For decades we’ve been told diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other forms of dementia are purely “brain problems.”

We imagine misfiring neurons, plaques, tangles, the brain slowly breaking down. But if you’re a mid-life woman who’s been working hard to reclaim your metabolic health, get your hormones in order, feed your body well and build strength with resistance training, you likely have already suspected something simple but life-changing—the brain doesn’t live in a bubble.

What happens in your gut, with your insulin system, your metabolic health, your circulation and your life habits matters, and I’m going to show you how.

Let’s start with Parkinson’s, because it offers one of the most compelling stories of how a “brain disease” is really a whole-body disease. In a recent podcast episode, Dr. Mark Hyman's conversation with both Dr. Ray Dorsey and Dr. Michael Okun made clear the initiating pathology of Parkinson’s may not begin in the brain at all. Dorsey noted that in 2003, according to German pathologist Heiko Brauch, “Parkinson’s disease, which you consider a brain disease, it does not begin in the brain.”

“He (Brauch) says, I first see it … in the olfactory bulb, the smell centre … or in the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus nerve,” said Dorsey.

That means the gut, the vagus nerve (aka the gut/brain axis), reduced gut motility, changes in smell occur all before the tremors and movement symptoms we usually associate with Parkinson’s. That’s massive because, for women, navigating perimenopause, menopause, shifting hormones and metabolism, the idea that gut and nerve health are foundational means they have control.

Now broaden........

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