Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure
By Patrick Holford (2025)
Available at foodforthebrain.org/books, Amazon, Kindle, and Audible (£12.99, 240 pages)

There’s a grim kind of poetry in watching your elders collapse into gibbering ruin—grim, that is, until you realise it might be your future too. But apparently, it doesn’t have to be. According to Patrick Holford’s Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure, the entire modern dogma around dementia is wrong. Alzheimer’s is not some sad lottery of age and genes. It’s the bill for decades of sloth, sugar, and seed oils finally come due.

This is not a comforting book. It’s not even especially kind. Holford’s central claim is that almost every case of Alzheimer’s is preventable—99% preventable, to be exact—and that most people who get it have effectively chosen to. The idea that your brain dissolving into soup is something you signed up for by refusing to exercise and eating crap food isn’t popular with doctors, probably because most of them are overweight and prediabetic themselves. But it rings true.

The usual medical establishment likes to fixate on genetics. You inherit your fate. There’s nothing to be done. Take the drugs. Wait to die. Holford—Chair of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Expert Group—calls this out for the lazy nonsense it is. Less than 1% of Alzheimer’s is down to genetics. The other 99% is lifestyle. You get the brain you deserve.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s fixable—if you’re not already too far gone. The book offers what should be obvious but is still somehow revolutionary: eat well, move your body, get sunlight, sleep, cut the sugar, and take your supplements. Your GP will probably scoff. Ignore him. He’ll be senile at 65 and dead by 75. Follow Holford, and you might still know your own name at 90.

The four “horsemen of brain death” that Holford identifies are:

1. Not enough omega-3 fats
2. Not enough B vitamins
3. Not enough antioxidants
4. Too much sugar and processed carbohydrate

You don’t need a medical degree to understand this. You just need a brain—and ideally one that hasn’t yet been pickled by Monster energy drinks and a lifetime of crisps. A simple homocysteine test (available through Holford’s charity) can tell you if your B vitamin levels are low. Most doctors won’t order this test, of course, because they’re too busy trying to hit their statin targets. But according to the research Holford cites, elevated homocysteine is one of the clearest predictors of brain shrinkage. Fix your B12 and folate, and you may just keep your memories.

There’s real economic weight behind this, too. A study by Oxford’s Dr Apostolos Tsiachristas estimates that simply supplementing B vitamins could save the UK £60 million per year and extend life by over a decade. That alone is worth more than the last twenty years of drug development, which has mostly amounted to expensive failures and televised despair. Oh, I agree, all this talk about “saving the UK” anything at all is so much socialist bilge. Before coming out with these figures, you need to identify who bears the cost. Even so, there is more senility about than there could be.

If I sound evangelical about this, that’s because I am. I plan on keeping my brain, thanks. I also plan on dying with the body of a Greek god and the mind of a first-rate philosopher. That’s achievable. But not if I eat like poor Dr Gabb and spend my afternoons shuffling round the park on a mobility scooter. He used to possess a brilliant mind. Now he just mutters in Latin about the pigeons.

The most arresting claim in the book, though, isn’t biochemical. It’s moral. “Becoming an Alzheimer’s patient is almost always a choice,” says neurologist David Perlmutter. That’s not something you’re allowed to say in a society addicted to victimhood. But it’s true. If you’re living on toast and microwave curries, if you drink every night and never move, if you’ve outsourced your health to the NHS, you’ve chosen the path. You can get off it. But you probably won’t.

The book is full of useful specifics. Omega-3 raises brain resilience by 20%. Vitamin D cuts dementia risk by a third. People with the highest antioxidant intake had half the rate of decline. And yet, one in five Britons eat oily fish even once a week. The rest eat brown sludge and pretend their dementia is genetic.

Holford’s book is not perfect. The tone is sometimes over-eager, the faith in mass behaviour change a little optimistic. But the data is real, the diagnosis accurate, and the strategy clear. If the NHS had any sense—which it doesn’t—it would throw this book into every household with a free bottle of vitamin D and a voucher for wild salmon.

I won’t end with a plea. If you care about your brain, you’ll read this book. If you don’t, then you deserve what’s coming.