Yoram Barak

In May 2016, we were treated to a fascinating and eye opening presentation on what modern science can tell us about how to prevent Alzheimer’s Disease by Professor Yoram Barak.

Dr. Yoram Barak is an assistant professor of Psychiatry at the Sackler School of Medicine of Tel-Aviv University, and director of the Psychogeriatric Department at the Abarbanel Mental Health Center. Trained in medicine and psychiatry at the Sackler School of Medicine, he became an Israel Medical Scientific Council Specialist in Psychiatry in 1993, and was awarded a Masters in Health Administration from Ben-Gurion University of Beer-Sheva, Israel in 2004.

Dr. Barak is also a consultant for the National Multiple Sclerosis Center in Israel and a special consultant on Positive Psychology for the Israel Defense Forces. He was president of the Israeli Association of Old-Age Psychiatry, and is currently on the editorial board of the Israel Journal of Psychiatry and the Open Psychiatry Journal. Research interests include multiple sclerosis, cancer, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive–compulsive disorder, suicide and geriatric psychiatry. He has published extensively in these areas, and is author and co-author of over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles.

He is currently on Sabbatical and teaching at the Otago University School of Medicine in Christchurch.

Here’s a few takeaway thoughts, and in no particular order:

• Losing your sense of smell is a poor indicator of whether will eventually suffer from AZD.
• The evidence that Omega 3 compounds can help prevent AZD is also poor.
• A “good” diet can reduce the risk of AZD by as much as 53%.
• AZD is likely, but not exclusively, to be the result of cumulative damage caused by a “poor” diet over several decades.
• A “good” diet has:
  • No red meat
  • No butter
  • No margarine
  • Lots of leafy green vegetables
  • Fish
  • Olive oil
• Live life without stress
• Stay active, and connected to people, don’t get lonely;
• AZD is less prevalent amongst those who volunteer for two or more days of work per week
• Learn a foreign language.
• Learn to play a musical  instrument.
• Don’t stop learning.
• Listen to classical music; all other forms of music do not stimulate the right parts of the brain.

We have received many requests for his PowerPoint presentation and a video recording of his lecture. They may be downloaded from here and here. The video of the second part of his presentation is here.

The videos are a low resolution version that takes up around 215 MB of disk space.  If you would like a high resolution version that takes up over 2GB of disk space then please request it from contact@nzfoi.org.