You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool fact of the day is that the brain chemical that's missing in Parkinson's

disease is probably responsible for its own demise.

I'm talking about dopamine.

It's a neurotransmitter that keeps your body movements fluid.

It can kick off a toxic chain reaction that kills the nerve cells that make dopamine,

at least according to some new research.

What the scientists who did this discovered is that there may be a way of treating the

estimated 10 million people with Parkinson's.

Those are the diagnosed ones.

There's a lot of people who are on the way to Parkinson's who aren't diagnosed yet.

What they're proposing is that if you can make less cellular damage in the brain by treating

the neurons early on with antioxidants, you can probably prevent the damage from too much

dopamine.

The scary part about this too is that if you're doing things that spike your dopamine a lot

and very frequently, then you may be actually wearing these cells out more.

This may be a reason to think about porn, gambling, high sugar diets, cocaine, and all the

other bad habits that you may or may not have that affect your dopamine systems.

You don't want to be a low dopamine person because if you have no dopamine, you hit your

life.

But if you spike your dopamine all the time, you might not have as long of a life as you'd

probably like, unless, of course, you hack that with the right selective use of antioxidants.

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