Daniel Amen M.D. Talks Brain Health at Brendon Burchard's High Performance Academy

how do you like the psychology section has been too much you sure yeah okay you ready for some more well i would love to say i have some more to give but instead i brought one of the world's renowned experts in this space and one of my great honors of having this stage is having the beautiful ability to bring people not only who's changed my life but who are literally impacting millions and millions of people on any given topic and on the topic of psychology and frankly happiness there's probably one person i know who i would trust to come to speak to you who i love this person's work i follow this person's work i've been personally impacted by the person's work and this is someone who has done such remarkable things who has data and insight that almost no one else on the planet has at all not even a close it's a person who's double board certified as a psychiatrist it's a person who has the world's largest vault of brain scans to know how do we actually act how do we actually behave it's a person you've seen on public television over and over and over again a person who wrote a book that is now all over the world to help people lose hundreds of thousands of pounds a person who we're all here because one day i called him and asked for some help and he saved my brain in this house we have dr daniel amen love you thank you i hope you feel this happy in about 20 minutes so i have a brand new talk for you and i so excited about it i'm like a little kid all wiggly because i'm going to introduce a brand new concept today and that is that i want you to become a brain warrior why because you're in a war for the health of your brain everywhere you go someone is trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early and the food industry hires nurse scientists to hook you on these bad foods that will kill you and they go after your pleasure centers in every single way they know how to do that in addition everywhere you go the crisis news network is telling you what awful and terrible thing happened anywhere on this planet and they play it over and over again because they know that fear hooks you and so you have to watch it over and over and then the computer industry gives you gadgets that hook you to the negativity and hook your children so if you really aren't conscious if you're not a warrior you lose and there are serious consequences to losing the war alzheimer's disease is expected to quadruple in the next 30 years and there is no cure despite the pharmaceutical industry spending tens of billions of dollars there is no cure on the horizon in fact if you are fortunate enough to live until you're 85 you have a 50 risk of being diagnosed with that now let's just pause and think about that how many of you want to live until you're 85 or older the rest of you suicidal think about that that if you're fortunate enough half of you in this room will be diagnosed with alzheimer's disease or some other form of dementia how many of you know somebody who has alzheimer's disease a lot of us and it's a disaster in so many ways and the thing that frightens me brand new research suggests that alzheimer's actually starts in your brain 30 to 50 years before you have any symptoms so this 59 year old woman so spect is the study i do at the amen clinics i have six clinics around the us we see about 4 000 patients a month and as brennan was saying i have the world's largest database of scans related to to behavior his is one of them isn't he awesome i went to his 10x empire and just like sat there like you are listen to every word and i adore him i am so grateful that he does what he does and so a healthy scan is the one on the left which is where his would be now that he's been serious he's a warrior for sure and a 59 year old woman scan is on the right do you know that she likely had negative brain changes in her 20s so those of you that are waiting to get well you might want to rethink that because i hear all the time in 40 well my memory is no good that's normal it's not no because your brain's deteriorating i'm 60 and my memory is no good isn't that normal it's like no that's not normal that means you have bad habits so there is never an age where memory problems are normal so if we just stay with this concept a little bit longer alzheimer's disease starts in your brain decades before you have any symptoms i want to show you this video these two women are on a railroad bridge and you got to ask yourself why would a person be on a railroad bridge where there's no way out watch what happens if you knew a train was going to hit you or had the possibility of hitting you would you get out of the way well that's what i'm going to teach you to do today is to get out of the way now they didn't die because they laid down flat on the tracks but in my mind i'm like that is just not the sign of intelligent life but now i want you to think about what you had for lunch is that the sign of intelligent life are you a brain warrior do you love your brain and are you winning the war or has a food company hijacked your taste buds and made you act like a rat that they're studying in a lab it's just an interesting thing to think about um no question you're in a war when it comes to psychiatry my field depression is the single most expensive illness on the planet it's estimated that 50 million americans at some point in their life will have a major depressive episode it has increased 400 percent since prozac was released in 1987. isn't that interesting one would think if prozac was the answer that it would have gone down but in fact it has gone up 23 of women between the ages of 20 and 60 are taking antidepressant medication why is that well a little known secret that no one tells women is if you take birth control pills it drops your serotonin levels so the don't worry be happy chemical all of a sudden you can have more sex but you actually don't want to have more sex is that a good idea i'm not sure and depression doubles the risk of alzheimer's disease in women and it quadruples alzheimer's disease in men in fact some people think depression later in life so if you're 60 and you're having your first depressive episode it's a prodrome for dementia so you want to take it seriously it doesn't mean you have to go on prozac what it means is you have to get serious about changing your life like i'm going to talk to you about today everybody knows obesity is a serious national crisis two-thirds of us are overweight one-third of us are obese it increases this thing called inflammation and if you actually break down the word inflammation and you look in the middle it's flame it's causing a fire in your body that damages every single organ in fact obesity is a risk factor for 30 medical illnesses including cancer diabetes depression and dementia and i'm horrified because there are 200 studies that say as your weight goes up the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down which should scare the fat off anyone i read the first study from the university of pittsburgh and i lost 30 pounds because i'm never going to do anything purposefully to hurt myself because i love myself god put me on this planet for a reason and i get to do my passion every day and i was listening to brendan and you know the future with enthusiasm i'm so stinking excited about the ability to change people's lives that it keeps me motivated no matter what bad things people say about me i'm like okay with that but i'm not damaging my brain think about this two-thirds of us are overweight as your weight goes up the size and function of your brain goes down it is the biggest brain drain in the history of the world wow so i'm on a plane going from chicago to des moines for public television it's early in the morning i'm sleepy and there's a very overweight person on this very tiny plane next to me and so half of this person is in my seat now one of the huge advantages of being short is every seat on every flight is first class i have leg room wherever i go but i'm tired and when you're tired you're a little on the irritable side and so in my head it's like you should reach over and tell this person they do not want to be a dinosaur you know big body little tiny brain you're going to become extinct and the next thought in my head was shut your mouth that is so rude now some of you may have had mothers like mine if you don't have something good to say don't say anything at all right and so i didn't say anything and i got home from the trip and i told tana my wife i'm like i just thought up the dinosaur syndrome and i told her about it and do you know what she said shut your mouth she said you have enough people who hate you you don't need this and two weeks later i'm in pittsburgh um at gnc's headquarters because they want to do work with me and i'm so excited until i met their marketing director who's morbidly obese and it pissed me off why because if you don't live the message of your life i mean let's just be honest here you're a bad messenger i mean my favorite bible verse is john 8 32 know the truth and the truth will set you free and um now i'm uncomfortable with this because i like to work with people who have integrity and but you know i'm polite and we go out to dinner that night and he orders two souffles for dessert and i look at him and my wife is with me and i'm like tom you don't want to be a dinosaur he's like what do you mean i said well there is a study actually here from the university of pittsburgh that said as your weight goes up the size and function of your brain goes down and then all of a sudden boom why do women wear pointy shoes you have to be kidding me like right on my shin boom but tom's paying attention he's like really he said all my numbers are fine my doctor says it's like not a big deal it's because his doctor's obese are you kidding me and so for an hour while i'm nursing the bruise we engage in this discussion and a month later he writes me a letter and he said thank you for telling me the truth i'm down 17 pounds and now he's the number two person at gnc and he's down 100 pounds know the truth and the truth will set you free and so i was writing my next public television special i'm actually working on my tenth one now and i'm like do i put it in and the pointy shoe lady says no and i did and i get letters from people all over the world who've lost 100 200 one guy 400 pounds because they don't want to be a dinosaur so you want to avoid the dinosaur syndrome people go why is this psychiatrist that's what i am interested in weight loss because i don't want you to be a dinosaur and i don't want you to get dementia and i don't want you to be depressed and um well i have to tell you this the answer to alzheimer's disease depression and obesity is not to see these as separate disorders in fact it's to see them as different expressions of the same unhealthy lifestyle that have okay here's the answer this is what i want you to take home the exact same treatment there are many ways to get sick there's one way to get well and if you pay attention to me for the next hour and 13 minutes i'm going to tell you exactly how to do that so here if you want to survive and thrive in our world you have to be a warrior you have to be a brain warrior because people are out to make money off of your early death and i'm not okay with it now warriors don't have one tool they don't have one weapon they have multiple weapons but we're going to win this war together so i'll tell you a little bit about my journey so i'm a psychiatrist i love being a psychiatrist i became a psychiatrist because when i was in medical school i got married and two months later my first wife tried to kill herself and i was horrified brought her off to the department of psychiatry she saw the chief and i completely fell in love with him why because i realized if he helped her which he did it would not only help her it would help me would help our children it would ultimately even help our grandchildren because they would be influenced by someone who is happier and more stable i fell in love with psychiatry because i realized it had the potential to change generations of people and so i'm fully mission driven in what i do but in 1991 my world got rocked again when i started looking at people's brains you know psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who never look at the organ they treat think about that cardiologists look your neurologists look every other medical specialty looks we guess and i'm like now there's a better way and so in 1991 i started looking at the brain with this study called spect looks at blood flow and activity so it looks at how the brain works healthy full even symmetrical activity like the one on the left this one is a drug affected brain i was the director of the dual diagnosis unit it's a psychiatric hospital unit takes care of drug addicts their scans were so bad i brought them home to my four children and effectively induced anxiety disorders in all four of them when it came to drug abuse i used to think my job as a psychiatrist was to lower people's anxiety that's not my job at all for a lot of my patients and some of you in this room i'm going to raise your anxiety right so you do the right thing people have low levels of anxiety go to jail you know they get a thought in their head i'm gonna go rob the grocery store and they just go do it rather than you know if i got the thought i'm gonna go rob the grocery store the next thought is are you stupid you could get caught it's immoral you don't like institutional food right that's what a healthy brain does it helps you think beyond the moment so i got so interested in the imaging work that we do at amen clinics um i scammed myself and it looked like crap i'm like why does my brain look bad because i actually don't drink i never smoked i've never done a drug in my life but i had meningitis when i was in the army and i played football in high school and if you're little and you play football the big people just love to hurt you because they're mean so i looked at my brain and i was horrified and that's when i developed this concept i call brain envy and i do exactly what i'm going to tell you to do and 20 years later my brain is fuller and fatter and healthier so big brain little belly it's a good thing because quite frankly freud was wrong penis envy is not the cause of most psychiatric disorders it's brain envy you have to care i'm like where did he come up with us most people don't know that freud was a coke head that he actually spent a lot of time doing cocaine because he was depressed and really negative he was not a happy guy so the imaging work actually changed everything in my children's lives this is my family and the rule in my family is if you date one of my daughters you have to get scared and i'm not kidding it's sort of like meet the parents but worse do you remember meet the parents robert de niro's got ben stiller in the basement and he's doing a lie detector i'm like no no we're not doing that i'm looking at your brain and so here are my two son-in-laws so these were the kids with the good enough brains they could stay imaging actually changed everything in my love life because uh you know i got divorced about 15 years ago and i said look if i'm ever gonna get married again i'm gonna make sure before i see any other naked part of her i'm going to see her naked bread and so this is tana who i just really like she's a neurosurgical icu nurse she's pretty she's bright she's i'm like two weeks into our relationship i'm like would you mind coming over to the clinic i have some very interesting things to show you so here she is in the camera she had a stunningly beautiful brain so i married her she wrote a new york times best-selling book see this is what good brains get you that actually was just recently translated into turkey and russia so we're pretty excited about her the imaging work i do completely changes the discussion about mental health because quite frankly no one wants to see a psychiatrist no one wants to be labeled as abnormal or defective but every single one of you wants a better brain so what if mental health was really brain health we have to change completely change the discussion because most with mental illness there's still great stigma and because of the stigma people won't get help my new show is called on the psychiatrist couch so it's going to be if you could spend a day with me what would i want you to learn and one of the first lessons is that normal is a myth that in fact it is a setting on a dryer or a city in illinois 51 of the u.s population at some point in their life will have a psychiatric illness 29 of us will have two and 17 percent of us are 51 million americans will have three so if you struggle with add anxiety depression addiction welcome to norm so i actually had the privilege of i had the privilege of going to normal illinois and giving a lecture at the university of illinois normal and it was so cool because i got i was i got to go to a gross normal grocery store i did not think of robbing it as interviewed on the normal radio station i finally got to meet normal women being from california that was rare and they had the same problems they had everywhere else so one thing that should horrify you this slide says as you age your brain gets less and less active so it's literally true so as you age you know your skin falls off your face that same process happens in your brain so here's a typical 55 year old person so you can see the wrinkles just like you'd see wrinkles in someone's face this is a typical 82 year old person it looks awful that's typical but this is my friend doris wrap who's 82 and has a gorgeous brain what this really taught me because i have a whole group of 80 year old brains that are stunning is that brain aging is optional but you have to have a plan you have to have a battle plan or the brain on the left is what's headed your way i don't want that brain so i have to do something to make mine better so write down how many of these warning signs you personally have if your memory is worse than it was ten years ago that's a sign your brain is in trouble in fact that's probably the biggest one on the list if your energy's lousy if your mood is no good if you're irritable anxious stress and worried if you have a short attention span brain fog if you're impulsive means the front part of your brain's not working if you make bad decisions repeatedly if you can't sleep sleep is so stinking interesting do you know what happens when you sleep is your brain actually washes itself your brain detoxifies itself it's got a whole cleaning mechanism system it's got a whole separate fluid system that only works when you're asleep so if you're not sleeping it's like the trash in your brain never gets taken out so i think of it sort of like new york city with the trash collectors on strike and things don't work and your life sort of smells sleep apnea is a disaster for brain function and i know some of you've been diagnosed with sleep apnea and the doctor sent you home with one of those positive pressure masks and you couldn't get used to it and so you took it and you threw it away that is not the sign of intelligent life because sleep apnea triples the risk for alzheimer's disease what you need to do if you can't get used to it go back to the sleep doctor and go you help me get used to this and they have new masks they have different technology but sleep apnea we actually see it on the scans early alzheimer's disease it's a disaster plus you're tired and you can't lose weight no matter how many different times you try because your brain is so metabolically active people don't know that so your brain is about three pounds two percent of your body's weight but it uses twenty percent of the blood flow in your body twenty to thirty percent of the calories you consume and about 20 of the oxygen so think about that it's busy whenever you deprive it of oxygen it starts to die so if you're a warrior you get sleep apnea taken care of high blood pressure it's a disaster as your blood pressure goes up blood flow goes down high blood sugar maybe another one of the like top three worst why high blood sugar levels all of you will talk about this later should get your resting or your fasting blood sugar and you should have that under 90. why because when it goes high even high normal blood vessels become stiff brittle and they start to break so diabetes alzheimer's is actually now called diabetes type three so you sugar is not your friend i i don't know how else to say that people hate me when i say that right it's not your friend because high blood sugar levels which come from sugar and foods that quickly turn to sugar bread pasta potatoes rice sugar high blood sugar lousy blood flow new study just out this month neurons don't age blood vessels do so if you can keep your blood vessels healthy you can keep your brain healthy and the thing that i find so fascinating so i've written a bunch of books and one of my favorite books is called the brain in love and as i i've always said whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain because your brain gets 20 of the blood flow so whatever is bad for your heart is bad for your brain and then i'm writing the brain in love and i'm thinking oh my god whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain is good for your genitals because it's all about blood flow right and whatever is bad for your brain you're bad for your heart is bad for your brain is bad for your genitals and then i read a study that said 40 percent of 40 year olds have erectile dysfunction which meant 40 percent of 40 year olds have brain dysfunction because it's about blood flow and 70 of 70 year olds have erectile dysfunction i don't know about you i'm not good with that that means 70 of 70 year olds have brain dysfunction so brain dysfunction is normal i'm not interested in normal right i don't know how many of you were like okay with being in the middle of your class i wasn't right you're at high performance academy that means you're interested in not being in the middle or the bottom of the class so you have to be a warrior wait we talked about that sexual dysfunction i got ahead of myself and if you can't do what your doctor tells you to do if in fact you have a smart doctor because there's some doctors that were in the bottom of their class i mean because they'll like oh here take this medicine and they'll not talk to you at all about your lifestyle and that's just stupid i don't know how else to say that big lesson so if you go okay dr raymond single most important thing you've learned from a hundred thousand scans you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and i can prove it so who wants to make their brain better and the rest of you all right i pick a study every year that i just completely fall in love with and last year this was it dale bredesen from ucla took 10 people with alzheimer's disease with alzheimer's disease put them on the program i'm going to teach you it's the program we've been doing for a long time in six months nine of them were better six of them went back to work you are not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better so what did he write about single agent treatments are not likely to work in alzheimer's disease that's a.d or mci which is mild cognitive impairment many senior moments which means you're on your way to alzheimer's disease you have to go at it in multiple mechanisms so if you write anything down this is like one of the big things i cannot just think of doing one thing like lumosity and think i'm doing anything good for my brain i cannot do one thing even gingko i love gingko i think gingko is cool but think i'm going to be doing anything for my brain and we learned this with cardiovascular disease we learned it with cancer we learned it with hiv and aids you have to go after them with multiple weapons so his strategy was really around four things optimize your important numbers so i don't ever want you to say if i go what's your vitamin d level and you go oh my doctor said it's normal i'm not interested in normal is it optimal normal is between 30 and 100. i want my patients at 80 or 90 or 100. i don't want you normal because the bottom quartile of normal is associated with cancer i don't want you normal i want you optimal and this is my perfect audience right high performance academy so you have to know your numbers and we want to optimize them um multiple mechanisms we'll talk about that it's got to be personalized so you're going to have to do a little work to personalize it and it needs to be iterative which just means you got to keep after it right i turned 60 last year and i'm like i i know what 60 year olds look like i know what their brains look like i'm like not okay with it so it's a war every day right i mean i'll lose some battles right it's just in turkey i mean some of the food was awesome right but i didn't lose very many of the battles because the war is really important to me all right so here's the program it's 12 things it's sort of simple actually the first thing is you need to be screened um at our clinics we use spec because it's a functional study so it's different than a cat scan or an mri those are anatomy studies they show what the brain actually physically looks like spec looks at function so if you actually took an mri of someone that was alive and it looked healthy and the spec scan looked healthy and then you took an mri of a dead person it would look exactly the same and the spec scan would look empty right so what i'm really interested is not what the structure looks like i'm looking at how it works does it work too hard does it not work hard enough so i think every five years if you have alzheimer's in your family starting at 40 you should be scanned if you don't have it in your family probably at 50 every five years you should be scammed because treatment works early much better than it works late the one person in bredesen study that didn't get better had had it for a long time so one question i would ask you is well where are you which brain would you have would you have the really healthy one the not so healthy oh my goodness i'm in trouble or i'm in serious trouble now i realize everybody can't get a scan see for me i get scanned every couple of years because i want to know if a train's coming my way um there's a screening tool we use that's computerized that we like a lot it's actually the neural psych assessment we use at ayman clinic so it takes about 40 minutes it's called web neuro and it measures coordination processing speed attention memory executive function mood anxiety and this very interesting thing called positivity versus negativity bias do you tend to read faces that are happy or do you tend to read quickly faces that are unhappy and if you tend to be negative you want to work on training that out because the focus on negativity sucks out your memory brand new study actually just this week the people who focus on awful thoughts and if you just watched cnn or fox news or whatever repeatedly and allow that junk that toxin in your brain you don't think as well because it's the stress i mean in fact it's one of the safest times in history but we don't think that because cnn knows if you're going to support their advertisers they hook you with scary things um there always have been crazy people like isis always right but we think they're hiding around every corner now it's not a good thing screening so you want to know what your bmi is so it's called body mass index normal's between 18.5 and 25. between 25 and 30 is overweight four percent less brain tissue your brain looks eight years older than healthy people if it's over 30 your brain has 8 percent less tissue ew and your brain looks 16 years older than healthy people so think about that it's time to get your weight under control and not in a crazy stupid way right and doesn't have to be fast it just needs to be consistent over time um i want you to get these labs i want you to know what your cbc is stands for complete blood count why because if you're anemic you won't think right and if you're drinking too much your red blood cells will be big they'll suffer and they'll be big and inefficient a general metabolic panel looks at your liver and your kidneys fasting blood sugar remember what i said under 90. this is a very interesting test it's called a hemoglobin a1c and a hemoglobin a1c looks at blood sugar over the last three months you don't want a high blood sugar you don't want your doctor telling you you're pre-diabetic you should be very upset if he says or she says you're pre-diabetic and then you should do this program because it can often get you out of being pre-diabetic fasting insulin a cholesterol panel but i want you to be very careful with this one there's actually a great book by a friend of mine johnny bowden called the great cholesterol myth so cholesterol levels at 200 220 even 250 are often fine unless you have a certain kind of ldl people think of ldl and they think of bad cholesterol it's not bad but they fractionate it and if it's got the little b particles that is bad and the big fluffy a particles have no problem at all the problem is everybody gets put on statins and it sucks your memory and your testosterone so it's just something to be careful with and i'm not telling you to stop anything but i would encourage you to read the great cholesterol myth thyroid is absolutely critical to brain function c-reactive protein and homocysteine are both inflammatory markers you don't want to have inflammation brewing in your brain you don't want that it's associated with depression and dementia and arthritis and chronic pain and all sorts of bad things so you want to just measure your c reactive protein and that number actually should be under one and your homocysteine and that number should be under eight vitamin b12 level b12 is essential as is folic acid vitamin d is a universal risk factor when it's low in fact article just came out from uc san diego that if everybody took 2 000 units of vitamin d a day it would decrease cancer risk by 30 percent i'm like how simple is that get more sun or take vitamin d3 ferritin which is iron storage do you know why women live longer than men they bleed high iron levels associated with rust low iron levels you can be anemic and tired so it's about optimizing your level but if you're a guy you should know your ferritin level and if it's too high you should donate blood right i mean it's sort of like bloodletting so i'm in turkey and i'm at the spice market and you walk outside the spice market and they have little quail in these cages you can buy oh my god i'd feel so terrible killing the quail and little chickens and then they have leeches and these huge tubs and i'm like and my wife's a neurosurgical icu nurse and she actually used to use leeches during surgery to help with wound healing like wow um dhea which is a hormone precursor along with testosterone and estrogen for women so these are the blood tests that you should know and you should know am i normal and am i optimal you're with me so you gotta you gotta know your important numbers it's a business principle you cannot change what you do not measure right that's why i love doing imaging because if i measure it now all of a sudden people get brain envy if their brain looks bad they're like oh i don't like that i want it better i'll show you some as we go along all right so the first one baseline screening the second one is you got to know your risk so the short course in preventing alzheimer's prevent all the illnesses that are associated with it and it's the same program so there are genetic risks if you have it in your family your anxiety should be up now not so that you have to go get drunk or smoke pot to lower the anxiety because you're raising your anxiety further your risk further um but you should be serious if you have a brain injury anybody see what happened with chris borland this week the linebacker for the 49ers who is a rookie last year and he retired now why did he retire so he actually called our clinic the week before and he's like what do you think his aim in clinics we did the world's largest study on active and retired nfl players at a time when the nfl was lying that it had a problem we went they're so funny they're like they started a concussion committee in 1994 but by 2008 when i started my study they'd never looked at anybody's brain so they actually really didn't want to know the answer to the question instead what they did is they took rats and they put little tiny helmets on rats and then they got these 50 to 100 gram pellets and they whacked them in the head repeatedly and then they killed them and sliced up their brains and they went we can't tell that is just silly so when we looked at their brains they were awful and uh so chris heard the news and went so let's see i could make maybe 10 million dollars over the next five years and then give myself a risk a 30 risk for dementia or depression i'm not going to be a good dad i won't be a good husband i mean you see about the domestic violence and football players let's see worth it not worth it worth it not worth it i was so proud of him right you have to protect your head now i know some of you have children that play contact sports and i just want you to be thinking about it i was i was at the future of medicine conference recently and the guy that interviewed me said i have a 13 year old son who wants to play what would you tell him and i went no and i guess he didn't really hear me because he said but he really wants to play okay i'm sorry i wasn't clear your brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter it's housed in a really hard skull that if you actually looked inside his skull it has many sharp bony ridges your brain is the organ of learning loving and behaving it controls absolutely everything you do when it works right you're healthier because you make better decisions you're wealthier because you make better decisions you're happier and more successful in everything you do when your brain is not right for whatever reason like your dad lets you play football you're sadder sicker poor less successful in everything you do if your brain is really the super computer that runs your life and oh by the way it's not fully developed until you're 25 and girls or 28 in boys why in god's name if you actually like this person would you ever allow them to put themselves at risk for brain damage that doesn't sound smart loving and in fact if he really wanted to do cocaine would that be okay with you he was going to get him like the best football coach i'm like well would you go get him the best drug dealer you could because in my mind it's identical the damage i've seen is identical so those of you that are putting yourself at high risk stop it unless you're just not that smart was that clear all right you're not going to be happy with this one no one is alcohol is not a health food the wine industry is magnificent at making you think you should have two glasses of red wine a day and i just have to tell you studies from johns hopkins that say people who drink every day have a smaller brain so when it comes to the brain size really does matter it's the only organ in your body where size matters i know how much can i drink like two normal size normal size that's important i used to live in germany with the 40 ounce beer steins two normal size glasses a week more than that i'm just not a fan and drugs i know they're legalizing marijuana everywhere and i actually think it should be legal please don't be sending those potheads to jail where they learn how to be better criminals and we have to spend money on them that's a bad idea but it's not a good idea to be smoking pot why because it damages your brain we have done study after study it gives your brain a toxic look and it's less perfused than people who are not smoking pot obesity we talked about cardiovascular disease so the numbers after each of these risk factors is how much it increases your risk so alcohol and drug abuse quadruples the risk obesity triples the risk high blood pressure and heart disease two and a half fold cerebral vascular disease so if you have blood vessel disease in your brain it increases it tenfold if you exercise less than twice a week now isn't that interesting so we could look at all of these and go well how do i decrease my risk i don't engage in high-risk activities um i really sort of kill the alcohol in the pot i'm eating healthy food i am exercising it's the same thing right it's the same plan i'm not eating the standard american diet you know high glycemic low fiber diets i'm in a job that requires lifelong learning anybody who comes to one of brendan's events i don't have to talk to you about it because i mean you just that's what you are as a person you are a learning person but people who drop out of school and are in jobs that don't require lifelong learning they have double the risk of alzheimer's diabetes is a disaster we talked about that smoking smoking's actually interesting because they discovered that initially they said people who smoked had a lower incidence of alzheimer's disease and then they when they figured out why the smokers weren't happy about that because in fact dead people don't get alzheimer's disease um parkinson's disease untreated depression um untreated add low estrogen low testosterone so i know a lot of women are afraid of estrogen because of the women's health initiative study but as estrogen levels go low blood flow to your brain goes low so in bredesen's work and ours too we often use bioidentical hormone replacement to get you in an optimized state sleep apnea we talked about cancer treatment how unfair is that but as chemotherapy kills healthy kills cancer cells it also kills healthy cells um we talked about that and you have to floss now i don't know about you but before i really understood this research i'm always like a little kid and i like i stay up so late because i'm like working on something or learning something and i'm always excited so i'm you know i'm like really tired when i go to bed and then i went you have to really stop that brush your teeth floss your teeth go take care of them be at the dentist on a regular basis why because periodontal disease increases inflammation in your body and increases heart disease and brain disease and the older you are the higher your risk look at this for people who are 85. it's crazy so know and reduce your risk and then you want to be on a warrior diet so what's the brain warrior diet it's calorie smart so you're not fat do calories matter hello of course they matter right they're all sorts of people you know they'll get up and they'll go oh calories don't count now you don't have to count them if you're eating the right stuff but if you have problems with your weight even if you're eating the right stuff weigh and measure things just for a month i mean i remember the first time i did it you know i'm like okay you got to get serious about losing your belly because you don't want to lose your brain and so i'd like get grape nuts and i'd put them in a bowl and i'd look on the box since 220 calories per serving and i'd get a bowl whatever freaking size i wanted and i'd like put the grape nuts in and then i put milk in it's like 80 calories per serving and i'm like and then i'm like oh read the label it says for a half a cup and i remember the first time i actually got a measuring cup and got half a cup of grape nuts and i put it in the big bowl i started to cry because i realized i was having a thousand calories for breakfast when i thought it was 300 right do the math clean whole food what a concept don't eat toxic things because and you always want to think what the food you eat eight but the food you eat ate and so ultimately it's hormone-free because why am i gonna get hormones they're not mine antibiotic free you know 70 of the antibiotics in this country are not given to people they're given to animals who then subsequently give them to us hormone-free antibiotic-free free-range grass fed why do they feed animals corn to make them fat so if you're fat don't eat corn i mean that sort of makes sense to me low glycemic high fiber which means a whole bunch of vegetables foods that don't quickly turn to sugar clean protein never go on a low fat diet it's the dumbest thing that we've done to this country why because 60 percent of the solid weight of your brain is fat isn't that interesting and when they took fat out of our diets they replaced it with sugar and obesity skyrocketed mental exercise so you want to be working out your brain new learning um it's never just crossword puzzles that's working out one part of your brain so if you just do crossword puzzles it's like going to the gym doing left bicep curls and then leaving so laughter for the right side of your brain memory games math map reading puzzles juggling coordination exercises you can see work out many different parts of your brain physical exercise is so important but i never want you all right all right all right for physical exercise i am not a fan and some of you are going to hate me because this is a high performance group of marathons i am actually i'm a believer in abundance and not suffering think of the first marathon so i was in greece over the summer and marathon greece the greeks won a war against persia and a young man ran 26.2 miles to athens said we won the war and then he died when you are running 26 miles your unconscious mind is like why the hell are you doing that that is not rational that is not what humans do there must be a tiger and the chronic levels of stress that are associated with that are not good for you in fact the brains i've scanned of my extreme athletes are generally lousy isn't that interesting so this is the exercise i like walking and bursting so walking this is what i would like you to do if you're a warrior take a 30 or 40 minute walk every day and during that time four or five one-minute sprints like just run as fast as you can if your doctor clears your heart or walk as fast as you can it's the interval training that is best for you and then i want you to lift weights because the stronger you are as you age the less likely you are to get alzheimer's disease and the thing that kills people especially old people is not muscle it's frailty so i never want you to be frail so if you're a woman i want you lifting weights now don't hurt yourself get a trainer get someone who can help you and never let the trainer hurt you so bursting weight training and coordination exercises especially dance and table tennis all right we talked about sleep sleep is really important uh so seven or eight hours so your brain can properly wash itself so i told my 11 year old daughter this a couple of months ago and she just thought it was so funny and before bed she went to her mother and i didn't tell her mother i was teaching her this and she said mommy have to go to bed to get my brain washed and my wife is like what are you telling chloe get sleep apnea assessed and treated if you snore loudly if you stop breathing at night if you're tired during the day this is life-saving and critical if you know about my work i often talk about ants they stand for automatic negative thoughts the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day so the short course i have much more information on this whenever you feel sad mad nervous out of control write down what you're thinking and ask yourself is it true is it rational is it helping me thoughts lie they lie a lot and it is your uninvestigated thoughts that hurt you more than anyone else will ever hurt you meditation fooled us we thought meditation would calm the brain it completely fires it up meditation is so interesting and hypnosis is the same as just on the oz show a few weeks ago we did a whole um segment on past life regression and which i just thought was hysterical and fun and my job was the imaging and so we scanned this woman's brain at rest and then she went in a hypnotic trance when they were doing the past life regression her whole brain fired up was so interesting hypnosis is very powerful thank you for that and then hormone optimization so the first thing in hormone optimization is to avoid any thing that hurts your hormones right so let me give you like the short course for brain health brain envy avoid anything that hurts it do things that help it right brain envy avoid bad do good if you want to have hormone envy too so hormone envy avoid anything that hurts it do things that help it and what hurts it is sugar i hate that right but if you get a sugar burst it drops your testosterone levels by 25 and so i had this crazy idea i put on one of my shows that if i take tana to the cheesecake factory and we share the cheesecake nobody is going to get dessert when they get home because you know testosterone is associated with your feelings of sexuality your libido and virility belly fat why don't you is anybody besides me bothered by all the pregnant men in our society i'm like dude deliver the baby because you know what belly fat actually does is it takes healthy testosterone levels and turns them into unhealthy forms of cancer promoting estrogen levels isn't that crazy so i'm like walking down the street going god deliver the baby please so sometimes giving people hormone precursors like dhea or even bioidentical hormone replacement i'm a huge fan so all right inflammation we talked about how this fire inside your body is a major cause of disease so how do you put out the fire the diet it's an anti-inflammatory diet omega-3 fatty acids something called sulforaphanes cook broccoli curry rosemary so if you go into your spice cabinet i really think that's your medicine cabinet garlic green tea cocoa chocolate i actually if you get on my website i make something called brain in love which is sugar-free dairy-free dark chocolate tastes amazing and has nine grams of fiber and you want to take care of your teeth so all very simple things that decrease inflammation what increases inflammation sugar wheat grains high glycemic low fiber foods so foods that quickly turn to sugar it's not because i don't like you i want you to give up the bread it's because i like you i want you to give up the bread beta amyloid reducing agents all right this one's really complicated when you don't sleep your brain actually begins to produce these clumps of sticky gooey stuff that when dropped into nerve cell fields cause short circuits so we think this is one of the major mechanisms of alzheimer's disease so sleep actually helps clear them as does vitamin d and curcumin simple this is going to be a little complicated in neurons there's a protein structure called tau and tau actually provides the lattice network that keeps the structure of your cells intact you never want that to escape your neurons so these this is these are the dementia brains and football players and you see those dark speckled things those are tau proteins that escaped and caused inflammation everywhere in the brain because if you just think about it if you have this protein structure and you're being hit repeatedly in the head it breaks it up causing what becomes a progressive degenerative illness can you reverse it it's an interesting question so this is the paper i published on the world's largest study on active and retired nfl players the damage was terrible this is on 100 people so it's highly statistically significant but on this program that i'm giving you eighty percent of them showed improvement in as little as two months and we published that too in a scientific journal we're pretty excited about this this is one of my players it's actually duvall love from the los angeles rams he played 16 years his brain looked awful he was morbidly obese and at the end of 18 months his brain was better and oh by the way he lost a hundred pounds so i was pretty excited he's a warrior okay so we have brain envy and hormone envy now we have to have blood flow envy but i want you to notice how similar all these are so basically blood flow so it's blood flow envy avoid bad do good so you have to avoid things that hurt blood flow in your body didn't we talk about some of these oh caffeine we didn't constricts blood flow bad thing now if you have a cup of coffee a day it's not the end of the world if you have six you want to rethink that um look at these they're the same things wow so it's sort of like coming around so do things that help it so hypnosis meditation water sleep ginkgo and vinpocetine we'll talk about them in just a sec ginseng green tea rhodiola is one of my favorite nutrients because it decreases stress and increases blood flow arginine increases blood flow and there's some treatments that we use as psychiatrists like hyperbaric oxygen or tms it's called transcranial magnetic stimulation to boost blood flow and then the last one is the nutrients what did i say multiple mechanisms multiple mechanisms so we're going to go after inflammation with omega-3 fatty acids we're going to support your vitamins especially b6 b12 folate vitamin c and vitamin d blood flow ginkgo and vinpocetine the prettiest brains i've ever seen take gingko and bin pocitine acetylcholine that's the neurotransmitter involved in memory antioxidant support blood sugar stabilization and energy so this is what i think is one of the most important things i've learned in the last 10 years is if you try to study any of these alone it's a mistake because your brain gets sick in many different ways you need to attack it or repair it in many different ways and when i was doing the big nfl study i created a product um called brain power basics and in brain power basics we got awesome vitamin support with neurovite high dose high quality fish oil and then the brain boost and we got highly significant improvements in memory and mood and overall cognitive health we're really excited and so we just put it into two packets a day so notice carlos who's pregnant and he came to our clinic because he was anxious it was during the recession he was irritable he had brain fog and but he was a smart guy and he just did everything i said some of you you'll come up to me later and go dr amon what's the one thing i should do stop being stupid and do them all so he just did everything his brain looked awful so look at his brain the one on the right and look at him later this is 30 weeks so he delivered the baby his sex life went through the roof he was so happy and his brain was better you can do this one of my favorite stories so ray white's one of my football players and he joined my study so i would see his wife his wife had just been diagnosed with frontal temporal lobe dementia it's a wicked form of dementia and he was very upset and he said the doctor said he should find a home for nancy because within a year this is 2009 she would not know his name and he was sad and tearful when he was talking to me and begged me to see her and you know i hardly see anybody new anymore and uh i scanned her her brain looked awful so you can see how the front part's deteriorating but i said i need you to do these 12 things and this is 10 weeks later and she's so much better now there is no doubt we're in a war for the health of her brain but it's five years later she still lives at home she still knows her husband's name and i want you to look at rey so look at rey before he's a big boy he's not very healthy and now look at him now and i'm like ray how'd you do this so he's down 50 pounds he's like dr raymond i knew if i did everything you said she would too sometimes motivation is about love and quite frankly in your families you're probably the most powerful person if you model the message it not only is about you ultimately it's about generations of you so i got this email this week it's a little long but i want to read it to you it's his update it starts with my rental car confirmation number for aruba was six three zero one two zero seven eight u s two and hotel was five five five zero five five one zero nine three one i thought this was the most unusual way to start an email the reason i know that is that i am able to supernaturally remember numbers that i would never have even tried to remember and they don't go away when i told my wife about this she cried steve came to see me because both of his parents died of alzheimer's disease and he felt like he was on the way and his brain showed he was on the way my productivity and creativity is off the chart i would say i'm getting four times the work done four times better than ever and creativity has resulted in book ideas and proposals that i can't wait to publish he's not manic he's not grandiose he's already written 20 books i have the ability to focus on tasks and connect my with my wife in ways i've never experienced here's what i'm doing consistently see if you can't get the gist exercising in bursts as you suggested versus 30 minutes of continuous running no sodas versus having four a day severely restricted sugar intake while increasing protein and reducing grains and processed carbs sound familiar taking brain power basics i love that part a cpap machine every night versus never he had sleep apnea brain fit exercises uh where i have a ways to go on memory and other areas but in problem solving i'm up to 99.5 percentile wow what a difference and sexual intimacy is another amazing peak performance and i put that there specifically because it's about blood flow if your blood flow's not right your brain is not right i know it sounds a bit difficult to believe all this now i hear it all the time that's why i do what i do i'm a warrior i think of myself as the warrior chief but i want you to come with me so who wants to be a brain warrior okay um my first brain warrior is lori so lori is a major in the salvation army she stalked me for years she'd come to every lecture i would give and just love learning about her brain and then one day it hit her that if i really love my brain i have to get my body right and she took the same course the same information that my wife taught the course and dropped 55 pounds now she's only 410 and she lost the weight but also her chronic pain rosacea and ibs and this is what warriors do they get the information and then they give it away why because it's in the act of giving that you receive and her husband got better her children got better her grandchildren got better here they are drinking a green drink with her five-year-old grandson now lori is the director of the salvation army's largest drug treatment program in anaheim and she realized that she was in a war that what they were feeding the drug addicts they were serving was crap and so she literally went to war with her hirer with her hierarchy and said we have to do better and so tana and i went we helped them create a brain healthy treatment program and the stories were phenomenal um now a lot of people wouldn't want to work with you know court-ordered criminals i actually thought that was a marvelous thing to do and what tana thought was if i help them that will be one less scared little girl and so these guys they got their geds where they didn't before where they thought they were stupid they lost massive amounts of weight the relapse rate went down all because one person laurie was a warrior following me and this is thomas who was a gang banger just came out of prison hated himself failed his ged three times he said dr amen i had every bad thought you could think of and i wanted to die but i thought well let's give the program a try over a year he lost 85 pounds got his ged and he's he wrote on his graduation a letter to tana and i and he said my life was a mess now it is a message i have been tested now i have a testimony i was a victim and now i am victorious i went through trials and now i am triumphant that's what i want for you okay i say my favorite story for the end i am a brain warrior in order for you to be a brain warrior you have to know why you care what in your soul matters to you because if you're going to win the war against the society that's going after your health you have to have a burning desire to be well and i have four children and i have four grandchildren and this is emmy and he's my third grandchild and emmy was born with a genetic micro deletion syndrome that left her floppy at birth and i'm like why is she floppy and i'm horrified and then at five months she started having seizures wicked seizures like she was being electrocuted and one day she had 160 of them and i'm in boston giving a lecture i'm horrified and she gets to see a neurologist i'm on the phone with the neurologist she diagnoses her with something called west syndrome and i look up west syndrome 30 percent of these kids die before they're three the doctor said she wouldn't walk and wanted to put her on a medicine called acth which was 26 000 a dose and had more side effects than you can imagine and i'm on the phone with him and i'm like what are my options he's like well i really think i'm like come on what are my options i'm a physician right i never want someone to tell me what to do i want someone to do informed consent which are what are my options and he's like well i really think this is the best thing and i said well have you ever heard of the ketogenic diet and he's like oh yeah but there's no science behind it which is where he lost me and my wife said she knew the conversation went south when i asked him do you read because now i'm furious i'm like there's 70 studies with it decreases seizure frequency in children by 50 the studies were mostly done at johns hopkins you've heard of john's hopkins it's this little tiny school in maryland and he's like oh dr ayman if you want to do that i won't be your doctor i'm like are you kidding you're fired i said did you fail like first year medical school where they teach you informed consent you're not the boss you're supposed to tell us what our options are boom i'm furious i am so pissed off and i'm like oregon health sciences university my kids live in oregon they have a ketogenic clinic so i'm on the phone to carter ray the director there i'm like please will you see emmy i said we just want to know our options so they said she wouldn't walk she went on the ketogenic diet within about two months she lost her seizures remember they said she wouldn't walk so here is emmy where are you going she is the most beautiful fun-loving happy child but you know my why is if i'm not healthy she won't be either that she needs me and so if i think of the cookie or i think of the apple the apple always wins because i'm a warrior because people depend on me who depends on you emmy's a brain warrior what about you thank you so much you

Channel: Dr. Daniel Amen

Views: 237,356

Keywords: Brain, Brain Health, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, Dementia, Alzheimers, Diet, Nutrition, Brendon Burchard, Daniel G. Amen (Author), Health (Industry), Depression (Symptom), Diet (Industry), Stress, High Performace Academy

Id: PlFpdV0Jxqo

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2015