These FOODS & HABITS Boost Brain Health & REDUCE INFLAMMATION | Mark Hyman

the

brain

responds to everything we do what we think what we feel exercise sleep our diet environmental toxins emphasize all of these things influence our microbiome everything influences the

brain

let's start by providing some immediate value to people three things people can eat or potentially not eating that is directly related to having a better brain, very important because one of the best ways to access brain

health

is through our diet, both what we eat and what we don't eat, let's start with what we don't should be done, the most dangerous thing for your brain. It's sugar and starch that cause

inflammation

in the brain, they cause dementia, they cause depression, they cause behavioral problems, they're really unpleasant for the brain, so that doesn't mean you can never eat them, but think of those things as recreational drugs. .

I already said it: starch and sugar. The third thing you really want to get rid of is bad fats, so trans fats are very dangerous and are still in our food supply even though they have been regulated as not safe to eat. there are still a lot of refined processed oils out there so those would be the things that I would avoid first and of course processed

foods

that goes without saying and what are some examples of those refined and processed oils so my favorite is The one they call vegetable oil, you go to the super

mark

et and it says vegetable oil, what is broccoli oil? no, it comes from seeds, sometimes it even comes from cottonseed oil, which is highly toxic, it's canola oil, it's soybean oil, 10 of our calories come from soybean oil. has increased a thousand percent in our diet didn't even exist as a real food in our diet until probably 1900 early 1900, so we're really entering an era where we're eating a diet that's very different than what we have for almost everyone. our human beings.

Evolution and those fats tend to cause

inflammation

, they oxidize easily, they go rancid, they are made with extraction processes that contain hexane, and they often cause significant inflammation and damage in the body, and just so people know that it is not So. They necessarily go out and buy these cooking oils with everything they contain, so you have to be a student of ingredient labels and pay attention to all the processed

foods

that exist because many of them are The big ones are going to be fighting your brain yeah the easiest trick is to just don't eat anything processed unless you know what's in it I mean if you have to have a list of ingredients I probably mean yeah there are some packaged foods that are okay, but If you have to know what's in it, if it says some big chemical words you can't recognize or has 14,000 things on the label, it's probably not what you should be eating anyway, great, so that's three.

Things to avoid, okay, so you were going to get into the topic of three things that we can pay attention to, which most people don't know, but your brain is mostly fat. You know, really we are all fat heads and about 60% of our brains. it's made from fat and most of it is what we call dha or docosahexaenoic acid sounds like a big chemical name but essentially it's fish oil it also comes from algae you can get it from algae so if you're plant based you can get it. of algae, but it is the main ingredient for a

health

y brain, so we should eat fatty fish that glows in mercury, we should eat algae, we should do things that really help increase our dha levels, the second thing is good fats.

In general, because our brain responds very well to fat, MCT oil, for example, is a derivative of coconut oil that is really great for the brain's energy system and can help improve cognitive function. He also has athletic performance. Improves athletic performance. The third category of foods that we should consume. They focus on phytochemicals, there are 25,000 compounds in plants, maybe more, the Rockefeller foundation is now putting together the periodic table of phytochemicals, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to map the medicinal properties of these foods, but it's really easy If you think about it just eat the rainbow if it's colorful and it's not skittles, it's okay to eat it, so all the dark colored vegetables, green, blue, purple, red, yellow, those foods that contain these pigments are full of these phytochemicals and They are really extraordinarily useful in regulating brain function. in many different ways, as an added bonus, how about hydration?

It seems to be an area that is often overlooked. You know, one of the things that people often forget is the bottom of the matrix in functional medicine, which is the kind of map that we use to figure out what's out of balance for people and hydration is actually very important. because most of us walk around dehydrated, most of us don't drink enough water, we have other liquids like sodas, juices, coffees and teas, but we don't actually have enough. water and often when we do we don't receive intracellular hydration, which is so critical, not only in the bloodstream but also inside the cells, which is what makes you feel good and gives you energy and performance, so that my favorite athletic artist is Tom Brady. and he never drinks water without electrolytes, maybe that explains his seven rings in the Super Bowl.

I don't know, but I agree. I used electrolytes in the water it's very important and not the kind that has tons of sugar and all kinds of weird stuff. My favorite, I have no affiliation with this brand, it's called Light Show Lytee Show, but it's just liquid drops that you can put in a glass of water and every time I drink I try to add them and there's a portable container that you can take to your little one . falls with you so intracellular hydration is actually very important and it is important for your cognitive function it is important for energy it is important for everything a warning about water naturally since the world and especially here in the United States unfortunately also has every time More infrastructure challenges More of the water out there is corrupted, so it's yet another reason why people should really invest in a high-quality filter.

I heard someone say once, you either get a filter or you become the filter, that's good, yeah, I think that's right, I mean, I mean. I remember reading an article recently that showed that in the average tap water there are 38 contaminants from sewage, pesticides, glyphosate medications. I mean, where do you think all the women who take birth control pills, hormones, prozac or statins, are metabolized and excreted in urine? Where is that going? It goes into our water supply that is filtered, cleaned and reused and we end up having all these wastewater contaminants and people have no idea what they are drinking, forget about chlorine, fluoride and everything else. things that get added to water, but there's a lot of unnoticed things in water because of the level of toxicity in our society, so I think filtering water is very important, obviously, if you're drinking water, bottled water is a problem because one um.

It's usually plastic, which is not something we need more of in the world. Glass bottles are fine, but getting a filter is very important, so let's get away very quickly from the magnitude of the problem that is poor brain health and brain inflammation. Important question because many of the diseases that we see that are causing disability, lasting productivity, loss of quality of life, are brain disorders, whether anxiety, depression, opioid epidemic, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and all cognitive disorders such as ADHD, autism, these are all brain inflammation diseases and they are rampant if you look at, for example, just depression, our modern tools really suck at treating it, I mean, if you have severe depression, sometimes medications can help, but for most people, if you look at the data, maybe 30 is effective, not much. more than a placebo and the question is what is driving that problem, it's our whole inflammatory lifestyle that we've talked a lot about on the podcast and it's one of the most important things, one in four people has a serious episode of depression in his life.

Life in the world accounts for the majority of our healthcare costs and all the collateral symptoms we have due to the externalities of depression, such as loss of productivity, so there is a macroeconomic analysis that looks at the next 30 years. What's going to cost for chronic diseases is 95 trillion dollars with a t okay, that's a lot of money, you know, much more than the GDP of the main nations of the world combined, probably double that of the six main nations combined, that amount of money, most of that is from depression due to loss of productivity, effect on society, etc., so these are rampant conditions, one in 10 children has Alzheimer's, you know, we probably have Alzheimer's or pre-Alzheimer's and between 40 and 50 million Americans, depression affects, you know? more than 60 million people, but throughout people's lives it is very common that we see a rampant increase in autism in neurodegenerative diseases, so we have to deal with this problem in brain health and in a way more focused because it is the something we need to operate in our lives to be happy to have healthy relationships to do the work we want to do in the world to be a functioning member of society to be engaged and not just spiral into an almost vegetative state sitting around on the couch watching TV because you feel like shit, so there's a huge opportunity to pull back the veil and rethink our entire approach to brain health.

Now one of your first books was an ultramental solution and one of the central ideas in that. The book was what you do to the body, what you do to the brain, yeah, can you expand on that? What did you mean by that? Well, the title of the book was the ultramine solution, how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first because, unlike what we do, what we learned in medical school is that our head and our brain are a kind of disembodied thing. on the top of our shoulders and doesn't connect to anything happening below.

We have learned that this is completely false. that the brain responds to everything we do what we think what we feel exercise sleep our diet environmental toxins stress all these things influence our microbiome everything influences the brain so we really have to think about how we balance ourselves to reach a different way of thinking about brain health based on all the things we can do to correct imbalances in the body that affect the brain, whether it's the thyroid, the microbiome, toxins, low nutritional levels of certain vitamins and minerals like fish oil. or omega omega-3 or vitamin d or b vitamins, so we know a lot about the things that make the brain healthy, we call these trophic factors, these are things that help the brain grow, improve and increase neuroplasticity and neuroconnectivity, there are so many exciting things. that we know how to do that and yet most of us are poisoning our brains and thinking, oh, I know, for my heart I have to exercise, I have to cut out saturated fats, I have to do all that and I can prevent it. heart disease, but most of us have no idea how to take care of our brain or live a brain-healthy lifestyle, you know, we just don't learn it.

What are a couple of examples of things people are doing today outside of food? True, they are some of the biggest contributors to poor brain function in your life in general. Well, the low hanging fruit is lack of exercise. Eight percent of Americans get adequate exercise, which leaves 92 percent who need some help and exercise is really extraordinary because when you do cardio you do strength training, you do strength training and specific types of exercise they increase these amazing molecules in your brain called bdnf bdnf stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor, think of it as miraculous growth for your brain, so when you exercise you are literally increasing the number of brain cells, you are increasing the connections between cells brain, you are increasing your cognitive power.

Exercise is super critical, so that alone can make a huge difference for so many people. The second thing is to sleep if we don't. When we sleep, our brains don't work and I remember the study I read recently that looked at snipers in the military, snipers essentially that are super accurate, like 99 accuracy, when they sleep eight hours, when they sleep seven hours, they drop a bit. maybe ninety percent less than six hours starts to be like forty sixty fifty percenthundred in less than six hours, it's basically unpredictable, it's 50, so we don't really understand how important sleep is to cleanse our brain, repair it and get rid of it.

From the garbage the garbage dump comes at night when we sleep to clean all the metabolic waste that our brain produces during the day and if you don't get enough sleep you won't be able to do it on the third day. What besides exercise and sleep is stress, we know that chronic stress now we all have acute stress, but the absolute chronic stress of our modern life and whether it comes from the world that we live in in all the chaos, whether it that comes from the inflammation and the stress that our diet causes because our diet literally causes us to generate more adrenaline and cortisol in our body, like structured high sugar diets, whether it's our senior lifestyle, all of these things cause Our brain does not function properly, so the stress response is something we know how to do.

To deal with this, we know how to reset the body by activating the part of your nervous system that is the relaxation response we call the parasympathetic system instead of the fight, flight or freeze response. It's, you know, playing possum, which you know basically, and it's not just sitting on the couch watching TV drinking a beer, it's actually something very active, so it could be meditation, it could be yoga, it could be my favorite or the more passive ones, like hot massages. and cold soaks, there are many ways to access the nervous system to help reset it and create a deep sense of deep relaxation that is physiological and that helps you repair your brain because if you have chronic stress, it literally shrinks your brain, shrinks the hippocampus. your brain, which is the memory center, so we know that chronic stress causes dementia, so that alone can have a big impact, those three things and then there's a huge, long list that goes on and on, but Dale Bredesen , who is one of my favorite people. he's a credible neurologist who's studied Alzheimer's and has used functional medicine to reverse not just stop or slow but also reverse Alzheimer's in patient after patient and he talks about this idea called conoscopy, which is how we get a colonoscopy but how we measure our brain. works well there are some simple and really specific online tests neurocognitive tests you can do there are ways to look at images of the brain there are certain lab tests and things that you look at to see what the threats to the brain are how is it assessed? threats and it's important because when you start to understand how the brain works you can really play with it and see reverse conditions that you would never see, I mean I only wrote the ultra mental solution because I was treating people's physical problems and as a side effect , their brains would improve and I think about what happened as if someone, for example, had panic attacks, anxiety and depression, and I would monitor their insulin and their microbiome, and they do well, I don't.

I have that I'm not depressed anymore I'm not anxious or they have bipolar disease and I did this and I got better or they would have ADHD or autism or Alzheimer's and they would start to really get better or fully recover I'm like what is this This is not what I learned in medical school, so I started researching my own patients and their data and experiences, and by applying functional medicine I was able to somehow map how all this and all things are connected. that affect the brain and it's not just the obvious things, but there are a lot of things that we can dive into around infections, the microbiome, toxins and other things that affect brain health, so the fundamental things are easily accessible to everyone and we should all be thinking not only about how we take care of our bodies and our weight and our heart risk but also our brain health and there are some very specific things you can do to do that now that this topic is near and dear to you because you write in your book that not only was he focused on helping his patients but he was also trying to help himself, his own brain broke, so I would love for you to tell us your story and also as we go through it, help us see everything the topic of conversation about brain-related disorders and how conventional medicine might view it and how functional medicine might view it first.

I'll start with my story because it helped teach me a lot about how the brain breaks down and what to do to fix it uh when I was in college you know a student got into medical school it was easy for me I barely studied and my brain It was like a steel trap and I remembered that everything could concentrate, pay attention, uh, he was happy. I mean, my brain was just fine, I exercised, I ate healthy, I did all the right things, I did yoga, and then I went to China and got mercury poisoning, which I didn't know at the time.

I came back and received some other insult. That trick tripped me up. system to being really sick and all of a sudden I went from being completely functional to completely dysfunctional. I could not sleep. Even though I was exhausted and had chronic fatigue syndrome, I couldn't concentrate like I had ADHD. I couldn't remember anything. I became depressed, so it was like I had depression and dementia at the same time and I was literally reading a story to my kids at bedtime and I couldn't understand the sentence if I read it out loud, I literally couldn't. to understand what I was saying my brain wasn't working or when I was talking to someone I started a sentence and I didn't know where I didn't really know where I was going I didn't finish the sentence I was really damaged and so, through understanding my own biology and Reverse engineering my path to health, I started to understand that you know all the factors that affect brain health and that's why I wrote the ultramine solution because it's what I learned about myself, but it's also what I started to see. to almost thousands of patients.

Talk to us about some of those pivotal factors that happened to you that might be beneficial for other people to hear what was happening in your life that contributed to you being in that place for the first time. place, well, I had a lot of stuff, I mean, I was on a crazy work schedule. He was working as an emergency doctor after returning from China. He did not sleep. You know, I literally would. I was doing 15 shifts a month. It doesn't sound like a lot but it is a lot I stayed up all night many many nights I was taking care of my two children my ex wife was an alcoholic and it was a really difficult time a lot of stress and a lot of work and a lot of lack of sleep and then you know ?, I would go to the ER and have an 11 o'clock to 7 a.m. shift. m. at night and I would have a quadruple espresso, a giant chocolate chip cookie and a half pint of ice cream and I would get in the car and drive to work and it would probably last until five in the morning.

I wish it was enough if I could take a nap. And I did for years. And so, between that stress, between difficult stress. in my life in terms of my marriage and also this underlying mercury toxicity that men experienced at its peak when I had a serious intestinal infection that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back and ended up cascading down into years and years of I was trying to figure this out and had terrible diarrhea from sibo bacteria overgrowth. My muscles were getting damaged. My immune system was deregulated. I started to get sores on my tongue.

Rational in my body. Autoimmune antibodies. My liver function increased. I mean all my lab testing. I looked terrible and I was a mess, uh, and doctor after doctor told me, "Well, you're depressed, take Prozac or you're anxious, take Xanax or you can't sleep, take ambien or you know it's like I'm that and I memory". and I started getting weird fasciculations and all kinds of weird symptoms and my muscles were twitching and my muscle enzymes were very high, which means my muscles were damaged and I remember going to Colombia and seeing these top-notch neurologists who were experts in this type. of something and they ordered a test called an emg, which is not fun, they essentially stick giant needles into your muscles and then send electrical currents to see what's going on and this guy was an old British doctor who was joining the test and he said oh, you've been benign fasciculations, which means your muscles twitch, but it's not serious, it's not like that, because it could have been ALS and uh and uh and he says off the record that this is not normal like there's no such thing. like benign fasciculations you don't have ls, but it's something else you know, and that was even before I discovered the mercury thing.

I just didn't know what was going on. I was searching and searching so I grabbed a couple. It took me years to discover the mercury issue before I could get better. Which was part of that process of change that was also the introduction for you to the world of functional medicine. How did you start to see things differently and then start? treating you well that was always a little weird, I mean, you always know, I studied nutrition in college and I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I was interested in holistic health. I didn't remember that then um and I was always exploring the edges I studied ancient healing systems, Chinese medicine, so I always had a different framework than what I came from when I went to medical school and then when I got a job at Canyon Ranch, it was just when i got sick and i met a a woman named kathy swift who is a nutritionist there and she told me you have to come to this jeffrey bland conference and i told her ok so i went to hear this guy speak and i listened to him and I thought this guy is a genius or he is a lunatic and if what he is saying is true, it means that everything I learned needs to be reexamined, questioned and reimagined and I need to prove it to myself and my patients, so I said I'm going to do it. try because if he's right he's a game changer if he's wrong he's just a crazy guy who's promoting a bunch of stuff that's kind of dumb and it turns out he was right and the rest is history and that's when we really started to Diving into functional medicine at Canyon Ranch, we had a great incubator where we could spend hours with patients, I could delve into all this stuff, they could learn everything they were willing to do, so it was really a great incubator and then I kept going down. down that rabbit hole and I was healed and I began to heal thousands and thousands. of patients, so what was one of the first things and we're going to touch on your story, but these are also things that people can come away with when it comes to their own story, so it was one of the first things that you did when came into your diet you're eating double espresso chocolate chip cookie you know you had all this sugar in your diet what was one of the first things you did when it came to your diet uh well I literally had to do an elimination night because The mercury not only affected my brain, it also affected my intestine, which by the way are totally connected, there it is called your second brain, there are more neurotransmitters in your intestine than in your brain, there are more nerve endings in your intestine than in your brain, it's actually quite fascinating and my gut was a mess, so I developed leaky gut, I developed sibo, which didn't even exist at the time, bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine, fungal overgrowth, I would eat anything and my stomach would just explode. like a balloon as if it had gases.

It just wouldn't come out and I felt like they had me, you know, like some kind of giant tire inflator that just blew up my intestines and it was painful and difficult and I had diarrhea and I digested the food, my stool and it was just a disaster, like that. that I literally had to drastically change my diet to be able to tolerate any food, so I used turkey, broccoli, and brown rice for a year just to calm my system. It didn't really help me get rid of all my symptoms, but it just helped them not be as bad and until I got rid of the mercury my gut couldn't heal and it's not like you're necessarily recommending the turkey brown rice diet to others. people, you're just talking about what Am I just saying that my system was so unregulated that I couldn't eat anything without causing a rash or my eyes turning black like a raccoon's or a swollen tongue or my whole system was just in? bad condition and in order for me? just reducing my diet to them, the simplest foods that weren't going to cause reactions, I had to really simplify my diet, so that's what you did so, if you were your patient today, what would you do for that person in that same situation? when?

It got to the topic of diet, if I had had myself as a doctor when I started this I would have gotten better a lot faster, I wish, but I literally had to drag myself to find out and that was very difficult because not only was I sick, but it was very hard on my brain. work, so I literally had to do it, even though my brain was barely working, I still tried to learn and concentrate enough to try things and it was very difficult, it was really like trying. I liked it, you know,coming out of a very deep hole and a black hole and it was difficult because I didn't have the full capacity of my mind, so I started learning things and I started incorporating things. very slow and it took me several years before I realized that I had mercury poisoning and I ended up at some kind of functional medicine conference and I met a guy on a plane who was a naturopath and he said, Well, come to my office because maybe i can help you.

I told him what's going on, so he did this machine, this electrodermal exam that sounds like total nonsense, but it's about looking at the bioenergetics of different meridians and different electrodes, uh, electromagnetic frequencies on your skin, which they are. there and he said, well, it looks like you have metal toxicity. I'm really fine and then I went to my friend Mark David and told him that he was sitting at his house. I asked him: can you do a hair analysis and see what happens? I lifted it up and it took some hair and we sent it up and it was really high and then I did a challenge test and I found out it was at a level that you know, I've done it.

I've probably done 20,000 of these tests in the last three years and it was probably in the top 10 20 tests I've ever seen in my life of the worst levels and then that's when I started detoxing, but it was very difficult because I didn't have a sheet road, I was just In a way, we discovered things that we didn't even understand what sibo was back then, we didn't understand a lot of things that we didn't know now, we didn't have a lot of the tools that we have now, so that would probably be a lot better, a lot faster, then you mentioned mercury.

You know that mercury is part of these environmental toxins that exist and can come from many different sources. We'll talk about that in a second, but mercury is part of, you know, a ton of chemicals that are in the environment, like these pufas, always chemicals that are there, we have mold that can be environmental toxins with all the floods and the buildings we have, right? I think people are paying more attention to this topic than you've ever seen before about how environmental toxins can play a role in things like brain inflammation. Yes, I think there is more literature on the role of environmental toxins in neurodegenerative diseases and autism, and I add. depression, so there's more and more science around this, so I have a lot of hope, but I think it's still largely ignored.

I think people aren't really trained in medical school to understand other toxins besides acute, so low-level chronic toxicity. The toxicity that eventually overwhelms your system is simply not something that is even in the field of vision of traditional doctors. For example, I recently had this patient who had an autoimmune disease, but she had very high levels of lead in her blood and the highest level of lead in me. I had seen it in any patient in 30 years and it was causing all kinds of cognitive symptoms and also inflammatory symptoms and you know, traditional doctors don't know how to look for that and do tests, they can do a blood test, but they rarely do that, but Even if the blood test is normal, you can still have a lot of toxins stored if you are not currently exposed, so if you don't, for example, if you don't fish for three or six months, your blood levels will increase.

Be good, but you could have tons of levels stored in your body. I remember reading a New York Times article about a group of soldiers who headed to the Cleveland Clinic and can you tell that story? Yeah, well, you know, special forces guys are really not weak, you know these guys are Navy Seals that stay in ice water for three hours and you know, you run a hundred miles, I mean, these guys are just super human and there was a whole group of these guys that were really sick and they were being kind of dismissed by the department of defense and the va and one of them came to the Cleveland clinic and I said well, let's look at your story, what's going on, you have problems cognitive, you can't concentrate, you're depressed, you're overweight, your metabolism is bad, you have all these other symptoms, hey, let's see what's going on, so I told him what do you do, he says, well, I'm an explosion expert, I make things explode. and I teach other people how to do it and we do it. in closed buildings and when you blow things up and make bombs and weapons, you release lead mercury into the air and they are there, in a closed space with poor filtration, they breathe it in to do this long enough and you start to become poisoned and they went in and they were poisoned and I was able to help these people improve.

It was really quite miraculous and one of the stories in the New York Times was about a soldier who went, I think, to Mount Sinai, where they have a leading expert who uses a very specific technique, it's the only research that looks at lead levels in bones, which is the best kind of measure of total lead in the body, and this physician scientist at Mount Sinai said, look We see this, we can measure it, but we never see it go down, but when these patients came back to me after they had been treated, not only did they improve clinically but their bone lead levels decreased.

I've never seen this before. and of course you've never seen it before because most of us were never trained on how to detox heavy metal patients, but when you know what to do you can remove the metals and these people get better, so now we have a whole group of the people who work with us or the department of defense and the danga special task force to incorporate these ideas into the va and the department of defense health care system, so before we get back to neuroinflammation in general and brain health in general, let's just put a button on the The issue of mercury and lead for most people may not necessarily be the first thing they consider, unless they work with a functional medicine doctor.

Most people listening ask, "Do I have lead?" It's an important topic to pay attention to, it's probably something that you need to be guided down the path of working with a trained professional who knows that area and I think it's important to say look at brain disorders, whether it's mental disorders. mood, anxiety, depression, is the intention of cognitive disorders such as autism or the spectrum, whether neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's Parkinson's, there are many factors that drive these problems and we must analyze them all: mercury It's just one of them, they're just one of them. common pathways of multiple insults, so if you take 10 people with depression, there may be 10 different causes, for some it might be metals, another might be low vitamin D or the fact that they took antibiotics and ruined their microbiome or Maybe it's because they are taking an acid blocker and have low levels of vitamin B12 or maybe they have a gluten intolerance and have developed antibodies to the thyroid, which causes depression, so there are many ways to get to the same end. disease so I always say just because you know the name of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you just because you have a label doesn't mean you know the cause and the problem with modern medicine is what we call the name blame entertainment game le we name the disease oh you have a bad mood you are crying all the time you are not interested in eating you do not want to have sex you cannot sleep you want to commit suicide oh I know what is happening to you you have depression but that is not the cause of your symptoms depression is not it's the cause of your symptoms it's the name of your symptoms and then we blame the name for the problem oh the reason you have these symptoms is because you're depressed and the treatment is an antidepressant so we call it, blame the entertainment instead of what I call thinking and linking, which is where we start thinking about the cause, not just waiting, you know, waiting for people to take medications to see what happens, is actually a very important thing. understand that the same diseases can have many causes and the same causes can create many diseases, so mercury could cause autoimmune diseases, it can cause intestinal problems, it can cause depression, it can cause Alzheimer's, it can cause autism, but not all cases of autism or depression or Alzheimer's is caused by mercury, so you have to think in this kind of framework just because you know that the name of the disease doesn't mean what's happening to the two of you.

One cause can create many diseases and one disease can have many causes. it's a really different framework for understanding human biology. Let's go back to one of the first things you talked about, which was sugar. Help us really understand how sugar is so deeply tied to this whole field of neural inflammation and poor brain health. What is that sugar? it's actually working in the body, okay, you have a couple of hours, I spent my life studying this and I'm going to try to synthesize it, but sugar is not necessarily bad if you have a cookie or if you have a little bit of this for that.

Once in a while it's not going to kill you, it's the dose we have, historically we used to have 22 teaspoons a year when hunters collect, that means if we're lucky we find a honey, like a honey hive, and we can get the honey or you. We know we could find some berries in the summer and get some sugar, but historically we didn't have sugar as part of our diet in the 1800s we had 10 pounds of sugar per person which was still a lot and now in 2020 we have about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year, so sugar, when you take it at that pharmacological dose, is a poison and it does several things, like it ruins your microbiome, so it fertilizes all the bad bugs that create inflammation and then that creates a gut permeable and that creates neuronal inflammation, it also drives a process in the body called insulin resistance, which means that your body is resistant to the effects of insulin, it's like the boy who cried wolf, you eat a lot of sugar and starch and your Insulins increase and get higher and higher and the cells become resistant to insulin, so you need more and more insulin, but the consequence of that increase in insulin is that more fat is stored in abdominal fat and belly fat. , and those fat cells are not there to hold on.

Your pants are a very special type of fat cells. They're not like the fat on your butt or your thighs or whatever. They're very active organs. They produce hormones. They produce cytokines. Have you heard of the greed cytokine storm? They produce all kinds of inflammatory molecules. such as il-6 uh il1 and tumor necrosis factor alpha. These are very powerful inflammatory molecules that come from fat cells, which drives systemic inflammation throughout the body and neuroinflammation occurs. Third, we now know that in Alzheimer's. disease in which there is a big problem with glucose metabolism and its resistance to insulin in the brain for many patients, not all Alzheimer's is a rest of the brain, but now they call it type 3 diabetes because of the impact of resistance to insulin in the brain, so there are many ways and pathways through which this causes a problem and I'm not saying never have sugar, of course I have sugar, it's just what the overall balance of your diet is. .

Is this a staple food? Is this a daily product that you consume? drink for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I mean, in America we have sugar for breakfast, lunch, dinner, it's in our cereal, it's in our salad dressings, it's in ketchup, I mean, There is more sugar per serving of tomato sauce than in two two-age cookies. oreo cookies, so we have to get kind of real and eliminate all the hidden sugar from our diet that I would love to give you. It was very kind of you to share your own testimony earlier and we'll talk about some of the things that worked for you. a couple more case studies from your practice of people you've worked with let's start with the topic of depression first, any case studies that come to mind, well, you know, I remember this patient who was severely depressed, she had Just over 30 years old and she was an executive. trainer and she was really struggling and she had crippling depression, she also had sinus problems that were untreatable, she was overweight, she was very bloated, she had a lot of intestinal problems, she had tons of yeast overgrowth and she was kind of miserable, uh, and she came to see me and I looked under the hood and discovered that I had a lot of inflammation in my body that was secondary to high levels of mercury.

This patient had very high levels of mercury like 300, which is mine, it was 187. This was not out of the ordinary and the mercury was causing weight gain because it is a metabolic toxin, it was causing intestinal dysfunction because it poisons the intestine , caused yeast overgrowth, which is because mercury causes yeast overgrowth and caused her depression, so I systematically treated her by cleansing her intestine with yeast by cleansing the mercury her sinuses improved, she lost weight her depression disappeared and it took several years to eliminate so much mercury from her body, but I just saw her afterof more than 10 years. years and it's amazing that he's still doing very well, so the beauty is that you can take care of people with really intractable problems if you know how to navigate to the cause, which is what functional medicine does, you can really make a big difference for these patients. about a child or children with, you know, a brain disorder, someone who has a case study that you worked with before, well, I have a case of autism, it's a long story, but I have seen children with autism completely improve using this approach because When you look at the brains of autistic children or people with Down syndrome, they are inflamed, there is a whole immune system in the brain called microglia and they can create an inflammatory process in the brain and on MRIs you literally see big, swollen brains in these.

When kids do autopsy studies of kids with autism for a car crash diet or something like that, they'll see that their brains are full of these inflammatory cells and they're inflamed, so the question is what's causing that inflammation and kids with autism? Autism is like the canaries in the coal mine. This child I saw was 22 months old when he started having symptoms. We had regressive autism and I knew a lot of antibiotics from the beginning. You hear the same story. Cesarean sections and breastfeeding. Early antibiotics. and then you know, maybe get vaccinated when they're sick. I'm not saying vaccines cause autism, I'm just saying it may be part of the mix that causes a dysregulated gut and immune system to go haywire and the entire vaccine field. which is fascinating, which is watching how individuals respond differently to vaccines, so this child had terrible intestinal symptoms, sticky, smelly poop, you know, he didn't talk at two and a half, he couldn't look at you. eyes, it was just a mess with all the classic symptoms of autism, the doctors told me, you know, give them some behavioral therapy, good luck and you know, eventually he'll end up in an institution because he had very severe autism, so everything I did was what I normally do.

Did I do my analysis of what are the factors that cause diseases? What are the factors needed to help you thrive and be healthy? What is missing? What do you need to get rid of the basic functional medicine approach? We found out that he had a terrible bowel movement. three species of yeast, he had leaky gut, he had bacterial overgrowth, he had massive nutritional deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc, magnesium and B vitamins b6 b12 and he also had a significant amount of mercury in his system. We started treating these things, we got rid of the metals in the system, fixed his gut, killed the bad bugs with antibiotics and fungus and reset everything, gave him all the nutrients he needed and B12 shots and this kid literally became normal. and I thought, "This is crazy because I learned that autism is not reversible." That doesn't mean that all children will respond this way because there are many factors and I have seen children with autism who have more problems solved than for example, genetic and I look at all their lab tests, they are normal.

I guess I don't know what to do because they are normal. So there is a way to navigate the field of brain health by looking at all of these. factors and I have had children with additions who completely normalized simply by giving them the things they need for their bodies in their brains to thrive. Let's do another one and that's the topic that you shared about Alzheimer's before and kind of Alzheimer's. Dementia, all neurodegenerative diseases that more and more people suffer from. You had a patient who came to you and was a referral about who was a gentleman who ran a company and was thinking about retiring early because his brain was so messed up.

Talk to us about that, yeah, he was seven years old and you know he was in the book. The ultramine solution was one of those cases where I had to rethink everything about my wife. She brought it. She said my husband is basically. non-functional, he's the CEO of our company or a family health business, now he sits alone in a room, depressed and demented, and uh, the kids don't want to be around him, the grandkids are afraid of me, they just don't I am the human that I was. You do anything, I think I don't know, let's try it, from the perspective of functional medicine, the beautiful thing about this is that no matter what disease you have, you treat the system, you normalize the function, hence the word functional medicine and see what happens and usually the illnesses get better, it turned out that this man had a lifelong history of intestinal problems, he had irritable bowel, a terrible overgrowth of bacteria, he was on a drug called stellazine for 30 years because his intestine was a disaster and it's an anti - a psychotic tranquilizer drug that calmed his gut, which was kind of surprising.

He also had the apoe44 gene, so he had some genetics set up for this, which is the genius of Alzheimer's. He also had genes that affect his B vitamins called methylation and he had a very high Homocysteine, which is an important nutritional

mark

er of folate or B6 or B12 deficiency and when you look at the data, if your level is above 14, you have an increase of 50 in Alzheimer's, I also had significant heavy metals and that's not my intention. I'll be harping on heavy metals, but they are a major factor in a lot of brain damage and are one of those things your doctors don't know how to look for.

They don't have a test. They don't diagnose. I know how to treat it so it's really a problem, you need to see a functional medicine doctor and he lived in Pittsburgh and all my Pittsburgh patients are mercury poisoned. Why, because American steel is there? All steel plants use coal to make steel. Ash is often used in Pittsburgh to cover the roads from ice in the winter to put on the fields, it is in the air pollution and its level was off the chart, plus it had a mouth full of mercury so we did a aggressive medical treatment that fixed his heavy metals, fixed his gut, optimized his nutritional status and he also had prediabetes so he's a skinny fat guy, he looked skinny but he actually had this little belly and he was prediabetic and we had him on a low level. starting the sugar diet cured him for some reason, so he had vitamin B issues, he had gut issues, he had metal issues, he had some resistance to prediabetes and we fixed all of that and he went from completely non-functional to being back on administration. his business engaged with his family and friends and reversed the cognitive symptoms he had, it was truly a miracle and the neurologist I sent him to at Harvard to do all the imaging, brain scans and everything we couldn't do was very impressed.

Because of the results, he then founded a center for brain health at Harvard, so you know, it's amazing what you see happen with these patients. As you mentioned, sometimes a person may need to work with a functional medicine doctor, but many times people can take action and move in the right direction even through a little bit of self-guided testing and in some cases at home, so I want talk about testing and is there any testing available? You mentioned genetics, for example, you also mentioned. uh you know, omega-3s and getting more of them in your diet is like a simple at home test that people can do, we have no affiliation with them and you can see that they are omega-3s, so it gives some of these en- home tests and your general thoughts on them and whether they can be part of the pieces of the puzzle for people to figure out how to get to the root causes that are happening with them, well, it's interesting, I see a lot of companies popping up that They focus on home health tests that focus on giving access to their data to people who are creating companies that allow people to start making diagnoses for themselves and be part of a kind of self-care process to which You often know we give up. to our doctors, so there are many things we can do ourselves.

I think people should be empowered with their health information, they should be empowered with their diagnostic tests, they should be sold their tests are fine, they'll see it later and they'll come back next. year and you can really start to look at some of these things. The current landscape of self-testing is limited now, but there are things you can do about food sensitivities. There are things you can do about hormones. There are things you can do about yourself. I know gut testing, so there are things that are starting to emerge. I don't think we're there yet for everyone.

There are genetic tests like 23andme so people can get an idea of ​​what to do, but what would be most exciting for me is. some of the companies that are creating 360 solutions, whether it's asking diagnostic questions, they're walking you through what you need to do and how to fix these things. I think we're not there yet, but we'll get there and what do you think about continuous glucose monitors and their ability to be a professional part of the process of people figuring out what diet is right for them? So before you measure your blood sugar level, you have to have a blood test with a normal needle or have a finger prick test which is annoying and painful and you have to use a machine.

They've developed these new technologies called continuous glucose monitors, which are little patches that you put on your skin with a tiny little needle that goes into your skin. There are even more advanced ones. the ones that come out are going to be like piercing your skin, you don't even have to put a needle in and then measure your sugar continuously so you can see what affects your blood sugar, what makes it go up and down and you can tell oh wow , I'm eating this if I eat this if I eat a plum my sugar goes crazy but if I ate a blueberry it doesn't, or if I ate this, you know, food this or that way affects every time I have a glass of wine before my food is much worse than taking it with my food, so you start learning about your own biology and what's really interesting is that it's not uniform, so for example there's something called the glycemic index or glycemic load, but it really depends on the person, if you look at a study, for example, done in Israel, they looked at the same foods in different people and depending on their microbiome, their blood sugar levels were quite different.

That's just one variable of the microbiome, but there are many other variables. genetic variables, nutritional status variables, etc. that will affect your metabolism, so learn how your body works and get continuous glucose monitoring as a super useful and personalized way to identify what works for you and what doesn't, so I am a big fan, let's talk about supplements, there are many companies advertising that this supplement is the best thing out there for brain health. What are the real supplements that have a strong evidence base to support brain health on top of all the basics? lifestyle things and what they are, maybe we should be a little skeptical or maybe be careful when it comes to a category, so they're called supplements, not replacements, so if you're eating a bad diet, you're not doing much exercise. of stress, not sleeping exposed to toxins and your micropumps are a disaster, you know that you are not really going to see a big impact and you know that you really have to consider how to address the factors that are causing the imbalance that we talked about and then when you start to put these ingredients in the body can really respond well, so the most important one is dha for the brain, which is docosaccinoic acid, it's an omega-3 fat that comes from fatty fish and you get it from algae, that would be my number one there.

There are really important cascades around B vitamins and detoxification that are important. These are genes that affect the metabolism of B6 and B12 folate and also glutathione, so taking B6 B12 and folate is very important for the brain. Magnesium is also very important for the brain and helps deal with anxiety. helps stimulate a receptor called nmda in the brain which calms the type of overexcitement that occurs in the brain and leads to inflammation, oxidative stress, vitamin b, fish oil, vitamin d, magnesium, these are staple foods for the brain , so let's get into some questions. from our community and starting with the first one, what are the best foods for brain health, so you already mentioned a few, but maybe you can expand on this a little bit more and add some additional ones that you didn't get a chance to talk about.

I'm sure, so the categories are omega-3 fats, other good fats and polyphenols, um, and there's a whole category of other things that can be useful, so in terms of omega-3 fats, fatty fish is really important, We talk about things. such as olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, excellent for the brain. Walnuts look like a brain, a kind of brain food. They have good levels of omega-3 fat.Also, the eggs are really amazing, so the eggs have been wrapped wrong. You need to make sure they have been pasture raised. eggs because those yolks have a lot more nutrients and polyphenols and the reason they are dark yellow instead of this pale yellow that we see in most modern eggs is because of all these plant compounds that give it its power, it also has choline which is super important for the brain because one of the neurotransmitters is acetylcholine and you need choline to help your brain function properly so it's really great in terms of the brain so I think eggs are a great food for the brain, we also have all the berries they contain.

They're great because they have these kinds of compounds called proanthocyanidins, which are powerful antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, dark leafy greens, also very important for things like vitamin D, sorry, vitamin K and folate, lutein, a lot of other compounds. which are great for the brain and of course Turmeric, which is a spice that we use a lot in Indian cooking, but it's a wonderful, powerful anti-inflammatory that has really been effective for the brain, so those are some of the best that I think of, there are some, although others that maybe We're thinking of something like green tea, which has a lot of catechins, uh, theanine, which is calming for the brain, so there are a lot of benefits of the next question in the community, what is the role of coq10 in the brain?

Well, this is a big rabbit hole, so one of the things that people need to understand is that your brain is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the brain. We've heard statistics that you know five percent of your brain about body weight or something like that or maybe less. Three pounds, so I guess it's like a fraction of a percent, but it uses up 25 of the body's energy because it's so busy and in every brain cell there are tens of thousands of mitochondria, which are the energy factories in the cells that you need. it actually runs your brain and if you have low energy in your brain, you have Alzheimer's, you have autism, you have Parkinson's, you have all these things that are really an energy deficit, then the question is how do you generate energy in the brain, they are all The things we've talked about so far, but there are certain nutrients that are so critical to reviving and helping the mitochondria function better.

Coq10 is one of them, but there are many more carnitine coq10 ribose enzyme cysteine ​​and there is a whole cocktail of supplements mitochondrial lipoic acid B vitamins niacin riboflavin that are so critical for producing energy, so think of your energy cells as having a line production where they take food and oxygen and convert them into energy that your body uses. That production line has many steps and each step requires nutrients and if you are deficient in any of those nutrients, you become dysfunctional in terms of energy production, which has all these downstream consequences in terms of not just brain health. but of all aspects of your health and aging, which is why taking a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements is really important.

There is a woman named Suzanne Go, who presented grand rounds at the cleveland clinic, who is a Harvard Oxford-trained pediatric neurologist, a brilliant woman who published in the New England Journal, covered all the major journals, and has performed fascinating MRI studies. functional magnetic analysis analyzing images of mitochondria in autistic children and found that there is a subset of children who have really poor energy metabolism in their brains, no wonder they can't connect, concentrate, pay attention to anything, so she gives them a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements and these children improve, that does not mean that all children with autism improve with mitochondrial supplements, it is those children who have that particular pathway and that deficit, right?

Remember I said just because you know the name of what you have, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you if you have autism it just means you don't have social skills, you may not be talking, you have repetitive behaviors, there are certain descriptions we give to behavior. , but we're not talking about the cause, so you know when. You see these studies that aren't even citations of functional medicine studies, they're conventional medical journals, but they use functional medicine principles of how you create energy properly, so the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine is often It's about conventional medicine. stop the suppression of the inhibitory pathways, the anti-drugs, the antibiotics, the anti-inflammatories, the blockers, the beta-blockers, the calcium channel blockers, or we have the inhibitors, the ace inhibitors, so we inhibit, block and anti-everything instead to optimize and improve function, which is why functional medicine uses compounds.

They help the body do what it is supposed to do naturally, which is how it produces energy naturally. You have all these different compounds in your diet and supplements that you can take that help these pathways, so when you improve function there really aren't any side effects. It's actually about using the body's natural pathways to optimize your health. What about the role of caffeine in the brain and body? Well, bad thoughts, okay, okay, so caffeine, well, yes, caffeine gives alertness, concentrates attention, but often you get a crash, so it creates a temporary effect. it increases focus and energy, but then it depletes adenosine in your cells, which depletes energy and you'll often crash afterwards, so depending on your genetics, your ability to metabolize caffeine, how quickly you are, how slow you are, will affect you differently there.

There are other compounds in coffee and tea, which is why I often say that, unfortunately, coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet because Americans have such a bad diet that there are no other antioxidants because 70 60 are processed foods, that doesn't mean you should drink a lot of coffee for the antioxidants, but it is a source of antioxidants and polyphenols and may have benefits for the brain. The same goes for tea catechins and other polyphenols in green tea and other teas, they can actually have beneficial effects on inflammation, oxidative stress detoxification. They can be very helpful, but I think consuming too much caffeine is probably not a good idea, so let's recap here when it comes to improving our brain health and the things we can do today, starting today, like steps one, two and Three, what are you doing?

I want to share with our audience here as we begin to wrap up today's master class. Well, I think the first thing that people understand is that they need to learn how their brain works, what makes it thrive and what damages their brain, and they need to systematically review their lives and

reduce

or eliminate the things that damage their brain and add the things that They help your brain, so one of the things that are the worst things that damage your brain sugar and starch processed foods stress lack of exercise lack of sleep those things can be fixed by anyone without consulting a doctor, and then there are things that the brain needs to function, you need a lot of good fats, a lot of omega-3s, you need a diet rich in polyphenols, these colorful plant compounds, you need a diet rich in certain nutrients like magnesium and vitamin D and B vitamins, leafy green vegetables , colorful fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, you should make sure you exercise because it is one of the best things you can do for your brain, meditate, do yoga, make sure you get eight hours of sleep, these are simple things you can do and there are a lot more depth on how you can even go down the rabbit hole, you know, balancing your circadian rhythms and light therapy and various types of what we call hormetic therapies, which are therapies that give your body stress, but then it responds by creating a healing response, so it could be heat and cold, it could be that you know certain types of exercise, there are ways to stimulate the body to repair and heal, so even you know more. therapies that people can think about for their brain, whether it's regenerative therapies like ozone exosomes, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, these are all things that are coming that can be really helpful in repairing and recovering the brain, but for for most people the basic ones work great and are really things you don't need a doctor for, well you get a whole two part series on brain health.

I make a broken brain, one you make and a broken brain too, and people can sign up and watch it. It's on their website at dr.

hyman

.com and if you sign up for dr

hyman

plus you'll get access to that and your longevity docuseries and a bunch of other really cool stuff including premium episodes of your podcast so that's a great recommendation for where the people below. Check this. It was a fantastic masterclass and a fantastic breakdown of a topic that interests so many people. I'll pass it over to you again to conclude today's episode.

I think you know, we just have to have hope because we're seeing such an epidemic of brain disorders um, I mean, anxiety and depression are rampant in our society, uh, and a lot of this is driven by our diet, we're seeing an increase. Dramatically in neurodegenerative diseases, we see skyrocketing levels of ADHD and autism and often people think these are fixed. and I just want people to go home thinking that these are problems that can be solved and that if we understand how our bodies work we make the most of the good that people can recover from even the most difficult conditions now there are surviving Alzheimer's survivors of autism, I mean, I've never heard of that before, so I want people to walk away with hope and understand that they need to focus not only on their overall health and well-being, but also on how to create a healthy lifestyle for themselves. the brain, which, by the way, also solves everything else.

What are the top three things people are doing? The fundamental factors contributing to the chronic inflammation epidemic we face today. I'm going to address those things, but first I don't know if people really know what. Inflammation is, let's break this down so people know that if you have a sore throat, it's red, painful, swollen, and, um, that's inflammation and it hurts. The old description of inflammation was neck pain flushing and tumor, so tumor is swelling, rhubarb is redness, pains. and um, the color is heat, so we have to understand that those are the cardinal characteristics of inflammation, but then you're fine, I don't really feel inflamed, my throat doesn't hurt, my joints aren't swollen, it doesn't have a rash What do you mean by inflammation?

It is what we call hidden or silent inflammation and that is the problem. It's the inflammation that we don't see, that we can't feel, that is causing all the chronic diseases that we see today, heart disease. cancer diabetes Alzheimer's depression not to mention obviously autoimmune diseases allergies and so on, we know there is inflammation in them, but I mean, do people think that being overweight is an inflammatory state? Do people think that diabetes is an inflammatory state if you don't think of depression as an inflammatory state, no, but inflammation is causing all those chronic diseases, so going back to your question, what are the main drivers of inflammation?

Well, it is something that has been a recent phenomenon in traditional medicine and has been almost always ignored, except by the functional ones. medicine what is your gut your microbiome turns out that 60 to 70 percent of your immune system is in your gut why is it there well it's the place where you are exposed to all the foreign materials every day more than anywhere else the purpose Your immune system is identifying friends from foes and getting rid of bad things, so when you're eating pounds of foreign material, i.e. food, and you have three pounds of material in form, i.e. bacteria, there's a lot that handle, so the ability to It's very important for the gut to sense what it needs to absorb to keep things out that shouldn't be there, so having a healthy microbiome allows us to properly regulate our immune system and let in the nutrients that we need.

We need proteins, amino acids. acids fatty acids sugars and carbohydrates that we need the nutrients that we need but it keeps out all the bad stuff it's the first line of defense, the first line of defense, so when that barrier breaks down in the intestine, all of a sudden, your immune system is exposed to a c or more accurately exposed to a sewer and that starts to piss off your immune system and starts to create systemic inflammation so the microbiome is really important and we're just starting to understand how to identify what's out of balance there and how to correct the system traditional medicine is still a long way offbehind the eight ball in this functional medicine is way ahead by 30 40 years in understanding how to identify dysfunction in the gut how to fix a leaky gut how to

reduce

inflammation how to restore a normal microbiome now before we move on to the other two just to jump to the ancients knew a little bit about this yeah talk about it uh there's a famous ayurvedic quote that actually says if your gut is not healthy you're not healthy and if you want to fix a disease focus on the gut as this is has known for a long time.

Actually, this idea was not new. Eli Metchnikoff, in the early 20th century, was a scientist who first came up with the notion of the gut as a source. of chronic diseases, they had some outlandish ideas about how to deal with them, which was to remove your colon, which I would recommend, but they were on the right track, which is, problems in the gut microbiome cause systemic diseases and the solution is not to eliminate them . your colon is mixing with the intestine, but it's not something I knew and Hippocrates says you know that health is not health and that disease begins in the intestine absolutely, that was the first one you wanted to get into and what are the other ones? two that I want to mention and there are many of them that exist, but we are talking about the main three.

What are the other two you want to mention? The other big source of inflammation is our diet and not just any random thing in our diet, but the amount of starch and sugar in our diet that causes a dysfunction in our metabolism called insulin resistance is essentially like we become resistant to the effects. of insulin and our bodies will need to produce more and more insulin to regulate our blood sugar and that is because we are flooding our system with pharmacological doses of starch and sugar of about half a kilo per day per person, which has no historical precedents and insulin resistance causes the development of specific types of fat cells called adipocytes.

There are specific types of fat cells. in the gut around your abdomen, belly fat that produces a class of compounds called adipocytokines, cytokines that you may have heard of with covate or cytokine storm, these are the messenger molecules of your immune system and when they are produced many of these abdominal fat cells. By eating starch and sugar, the cause of excess insulin and insulin resistance creates systemic inflammation, so you literally set your body on fire. If you're overweight, if you have diabetes, if you have high blood pressure, if you have heart disease, if you have dementia, all of this is related to this phenomenon of too much starch and sugar and systemic inflammation.

We now know that, for example, if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation, the risk of heart disease is very low, but if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation. Those are the people who are at risk for heart disease, so when you start looking at inflammation in the body it's not what we can feel, but there are ways to measure through laboratory tests the amount of inflammation in our body and we're going to Get more and more sophisticated about this David Furman at Stanford, who is a scientist and doctor developed through newly available technologies, big data analytics, giant performance analytics where you can look at thousands and thousands of blood markers, I mean, come on to the doctor and we get 10. 20 correct lab tests 30 40 maybe 50.

There are thousands of molecules floating around your blood and most of them we completely ignore, so he said, "I don't care what we're measuring in "Actually, let's see what really matters," so he put in thousands. of these chemicals through analytical machines was correlated with the clinical history of the people and was able to find four biomarkers of inflammation and immune deregulation that are highly predictive of aging highly predictive of heart disease cancer diabetes Alzheimer's all these diseases so we We're going to get more and more sophisticated about our ability to look at inflammation, people want to know more about it, they can go to Edifice.

I think Edifice Health is the company that's actually marketing this test, but there are other tests that we like, like C-reactive protein, to help look at. inflammation, but insulin resistance is a huge driver of inflammation because it literally makes your belly burn and these fat cells just pump out tons of inflammation throughout your body. The third thing that's really important to understand is that stress is inflammatory. Chronic stress causes inflammation. In the body through a series of different mechanisms, stress makes you resistant to insulin, which will contribute to generating overweight and abdominal fat. I even want to say, I once had a patient where it was so clear that she had a daughter who was in Israel.

It was during the time of Infata, the uprising of a few decades ago and every day she was terrified that her daughter was going to die in some kind of bomb or some kind of attack during this Palestinian uprising and that's why she couldn't, she couldn't sleep, she was , was. She didn't even overeat, but she just gained all this weight and as soon as her daughter came back from Israel, she lost 40 pounds without changing anything, so sometimes stress can be a very big factor in insulin resistance and also affects your inflammatory response. and it creates a greater inflammatory response, so, and this is interesting, if you look at the data that we call sociogenomics, which is the ways that our social interactions cause changes in gene expression, you can have a conversation with someone and if they're in it goes into conflict with you if you object if you are having an emotionally charged negative interaction inflammation genes will be activated if you have a loving and connected conversation with someone genes that turn off inflammation will be activated so your mind, your food, your The brain is the most powerful pharmacy that exists and will drive inflammation or stop it just by your thoughts, so you have to look at that and that's something we haven't talked about much is how we master our minds, most of us are victims of the activity of our mind and We train our muscles, we train our body, we increase our metabolism, no one knows how to train their brain to actually function better from the perspective of being in control of their thoughts, and that's not an easy one, it's a completely different topic for a podcast.

How big a challenge the inflammation issue is. Really, put it in a sense of scale in terms of all the things the world is dealing with when it comes to health issues. Inflammation is directly related to these problems. It is probably the number one factor in all the misery we see in the world. There is a beautiful new book that was written by Raj Patel and Rupa Maria, who I heard on the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. It's called inflammatory and it's about the biological, social, economic and political consequences of an environment and a diet that has driven systemic inflammation throughout society and it's amazing when you start to look at it, you know that oppression is inflammatory and there is so much people oppressed and struggling in this society diet is inflammatory the social structures that we have are inflammatory and therefore inflammation when you look at all the problems that humans face, in terms of health, and even in terms of some of the problems socioeconomic, the inflammation is so great.

The driver and understanding how we calm that down is very important, one of the things he does, which I think is something that people don't understand. When you look at our society, we see so much conflict, so much division, so much hatred, so much intolerance. I don't remember it like that growing up, I mean, I just don't, I mean, the diet wars are terrible, the Democrat-Republicans don't work together in any meaningful way anymore, um, you know, we have a religious conflict, a political conflict, we . We have divisions in this country where we had a kind of takeover of the capital by a bunch of people who, you know, hoped to make the world a better place, but that wasn't really a very helpful act, so, why is that happening?

It turns out that your brain when it's inflamed doesn't work and all the things that we see as behavioral disorders like violence like depression, anxiety, mood disorders, the opioid crisis turns out a lot of these things are driven by inflammation in the brain. and What often happens is that the inflammatory process is a diet where we have changes in our microbiome because of our diet because of C-sections, antibiotics and toxins and all the things that damage the microbiome because of glyphosate, all of that leads to inflammation and when you have inflammation like in the body it disconnects the old limbic brain the reptilian brain the fight or flight response of the frontal lobe which is basically the adult in the room your executive function your higher self so when your higher self and your lower self are not talking to each other when your survival brain and your kind of mature, adult brain that makes sure you don't do, say or act in ways that are harmful or harmful to other people, that connection weakens or breaks, and so on. when you look for example, the studies on diets in prisons or in juvenile detention centers are so impressive because simply changing healthy foods, an anti-inflammatory diet for an inflammatory diet in prisons, reduces violent crimes by 56 percent.

He took an 80 percent multivitamin in juvenile detention centers. children are violent 91 reduction in violent behavior 75 reduction demonstrates 100 reduction in suicide rates in this group, which is the third leading cause of death in adolescent males and is reduced by one hundred percent simply by changing the diet why it works works because it cools inflammation in the brain, it's causing a disconnect between people's ability to have executive function, having the adult in the room and having the higher self come in and say "wow, maybe I shouldn't hit this person or maybe I should". Not cutting them or maybe I shouldn't shoot them or you know, maybe I shouldn't be in this life of violent opposition and I guess I don't know how much it has contributed to the division in our society over food, but I think it's a lot more than we think. and we've had David Promatter and his son Austin on the podcast talking about their book that describes this phenomenon and the science and neurology behind how our diet affects our brain and disconnects our limbic brain from our frontal lobe drives a behavior violent, disruptive and divisive.

Well, one of the unique things that's happening in the world today that's based on all the different things that you're talking about is that there are a lot of people that are getting rich creating this. inflammation, we have the food companies that are getting rich by marketing and selling high sugar foods to the public, we have the media that is literally making incredible millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars by generating inflammatory style news that They cause inflammation in people and create more stress. and advertising is about inflammatory products, right, about inflammatory products, foods and many other factors that also exist, so something unique that is happening in the world today that is important to highlight and that has never really been there before.

This level is that through really hijacking the media and using the media to grow these large companies we are now able to spread such rampant inflammation and there are very few, small groups of people that are getting dramatically richer from the process. Yeah, you know, I think you know a lot of things started with good intentions that had bad consequences right in the post-World War II era, we needed to expand agriculture to feed a hungry world, a growing population to produce a lot of calories. of cheap carbohydrates and starch and we did a great job. We did a great job.

The average American has 500 more calories available to eat than in 1970 and is eating them, which is why we are all so unhealthy. It was a good idea, but the unintended consequences have been devastating. just for human health in terms of diabetes and obesity, I mean, when I was born there was a five percent obesity rate, now it's 40. That's an eight-fold increase in obesity in my lifetime, but we've also created unforeseen consequences. for the environment and the climate and the changes in our biodiversity and the loss of species and the damage to the soil and our water systems because of the way we grow food, so we have created all these unintended consequences of the same way these food companies did.

We didn't actually design foods to create all these problems, but we are trapped in a system where they are trying to preserve the status quo so that they can maintain their market share and their profitability and they are trying to navigate and figure out how.change because the changing demand of the culture is changing, but you know, we have an enormous amount of money that goes into preserving the status quo how we grow food what we grow the processed food industry the marketing of food, I mean, we spend billions of dollars that the food industry receives they spent billions of dollars on bad food marketing and advertising and the worst thing is the food, the more money they spend on advertising uh and the worst thing is that hidden advertising is now really a problem and that's why these algorithms on these social networks lead you to more and more of the same, so if you click on one conspiracy, one conspiracy theory, you will get another 10 conspiracy theories, so I met these people who believe in all of them these strange conspiracy theories seemingly disconnected because that's the universe they live in.

We live in these self-reinforcing information bubbles that are driven by algorithms and algorithms are designed to give people things that they like to show them if they want a nice pair of shorts or a swimsuit that they like again. . intentional, well-intentioned, but the consequences now are like we let the genie out and it's out of control, so even the people who develop these systems, I mean, I don't think mark zuckerberg is evil or had a bad intention to create more division and Conflict and disruption in the world and violence. No, I don't think so, but I also think that the incentives now are to keep doing it and not stop, so we have to start analyzing what we are doing and create different forms of communications, media and social networks that are not based on these algorithms that tend to cause more disruption, more division, and are incentivizing the wrong thing.

I mean, one of the things that surprises me is forgetting all the ads on television that kids watch and they've spent about 10 billion dollars all there is there are 500 billion ads 500 billion ads in a year targeting kids about junk food on Facebook that's terrifying to me because parents don't even know about it no one it's like you can say oh don't watch TV kids or those commercials about fruit loops but they're all hidden things, it's everything, it's everything and everything is stealth, it's built into the games, there are free games for these kids on social media and they play these. games, but in the games they highlight McDonald's or Coca-Cola, they highlight these different types of food companies that are paying for it and it's really co-opting these kids' brains, it's taking advantage of their uh, their own free will in some way and I think That's what scares me the most is if they are usurping, if we do, through this economy of digital persuasion that uses algorithms to attack us in ways that appear to be things that we like, but in reality it keeps them out of control and so we have So finding a way to solve that, whether it's inventing parallel platforms that people can use where that's not happening on social media platforms or whether it's through regulation or legislation, this has become quite dangerous.

It's multifaceted but the most important thing is that we have to have a dialogue about it and even more important than that is that you, the person watching the person listening today, you have to be the CEO of your health, you have to be the CEO of your family's health. because ultimately you know regulation can do a lot, but it can only do so much. At the end of the day, we have to push education for ourselves and for our family and that's what this podcast and your work is about, so let's continue with the topic.

A patient with inflammation comes to you today, what are the signs and ways the patient says "ouch" that are an indication that they have rampant chronic inflammation that has taken over and taken over their body? It's not that difficult for almost anyone with any chronic illness, inflammation is a factor, um, and and, whether you have the typical things that we understand to be inflammation like autoimmunity, allergy, eczema, or skin disorders, or is it the silent inflammation that causes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer's, whatever. People with a chronic illness are often inflamed at some level, so my job is to navigate and figure out what's causing it, because when you get to the root of the inflammation you don't need to treat the illnesses directly.

I don't actually treat diabetes. I don't treat Alzheimer's, I don't treat heart disease, I don't treat cancer, I just change the biology of the body to normalize function, reduce inflammation, and as a side effect, these things go away and I think that's a really important concept. because if we don't understand that root cause medicine is the way we need to move forward, then we're going to be constantly launching all these new drug treatments and spending billions of dollars to address this, I mean they discovered that oh Alzheimer's is a disease brain inflammation, so what do you have to do right?

They did a whole study taking Advil, it didn't work and it caused all these side effects. Because? Because recently they didn't get to the root of the inflammation. A large study was published on aspirin. Doctors have been saying to take aspirin to reduce inflammation and prevent heart attacks. Well, if you read my articles over the years, I've always said it's a bad idea, maybe there are some people who would benefit, but not aspirin. a drug with no side effects and kills as many people as asthma or AIDS per year due to stomach bleeding gastrointestinal bleeding brain bleeding strokes hemorrhage so the recent study proved that sorry guys we were wrong.

I can't just take aspen to reduce inflammation and prevent heart attacks because it's going to kill you, it's more likely to kill you than the heart attack, so stop taking it, which was a big surprise because if you talk to any cardiologist or you talk to any primary care doctor. healthcare doctor, everyone was in agreement and I was a little surprised because I looked at the actual science behind this and I even looked at the risk calculator from the American College of Cardiology; In fact, there is a calculator on the American College of Cardiology website to indicate whether or not you would harm or benefit from aspirin and most people who take aspirin actually don't even qualify or didn't qualify based on the guidelines above. , now there are a lot of people who shouldn't even according to the above guidelines.

For those guys, we're going to take it, so I think it's backwards to say we're going to stop the inflammation with anti-inflammatories or immunosuppressants. I mean, they're talking about using medications like humera, which is a 50,000 a year anti-inflammatory. inflammatory medication used for autoimmune diseases for depression why because depression is inflammation in the brain the key is not to calm the inflammation when the medication is to get rid of the source of inflammation how does traditional and conventional medicine work ? Traditional and conventional medicine looks at and treats chronic inflammation like, how do you think it comes and then how do you decide how to address it?

You know, it's surprising to me that there really isn't a conversation about why, oh, we. we know alzheimer's is inflammatory oh we know depression is inflammatory we know heart disease is inflammatory we know cancer is inflammatory okay so we have to give him anti-inflammatory drugs no doubt why in the first place , your immune system is so angry with what it is creating. inflammation and we know a lot about it, it is not difficult, it is our diet, our inflammatory diet, it is stress, it is our microbiome problems, its triggers, which for example can be latent infections, allergens or toxins, all of these drive inflammation, so as a functional medicine doctor, my background is to be an expert in understanding toxins, allergens, microbes, stress and diet, because those are the things that cause inflammation and therefore each individual You have a different cocktail of things that don't work, but my job is to figure out what your particular triggers are and get rid of them. them and then help your body, on the other hand, calm inflammation, so there are a lot of things that cause inflammation, but there are many things you can do to reduce inflammation and it's not taking Advil, aspirin, steroids, any chemotherapy medicine or biological product. that costs 50 thousand dollars a year it's because of the simple things we know how to do food is anti-inflammatory medicine exercise is anti-inflammatory medicine sleep is anti-inflammatory meditation is anti-inflammatory yoga is anti-inflammatory and then there are a lot of supplements you can take to help reduce inflammation, like omega-3 fats, vitamin D, probiotics, zinc and all the phytochemicals that you can get in your foods that really help reduce inflammation, all the spices and all the colorful fruits and vegetables, so there's a lot. what you can do to increase inflammation the way we see now if you have something latent, if you have a lot of heavy metals or if you have a terrible virus in your gut or an overgrowth of bacteria or you have any particular sensitivity to gluten.

We'll have to deal with those things too, but for most people the basics work very well. Let's talk about those basics. You talked about foods and you talked about some of the foods that help and we'll talk a little bit more about them. That, but what are some examples of foods that could harm you? What are some foods out there that could

boost

or at least support the chronic inflammation process and why do they support so well? It's what we are doing. Eating what we don't eat well, that's why we eat too many inflammatory foods. Sixty percent of our diet in the United States is ultra-processed food and what's this talking about the things you see on the shelves?

What is an example because you already know one? What I've realized and what I want to break this down is that if you go to Times Square, you go here in Santa Monica or we're filming and you go up to most people and say, do you eat healthy? I'm going to say yes I eat healthy because everyone has a different definition of what that is or you ask someone if you eat a lot of processed foods and most people say no I don't need that much, a little bit here and there , so describe what are we talking about here?

In ultra-processing there are some staple crops that are supported by our entire government thanks to the farm bill and that are the raw materials for processed foods, corn, wheat and soybeans, and they have been turned into all kinds of weird things. products, corn is turned into all kinds of food additives and high fructose corn syrup, wheat is turned into highly pulverized flour, which is highly inflammatory, the oils that come from soybeans and corn are often highly processed and inflammatory, which is why we eat a lot of it. of ingredients that are derived from these staples in ultra-processed foods that we're not even aware of, so when you read maltodextrin or something like that on a label you don't know where it comes from, it's a corn byproduct from a science project in the factory uh, when you eat high fructose corn syrup, the same thing we eat ingredients that are made from staple crops, it's basically the same three ingredients made in all sizes, colored shapes of chemically extruded food-like substances, like that If you actually cover the packaging and look at the ingredients, you will literally see the same ingredients in almost every processed food we know, with a few small adjustments here and there, and you won't even be able to tell what it is by reading the ingredients list. that's an ultra-processed food if you buy a can of tomatoes and it says tomatoes water and salt you know what it is if the ingredient list is you know 14 15 35 elements um and half of them you can't pronounce you don't recognize them you wouldn't have them in your medicine cabinet or in your kitchen, then you shouldn't eat them properly.

I mean, why should we eat butylene hydroxytoluene or orthodextrin or all kinds of foreign compounds that aren't our natural food supply, so they're ultra-processed? foods and it's a huge component of our diet and it's highly inflammatory so it makes up 60 percent of calories on average and when you think about all the people who don't eat as many processed foods and the people who do, it could be 70 to 80 percent just when the average is a lot for all Americans it's around 60 and kids it's even worse it's 70 percent 70 for kids I think 67 something is scary to me so that's it What we should really focus on, not eating that causes inflammation and sugar and starch are number one, two and three, all the food additives that we eat are about five pounds of food additives a year and they can be inflammatory, for example, all thickeners,emulsifiers, things like carrageenan and gums that are used in processed foods, they often have something called microbial transflutaminase which is a gluten product that they use to hold foods together and all of these emulsifiers cause leaky gut, so they damage your intestine and when you have a damaged intestine, guess what the floodgates open as we talked about earlier in the podcast that you start.

When food proteins and bacteria proteins leak into your bloodstream, your immune system gets angry and creates this vicious cycle of inflammation, so removing all that weird stuff is really important if you read the label and you don't know everything. what's there. and you can't pronounce it, you wouldn't have it in your medicine cabinet, don't eat it, let's talk next about another category that is directly related to inflammation and that is sleep and one of the biggest drivers of sleep that is affecting so much. a lot of people are sleep apnea, talk about sleep apnea and its direct connection to inflammation for most people and how it can increase weight gain and a whole list of other things that are in there.

Reminds me of this guy, actually sleep apnea is basically where you have multiple episodes of stopping breathing at night, so you snore, you may stop breathing for seconds or minutes, your sleep is interrupted and then It's often undiagnosed because you're asleep and you don't know you're doing it, your partner may yell at you or yell at you or move you to another room or put the plugs in, but you can actually use devices, one of them is a cool little app called sleep cycle and just record your sleep on your phone and you don't need anything it's just you.

Put your phone next to your bed and you can have it on airplane mode even and it records your breathing, your sleep and your snoring, so you can see and hear your snoring from the app, so I know my stepdad snored a lot and he never believed it. He had severe sleep apnea and I literally recorded it on my tape recorder in the '70s because he didn't believe me, but you can hear him snoring like an elephant, you know? So it's very common, often associated with being overweight. having a thick neck with sometimes structural problems, a narrow palate, various things with the teeth, so you can have a thin habit, but there can be problems with the airway, there can be central sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea sleep, so it can come from your brain or your obstructive airways and what that means is those repeated awakenings during the night and decreased quality of sleep, it actually causes insulin resistance, it actually causes diabetes, it actually makes you crave more sugar and eat more sugar and carbs and you can often fix that. weight problems, diabetes or obesity unless you fix the sleep apnea and it reminds me of a patient I had when I was at Canyon Ranch who was a lawyer and he said look, I can't lose this weight, I'm 50 pounds overweight, right? can? help me, I'm fine, well, talking about your life, well, I'm a lawyer, I'm like, okay and I start talking about how you sleep well, okay and I said, well, I'm tired all the time, I said okay, what does it mean. oh yeah well I have to have a standing desk this is before stamp desks were possible or I mean we were popular as you know 25 years ago because if I don't, if I don't get up I fall asleep on my desk, I'm fine, well, how about we check for sleep apnea and he had terrible sleep apnea.

We gave him a treatment, a CPAP machine and he lost 50 pounds like that and his insulin resistance went away just by sleeping so sleep is so important for regulating metabolism and inflammation and you know we think snoring is kind of funny and we can hit our partner or laugh at our parents or grandparents, but really as a dear friend of both, uh, dr. steven lin, a dentist. in Australia and it says that snoring is choking, so you have to think of snoring as choking at night, so if you know if you are snoring or if someone else is snoring, you are choking and you are choking, and that prevents you from getting the correct amount of air and another version of that that is gentler is breathing through the mouth.

You've done a few episodes about this. I've done a few episodes about this. If you breathe through your mouth at night and not through your nose, which is how we are designed to, that is also a sign that you could have a mild form of sleep apnea that needs to be addressed because it is directly related to promoting inflammation in the body. Let's talk about another category of things that drive inflammation and that's our sedentary lifestyle tells us more about that, yeah, I mean, sitting is inflammatory as we sit here and do our podcast and that's why many of us We are struggling because when we do not move, we are actually increasing the poor. metabolic function that we have increases the risk of muscle loss increases the risk of insulin resistance increases the risk of chronic inflammation in our body, so being sedentary is a big risk of inflammation, on the other hand, getting enough exercise, but not too much, if you exercise too much If you are an ultramarathoner or a marathon runner, you create more oxidative stress and inflammation in the body, but if you exercise regularly, you can literally reduce inflammation in your body and that is one of the most important things, also of your diet, to regulate inflammation. you talked about stress when you sit down with your patients and talk to them about their lifestyle, what are the biggest contributors that you see over and over again, top level, what are the big drivers of chronic stress individually in patients, do you know what it is? it's the relationship it's the lack of meaning and purpose, like what are the things that exist that you see over and over again that are really the drivers of the stress that we're all dealing with is a great question, do you know why some people are more resilient? than others, why do people roll with the punches and others just get completely off center and one of the things that we use in our practice at the cleveland and lennox clinic and the ultra wellness center is called the ace questionnaire or adverse childhood events and it's essentially a set of 10 questions or so so you get a score that tracks trauma if you suffered abuse as a child if you were unsure just a full series of questions that help you understand if as a child you experience lack of security or worse abuse trauma incest etc. higher score the more risk of chronic disease you have, the more risk of inflammation you have, the more likely you are to have an autoimmune disease, to have allergies, to have a chronic illness, so looking at someone's childhood is very important and that impacts of trauma and I think we're just beginning to understand how widespread that is and you know, for example, one in four Americans is a victim of sexual abuse as a child, think about one in four Americans is like 80 million people, that's a lot. people okay, I wonder if that's the 80 million that have autoimmune diseases, I don't know, but it could be, and as we start to look at how we manage the inflammation response, that's the first place I start and then, and then.

I look at how people navigate their minds because your thinking plays a huge role in chronic illness and so if you can regulate your thoughts, if you can, your environment doesn't trigger you and trigger you constantly, if you can. having a level of equanimity that can be cultivated and developed through practice, that is what meditation, yoga and prayer do, and there are a whole series of practices of whatever calls to you that you can do and that really They help reduce the level of equanimity. stress on your system, if you don't learn to do those things, then you just have this absolute unregulated stress response that creates so many chronic diseases that keep you inflamed, so yeah, I mean, we have to take a look at the original. sources and we have to look at, you know how we navigate our lives and what our thoughts are like and what our relationships are like and what our community is like and there are many ways to figure that out and I think it's very important for people. to understand that they need to build the structures in their lives that are constantly fighting inflammation, so what is that to me?

They are the basic practices that I do. I meditate every day. I exercise. I follow an inflammatory diet. I take supplements that help my gut microbiome. stay healthy I make sure I have low levels of toxins that I'm exposed to I make sure I connect with the people I love build a community have deep relationships that's for me what I do to mitigate and discharge stress and inflammation because if you do you don't do it intentionally, it just builds up and it's hard because we live in a bubble so it's like being in the Truman show, we don't even know we're in it and we're just victims of or in the matrix and we don't know we're in it , so how do we get out of that and do well?

I'm going to pause for a minute and restart and I think it's a really important set. of practices that we can all do and it can be fun, it doesn't have to be difficult or stressful, one of my favorites is hot and cold therapies, so the steam and ice sauna is incredible for releasing stress, literally, your entire system will do it. A kind of reboot. I remember working in the dorm and you know we had a lit dorm where we only had to work 30 hours straight, not 36 hours. I would leave at noon the day after the call and drive to these hot springs. in California and I would soak in the hot springs and then I would go to the ice pool and the hospital was super hot and the ice was super cold and I was going back and forth and I just know all my fatigue, all my stress from working in the hospital and the call and the trauma would just disappear and I would like to restart and you know, now it exists, but back then we were a little strange, but it is so powerful that you have to learn for yourself one of those things that you can incorporate and that you like in your life daily and that help you regulate yourself.

Let's go back to the gut microbiome. You listed it as one of the main things that an altered gut microbiome or a dysregulated gut microbiome is one of the key factors of inflammation that you've had in your life on multiple occasions you've had a gut that's gone bad. We will not enter the entire trip. We made a couple of documentaries about it. If people want to see them, they're on drhymen.com. Sign up for a free trial, you can watch the documentary series on the longevity of the broken brain. We've talked about all of them, yes, but at a high level, what he was missing when his gut was dysregulated and how he started taking steps to fix it again.

I mean, you know, I didn't have the usual stuff, I was always a weirdo, so for me, the first time was mercury poisoning and mercury is powerfully harmful to the gut, it will bind to all the enzymes, it will cause leaky gut. and it creates bad bugs that grow and yeast overgrowth, so for me I developed, you know, chronic diarrhea, bloating, irritable bowel, bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth and that was really, really, really hard to treat. until the mercury lowered, that was my first foray into bad gut and then it hit me. to correct it after they removed the mercury and rebuilt my intestine and then about five years ago I had a bad tooth and ended up having a root canal, the root canal went wrong, they took the tooth out and the dentist, who was a holistic dentist, he told me, I better take this antibiotic and I'm fine and I was a little nervous about it and it's a particular antibiotic that's great for dental infections called clindamycin, but it's also the main cause of what we call c difficile, which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills 30,000 people a year, it's very difficult to treat and they are using fecal transplants to treat it, it cures almost 100 percent and the typical antibiotics that are used don't work as well, so I basically developed c difficile, which was a terrible intestinal infection colitis. and that caused colitis and then turned into inflammatory bowel disease.

He had 20 bloody stools a day. Intense pain. I mean, I just lost 30 pounds. It was bad and all my normal tricks didn't work. Because? Because my whole body. The system was so screwed up from the mold in my house and from this infection that took over me that even taking prednisone didn't work and I knew the next step was to take a biologic and I didn't want to do that so I started to figure out how to really I reset my system and sometimes you just need one powerful set of tools to get the body out of a stuck inflammatory cycle and from my experience in the science and what I understood, I use a combination.

Of the things that just changed my system almost immediately, one was ozone therapy, which was hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I use high doses of intravenous vitamins and vitamin C and also stem cells and those four things and exosomes, those four thingsThey really changed my system. stagnant inflammatory cycle, but that was weird and that's weird and with most people I don't need to do that, but I'm a weirdo, so I get the worst of it and then I have to figure it out and then you know. of learning how to make my body work better, one of the unique things that came out of that is that once your system went back to baseline and it was really bad, right, it was really bad, we've talked about that before, but once you got back to baseline, you went down this whole rabbit hole of how the power of phytochemicals, as you talked about earlier about phytonutrients, phytochemicals, these plant compounds, on a regular basis, can help you maintain this level in the that is found, so talk to Yes, so how is it possible that foods are actually information in this category of phytochemicals?

Yes, for decades we have known that prebiotic fibers are healthy and prebiotic foods are healthy. What is a prebiotic? It's something that feeds the good bacteria. It could be various types of fibers that are found in plant foods, special foods like artichokes, asparagus, bananas, Jerusalem artichokes, they all have these special fibers that are really good foods for the microbiome. Also, probiotics are important to probiotics and there are all kinds of strains. We knew it too. Well, we need to make sure we have the right amount of overall fiber as well, so those are things we understood, but what I didn't understand was the importance of phytochemicals in foods to feed the good bugs. because not only do they eat the fiber but they also get stimulated and love certain phytochemicals, for example, there is a really important bacteria that I had almost none and it's called acromancy mucinophilia mucinophilia means love of mucin, right, mucin is mucus, why what do you have that?

I want to protect your intestinal lining and not have a leaky gut, so on your back this bacteria creates this amazing thick mucous layer that keeps bad things out, but if you don't have this bacteria you can't recover as well when I had this. problem, you couldn't really take necromancy or probiotics now that they have them, but acromantials love polyphenols, which are these colorful compounds in fruits and vegetables, they love blueberry, they love pomegranate, they love green tea, they love curcumin, they have all these amazing plant compounds, etc. That was a great idea, which is why we need prebiotics, probiotics and polyphenols to create a healthy gut, which is why eating a colorful diet is so important.

Beautiful and you have written about akromancy, we will link it to the blog post you have there, you even talk. a little bit about this type of smoothie that includes pomegranate concentrate and a bunch of other things, green tea, blueberry and green tea, so we'll link that to that as well that really helped me by the way that really helped me reset my gut that I created . This cocktail of things that was designed to incorporate all the knowledge that I had over 30 years of functional medicine, it was a lot of different things in little containers and things that we've now created something called gut food that will soon be available at getpharmacy. com that combines all of these things into a simple powder that you can mix in water or something else and actually consume it and it will help provide nourishment for your gut.

We call it gut food. Let's talk about testing when it comes to inflammation, are there tests that you use and recommend both with the patients you work with, but also if people don't have access to a functional medicine doctor, are there tests that you recommend they ask? to their doctor to help them understand how swollen they are? I mean, there are two aspects to this: checking for inflammation to see if you are inflamed and then checking why you have inflammation. Two different things, then, why your inflammation may be due to imbalances in your gut flora, it may be toxins, it may be allergens.

It may be your diet, it may be stress, so we have to go down those rabbit holes in terms of the actual measure of inflammation. We're getting a lot more sophisticated about this, so there's a common test your doctor can run called C-reactive protein. and that's really important, it has to be a high sensitivity C-reactive protein that can help you determine if there is a widespread level of inflammation. It's good, but it's not perfect. Then there is a sedimentation rate, which is an old test that looks at how long it lasts. takes your blood to settle, if it has a lot of inflammatory proteins, it makes and settles in the test tube very quickly, which can be a signal, so there are common things that we use, we can also look at cytokines, we can look at interleukins and we can look at two alpha necrosis factors and other biomarkers of inflammation, but that's just a sample of what's going on.

There is a whole, as I mentioned before. There's a scientist at Stanford who measured these unique analytes in blood that doctors don't normally test for and that are the most predictive. aging and chronic diseases, so we should probably test things like that, so those are the ways that we measure inflammation, we can also look at autoantibodies, we can look at allergens, we can look at immunoglobulin levels, there are a lot of ways that we can look at what's going on with the immune system we look at T cell function and a lot of things so basic testing is available through conventional medicine but the key is not just to see if you're inflamed the key is to ask why you are inflamed and then delve down the rabbit hole to look for the causes.

Can you share a case study from your practice of someone because we have so many different names for modern diseases that are driven by inflammation, but if you can think of one person who had the right combination of There are a lot of different fundamental factors that you helped and worked with to control inflammation and then regain health. Just think about so many patients that are flooding my brain right now, but I'll just share the story of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, terrible migraines, and a lot of intestinal problems, and you know, normally she would go to her rheumatologist and take all the rheumatology medications and I was really struggling, so I said, well, these are all inflammatory problems, migraines, intestinal problems, rheumatoid arthritis, let's see what's causing it.

It turned out that he had very high antibodies to gluten, so he was sensitive to gluten and, quite significantly, he had an overgrowth of bacteria in his intestine and he had super heavy metals, so I systematically eliminated gluten from his diet, cured his intestine and I got rid of it. heavy metals and she made a full recovery and all the things that were abnormal her C reactive protein her rheumatoid arthritis antibodies her migraines her leaky gut everything went back to normal and now it's been 20 years and she's still amazing and she got rid of them all those diagnoses because they were all caused by inflammation you talked about diet you talked about additional therapies like hot and cold sauna other things like that we talked about exercise we talked about supplementation how it plays a role and how it could be useful in the topic of inflammation Well, now you know the most basic things can be helpful so there was a study published that showed that if you take a multivitamin your CRP level goes down which is amazing but that's just one thing and what's the mechanism of that? .

You think so, so we have a system in our body to control inflammation and that system requires nutrients and many of us are depleted, so for example a multivitamin will reduce the C.protein reaction and it does so by activating all kinds of enzymes, so vitamin, what are vitamins, minerals, they're basically helpers, a third of all your DNA codes for enzymes, which enzymes turn one molecule into another molecule, one chemical into another chemical in your body and all the enzymes that we need, we have required auxiliary coenzymes or cofactors and what are those are vitamins and minerals, so some of us need a lot more of this or that and if we are low, which of us are?

This is not my opinion, it is the government's own surveys and diagnostic tests and giant studies of tens and tens of thousands of people that say that more than 90 percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level that they it is needed to prevent deficiency diseases, so no. How much do you need for optimal health or immune function, but how much vitamin D do you need to avoid getting scurvy? I mean, to avoid getting rickets, not much. How much vitamin C do you need to avoid getting scurvy? Not much, but how much vitamin C? or vitamin D to regulate your immune system and reduce inflammation a lot more, a lot of us are nutrient deficient so that's the mechanism and then there are specific nutrients that are really important for inflammation.

Omega-3 fats number one, we need omega-3 fats like ep and dj that generally come from fish oil, we need vitamin D levels to be adequate and not low because vitamin D regulates hundreds of genes that regulate inflammation, we need making sure we have adequate amounts of things that help increase the detoxifying compounds in Our body likes glutathione, which comes from, for example, the broccoli family. When you eat these compounds, they help increase glutathione, but you can also take supplements to do that, like n-acetylcysteine, which I think the government is now restricting somewhat. It makes me very nervous, but this is a substance that we have used for a long time, decades and decades since I was in medical school and in medicine as a therapy to help people recover from tolerant overdose and liver failure, from kidney failure, dye. contrast and a lot of other things for asthma and lung inflammation so it's one of the most powerful anti-inflammatories in our body so I take supplements to increase glutathione which really helps so there are some things we can do strategically and then of course there are things like curcumin and polyphenol supplements and various other things that you can take, but those are the most important ones.

Talk to us about the role that fasting in all its different forms plays when it comes to the chronic inflammation that affects so many people. Bodies were designed to deal with scarcity and we have hundreds of genes that help control hunger and put our bodies in a state of healing and repair. When we lack food, we have almost no genes to help us deal with excess abundance, like the extra 500 calories. of corn syrup that every American has been exposed to since 1970. So when we are in a state of scarcity, our bodies put into action a whole set of mechanisms that reduce inflammation that increase antioxidant systems that build muscles that burn fat they burn fat, which is good in the case of starvation and helps increase stem cell function and many other beneficial factors improve mitochondrial health cleanses your cells removes waste I mean, it's pretty amazing what happens when you're short when you're starving, which is a good thing because you want to stay alive as long as possible so everything is in your body.

It's like he's going to fix everything so he doesn't die. So how do you get to that state? Well, there are many techniques. that are now being talked about and they all have the same mechanisms, whether it is time-restricted feeding, that is, eating within a period of eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, or intermittent fasting, which consists of fasting from 24 to 32 hours once a week. or a longer fast, whether it's fasting, doing diets that are calorie-restricted diets for five days of 800 calories, whether it's a ketogenic diet that restricts carbs and increases fat, that's actually what we get when we're not eating , we go on a ketogenic diet when we don't have food, our bodies go into ketosis, but you can do that by eating more fat, so all those ways of eating actually activate the body's own healing mechanism and what happens well is you reduce the inflammation, you increase antioxidant systems, you increase the production of stem cells. increases muscle, increases bone density, increases cognitive function, brain chemistry and neuroplasticity.

It does all of these things just by activating these ancient healing systems that are designed to protect us from starvation, so it's like controlled starvation in a way and that's a good thing. And I think it's very important for us to think about how we do those things on a regular basis and I try to incorporate those strategies regularly into my life, so now we're going to go to our community, our YouTube comments, our Facebook comments. Instagram and podcast community that sent an email, we'll answer a few questions here and we'll start with the first one and the first one we have here is what role dopimples when it comes to chronic inflammation in the body.

Can grains help or harm chronic inflammation in the body? The big question depends on the grain. White flour is surely one of the most inflammatory foods on the planet, while ancient grains like Himalayan Tatar buckwheat may be one of the most anti-inflammatory foods on the planet. It's not about the grains as a whole, it's about which grains, in what form, how they are grown, where they were grown, what they were grown with, are they full of pesticides, are they full of glyphosate? I mean, there are so many layers of things that will really determine the answer. to that question in general, although the way we eat grains in this country is white flour, 90 of the grains we eat in this country are white flour, very few people eat whole grain foods, maybe there is whole grain bread, but if you look On the label, it's mostly white flour with high fructose corn syrup with some whole wheat flakes added, it's not like the dense breads you get in Europe or Germany, so I'm not against grains, but yes I think there is. are challenges for people who eat a lot, a lot of flowers, probably one of the most inflammatory foods, and if you have a leaky gut, if you have an imbalance in your microbiome, if you don't have an intact system in your gut, grains can be a problem, so I tend to eliminate pimples if I'm really aggressively trying to reduce inflammation, not forever but for a short period of time to try to reset the system to heal leaky gut and get people functioning again and if You do that and you also do other things because grains are starch and it depends on how much you eat well.

Having half a cup of black rice or half a cup of buckwheat may not be a problem, but we usually eat large quantities. of grains and that drives another pathway of inflammation which is insulin resistance or prediabetes or blood sugar problems, so we have to understand that we have to reduce starch and sugar in our diet and a way to do it is actually reducing grains, but Whole grains can be part of a healthy diet, the important thing is that when you eat them, who eats them, in what contact with what other foods and where those grains come from, and if they are hybrid grains modern grains that are full of starch and sugar or are ancient grains that have all these phytochemicals and other beneficial properties.

The next question is how hormonal balance or imbalance relates to inflammation, so the biggest driver of chronic inflammation is stress, which drives all kinds of hormonal regulation out of regulation and ruins sex hormones. hormones, your insulin, blood sugar, uh, cortisol, adrenaline, and that really drives large amounts of inflammation, so if you're really stressed out, that's going to drive a lot of the pathology, I mean, insulin is another hormone. which is important and drives inflammation. one of the big ones that we talk about a lot is that you will see people who are taking hormones, for example, estrogen or birth control pills, and it depends on what you are taking, if you are taking, for example, premarin, it increases inflammation in the body causes a high CRP just like the birth control pill, so many people are taking the birth control pill.

I'm not saying people should stop taking birth control uphill, but you need to make sure you mitigate the effects of that and I recently did an Instagram live with eben founder sarah morgan talking about the ways that, for example, medications deplete nutrients and negatively affect the body, so, for example, if you are taking the birth control pill, you may need to take certain nutrients to mitigate the effects. of that and help reduce inflammation, so certain things I would never take like premarin, which is a hormone that causes inflammation, but I certainly wouldn't tell everyone to stop using birth control, but I think you should know what you're doing and actually offset the damage by taking the right nutrients to really mitigate the damage and inflammation that comes from the last question here before we get into final thoughts and conclusions.

Can inflammation be related to our genetics? Some people are more likely to develop markers of inflammation, especially chronic ones. inflammation absolutely, I mean we are all heterogeneous, you know we have twenty thousand genes, we have about five million variations in those genes and some of those variations predispose to inflammation and we test for them. I do this in my actual practice by looking at measuring saliva swabs. DNA and we can look for variations in certain genes that affect cytokines like interleukins and cnf alpha, other genes and we can see, oh, you're someone who, if you get some trigger, you're much more likely to become inflamed, so there are people who are predisposed. inflammation, but that does not mean that they are predestined to inflammation, so they need to identify one of the sources of inflammation in their life and get rid of them.

We talked about them and they need to include anti-inflammatory strategies in their life. inflammatory diet plus polyphenols probiotics antioxidants and obviously other anti-inflammatory strategies like adequate sleep, exercise and stress reduction, etc., hot and cold therapies, we just need to regulate the anti-inflammatory system and calm the inflammatory system, so yes, there are people. that they are genetically predisposed, but that doesn't mean they are predestined, so not everyone will have access to a functional medicine doctor, obviously, if they do, that's fantastic and amazing. You can go to ifm.org and find someone in your area, it's often expensive. insurance doesn't cover it, but it's not available to everyone, but if you can, it's great if you can't and, for example, they wanted to explore the topic of genetics.

Many people have 23 data and do any of those exist? websites that you like or that you would recommend to people that can go into their raw data and retrieve some of these unique markers that they need to pay attention to for their own genetics, I mean, there's a genetic genius that's kind of an interpretation. guide where you can enter your 23 meat facts that may be useful to look for problems with methylation and glutathione and detoxification and some of the inflammation genes. 23andme only does a small portion of your genome, it doesn't analyze everything, so we do more. clinical trials uh and I tend to do that and focus on that so there may be so much going on right now in the space that you may not be familiar with, but there are probably companies that are looking at inflammatory genes that are available. for the consumers. the question is when do you get that information and I think that's the challenge for people, how do you change your diet, what supplements do you take, what do you avoid, I mean, it gets a little granular, so it's usually better to work with someone who has experience to understand.

These tests show how to mitigate your risk and create a lifestyle that actually helps reduce inflammation. Hello YouTube, if you enjoyed what you just saw, keep watching for more great content on how to improve your brain and your life if you give a plant too much. water drowns if we have too much glucose in our body, bad things start to happen, we start to see consequences and specifically if you eat a food that