Description:

In this episode we speak with Patrick Holford, founder and chair of the Food for the Brain scientific advisory board and author of Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure (2025). Highlighting why drug therapies have failed for Alzheimer’s we look beyond a single-drug single-target approach to multi-component nutrition and lifestyle medicine-based approaches that not only target multiple disease processes, but have been shown to reverse, not just prevent, Alzheimer’s disease in well-conducted clinical research. The discussion includes actionable biomarkers for personalised preventative approaches using nutrition.

Guest:

Patrick Holford
BSc, DipION, FBANT, NTCRP

About our guest:

Patrick Holford is Founder and Chair of the Food for the Brain Foundations Scientific Advisory Board. He is a retired visiting professor, specialising in nutrition and mental health, author of over 45 books and is in the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame. In 1984 he founded the Institute for Optimum Nutrition.

He started in the field of psychology and then became a student of two of the leading pioneers in nutrition medicine and psychiatry – the late Dr Carl Pfeiffer and Dr Abram Hoffer. In 1984 he founded the Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION), now degree-accredited, to train a new profession – the first generation of nutritional therapists and to define what it means to be optimally nourished. His mentor, twice Nobel Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling, was patron.

In 1998 Patrick left ION to focus on writing down what he’d learnt and his first book, the Optimum Nutrition Bible, was published, selling over 2 million copies and catalysing a global revolution. He’s now written over 45 books translated into over 30 languages.

One of his current focusses is on helping people with mental health issues and in 2003 he founded the Brain Bio Centre and in 2007 he founded the Food for the Brain Foundation.  

In 2014, Patrick was inducted to the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, joining his mentors Drs Linus Pauling and Abram Hoffer. He has also been awarded an honorary Diploma from ION and is also an Honorary Fellow of the British Association of Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine. He is also a retired visiting professor at the University of Teeside.

Guest website and links: 

https://foodforthebrain.org/

https://foodforthebrain.org/the-cognitive-function-test/ 

Selection of our guest’s publications: 

• Holford P. Alzheimer’s: Prevention is the Cure. Holford Press. 2025.

Additional publications: 

• Smith AD, Refsum H. Homocysteine – from disease biomarker to disease prevention. J Intern Med. 2021 Oct;290(4):826-854.