Hooked, Hacked, Hijacked: Reclaim Your Brain from Addictive Living: Dr. Pam Peeke at TEDxWallStreet

Translated by: Peter van de Ven Reviewed by: Christel Foncke I am the doctor and I come to save you. (laughs) No. I'm here to shape

your

survival strategy a little differently than you've done for a long time. Not all, but many of you are working with pseudo-solutions. As if there were... You know what I'm talking about. I'll give you a hint: it's not apples or broccoli. When things get a little hectic, it's usually that threesome, especially with women. Late at night: you and Ben and Jerry. (Laughter) Who said that cup of ice cream contained four servings?

Forget it. Good and bad times; perimenopause; Day off: one ration. You're done! Pleasantly sedated and you can survive another day. Recognizable? I will first describe the problem. Then, I prescribe a completely new solution based on interesting new knowledge that most of you probably don't know yet. A new look at survival. You already know what to do. All those well-known pseudo-solutions. I'm especially looking at that bottle of wine. It reminds me of that new Facebook page that is followed by a thousand women. It's called: "Give me a glass of wine or I'll sell my children." (laughs) Is this a problem?

Check out what else we do. Your life is full of addictions and you don't even know it. Your day is full of compulsive behaviors. If you don't believe me, try quitting smoking and see how you feel. You know it very well. Looking at screens... Go to work at five in the morning and not finish until midnight? Is something wrong with that? What about the food? What do you really eat? Do you sleep? I'll get back to that. We call that pseudosolutions. They work something out for a while, but then you come back strong. While we're talking about this, I'd like to show you.

Mind, mouth and muscles. I want to go deeper. I want to show you a little more about those pseudo-solutions, something you may not realize at all. We start with the mind. Of course, the mind... It is very important... (Laughter) Why are you laughing? This is very scientific. Now listen! Men, left

brain

, task-oriented. Honey, you're either on or off. Women are more complex. We have many buttons. That's because we work with two hemispheres. We have more connections between the left and right hemisphere. We also spend money differently. Men spend more money than us and especially on entertainment.

Exactly what? Alcohol, women, shoes and care. We help ourselves and everyone who comes within thirty meters. Even if we don't know them, we care for them. We are the eternal caregivers, to our detriment. Keep this in mind for the rest of my story. I said you're probably exhibiting compulsive behavior that you're not even aware of. You don't even know that's

your

survival strategy. I'll show you something you've never seen before: a PET scanner, and a very special one at that. You take a normal human

brain

(there's only one of those and we use it often in research) and you see orange-red areas - the orange-red of the reward center.

Normally, that reward center lights up when dopamine (that wonderful, lusty pleasure neurotransmitter) connects with dopamine receptors. This is how it should look. Now look at that other brain. It could be anything: overuse of anything. There really is something called food addiction. We actually exhibit compulsive behavior with food. Very strange: it's not broccoli. They are usually sweet, fatty or salty tasty foods. But they play with your brain. It is no longer a black box; We can look inside with scans. We can see the real damage to the reward center. Is the process reversible? Absolute. You know exactly what to do for that.

I don't need to tell you that, it's obvious. Let me tell you something else: did you know that sugar is more

addictive

than cocaine? Natural and refined sugar. You may have heard about that recent study on Oreos. I wrote another article about it, really cool. They took some rats and injected them with morphine, injected them with cocaine and then gave them an Oreo. You won't believe what happened. We were measuring a specific gene in the reward center. We wanted to know if Oreo produced the same changes as morphine and cocaine. What do you think? What do you think that happened?

The same and worse. The rats had barely finished the morphine and cocaine when they began to get full. Just like you and I have done for years. It seems like a metaphor, doesn't it? Actually, we were watching it, we have videos of it, they opened the cookies and started immediately on the filling. Yeah! I'm starting to feel like doing it again. And another, and another... What is happening here? Let's move on to another part of the brain that is being affected by this. As we describe the problem, we look at the prefrontal cortex, the intelligent part of the brain, where decisions are made.

Just touch your forehead, it's right there. When your life is full of small addictions, full of compulsive behaviors, what do you think happens? What we can see in that scan is that the brain's ability to provide us with all those wonderful skills that we find in the prefrontal cortex, like organizing; choose a strategy; don't let your guard down; pay attention; Stopping impulsivity, impatience and irritation: what do you think is happening? --you can't do it anymore. It takes a hit, gets damaged and that's it: end of story. Not good. What else influences? Stress. 'Stressed' backwards is 'desserts' for a reason.

Just think about that. Stress definitely has a negative impact on this entire part of the brain. By the way, like sleeping. How about 'zzzzz'? Come on guys: 'zzzzz'. There are people who boast of having only slept four hours. Oh yeah? Are you looking for excess weight? Then you're doing it right. He hasn't slept enough. Your growth hormones are not released at night if you don't get enough sleep. Belly fat grows due to stress hormones. There you go. That big belly increases the risk of disease, morbidity and death. You don't want this. Something has to be done about it.

So let's take a look at the body. You've probably never heard of sitting sickness. Just Google it. Mayo Clinic says sitting for too long increases your risk of heart disease and, more importantly, metabolically glaciers. Your blood sugar levels are not moving. The truth is that as a doctor this is of no use to me. Just get up. Come on, get up! Well, doesn't it feel better? I saved your life! If you really want to get something out of this, give your neighbor a high five. Wonderful, right? Feel! Your genes go crazy with joy and I saved your life too.

Pleased? Okay, let's continue. Most men who see this will say, "Yes, that's me." (Laughter) Women, of course, laugh the loudest. I already said it, I'm going deep: mind, mouth, muscles. Let's look inside the belly. This is what his stomach looks like when I cut it open like a salami and that's the CT scan. See that white there? This is only seen in studies. This is from our laboratory. That's fine, not so much. But what happens when you don't pay attention while eating? Even Michelangelo had a few extra kilos. This is what it looks like. What you see here is too much fat.

Is that reversible? Sure. Now you're swimming in fat and that's clearly not the way. This is the result of a lifetime of pseudo-solutions. How do you solve that? Have you ever heard of epigenetics? Epigenetics is a new and exciting science. If you don't know it yet, dig into it later. It's so wonderfully simple. I'll go straight to the gen level and show you how simple it is. We always thought you were trapped in the structure of your DNA. You had to settle for what you were born with. It doesn't work like that anymore. Instead, we now have exciting science that says: Every thought you think, every bite of what you eat, and every step you take changes gene expression.

Change the way your body communicates with itself and change your destiny. In effect: you write the script of your life. The beginning of epigenetics? Very simple. We took a mouse that was condemned. He had the Agouti gene deep inside him. That Agouti gene made him fat, weak, yellow, because the Agouti gene was related to coat color. Any illness caused him to die very quickly. Then we made a joke. We fed him vegetables (yes, mom was right) and vegetables (you didn't know) have what they call the methyl donor, aside from this. He contracted it when he ate vegetables or whole foods.

When you exercise, or when you meditate, the same thing happens: you change genetic expression. So we gave this to the mouse. Then the mouse had babies. They were muscular fighting machines, thanks to those vegetables. We didn't know. That was in 2007, so you've probably never heard of it. It is now a new and exciting science. Now, when you go to the produce department at the supermarket, you don't walk to the produce department; Vegetables are so out of fashion. Instead, you say, "I'm going to get some methyl donors. I'm going to methylate my genes. I'm going to change their expression." Then you are a trendsetter.

This is what a methylated person is like. Betty Lou Sweeney: 250 pounds, 68 years old, 26 drugs and half dead. Then she had the ghost – her moment of her epipha – as a dead end in the intensive care unit. This is what she ended up doing. She turned the whole story upside down. She fought the cravings for it. She fought against all of her addictions. A fierce battle that lasted two to three years. What did she end up doing? She entered the Guinness Book of Records for the longest sustained "plank." In fact, 36 minutes. Most of us barely make it to, well...

You don't even know what a 'plank' is. No problem. Before I forget, because we're going to finish, we need mentors. We need to know now that we can pass this on from generation to generation. We feel great when our mind, mouth and muscles work together. When we change our genetic expression, when we develop epigenetically. But perhaps most importantly: God, that feels so good. I met this man at the Senior Olympiad. 93 years old, in the stadium, doing a television report. He taught me something else that you shouldn't forget. He was flirting with me for three hours. I didn't know he was 93 years old.

He thought he was 23 years old. It's just to show you that when you work epigenetically, when you start with good, healthy solutions, you can prolong everything. (Laughter) Epigenetic transformation. And don't forget: health is true wealth. Thank you. (Applause)