Dementia Plan - Is It A Word-Art Plan that Misses the Root Causes?
- Gary Moller
- Sep 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 26
Missing the Root Causes
I’ve been reading through the government’s Dementia Mate Wareware Action Plan 2026–2031.
At first glance, it looks impressive: glossy layout, well-designed, sprinkled with te reo and the latest policy buzzwords. Goodness knows how many thousands of dollars it took — all those expert consultations, policy analysts, working groups, consultants, and writers — to produce this grand piece of word-art that achieves nothing that I can see that is of practical value to prevent dementia - just managing the condition after the fact, and money on gloss that could be better spent in things like practical support for their carers.
But for all the money and fine words, it misses the most important question: what is driving the dementia epidemic in the first place? Answer this, then we can action real prevention, rather than mere management.
What the Plan Gets Wrong
The Plan talks endlessly about “equity,” “culturally appropriate care,” and the “Rainbow community.” It divides New Zealanders into a patchwork of categories — Māori, Pacific, Asian, prisoners, homeless, refugees, rural, and so on — as if dementia somehow discriminates along those lines. It doesn’t. Dementia is ruthlessly equal-opportunity.
The danger of this identity-first framing is twofold:
It fragments society into competing groups of privilege.
It distracts from tackling the universal drivers of dementia that affect us all.
If the true criterion is need, then need alone must guide the allocation of limited health resources.
The Real Drivers of Dementia
After more than fifty years in natural health and sports medicine, I see the same root causes again and again. They are plain to anyone willing to look:
Malnutrition: Aged care menus full of white bread, sugary drinks, and processed mush. Many older New Zealanders are literally starving of nutrients while being overfed with empty calories.
Toxins: Heavy metals, pesticides, plastics, fluoride, and other poisons chip away at brain health year after year.
Medication side effects: Polypharmacy is out of control. Drugs like statins, antidepressants, sleeping pills, and anticholinergics are proven memory-killers. Combine a few and you’ve got cognitive dynamite.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI): A concussion from rugby, a fall on the farm, or a knock on the head may only show its full damage decades later.
Inactivity and isolation: The brain, like the body, needs challenge, movement, and connection. A sense of purpose. Without them, decline is inevitable.
What Prevention Really Means
If we are serious about prevention, let’s stop the smoke and mirrors. Real prevention means:
Food as medicine: Nutrient-dense, whole foods — not ultra-processed junk.
Detoxification: Support the body to clear toxins and stop piling more in.
Rational prescribing: Doctors must face up to the cognitive damage caused by many common drugs. Less is often better.
Movement and resilience: Exercise, fresh air, learning new skills — these keep the brain alive.
Community and purpose: Humans need family, tribe, purpose, and belonging. Loneliness kills faster than cholesterol.
A Personal Note
I’m now in my seventies, so I’m counted among the “old.” My family is proudly multi-racial and multi-cultural, with Pacific and European roots, and even some Chinese, if we want to play the game of division better, and go back a few more generations. And yet we expect no special treatment or privileges because of age, race, or background. We ask only that need is the measure. And in truth, we need very little — because we live by a freerange mindset of independence, resilience, and health.
The Bigger Picture
Instead of glossy identity-driven policy documents, our health leaders should be asking:
Why are so many New Zealanders nutrient-deficient?
Why are so many people, young and old, on multiple prescription drugs?
Why are toxins still so lightly regulated while dementia wards overflow?
Why do we still mostly ignore the long-term effects of concussion and head injury?
Conclusion
Dementia is not an inevitable part of ageing. It is a man-made epidemic — born of poor nutrition, pharmaceutical overreach, toxic exposures, and lifestyles stripped of resilience.
The Action Plan is a political fog. A costly, well-packaged distraction. Meanwhile, a dark cloud of ill-health is gathering over New Zealand. Unless we face the true causes, no amount of word-art will save us.
Be strong. Be resilient. Be free. Be Freerange.
Anecdotal evidence from Rest Homes is that more and more residents who are in the general living sector are succumbing to dementia sooner and faster than they used to, so that one encounters them all the time in the general lounges and living spaces because the dementia facilities are no longer big enough. I seem to remember some experts predicting that a lot of harm would be done to the elderly we were "protecting" by isolating them and confining them indoors and using scary PPE around them for months on end. All the more sickening because outdoors time, sun and fresh air, was not only completely risk free, it was therapeutic and should have been used as such. Family and…
We're not old; we're seniors. That's top of the class. Eat well, exercise, use the brain to create, avoid stupidity, and we'll feel like the 60's for a long time. Or, as said in the movie "The Godfather II" by Fredo, "I'm smart, not stupid like they say."