The Root Causes and Fixes for Brain Fog

This episode explores the various underlying causes of brain fog and offers insights into functional medicine approaches for treating and reversing it.

1. Brain fog is often linked to diet and gut health, with issues like dysbiosis and food sensitivities playing significant roles.
2. Functional medicine approaches can be effective, focusing on eliminating harmful elements from the diet while enhancing nutritional support.
3. Daily lifestyle choices, particularly around diet and exposure to toxins, are crucial for maintaining cognitive clarity.
4. Simple changes, such as an elimination diet, can quickly alleviate symptoms of brain fog for many.
5. Conditions like auto brewery syndrome and the broader implications of gut fermentation highlight the complex relationship between our gut flora and cognitive health.

1: Understanding Brain Fog

Brain fog is compared to symptoms like a cough, which can have various underlying causes that need specific treatments. Key points discuss the role of gut health in cognitive functions. Mark Hyman: "Brain fog is not just in your head. It's a legitimate medical symptom that needs attention."

2: Diet and Cognitive Function

Discusses how dietary choices, specifically gluten and dairy, can exacerbate brain fog due to their morphine-like effects on the brain. Todd LePine: "Often, simple dietary changes can lead to significant improvements in brain fog."

3: The Role of the Gut-Brain Axis

Highlights the critical role of gut health in managing brain fog, discussing conditions like auto brewery syndrome and the importance of gut microbiota balance. Mark Hyman: "Your gut's health directly influences your brain function."

1. Try an elimination diet: Removing potential irritants like gluten and dairy can clarify whether food sensitivities are causing brain fog.
2. Incorporate a gut-healthy diet: Include probiotics, prebiotics, and fiber to support a healthy gut microbiome.
3. Regular detoxification: Engage in practices that support liver health and detoxification, such as hydration and consuming liver-friendly foods.
4. Monitor environmental exposures: Reduce exposure to mold, allergens, and other environmental toxins that can contribute to cognitive cloudiness.
5. Opt for whole, unprocessed foods: Emphasize a diet rich in whole foods that are low in processed sugars and high in healthy fats and proteins.

A declining mind is one of the scariest things we can imagine. Yet, many of us walk around every day with brain fog, which is a clue that our brains (and our bodies) need some support. Left unchecked, there can be long-term consequences, and not just for your brain. The good news is that changes to diet, reducing toxic burden and stress, improving sleep and gut health, and getting good movement can work wonders to clear up any fogginess.

People

Mark Hyman, Todd LePine, Max Lugavere

Companies

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Books

"Young Forever Cookbook"

Guest Name(s):

Todd LePine, Max Lugavere

Content Warnings:

None

Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's pharmacy. Often people going on an elimination diet. Will have an immediate relief of brain. Fog, which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore. Sometimes people just think of this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function.

Todd LePine
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Now, so many of us are living day to day in a fog. We're not able to think clearly or sustain our thoughts. And maybe we can't recall why we walked into a room, and maybe we get agitated because of it. But brain fog, one of the most common complaints I hear about, is not just a problem with your brain. To fix your brain, you need to fix your body.

And in today's episode, we feature three clips from the doctors pharmacy about the functional medicine approach to eradicating brain fog by removing what's harming us and adding in what supports us to heal the body and the brain. I talk with doctor Todd Lepine about the connection between brain fog and the gut microbiome. And I talk about daily lifestyle habits that support a healthy brain. And finally, Max Lugaver and I discuss the best foods for brain and overall optimal health. So let's jump in.

Unknown
Brain fog is really a symptom, sort of like cough. So, cough can be caused by a cold, bronchitis, pneumonia, post nasal drip, asthma, a whole bunch of things. So you got to figure out, okay, what's driving it. And there is no ICD ten code for brain. You know, you might call it, you know, altered mental status, but oftentimes it's transitory.

And that's the really interesting thing. And I've seen patients where they'll, you know, get brain fog when they're in a certain building. They'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal. Certain foods may trigger brain fog, and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. And we'll talk about that at this particular case.

Is gut fermentation is oftentimes a cause for brain fog? I mean, it's like bugs fermenting the food you're eating, creating all these nasty products. Yeah. And I don't know, Mark, if you've had patients who've had. This is a really interesting thing, because I have patients come in, they say, I feel like my gut is just, like, bloating and I'm fermenting.

And that's exactly what's happening. So there is a condition. I just recently had a patient who had auto brewery syndrome. Yeah. And I've seen your own, like, beer factory.

Exactly. So when you want to make beer. What do you do? You take sugar and you add yeast to it, and you can actually produce alcohol. And I've had a couple of cases where it was missed.

And it's actually not just the recent findings is it's not just yeast in the gut that do this, but also klebsiella bacteria. So both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds, which are toxins. Alcohol is a toxin. That's why when you get drunk, you're intoxicated, and you'll actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain. Interesting.

Todd LePine
I never really had that insight before you said that word, intoxicated. You're toxic. Toxic. You're toxic. Exactly.

Unknown
That's what intoxicated. Okay. That's how I explain to the patient. It took 60 years to figure that out. That one out.

Max Lugavere
Exactly. Exactly. But I think that what you're saying is very true. I mean, I've had two times in my life when I've had severe brain fog. One was when I had mercury poisoning 30, 25 years ago, and my gut was a mess then because the mercury poisoned my gut.

Todd LePine
I had terrible bloating, distension, diarrhea. And the second time was more recently when I had mold toxicity and I had c. Diff. And I also had colitis and gastritis. And my whole gut was a mess.

And I had severe brain fog. And it was pretty debilitating. You could barely focus, answer an email. Talk to somebody, oh, yeah, you can't concentrate, concentrate at all. And people think, oh, that's just sort of in your head.

It's not in your head, maybe in your stomach. Well, it's manifesting in the head. That's the whole thing. And we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind, and they're all interconnected. And brain fog is a real phenomenon.

Unknown
And then you have to sort of figure out what's doing it. The other thing that is interesting, I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy. Yeah. And I tell patients that, you know, the most, one of the most addictive foods is pizza. And the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it.

Todd LePine
That's true. You can eat a whole pie. I tell you. It's one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in, but I don't have it that often because it's not the best food for you. You have my cauliflower pizza with goat cheese.

Unknown
You can make a healthy pizza. Exactly. Yeah. But the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down. The proteins in those get broken down into casey morphins and gluteomorphins, and caseomorphins are the ones from dairy, and gluteomorphins are from gluten.

And those have morphine like effects. So you literally get a little high, you get a little foggy in the brain, and it also can cause cravings, and it can sort of make you sleepy. You eat it, and then you get a little sleepy from it also. And that's, you know, when children drink breast milk, they go to sleep after they, you know, they conk out. I mean, that's because of the morphine like action in milk.

Yeah. So that's true, I think, you know, it's. It can be our diet, it can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy, which are really common. And often people going on elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog, which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore. Sometimes people just think this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function.

Todd LePine
They're not realizing that it's actually something that can be reversed, and it can be reversed very quickly. So the second thing is the factors that are in the gut, bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, we call dysbiosis. That can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues, because your gut's connected to your brain, and that causes this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation. And then you get inflammation in the brain, essentially, is what causes brain fog. Absolutely.

Unknown
Well, the other important thing, I think I talked with this last time, is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver. And the reason for that is to filter all of the toxins that are there. So there's a lot of immune cells, the coupler cells in the liver, and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the gut, then going into the systemic circulation. So sometimes you'll have, in addition to leaky gut, you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself. And that's an example of that is the condition hepatic encephalopathy, which is brain fog.

That's essentially. Well, talk about that. What is that for people who don't know what? That's like a big word. And I think I mentioned this before, and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is when I worked at the VA hospital, there were a lot of alcoholics.

And when you're an alcoholic, you basically turn your liver into a pickled liver. You trash your liver. Yeah, you trash your liver, and then you're not able to detoxify. And I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and their liver was not able to detoxify. And then when they would eat foods, especially high protein type meals, they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma.

Todd LePine
So they would literally get delirium, confusion. Absolutely. Brain fog. Brain fog. Brain fog on steroids.

And the reason is it was coming from their gut. And what I found so striking when I started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut. We gave people antibiotics to sterilize their gut to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts. That made people have, you know, basically delirium or encephalopathy and brain fog. So it's like, wow, the gut is connected to the brain.

Unknown
Totally connected to the brain. Absolutely. And in some cases, you know, there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from gut dysfunction. Yeah. You mentioned Otto Brewery syndrome.

Todd LePine
I remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence, and it turned out she wasn't drinking, but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a very real phenomenon. You have to think about it.

Unknown
And the way that you actually test for that is, it's actually quite simple, is you just have somebody do what I call a pancake challenge. You basically, some pancakes full of carbs, throw some maple syrup on it, eat it, and get a blood draw at 0.0, eat the meal, and then half an hour hour later, check your alcohol level. That sounds like a fun medical test to be challenged. So we talked about the gut. We talked about gluten, dairy, foods, sensitivities.

Todd LePine
There are other reasons, too. So infections. Infections can do that. Another one that is tick infections. Absolutely.

Unknown
Tick infections. Yeah, those are. Yeah, those. I would say that's in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction, too. Memory issues.

Todd LePine
It's more severe. It's much more severe. The one thing that I see a lot is allergies. I call it the allergic brain. And you can have food allergies that can potentially do that, or even environmental allergies or mold.

Unknown
And the high levels of histamine, because histamine is actually acts as a neurotransmitter. And I've seen this in a number of patients. I've had some patients with another condition, which we're seeing more and more of, is mast cell activation syndrome. It's sort of a buzz diagnosis now, but it's a very real phenomenon and is related to the mast cells, which are the types of immune cells in the body, in the interstitial, the sort of the spaces between the cells where they reside, and they release lots of histamine. And if anybody's ever had hay fever, you see that the typical picture of a person with hay fever, they're like this, like half asleep and they're walking through a fog.

Hay fever is an example of brain fog. Yeah. And antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that naturally. Things like quest and nettles can also be very helpful. And you probably have used it.

This is something that I use. I've been using more is the drug chromalin sodium, which is. I've had some amazing success with that in more difficult cases. I wouldn't necessarily go to that for my first choice. What Todd's talking about is this drug that's used for asthma and allergies that is usually inhaled.

Yeah, usually inhale. But there's a version you can take orally that before you eat, inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response. And I often found it extremely effective for some patients. So, Todd, talk about this patient that you had that had really bad brain function. This is a guy who come to see you who worked a lot.

Todd LePine
It was a little less stress, and that could be easily dismissed as, oh, you're just stressed and tired. But you went deeper. What did you find? Well, he actually came into me, and he had already seen a variety of different doctors. And the background is that the gentleman, as a child had lots of allergies and asthma.

Unknown
So he had ear infections, bronchitis, also developed some sinusitis type symptoms. So you had multiple rounds of antibiotics. And I always emphasize to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction, look for the gut, because 60% to 70% of your immune system is in the gut. And just like with what's going on with the COVID virus or the COVID-19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus is, it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problem. It's our immune system's response to it.

And in general, we want to have a, I call it a balanced immune system. So we want our immune system to be idling. Yeah. So basically just sort of sitting there and, okay, we're enjoying planet Earth. We're going out for a walk.

We're not reacting to this. Under reacting or overreacting? Exactly. Underacting or overreacting. And when you overreact that, we call that an autoimmune disease.

When you underreact, we call that aids. So AIDS are cancer. Aids are cancer, or overreactions, allergies, or immune. And I think we talk about, like, a weak immune system or a strong immune system. It's really, I think, an intelligent and a balanced immune system.

That's how I like to think about it. And that's related to immuno tolerance, which is what the gut does. So when we have a healthy gut, we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things. And you can eat certain things, go out in the environment, you're not going to react to dog dander and all these other things. There are some genetic.

Some people have genetic predispositions towards being more atopic or allergic. But having a healthy gut, especially early on, the priming of the gut, is so critical. You know, having a vaginal birth, being breastfed, not introducing certain foods like gluten early on in living on a farm. Living on a farm, exactly. Being exposed to a lot of.

And crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt, and I call it your body's immune system samples planet Earth. Planet Earth is a very dirty place. There's lots of bugs and all kinds of things. And your body learns to be immuno tolerant. And one of the things that is really I also focus on is part of this immune system is called the Treg cells.

The t reg cells are like the conductor in the Boston Symphony orchestra. So you've got the wind section over here and the horns over here, and they keep everything in balance. And the Tregs are really, really critical. And what we're finding regulatory, they regulate. They regulate the whole, you know, the whole balance of the immune system.

And the Tregs that we find out the two things that are really simple that people can use to upregulate your tregs to keep things in balance are fibers, fibers in the diet. Fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that. And then also which I use quite a bit in the patients that I see is vitamin a. Vitamin a helps to downregulate the immune system and helps to keep the treg cells in place.

Mark Hyman
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Max Lugavere
If you are eating a crappy diet, if you're drinking too much, if you're smoking, if you're not exercising, if you have mercury poisoning, if your vitamin D is low, if your b twelve deficient, if your thyroid's not working, your brain's not going to work. So you just got to figure out how to get your brain healthy. So fixing your brain starts with fixing your body and optimizing all the inputs into your system and minimizing the bad stuff, right, the bad inputs, whether it's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, bad bugs, drugs like caffeine, alcohol, sugar, whatever, is causing your brain to not work. The brain is pretty resilient, and it can recover and heal given the right conditions. And I've seen miracles.

I've seen people reverse Alzheimer's, reverse autism, reverse, add, reverse depression, things that bipolar disease, schizophrenia. I mean, you just wouldn't even imagine how powerful this is. In fact, Christopher Palmer, who's been on the podcast, talked about how he used a ketogenic diet to reverse Alzheimer's and optimize mitochondrial function as a key way to treating mental illness. There's departments of metabolic psychiatry at Stanford, of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard. So we now actually have an understanding that the stuff I was talking about 15 years ago, by the way, was way ahead of its time and also extremely important to understand if we're going to fix our brains.

About 30 years ago, almost, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and it felt like I had dementia, depression, and add all at once. My brain was broken. I really couldn't focus, I couldn't pay attention. I used to be able to see 30 patients a day, remember all their medical history, nictative at the end of the day with no problem. I couldn't like remember where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started.

I couldn't read my kids a book out loud and actually understand at the same time. My brain really was broken. I couldn't sleep, I was exhausted. And I learned that I had mercury poisoning, and that broke my brain. My brain was just a mess.

I had terrible brain fog. I couldn't focus for much time. I was a physician trying to like, practice medicine. It was really tough. I couldn't even remember my patient names.

And I knew I had to do something different. And that's when I discovered functional medicine almost 30 years ago. And when I reversed my chronic fatigue, when I detoxed from mercury, when I fixed all the other systems in my body, my mitochondria, my gut, my immune system, everything that was going wrong, I was able to reverse my chronic kidney syndrome, and my brain got better. And since then, I've written 18 books in 20 years. My brain is great.

I feel good, and I'm sharper, faster and better than ever. So what's the worst things we do for our brains? Well, we have too much sugar and fine starch, carbs, and not enough good fats and not enough intake of the right nutrients. A lot of nutrient deficiencies, omega three s, vitamin d, magnesium, they name a few that are critical for brain health and that affects over 50% to 90% of the population with deficiencies in those nutrients. Also, we're exposed to all kinds of weird things in our diet that are chemicals like artificial sweeteners like MSG, environmental toxins that actually cause damage to the brain, heavy metals.

All these things damage our brain. So a lot of things cause brain damage, not just what I mentioned, but things like lack of sleep, too much stress, not exercising, overuse of certain substances like alcohol or other drugs. Now, I found over the years really fascinating to me. It's really quite amazing that people don't connect how they feel with what they eat or how much they rest or sleep, you know, how much they exercise or how much time they take for friends and community and connection, or how much bad news and media they're exposed to. I had a patient said, jeez, doctor, I'm so tired, I don't know what to do.

I'm always tired. My brain's not working. I said, well, how much do you sleep at night? He goes, well, five, 6 hours. And I'm like, well, get 8 hours sleep and try, see what happens, right?

Some people don't connect the dots now. Once you make those connections, you can start to change those simple habits that can have profound effects on your health long term and make a lot of little small changes that can make profound impact. Now, feeling fully focused, fully energized, having great brain health. It requires really following the principles of functional medicine, which is taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff. It's taking out the bad food, toxins, allergens, microbe, stress, adding in the good stuff, the right whole foods, nutrients, balancing hormones, light, air, water, sleep, relaxation, connection, meaning, love, purpose.

All these things are necessary for our brain to function properly. And most of us don't get enough of the good stuff. We don't get whole real food. We often are deficient nutrients, we're not exposed enough natural light, we don't get enough fresh air, we don't drink clean water because most of it's polluted. We don't have periods of deep rest and relaxation, we don't sleep enough, we don't live in rhythm, we don't exercise, we're too focused on being busy in our careers and all kinds of stuff to focus on community and meaning and purpose and love.

And so we basically have to optimize those things in order for us to be healthy. One of the things that I really focus on, well, food is the number one thing that controls your brain. And we've seen miracles by simply people changing their diet from treating depression to Alzheimer's to everything from add to even schizophrenia, as I mentioned. So eating real food is so important. When I say real food, I mean real food, not processed food or ultra processed food.

Whole, organic, fresh, local, unprocessed food. Basically it has a barcode or a label. You might want to get rid of it. If your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it. Does she know what a lunchable is?

Or a pop tart, probably not. Junk food is just bad. Fast food is bad. Ultra processed food is bad. Some processed foods, okay.

A can of sardines is processed, right? It's in a can. It's got salt, maybe oil. Can of tomatoes is processed. It's tomatoes, water, and salt, that's okay.

But if you can't recognize where it came from, like a pop tart, you probably don't want to eat it. And some things that seem like real food are really not, like yogurt. Yogurt is often filled with high fructose corn syrup. Colors, additives, gums, thickeners. All these things are pretty, pretty nasty for us.

Also, you want to eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables. I know you hear me say this all the time, but these are full of phytochemicals. These attack brain. The deep, dark reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues are so important because the color is where the phytochemicals are. It's where the medicine is.

These are anti inflammatory compounds or detoxify fine compounds, antioxidants, their mitochondrial boosting, energy producing compounds, brain powering molecules. We need to eat that. So get lots of cultural plant foods, blueberries, dark green leafy vegetables. So go for the slow carbs, not the fast carbs, right? I'm not saying no carbs.

I mean, basically, broccoli is a carb, but it's quite different than white bread or from sugar. Cauliflower and ice cream are all carbs. Right. But, you know, cauliflower is good for you, but an ice cream sundae, probably not, right? So eating whole plant foods also will have lots of fiber.

Helps to reduce the surges of sugar that cause some of the problems. In fact, we call now Alzheimer's type three diabetes. It's like diabetes of the brain from too much sugar. So eating lots of fiber helps slow the surge of sugar. Nuts, seeds, lots of veggies, whole grains, beans, all really can be very helpful, and it also keeps your gut healthy.

And by the way, your gut and your brain are connected, you need to maintain your healthy microbiome to actually protect your brain health and prevent Alzheimer's. Also fat. The brain is made up of 60% omega three fat. It's mostly fat in your brain, so you need to be a fathead. And going on low fat diets are pretty bad for the brain.

In my book, eat fat, get pin. I talk about fats a lot. And when they're good fats, what are the bad fats and how to get the omega three fats from your diet? From algae or fish. My brain worked pretty good before, but I actually have gotten on a better fat diet, including things like McQl, which is really powerful for the brain.

And my focus and my clarity has just gone through the roof. Also, you want to optimize protein. We need protein because if you lose muscle because you don't eat enough protein, it leads to this cascade of problems with low muscle mass, fatty deposits in your muscle leads to prediabetes, lowers your testosterone, which you need for brain function, lowers growth hormone, which you need for brain repair, increases cortisol, which causes brain damage, literally causes the shrinking of your hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. So you want to make sure that you're having enough protein, ideally animal protein, which is better able to build muscle. And when you age faster, your brain takes a hit, it shrinks.

So you can keep your brain good by eating good fats and the right amounts of protein. Omega three eggs, protein shakes I like regeneratively based goat whey for a protein shake in the morning, nut butters, fish for breakfast, all that is great. Also, stop poisoning your brain. Get rid of all the bad stuff. Stuff, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, food additives, preservatives, environmental chemicals, all which really are problems.

Supplements also very important for the brain. A good quality multi magnesium is important for the brain, calms the brain. It reduces the stimulation of the NDMA receptors, which is actually producing Alzheimer's risk. Vitamin D is important for the brain. Omega three fats, probiotics, all the B vitamins, folate, B six B twelve are critical for your brain and your neurotransmitter function.

And you can find all these versions, the best versions, the cleanest versions, at my online store, at store dot drheiman.com, along with other brain boosting supplements. So you need to design a plan for your life that includes your overall health. But you ought to incorporate some of these important practices for your brain. But the good news is, what prevents brain problems, prevents heart disease, prevents cancer, prevents diabetes, and everything else. So now I can do a million different things, but these principles are really important for brain health.

Now, if you've tried all these things and you're still struggling, you got to dig a little deeper. For me, it was mercury poisoning. I was exercising, I was trying to eat well, I was doing all the right things, taking my vitamins, but I still wasn't better. Sometimes you got to figure things out. It might be Lyme disease, it might be mold, it might be food, sensitivities it might be some gut issues.

You need to probably work with a functional medicine doctor to figure it out. And you can go to ifm.org and you can find a practitioner who's certified in your area. I looked through the medical literature and I determined the foods that were going to be the most accessible, the most available to people that are listening to this and watching this, that are going to serve a neuroprotective effect. Foods that are literally superfoods for the brain. And I coined the term genius foods, which is not a scientific term, but I love it.

Unknown
It's the term that I've applied to the foods that are going to give your brain the most bang for its buck. With regard to neuroprotection. With regard to promoting neuroplasticity by providing important builder block molecules like the cosahexaenoic acid or dha fat, which we know is one of the most important and yet under consumed structural building blocks of the brain. And so we can look to certain foods, like avocados for example. Avocados at this point are pretty widely available.

And avocados are a fruit that provides the highest concentration of fat, protecting antioxidants of any other fruit or vegetable. Wow. Yeah. Why this is of relevance to the brain, because the brain is made of fat, right? Doctor Hyman the brain is made of fat, but not just any fat.

It's made of a type of fat that is most prone to oxidation, most vulnerable to what's called oxidative stress. And so when you eat an avocado, which is rich in vitamin e, a fat soluble antioxidant, it literally is one of the most powerful brain anti aging foods that you can consume. It's also loaded with fiber, which makes it satiating, and it helps support gut bacteria, which is promotive of a healthy gut microbiome. It contains potassium, which we know is really important for helping maintain a healthy level of blood pressure. And it also contains compounds called carotenoids, which we know protect neural tissue both in our eyes and in our brains.

One of the reasons why avocados and dark leafy greens are protective against age related macular degeneration. They contain these carotenoids, which we now know also protect brain health. So that's one of my favorite foods, avocados. Yeah. The thing, my problem with that is it often comes in the form of guacamole.

Unless you order the vegetable sticks instead of the chips. It's a danger zone for me because I can, I just kind of like those chips are I don't like crack. I don't know why, but if anybody else has those corn chip thing, it's like I can't eat them because I just can't stop. Yeah, I'm the same way. I think it's better to.

For me, well, it's that slogan, once you pop, you can't stop. We know now, thanks to scientific research. That's a slogan with scientific backing at this point. That is a truism at this point, right? Because foods like tortilla chips are hyper palatable.

They combine salt, fat, flour, and they're so calorie dense that it would have actually been a life saving food potentially for a hunter gatherer. Right? Well, that's why, that's why I actually am afraid of mexican restaurants now. I'm like, I'm gonna. And then someone orders.

I don't order that. I usually don't order the chips and guacamole. Then someone's like, bring the chips. I'm like, oh, no, I'm the same way. I'm the same way.

A crack addict. Some crack. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, we feel as though we. I feel like there's this innate sense that we should be able to moderate our consumption of those foods.

That's part of having a healthy relationship with food. However, I think what most people fail to realize, and what's certainly not acknowledged by even our most esteemed healthcare professionals and those in the nutritional orthodoxy, it's that these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. They're hyper palatable. And by the time you've filled yourself up on them, you've already over consumed them. Unfortunately, people tend to experience a sense of moral failure when they're not able to stop eating the chips.

Right. Yeah. At a reasonable level of consult consumption. But that's because your brain has been honed by millennia where the, where food scarcity was a real problem. Right.

We didn't have food security the way that we have now for the vast majority of our evolution. So as I mentioned, those chips, as calorie dense as they are, would have been an amazing food for a hunter gatherer who didn't have access to Grubhub on their phones or a supermarket on every corner. And that's why it's easy to eat an entire bag of corn chips. But no one's going to be binging on twelve avocados. Right, there you go.

Because avocados are. They're satiating in a way that ultra processed foods simply aren't another example of a brain food. Before you jump on the next example, I just want to highlight what you just said, because there's been an elegant study done by Kevin hall looking at feeding people an unlimited amount of ultra processed food, or nourishing whole foods, and they let them eat whatever they want, and they track, over a few weeks, they track their consumption and their actual weight gain, and they found that the ultra processed food group essentially ate about 500 calories more a day than the people eating whole foods, and they gain, obviously, more weight. So it really speaks to this whole idea that there's some nutritional intelligence that we have that causes to seek nutrients in our diet. The problem is, when we don't find them, we keep eating more.

Like looking for love in all the wrong places, and we end up just over consuming because we're not getting the nutrients we need. And we see this, like with kids, for example, we've talked about this in the podcast, who are iron deficient, they'll eat dirt. They'll eat dirt because dirt has iron. So in animal studies, and we've had Fred Provenza on the podcast, there's an innate nutritional wisdom where they're sampling maybe up to 50 to 100 different plants to get the medicinal properties of each of these plants, to heal their body, to make it work properly, and they know when to stop. We don't have that nutritional intelligence anymore.

And there was a study done decades ago, I think in the twenties maybe, of orphans. I've talked about this in the podcast, too, but the orphans were led to eat whatever they want. Rain, kidney, liver, weird vegetables, kind of. They give them an array of foods that were nutritionally dense that you think kids wouldn't eat, right, but kids gonna eat liver on their own, or kidney, and then they kind of track what they did. And these kids were far, at the end of the study, were far more healthy and far more robust because they chose all this variety of weird foods that actually their body's own nutritional intelligence told them to eat.

But we lose that as we get older, because our brain chemistry, metabolism, immune system, microbiome, all of its been high hormones have been hijacked by the food industry deliberately. So when you have that deliberate usurping of your own internal guidance system and wisdom of what eat, we end up in this chaotic state of constantly searching for ingredients and nutrients and compounds that we're needing to survive, but we can't get from the food. So we just keep eating more and more and more. That's really the problem. Yeah, that's the movement towards what's been called intuitive eating.

That's why I think that that's such a short sighted and not very evidence based initiative. Because when I sample the pint of ice cream that's sitting in my freezer right now, intuitively, what my body wants is to eat the whole pint. Oh, yeah. So I agree with you that we need to get back to foods that are less industrially processed. And you bring up an interesting point.

I mean, the tendency to over consume ultra processed foods. I think it's really important for people to know the three things that make a food satiating, because then they can use this as a tool in their own lives. The first thing that makes a food satiating is its protein content. So there's actually the protein leverage hypothesis, which stipulates that our hunger mechanisms are driven in large part by our necessity for protein. It's an essential nutrient, right?

And not just any, any type of protein, high quality protein. And the protein leverage hypothesis, I mean, people should remember that protein can be used powerfully to leverage as a way to kill hunger. And unfortunately, ultra processed foods are depleted of protein, in part because protein is the most expensive macronutrient. So typically with ultra processed foods, what you get is just carbs and fat, some combination of energy rich carbs and fat. Right?

And so protein. Protein is crucially important. One of the major factors that makes a food satiating the second aspect would be its fiber content. Because fiber mechanically stretches out the stomach. It's not an essential nutrient, but it does draw water, it does absorb water, and so it stretches out the stomach, which turns off the release of the hormone ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone.

Usually, ultra processed foods are depleted of fiber. Right. It's one of the reasons why your average american today consumes between six to 10 grams of fiber every day, whereas one of our hunter gatherer ancestors probably consumed about 150 grams a day. Yeah, that reminds me, that study by Dennis Berger, where he looked at hunter gatherers who'd moved to the city. It became urbanized in Africa compared to their hunter gatherer neighbors.

And the hunter gatherers had stool weights of four of two pounds, and the city dwellers had stool weights of 4oz. So their poop was just a little hard poop. And the reason is all the fiber and the tubers and the nutrient dense food. So you said fiber is not an essential nutrient. It isn't for us, but it's essential for the microbiome.

Our microbiome is essential for us to stay healthy. So in a sense, it is really an essential nutrient. It is yeah, through the lens of the microbiome. Absolutely it is. And it certainly makes life better.

Studies show that people who consume more fiber have reduced inflammation, they live longer. So it's definitely, I would call it a conditionally essential nutrient. Absolutely. That we definitely want to look to consume more of. And then the third factor that makes the food satiating is its water content.

Because when water cease to be available for hunter gathering, the second best place that they would look to get their, to meet their requirements for hydration would be food. Right. Food is actually a viable source of water. And shelf stable ultra processed foods are depleted of water because water impedes a foods shelf stability because it allows mold to grow. Um, and so these are the three factors that are, that are all but missing in ultra processed foods.

And, and all always very present in um, minimally processed whole foods. So definitely worth uh, worth seeking out, you know, any of those nutrients. Ideally. Didn't you miss the most satiating nutrient of all on our fat? Fat is satiating, yeah, it slows, it slows the absorption of food, it slows gastric emptying.

Um, so that's why. Well most, most high protein foods are going to come with a, are going to have a fat source, right? Grass fed beef for example, is a good source of healthful fat. Wild fatty fish, great source of fat. And so fat is fat, basically.

Here's the, here's what fat does. Fat prolongs the satiety effect, the protein fiber, very, very satiating. But fat prolongs that effect so that you're not hungry 30 minutes later. So its definitely good to look and find helpful sources of fat. And by the way, the thing that makes you hungry is sugar, is basically when you eat a lot of carbs and sugar, you just get hungrier and hungrier because you produce more insulin which triggers all these secondary, downstream biochemical challenges, changes that actually lead to increased hunger.

So the more you carbs you eat, the more you want to eat. And the less you eat the less you want to eat. I mean you know that from your own experience, so do I. It's like wow, God, that bagel doesn't look like food to me anymore. Or that muffin doesn't look like food.

Or cookie. Why would I ever eat a cookie? It's not that you're depriving yourself, it just stops looking appealing. Yeah, you're absolutely right Doctor Hyman. There was this really fascinating study that I'm sure you're familiar with, but they basically took scientists, took two porridges, they were controlled for carbohydrate content and calorie content.

It was just two wheat porridges that were identical in terms of their overall nutrition facts, but the difference was the degree of process. So one was a more coarsely ground porridge and the other was a more finely ground porridge. And it's the finely ground porridge that sent subjects blood sugar through the roof and led to a higher release of insulin. But what was most interesting about that study was that in the post absorptive state, so after they consumed the more finely ground porridge, the finely ground porridge sent their blood sugar below baseline, which the more coarsely ground porridge didnt do. And when your blood sugar goes below baseline, what that is is reactive hypoglycemia.

And that can trigger, in people that are susceptible to anxiety, trigger anxiety. It can increase hunger, that sensation of hanger. And that was the capacity for the food to do that was driven purely by the degree of process that the food had undergone. The more finely ground porridge was more akin to a sugar, right, because it was just so easy for the subjects bodies to assimilate. Whereas the more coarsely ground, the less processed version of the porridge actually sent, brought subjects blood sugar back down to baseline really smoothly and evenly.

So that's why you definitely want to avoid added sugar to the best of your ability, and also reach for foods that are less processed, because this is not about calories, this is not about carbohydrate content. This was purely about the degree of processing that that food is undergone. Yeah. So it's. Great point.

Yeah. I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, it goes without saying, people listening to the podcast understand by now that, you know, the ultra processed food is the number one killer on the planet. Like, if you want to do one thing to improve the quality of your health, is never eat ultra processed food. And what is ultra processed food is basically, basically anything that comes from a factory, unless you recognize the ingredients.

And always the rule is if you can basically cover the front of the package and just read the ingredient list and know what it is, it's probably okay to eat, right? If it says tomatoes, water and salt, or sardines, olive oil and salt, you know what's in the can. But if it's got 45 ingredients, most of which you can't pronounce or in Latin, and you have no idea what, what it is, we can't tell if it's a corn dog or a pop tart from the label, then you shouldn't eat it. Absolutely. Real foods don't have extensive ingredients lists.

They are the ingredients. They are the ingredients. Exactly. An avocado doesn't have a nutrition facts label or an ingredient list. It's an avocado.

No, it should have an ingredient list of phytochemicals so people can see what they're actually getting. It should, you're right. But I mean, the, and the biggest irony is that they don't make health claims either. Like avocados, grass fed beef, wild salmon, eggs. You know, they don't, they don't make health claims.

It's the, it's the ultra processed foods, the kinds of foods that have ads on tv. Right. Those are the ones that are making all the health claims, and yet those are the worst foods for you generally. True. Yeah.

So we've got, we've got a really beautiful insight here, which is, one, that we should be eating phytonutrient dense food. We're going to talk about some more genius foods. But two, the quality of our food and the ability to understand what makes us feel satisfied really are key principles. So protein, fiber, water, fat are kind of the secrets to keeping your metabolism healthy. And you said that there's no biological requirement for grains.

It's even a step further, I would say there's no actual biological requirements for carbohydrates. There's no essential carbohydrates. So there's essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, but there's no essential carbohydrates. So you literally don't have to eat any carbohydrates. But with that said, I often also say that carbohydrates are the single most important food for long term health and longevity.

And what I mean by that is that vegetables are carbohydrates, and they, they do contain some protein and sometimes fat, depending on the vegetable. But essentially, they're phytochemically rich foods. So phytochemical richness is such a key principle that most of us don't pay attention to. And when you talk about genius foods, you're often talking about the phytochemical richness of the food. So tell us some more about other genius foods that we should be focused on, particularly in terms of the brain.

Yeah, so, I mean, phytochemicals are abundant in avocados, dark leafy greens. But because we already talked about avocados, I feel like we should ping pong and talk about a good protein source, like a grass finished beef, I think is a powerful brain food for people. It's actually one of the more controversial recommendations but when you look at grass fed and finished beef, it's a great source of vitamin e, which I talked about as being a powerful fat protecting antioxidant. You find three times the vitamin e in grass finished beef as you find in grain finished beef. It's also a great source of a compound called creatine, which supports brain energy metabolism.

So people who don't regularly consume creatine, which is found naturally in beef and fish, and you give them supplemental creatine, you see an improvement in their cognitive function. So we know that dietary creatine plays an important role in good brain health and good brain function. Our brain's level of creatine tends to decline with age and is also apparently depleted in carriers of the apoe four allele, which is the most well defined Alzheimer's risk gene. So I'm a big advocate of in general, foods that contain creatine naturally and grass fed beef is a viable source. Thanks for listening today.

Mark Hyman
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