Laurel, you're a podcast host, so you have to look at multiple documents to make sure you're being, you know, accurate.

You've got something called the plus one, minus one, just right approach to transformative brain health. Do you want to unpack your method for us and then we'll keep going? Sure. And I think this very much stems from my occupational therapy background, though it was a big part of health coaching as well. I have to do a little shout out to one of my professors, Dr.

Sally Schultz, who was the. She and her colleague Dr. Scottie were the inventors of this frame of reference called occupational adaptation. In that framework, it's the therapist's job to create an environment with the just right challenge. Okay, so where things aren't too hard, they're not overwhelming, but you're steadily making progress.

And I took this plus one minus one. It kind of formed out of that because some people come to me and they are like ready tomorrow to go on an elimination diet and you know, investigate if they have mold in their house and they are ready. And some people like don't want to talk about not having a bagel for breakfast like that. Everything in between and everything in between. So you really have to personalize the next step for the person in front of you.

And so I would create. Sometimes people get a plus one list of 10 things and sometimes they get a plus one list of one thing. So I have a course that Happy and Healthy Brain Roadmap. And for each week we have a new list things you could add a plus one, health promoting behaviors and things that you could take away that you would be better without. And they, some people might implement all of those things in one week and some people might take a month or two or three to implement those.

So that's what a plus one minus one approaches. Right. And what you're doing is you're working with people's temperaments and their readiness for change and you're customizing it. And I know this. You know, we've been in business five years and we coach people and people truly are very unique and different their path.

There can be a lot of commonalities in your approach, but you got to bring them along at different speed. So that's excellent. Is nutrition the core of what you do? It is a piece of what we do. So as I mentioned, I was trained by Dr. Bredesison. He has a B7.

There's seven different categories and nutrition is one of them. But also we're looking at sleep and exercise and stress and mindfulness. Like are you constantly stressed about what's next or can you like take a second and take a breath and be in the present moment? Supplementation is part of that, but not the main part. We look at toxins in toxins.

So we look at a lot. Gut health is a big piece. DNA testing is a piece for some people. I have some people that really don't want to know what their genetics are. And some people really do.

So again that's another way that we personalize. And what's the path? Do you do all of that stuff up front or is it a little bit of a time the testing know keep unfolding, un peeling back the onion and a certain order in terms of how deep are you're digging. Yeah. Right.

And again that is fairly individual. So sometimes if people are working with me one on one we can. We'll go exactly at their pace. And some people want to do the DNA test immediately and we can start optimizing their genes. You know that we will do things a little differently if they have an APOE4 gene, if they have two APOE4 genes which does increase risk.

But it genes are not our destiny. Right. So. And in the happy and healthy brain roadmap, which is a three month course, we meet individually but we also meet in groups and some people make dramatic change in a short amount of time and some people need a year to make change that is lasting. So we have.

Oh, I'm sorry, Go ahead. Laa. I was going to say we have support groups after the initial functional medicine assessments and lifestyle like integrations because it's challenging to maintain sometime for some people. For most people. For all of us.

I'm gonna put my hand up. Me included. I'm in the middle of prolong right now because I need a reset. Yeah. And you're nice.

I'm surprised. Yeah. State free too. This is like 600 calories or something. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. For everyone who might not know what that is. It's a fasting mimicking program. So it's not fun during a week long process. So she's quite courageous.

Do this and smile when she feels like crap. Probably. I'm actually okay. This is my fourth round. This is my over about a two year period.

But y. Yeah. Anyway. A little bit of brain fog though. So you might have to remind me.

What we were just talking. Well you were talking about there's a three month program and then when they're done with that they're. There's the coach, there's a group community. Yeah. Yeah.

And sometimes it's after they go through one on one or the three month program that we're then continuing to meet. If they're local. I have a Liveo 2 and VLite which are modalities to support brain health. And it wasn't until, you know, five months in with one of my clients where we discovered that mold was an issue for her. So sometimes things appear later as we peel back the onion.

Right? Yeah, right. That makes sense. You know, interesting thing with the way you're testing for prevention of dementia is that it's not, you know, like people sometimes think, because I'm one of them. My wife, we both have been tested for that genetically, and neither one of us have either copy.

That does not mean that you're still not at risk because our Dr. McNamei talks about this all the time. One of our doc says that 30% people who are diagnosed to have neither copy, it's from. There's another pathway, either toxins or diabetes or something else. Right?

Yeah. So that's interesting. So your core customer, so that people who are listening, your core customer is a female. What's the, what's the age range you typically are working with? Um, I mean, initially, my, my, like my first client, this was early, early Covid, you know, and because I'm an occupational therapist, I went to her house because a home visit is you can learn so much.

And she was a recode client. And I know sometimes we come up against mainstream medicine and this is what happened there. Like, her doctor didn't agree with the path I was taking, and she'd been with that doctor for 17 years. So he won. He won.

And I realized, okay, working in recodde can be very challenging. I'm going to have to go to people's houses and talk to their doctor. Let me try to work with people who are more on the prevention side. And that can be from age know, 25 to 85. So I have a big range.

I get a lot of women who already have autoimmune disease or they have a parent with dementia or concerns of dementia. And so they might come in with questions about their mom, but then they start to learn themselves. Right. You have a first degree relative that obviously elevates the risk. Yeah, Right.

So real quick, rec code and pre code me. And you are throwing these terms around. We know. Well, why don't you answer that? Tell the audience if they're listening.

What does that mean? Yes. Okay. So recode stands for reversal of cognitive decline, and pre code is prevention of cognitive decline. And what I've learned is that brain changes happen 20 to 30 years before symptoms appear.

So there's a whole lot of work that we can do early and it's easier to Prevent than to reverse though. You know, there are people who are getting reversal, not full reversal, but Dr. Christine Burke, I'm in a mastermind with her right now and she has had some amazing results with clients and has started a program that is going to launch soon that will help people, practitioners, doctors mainly navigate all of the moving parts to help people with reversal. Because it is, it's a lot, a lot of moving parts. There are.

Yeah. You know, and just for the audience benefit, because our Tiger Medical is certified by Dr. Breesison, just like you, you are this Dr. Bredeson is a neurologist MD at UCLA. He's done 30 plus years of research.

His wife is actually a naturopathic physician and she I think was very influential in his research. But what he's learned is, and the reason that medication isn't really getting it done is that it's like a house with 50 holes in the roof. And there's 50, you know, anywhere the number is changing, but it's like roughly 50 caus, you know, points of causation. And you have to manage all 50 and no drug can target that many things. And, and so the idea is if you measure the 50 and you know how to optimize the 50, then you, you radically reduce the risk of that, of all of that, you know, the Preponderance of the 50 going the wrong direction and flipping a switch and causing the brain to go into protect mode where it builds up that amyloid plaque.

So it's, you know, been supported in clinical trials and he's got a lot of evidence now. And there's a book called the End of Alzheimer's. If you read it, you'll want to work with Laurel because you'll quickly learn I can't do this by myself. But at least you understand the fundamentals behind it. Laurel, in your work sounds like you bring people in for a three month process and then keep them in a community.

What is the biggest challenges you see for people trying to implement what you do with them? Well, I touched on the first challenge, which is just skepticism from people that are important in their life. So could be a doctor, could be a spouse. So if they get pushback from people that are close to them, that can be challenging. But I also think that all of the things that you need to implement are challenging.

It's changed and nobody likes to do it. Right. Yeah, I 100% agree. Yeah. Do you have.

So if somebody's listening, you know, I mean, I think I can jump in and you can tell me if I'm wrong on any of this. You know, if you're 40 plus and you have a first degree parent that has had Alzheimer's or dementia, or you are someone who would be classified as having metabolic, chronic metabolic disease, like cardiovascular or diabetes or hypertension, they're gonna be a little bit higher risk for this. And what would you say are three things, two to three things they could do on their own that would be helpful. It's clearly not going to get it done in terms of prevention, but it could at least get them on the right track and then they would seek out help from someone like you. So I think about my mom every time that we kind of go down path.

That's a great way to think. Yeah. Because she was searching for something that would help. She could get all the, the magazines, the self help. She subscribed to Prevention magazine and she's like, oh, blueberries, they're good for my brain.

So she started having blueberries on her cereal every morning. You know, then she realized that the cereal that she was having probably wasn't good either. Spiker blood sugar. Yeah. Yeah.

But the one thing that she did was dry blueberries. And. But I know now that there are other kind of bigger things that might be helpful. And first, I do free consultations at a 30 minute free consultation and some everybody walks away with something and it depends again on that person in front of me for one person who you know is a CEO of a business and they're go, go, go, go, go. And they sleep four hours a night.

Yeah, not the four hour part, but I know what you mean. I'm the go go guy. It might be pause and take a long exhale before you eat.

Yep. You know, get into the parasympathetic nervous system where we can rest, digest and heal. Because if you're go, go, go, go, go, you might be in fight or flight all day. Your high level, your. I mean, there's nothing wrong with being in fight or flight in the sympathetic nervous system, but we just have to be able to come out of it, out of it.

Right. Not chronically there. Right. And especially before we eat. And so for some people it might just be take a big long exhale.

Dr. Kberman in his lab, they studied the physiological psigh. Like it's very similar. You just take a breath in, another breath in noisy exhale. I teach yoga and we do that in every single class.

So a long exhale might be a takeaway for one person if they're not getting good sleep, then we got to figure that out. So is it because you're not relaxing and maybe just some breath work will do the trick, or is it because you have sleep apnea? So we need to figure out why you're not sleeping. Is there blood sugar, dysregulation? Hormones?

You e too. Your timing of your eating. For me, the last piece was genetic. I had a predisposition to disturbance. And when you figure that out, you can address that through supplementation.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I appreciate that. And, you know, the big thing I want people to take away also is from what you're saying is you can do something about this. You are not a victim of your genes.

You're not, you know, you're not in a situation where you're paralyzed. Just because mom or dad has dementia doesn't mean you're going toa get it now. Maybe if you don't change anything, you have a higher risk of that. I think the numbers are if you have one copy, it's 30 to 50% chance. If you have two, it's 50 to 90%.

So definitely, if you have parents with this, with cognitive disease, you're at risk. But the message is you can do something. But I will tell you, from the research I've done, if you're worried about cognitive disease, don't try to do that on your own. Get help. And Laurel, you said you have.

You have a free consult. Why don't you tell people? Like, how can they find you, first of all? And then secondly, you know, how do they get that? Console?

Yes, absolutely. So my practice is called root causology. It's a long word. R o o t C a u S e o l o, g y. So my website is rootcousology.com comy and there's a top 10 brain wellness tips that you can get there, which is just root causology.com top 10.

T, O, P T E, N word. You can get it from the home page, right? It'll be there somewhere and you can click on it. O. I should add that button. That's a good point. Free consulting here today. But that's okay. No, but, yeah, that's really good.

And so is it a 30 minute consult? That's what it is. It's a 30 minute consult. There's lots of buttons on the website to schedule a free consult. And if you want that paper to look at daily of your top 10 tips, you know, then you can register for that.

Okay, good, Good. And my guess is that you are. It's truly an assessment. You're asking questions. You're going to be of value because a lot of people worry. Oh, it's just a sales call in disguise. That is not true of you. I can tell already. You're right. Yep.

I mean, some people, we talk for 30 minutes, we get like a deep connection. I give them some advice and then I wonder how they're doing, you know? Right. I might never talk to them again. But, yeah, I gave them some information that hopefully was useful.

But, you know, I do the same approach with Tiger Medical because I believe if I just give to them, get them in the right direction, the people that are ready to change will come back to you. You don't have to do sales trickery or anything like that. So, Laurel, it was a pleasure to meet you and thank you for participating and being part of the summit. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.