Heart Disease vs Brain Health: Why America Protected the Wrong Organ First

Quick question. What's your cholesterol number?

You probably know it, don't you? Or at least you know if it's good or bad.

Okay, second question. What's your brain health number?

You don't have one. Nobody does. Your doctor has never measured it, never mentioned it, never even brought it up.

And today I'm going to tell you exactly why. Because it all traces back to one single day in September of 1955, and one man's heart attack in Denver, Colorado.

That one heart attack decided which organ America would protect for the next 60 years. And which organ it would forget.

Spoiler alert. The organ they forgot is sitting right between your ears.

I'm Julia Lundstrom, your neuroscience and brain health educator, and this is your Brain Health Moment.

The Day Before Everything Changed

So let me take you back. Not to the day everything changed, but to the day before.

It's September 23rd, 1955. And believe it or not, brain science is about to have its moment.

Scientists are recording brain waves with EEG machines for the first time. Neurochemistry is being born, and researchers have just discovered serotonin in the brain. The very first medications that work on brain chemistry are hitting hospitals.

After centuries of the brain being a total black box, we are finally, finally starting to look inside.

After decades of being ignored, the brain's turn was finally coming.

September 24, 1955: One Heart Attack in Denver

And then comes September 24th.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is on vacation in Denver, Colorado. He plays 27 holes of golf. He has a hamburger with raw onions for lunch.

That night, at 2:30 in the morning, he wakes up with crushing chest pain.

The President of the United States is having a massive heart attack.

Now here's where history takes a turn. Because presidents before him hid their health problems. Roosevelt hid his polio. Kennedy would later hide his Addison's disease.

Eisenhower did the opposite. He told his press secretary, tell them everything.

His heart doctor, a famous cardiologist named Paul Dudley White, stood in front of the nation's press and explained exactly what a heart attack is, what causes it, and how the President was recovering. Right down to his bowel movements. I'm serious, that was in the briefings.

For weeks, heart disease was on the front page of every newspaper in America.

And America collectively panicked. Because if the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, the strongest man in the free world, could be struck down in the middle of the night, what about the rest of us?

Overnight, heart disease became public enemy number one.

For Every Dollar the Heart Got, the Brain Got About 8 Cents

Congress opened its wallet. Researchers flooded into cardiology. Money poured into the American Heart Association.

And the brain's turn? It never came.

In 1948, Congress created the National Heart Institute and funded it immediately. The brain didn't get its own institute until two years later. And do you know how much new money Congress gave it? Zero. Not one new dollar. Its first budget had to be scraped out of existing NIH funds.

So from the very start, for every dollar America spent studying the heart, the brain got about 8 cents.

In those early years, heart research was getting roughly 20 percent of the entire NIH budget. Brain research was getting about 2 percent.

And it gets worse. That tiny little brain budget? It also had to cover blindness research. The brain was sharing its 8 cents with your eyeballs.

Then Eisenhower has his heart attack in 1955, and heart funding takes off like a rocket. It nearly quadruples in five years. By 1963, it has grown nine times over.

And that head start never went away. Year after year, decade after decade, through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s, the heart got more than the brain. Every. Single. Year.

It took until about ten years ago, when the Alzheimer's crisis got so big and so expensive that Congress couldn't ignore it anymore, for brain research funding to finally catch up.

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What the Heart Era Means for You

Now think about what this means for you.

If you're over 50 today, you have lived your entire life inside the heart era. Every checkup you've ever had was designed in it.

That's why your doctor measures your cholesterol every single year but has never once measured your memory. That's why you know the warning signs of a heart attack, but you couldn't name one early warning sign of a failing brain.

It was never a plan. It was a blind spot. And you inherited it.

Your Heart Is a Pump. Your Brain Gives the Orders.

And here's the part that gets me fired up. America put the wrong organ first.

Now hear me out, because your heart is critical. But your heart is a pump, and it takes orders. Who gives the orders? Your brain.

Your brain regulates your heart rate. Your blood pressure. Your hormones. Your immune system. Your sleep. Your stress. Every single system in your body reports up to your brain.

It's only 2 percent of your body weight, but it uses over 20 percent of your energy. It is the hungriest, hardest working organ you own.

So when your brain starts struggling, everything downstream struggles with it. The fatigue. The brain fog. The poor sleep. The blood pressure that won't come down no matter what you do.

We spent 60 years managing the downstream problems while ignoring the control center upstream.

That's why I always say, when your brain is at its healthiest and happiest, you are the healthiest and happiest you can be.

The Hopeful Twist: Your Heart Scan Is a Preview of Your Brain

But here's the hopeful twist in this whole story. Those 60 years of heart research? They weren't wasted. Because it turns out, America was accidentally studying the brain the entire time.

Your heart and your brain aren't two separate systems. They are so intricately connected that damage in one shows up in the other.

If you have coronary heart disease, your risk of dementia goes up 27 percent. If you have heart failure, it goes up 60 percent.

Now, that sounds like bad news. But flip it around, because it's actually one of the most useful things medicine can tell you today.

We can image your heart. We can see the plaque in your arteries, measure it, and track it. And when a doctor sees that damage in your heart, they are looking at a preview of what's happening upstream in your brain. The same clogged, stiffened blood vessels running through your chest are running through your head.

Your heart scan is the closest thing we have right now to that brain health number I asked you about at the beginning.

And here's where it's all going. One day, and I believe it's coming in our lifetime, we will image the brain the way we image the heart today. Not just the plaques, but the actual damage, so we can see it, measure it, and fix it. We will have blood tests that tell us far more than the handful we have now, like homocysteine. And we will learn to reverse damage in the brain the way we've learned to reverse it in the heart, the way we lower cholesterol and shrink plaque today.

The heart got its 60 year head start. Now the brain gets to borrow every bit of it.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

But you don't have to wait for that future, because there's plenty you can do right now.

So here's where to start. Three things, this week.

Number one, get your baseline. And I mean deeper than your annual physical.

Keep getting your physical every year. Everybody gets their heart numbers, their cholesterol, their blood pressure. That's automatic now.

But I want you to have your doctor go further, because there's a whole panel of blood tests that tell you what's happening upstream in your brain.

Test your homocysteine. It's an amino acid in your blood, and when it runs high, it's linked to brain shrinkage and memory decline.

Test your inflammation with an hs-CRP test, because chronic inflammation in your body means inflammation in your brain.

Test your fasting insulin, not just your blood sugar, because insulin resistance can quietly build for a decade before it ever shows up on a standard test.

Test your hormones, your full thyroid panel, your vitamin D, your B12. Every one of these directly affects how your brain performs.

Now, here's the honest part. Insurance doesn't cover a lot of these tests yet. Remember, we're still living in that 60 year blind spot. So start budgeting for them, start saving for them, the same way you'd save for anything else that matters. Because these numbers are the closest thing to a brain health number you can get today.

Number two, protect your brain's blood supply.

Your brain is fed by hundreds of miles of blood vessels, and when your blood pressure runs high for years, it quietly damages the small vessels deep in your brain. There's even a type of dementia named for it, vascular dementia, because it starts in the blood vessels.

The single easiest habit? Walk for ten minutes after your meals. It lowers your blood sugar, lowers your blood pressure, and sends fresh oxygen straight to the organ that uses 20 percent of it.

Number three, feed the organ that got skipped.

Your brain spent 60 years as an afterthought, and for a lot of us, our plates prove it. Start with one swap this week. Fatty fish like salmon or mackerel twice a week, for the DHA your brain cells are literally built from. A handful of blueberries at breakfast. Leafy greens with dinner.

One study out of Rush University found that people who ate just one serving of leafy greens a day had brains that performed like they were 11 years younger. Eleven years. From a salad.

The Bottom Line

So let's bring it home.

One heart attack in 1955 decided that America would protect the pump and forget the command center. For 60 years, your brain got the pennies while your heart got the dollars.

But you get to make a different decision, starting today. You get to look at how it's all connected on the inside, the way we just walked through.

Because when your brain is at its healthiest and happiest, you are the healthiest and happiest you can be.

And if today lit a fire in you, here's your next step. Join me at my next Brain Health Breakthrough Training Event. It's three full days with me, it's completely free, and I will walk you through my 10 Pillars of Brain Health and how you can use them to protect and optimize your brain for the decades ahead.

Click the link below. Save your seat, save the dates and times, and we'll see you there.