Eating Smarter for Your Brain with Shawn Stevenson & Jim Kwik

welcome back quick brain your question for today is a big one how do you eat smarter nobody wants to eat stupid right and so we have a back with us a very popular guest somebody who's been on our show numerous times we're really glad that he's back shawn stevenson he is a nutritionist best-selling author uh number one top health podcast host um we've had you back on this we had you know the show in the past talking about your book sleep smarter which very popular episodes now we're going to talk about your upcoming book called eat smarter brilliant branding my friend thanks for coming back it's my pleasure man i love talking with you jim dude i could talk to you for hours so we know uh let's jump into food we know what you eat matters especially for your gray matter and uh let's talk a little bit about brain you and i were geeking out about brain anatomy before we started recording what what's what's this thing made out of because you what you eat becomes used but what's what what's the brain that i've made out of yeah this is such a great question just an important place to begin because oftentimes i don't think we really realize that our brains are made out of the stuff that we eat and our brain is actually a very very hungry organ as a matter of fact it only takes up about two percent of our body's overall mass but it consumes upwards upwards of 25 of the calories we consume it's a massively hungry organ and it just makes sense because it's also arguably the most complex entity in the known universe and being that it's doing so many different processes literally like trillions of things are happening right now in our brains many of these pathways and the way that we're feeding our brain is actually this part once we get in this conversation it's not as clear-cut as it may seem because being that it's the most complex and powerful entity in the known universe it's also very protective all right our brains are so powerful but yet they're very delicate and they're actually about the your brain's consistency is about the consistency of soft butter so it's like this beautiful poetry in nature like this super powerful entity is also the most it's more delicate than my emotions after watching toy story three you know like i'm so it's this beautiful poetry now being that this is the case it also has a security system external and internal the external security system it's the only organ that's completely enclosed in its own hard shell its own bone right we have our cranium we have our skull that's protecting this organ and that's protecting from external intrusions but internal intrusions are even more uh potentially problematic and because they're subtle and for this the brain has what's known as the blood brain barrier and it's really this highly sophisticated velvet rope basically of what's going to determine what's going to get into your brain and what won't because with circulating in your body in your bloodstream uh there's a lot of toxins there's a lot of you know metabolic waste there are many different substances that can be incredibly detrimental to your brain and so the brain has developed this very sophisticated system of identifying only specific things that can cross over this blood-brain barrier and make it into the brain and so it's very very selective and our mutual friend dr lisa moscone uh she calls it neuro nutrition you know and so the brain has its own diet and so what i want folks to know just right off the bat is that there are specific nutrients that are able to cross the blood-brain barrier and directly feed the development of your brain cells all right and today we'll talk about what some of those are and we're not just going to talk about disease prevention as far as the brain and degradation that's where a lot of the work is focused we're going to talk about the things you can do specific foods and nutrients you can eat to make your brain work better and smarter that's tangential when you uh when we have when we talk about our second brain our gut and you hear this term leaky gut syndrome is that is there a similar phenomenon here in the brain with the blood brain very can certain things like leak in because of z disease inflammation oh jim this is so good so good and i'm so honored about each smarter coming out at this time and furthering these conversations because this is this is going to be some of the first in book form information getting out to everyday folks yeah to get educated in this topic you know there's leaky gut and we also have this developing term of leaky brain you know and actually things that can break down the this blood-brain barrier this basically very sophisticated security system can create a situation where it's breaking down and allowing things into the brain that shouldn't be there and also having degradation in the ability for toxins and metabolic waste because i just mentioned the brain is doing trillions of things there's a lot of metabolic waste products that need to get shuttled out of the brain and that process being broken down as well and not working uh as effectively and this buildup of this you know like uh amyloid beta plaque for example and not being able to get it out of the out of the brain we talked about this in sleep smarter and how sleep deprivation is one of the biggest factors behind an inability of the brain to clean itself because it's when you're sleeping that your this glymphatic system this cleaning process your your brain's little internal helpers it's about 10 times more active you know so what you just brought up is a very important factor in this and this goes into it leads into a conversation because what this topic in of itself can be a whole show but it leads into an important topic and a subject this term that a lot of folks are going to hear more about coming up and so this might be the first time you're hearing it but there's this new phenomenon called neuroinflammation it's not that it's new it's just that now we have a term for it and hypothalamic inflammation specifically hypothalamic inflammation so the hypothalamus is really largely regarded as the master regulator of your endocrine system all right it's like the the governator it's like the one that's running what's happening downstream now this is part of the hpa axis the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis but along that axis the superhighway is also your thyroid for example it's also factoring in you know what's happening with your immune system in your thymus gland there's so much going on in this axis now here's the big issue and this is one of the things that we talk about that's probably again it's for a lot of folks this first time they're going to be hearing it because when you're hearing about losing weight we're generally focused on this kind of calorie paradigm and not understanding that your hypothalamus is regulating how your body is using or not using energy in your body and the latest data that we have shows that hypothalamic inflammation can literally directly lead to leptin resistance so that's leptin is your body's satiety hormone with your major satiety hormone we talk about all the rest of them in the book too but that leptin processing starts to go down and so we find folks start to become increasingly more ravenous in their appetite and cravings and they also found that this hypo hypothalamic inflammation directly leads to weight gain and nobody's talking about that with their diet programs that we need to address the inflammation in your brain to lose weight but your brain and this is a very simple principle it's controlling what everything in your body is doing and this is the beauty of it if we can get our brains healthy we can get our bodies healthy um we've talked about this before that as as your your waistline increases your your brain actually can shrink and so that's why that weight management is so important as well so let's talk about this we have skyrocketing rates of brain inflammation so that's really affecting our health and so you alluded to like foods maybe we should be avoiding that could contribute to it and then the foods and the nutrients that would help build our brain so we could be smarter better what are what are some of those things absolutely so the first thing for folks to be aware of is that we talked about the blood-brain barrier and basically having these little pathways that only allow certain types of cars to drive through them your brain has a lot of sugar pathways a lot of sugar tunnels your brain has a preferential kind of um treatment it loves and will absorb uh of the vast majority of glucose calories that are in your body we're talking upwards of 50 to 80 percent of the glucose that comes in your brain is going to snatch it up it loves it but not because it's this like evolutionary uh drive to do it it's just that this is what we're kind of hardwired to do but that evolutionary drive can become faulty because of all the pure access of sugar that we have today that we never had throughout human evolution and so these sugar pathways that are just driving all the glucose we might be taking in all these sugar calories and i shared a recent study that upwards of about uh the average american's consuming over a hundred pounds of added sugar every year okay mind blowing that's added sugar that's not even the naturally occurring sugar in so many different food stuffs and so it's really shocking but at the same time we don't realize that our brain is taking the brunt of it and so these sugar pathways that are allowing rapid amounts of sugar to make it into the brain are one of the factors behind this growing epidemic of neural inflammation and one of the things that we see is that the brain's receptors sugar receptors uh receptors for insulin because the brain also has this insulin production that's needed to drive the sugar into the cells but we start to see insulin resistance happening in the brain all right and this insulin resistance in the brain is now being referred to as type 3 diabetes it's one of the kind of subsets of what we refer to as alzheimer's disease so alzheimer's is often being referred to now as type 3 diabetes so this insulin resistance in the brain and so we've got all of this kind of rampant sugar floating around in our system creating inflammation all right so that's one of the big causative factors behind the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier and also the inflammation in the brain is our ever-increasing consumption of sugar so now let me be clear this does not mean that all sugar is bad that you can't have sugar it's just being aware that this isn't just about weight loss you know because we tend to think of sugar in this very vanity terms it's literally destroying the most important organ in our lives to determine everything about you and so that's really what i wanted to accomplish with this book is to give people a layered understanding of how much food matters and not just this one vanity metric and so but the good news is we can fix these things with regards to sugar um does it matter that's the source then if you're getting it from honey or maple syrup does the source matter it's such a good question and this gets into the conversation that i'll just briefly touch on which is about our metabolic uh uniqueness our metabolic fingerprint is unique to us our cascade of microbiome you know our microbiome and our endocrine system our neurotransmitters the cascade that we have has never existed before in human history for us as an individual and will never exist after us even our cascade of all these different metrics is going to be different tomorrow than what it is today the body is this constantly dynamic changing entity and so when we're focused on like what type of sugar it depends on us it depends on us and i cite one of the studies in the book and i show this study is nuts it has folks to consume either a banana or a cookie to see the impact that it has on their metabolism and you would suspect like okay the cookie is definitely going to be more detrimental to the blood glucose you know just right off the bat like the banana has a little bit of fiber it has some micronutrients like wasn't the case for everybody some folks had a banana and it flipped their system out and the cookie did nothing to their to their metabolism it did nothing to their blood sugar it stayed normal as if they never had a cookie all right it depends on our unique metabolism what type of sugar is going to be most detrimental or even potentially helpful and can you test that can you test that with like a glucose monitor or yeah yep so we've got all these self quantification devices that can tell us this feedback for me personally i'm always referring people back to paying attention to what's happening inside of their inner world and this is something that we talked about like this any of us can get detracted from it especially when we're like focused on big project or family stuff or social media all this stuff takes us out of our own bodies but if you just pay attention to how you feel when you have a certain food how do you look when you are eating a certain way how do you perform how does how's your performance affected and all this can give us valuable data you don't need to get a glucose monitor but it can be helpful if you love that self quantification information and you might find out some really interesting things about how different foods affect your body yeah sean we how you'd appreciate this because you have kids we do a live kids program every tuesday and thursday from kids 9 to 13 14 18 and as part of it because we don't want what's going on with school to get in the way of their education right and part of it is i was citing some of your work and and i was actually having them journal and talk about all the foods that pass through their lips and then how they feel afterwards so that they could they don't you know and not having a monitor they could actually write down and go and connect with their intuition and see how they feel and they can see the association you know or the the correlation between what they're eating and the uh that cause and effect but that that that's that's huge that self-awareness is really a super power so what which foods and nutrients are clinically proven to be good for the brain for for memory for for focus for the things that a lot of our listeners are really want to enhance and optimize perfect well this will circle back first and foremost to the beginning of our conversation like what is our brain actually made of so we mentioned that it's made of the food that we eat but more so it's made of the water that we drink you know your brain is upwards of about 80 percent water and so if folks don't get that as jim and i take a sip uh if folks really don't get that today then we're missing we're really missing the point the number one nutrient needed for optimal brain function is water now this is an entire conversation and of itself because we can get into conversation about what type of water and you might be like i thought water is just water h2o just wet stuff but the truth is h2o this is what i was taught in school my typical university setting it's h2o but h2o doesn't exist anywhere in nature by itself there's no pure h2o anywhere in nature h2o is water is known as the universal solvent and so it's constantly interacting with uh the the minerals and the other uh components in our environment and it really integrates itself with it you know like bruce lee be water right water can be becomes whatever it interacts with right this universal solvent so water literally becomes you it integrates with you and becomes you it has this remarkable intelligence and so we want water that has structure that has the minerals that we need but not too many because we know that sea water right ocean water drinking that can literally kill you and that has to do with this process of of osmosis and like how water is moving from your extracellular fluid to your cells and all this stuff we go through that in the book but the bottom line is high quality spring water generally is going to have an optimal ratio of minerals if you're not i'm going to share this real really quickly because this is important if you don't have a water filter on your tap water then you become the filter and i cited a study this was looking at about 41 million homes of americans across the country from southern california to northern new jersey and testing their tap water and they found traces of a plethora of dozens of pharmaceutical chemicals pesticides uh everything from like antidepressants to chemotherapy medications traces of all these drugs these uh metabolic waste products in our water supply coming out of our faucet and unfortunately a lot of folks still don't know this and the question is like why how is that possible well again we're putting a lot of things into our environment that we never have before in human history and just part of the cycle of like getting uh you know dumping those things into our rivers and oceans that stuff you know it's the pro this hydrological cycle it's finding its way back into our water supply and there's also programs for for water that's going from toilet to tap all right not to freak people out but it happens you know it's one of the solutions that's being looked at and so we covered that as well you know so for the most part um just getting a simple you know reverse osmosis system but then you need to add some structure back to that water because again you don't want to just drink pure h2o and is that through like lemons or salts or perfect yep trace you can do trace mineral drops high quality salts even you know uh like you just mentioned lemons mint these provide electrons and minerals to the water and structure it gives it this energy and so we cover all of those things in the book too because this could be another whole conversation so i just wanted to point that out hydration is the number one thing and i also shared a study on how we are mostly water our brains are mostly made out of water and you have to know that the current environment you know it affects our internal environment as well and people don't realize where they could lose water even something simple like sleeping through respiration and perspiration so definitely stay stay hydrated it helps your focus your your cognitive performance certainly your memory your reaction time your thinking speed so now that people have prioritized water again and it's a good reminder as they take another sip what else is next on the list in terms of nutrients or foods perfect so uh going back to what can actually cross the blood-brain barrier and make it into the brain so water being 80 of the brain but what about the dry weight of the human brain you know what is the the rest of the brain really made of and for that we get into a conversation a lot of people hear that you know your brain is mostly fat your brain is mostly fat it's actually mostly water but of the dry weight it's about 11 fat but that's it's actually not that much more fat than it is protein it's about eight percent protein if we're talking about the dry weight three percent minerals we get again the minerals are very important with so many different functions in the body and just a sprinkling of like you know carbs and other compounds and so being that it has that it's primarily fat fats are obviously important but i want people to know that not all fats can cross over into your brain saturated fats have been really villainized in the media it just kind of goes up and down back and forth but a large portion of the human brain is saturated fat but primarily it's from saturated fats consumed in infancy all right so mother's milk can be upwards of fifty percent saturated fat so when you're a child in br in the initial development of your brain saturated fats are immensely important but those uh receptors or those you know the ability of saturated fats to cross the blood-brain barrier dramatically goes down once we reach adulthood it's like almost none and your brain but your brain can make its own saturated fat in it of itself the fat that is most important that we all need to be consuming and now we've got really sound data on this you might hear hear it but now we're going to really drill in is omega-3 fatty acids dha and epa and this isn't just like it sounds good anymore i'm talking about these essential fatty acids have the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier and directly nourish your brain cells and one of the studies that i mentioned in the book this was published in the american journal of clinical nutrition found that increasing your dietary levels of dha specifically was able to directly improve both memory and reaction time in test subjects all right directly improves your memory and some of the best sources of omega-3 dha and epa are going to be from fish and i wanted to like directly look at this is is fish gonna be more effective than you know other sources and and different supplements and so there was one really interesting study and what they did was they found that folks who have one seafood meal per week did in fact perform better on cognitive skills tests than folks who had less than one seafood meal per week just one seafood meal per week now this is for some folks you know taking a vegan and vegetarian protocol there are ways around this as well or if you just don't like fish and you like even watching aquaman just makes you dry in your mouth you can't just deal with the seafood it's okay but just know that this is the most viable source as far as a direct whole food source because dha and epa are not found in uh plant sources okay all right there is algae though algae sources do contain these but they need to be very concentrated and so folks might hear mega threes and they think chia seeds uh flax seeds hemp seeds these are great sources but these are ala and your body can convert some of that to epa and dha but about 75 percent at least gets lost in the conversion process so to get the amount of dha that you need you're going to have to consume technically speaking a butt load of chia seeds all right every day and it just it's not the most viable option so whole food fish sources fish oil if it's like the you know sourced properly and i highly recommend if you're vegan or vegetarian get yourself a high quality algae oil so that you can get your omega-3 dha and epa your brain literally is starving for it algae oil what kind of algae oil was that so this is such a diverse array and diverse conversation i all i want to preface by saying krill oil depending on your ethics that might be an even better source because it's a little bit closer it's a little bit more studied right now all not all but 99.5 of the studies on omega-3s from supplemental form are done on fish oil that's where the data is coming from not to say that algae oil isn't effective but we don't have that much data on it uh we do know that the omegas are there and so out when people think of algaes they can think of things like spirulina chlorella and these have remarkable oh spirulina has been found to have uh to be protective and to help to reduce neural inflammation in the brain what you know so you get these like double benefits you know it has another essential fatty acid gla that's found in um in a rare kind of plant source in spirulina so for you do you supplement with like chlorella and spirulina or do you have it in your green drink some do you take it is that something you do in the first thing in the morning yeah for years man it's been almost about 19 years now like i've been tinkering with these different algaes you know afa spirulina chlorella generally at this point i might have it you know one or two times a week yeah throw it into you know even guacamole like put a little spirulina in there it might look like super you know star wars green you know but at the same time it tastes actually tastes really good but you can you know mix it in with smoothies and juice and things like that but i'm a big proponent of things tasting good so you've got to do it in a way that it feels good and i i can't let everybody go without saying this that there was another study and this was published in the journal neurology and they actually did mris and looked at what happened in folks that were deficient in dha and epa and we when we talked earlier about brain shrinkage this was one of the biggest factors of brain shrinkage was lack of dha and epa in the diet so this is not the kind of shrinkage that happens when it's cold outside this is like the shrink is that happens like that can permanently mess up your brain and your life because your brain is regulating so much and so the the target is about three grams per day of uh you know fish oil or a combination of like whole food sources algae oil but that's the minimum that you want to hit is three grams there are uh good sources which fish do are high in those high quality fats so this would be cold water fatty fish you know a lot of folks know salmon sardines mackerel there's so many different options and that's another thing too is like having a diverse array and i also shared in the book several studies with lean fish as well having some benefit uh with the brain and metabolism so it isn't just the the fatty fish but fatty fish do have the lion's share of benefits for the brain astonishing so we have uh we have water we have fish what um do you have a third one like in terms of your i know you go way more in detail in the book did you have a third favorite you would add to the mix absolutely so as we mentioned before that the brain and the the minerals play such a big part and really i want to put it in the category where we say electrolytes all right electro electricity right the brain is running on this remarkable type of electricity and this energy and so electrolytes are incredibly important and specifically magnesium magnesium is critical it is so important for brain function and unfortunately it's the number one mineral deficiency in our country today with at least 56 percent of the u.s population being chronically deficient in magnesium and here's a double-blind placebo-controlled study and this was published in the journal of alzheimer's disease found that improving magnesium levels in adult test subjects these are folks between the age of 50 and 70 could potentially reverse brain aging by over nine years literally making your brain younger by getting your magnesium levels up and this is one of those things where we see and this was done in a journal specializing in alzheimer's disease because these are conditions that largely considered to be one directional like it's just getting worse you can try to slow it down but it can't get better and now they're finding there are things we can do to improve our cognitive function when we start to see uh decline and one of those things is magnesium so i'm a big proponent of food first because it has the cofactors and and um you know additional nutrients that come along with it that make it work better in your body great sources of magnesium are going to be anything that's green it's going to be a great source of magnesium uh the power play here like spirulina for example but green leafy vegetables uh are going to be a great source and so there's there's so many different things so many different foods magnesium supplementation might be something to look towards too but you need to be careful about that there are many different forms of magnesium i mean everything from magnesium citrate this is popular in supplements to sulfates and things we have in common like epsom salts that's magnesium you know it's known to help with like muscle relaxation and things like that so there's a wide spectrum and what for myself personally one of the things i do almost every night is i put it on a topical magnesium that's absorbed through the skin you know super critical extract and your skin absorbs nutrients too you absorb water from when you take a shower you know so your skin is hungry and absorbing nutrients but food first dense sources of magnesium rich foods and if you can power play that with sources of like dha and epa it's even better astonishing sean stevenson i can talk to you for hours and hours but luckily i have a copy of your book and i highly recommend everyone pre-order this book it's called eat smarter and this is really cutting edge information on how food controls your metabolism your memory your sleep and so much more and um you know obviously in the show notes we'll put links to your previous episodes we'll put links to the book uh it's at jim quick.com forward slash notes sean how can people find out more and stay in touch with you awesome man thank you so much jim uh for the book we actually put together a 10 video mini course for free that you get when you pre-order the book so this is 10 foods that are clinically proven to optimize your fat related or fat burning hormones so there's no food that's a magic bullet but these have the most efficacy in clinical data showing that these help to optimize what our hormones are doing and so people get that free as soon as they pre-order the book that's at eatsmarterbook.com where they can pre-order today and get access to that and of course eat smarter will be on its way to you as well and again jim i love you man and thank you so much for uh just being a continued inspiration in my life and i couldn't do this subject matter without you know having a friend like you to keep me inspired and i'm just excited about the future you know we've got a lot going on in the world but there's so much opportunity for for positive change and you're a big leader in that so i just want to thank you man thank you buddy i mean a big part of those choices that we're making are the choices that we make at the grocery store you know are the choices that we make in the kitchen or that we use in our hands in terms of what we feed our mouths with our forks so they're little things a little little by little little could become a whole lot i recommend everyone actually screenshot this episode and attack us on social media tag sean tag myself and uh share one thing that you're going to share your favorite breakthrough i would i would love to see that and i'll repost some of my favorites and then go over and pre-order sean's book it's kind of a no-brainer i'll just say that without a doubt sean buddy thanks for being back on the show and uh congratulations again on the book thank you i have a question for you sean um just maybe we could even just use your social media you have a minute oh yeah so um every you know everyone talks about what to eat and for me my model whenever i'm kind of looking at something i i like to look at it uh you know ask these questions it's not just what you eat it's how you eat a lot of people aren't chewing you know a lot of people it's it's where you eat some people are watching in the living room or watching television right or they're on their devices and so they're not getting that kind of rest and digest it's it's where you it's where you're eating it's it's it's why you're eating some people are just eating for you know emotional needs as opposed for energy and nutrition you know um but also it's it's when you eat also right and so does that play a role in for you and your family like when you're actually eating these foods that we talked about in the show absolutely you know all of these factors come into play you know and even who you're eating with has a major role on what's happening with our with our body and our food choices and what's so fascinating harvard researchers recently did a study and found that folks who eat together as a family at least three times per week this could be breakfast lunch or dinner tend to make better food choices and eat less processed food and have more intake of nutrients that are critical to the development and support of our brains simply by eating together more often now that's one aspect but the wind aspect is shocking in the impact that that can have because we developed as humans we really evolved uh we didn't have 24 access to food like we have today and so we would go through processes of eating and having time we're not eating and when we're not eating this elicits the impact of several powerful uh hormones that help to keep your body regenerating and also fit for example when we're not eating we allow insulin to stop doing its job insulin is amazing i insulin has been given a lot of bad press because it is a major kind of fat storing slash uh energy storing hormone but we could not survive without it but we want the action of insulin's twin brother they're not identical twins though all right insulin's twin brother glucagon which does the opposite glucagon opens the cell to use that stored energy for our metabolic processes and our functioning but glucagon doesn't get to do its job unless insulin sits down somewhere and stops doing that job and the only way that that really happens is when we stop consuming all the time and so that's one aspect from the metabolic side is giving glucagon an opportunity to do its job of using stored body fat and so on top of that when we have a period when we're not eating you know so when we're talking about the wind we'll just say and what the data shows is simply having at least a an 11 hour window of when you're not eating this includes your sleep time so you could stop eating you know be done with dinner at eight at eight pm and then have your first meal the next day at you know seven a.m you know after a good night of sleep and you're going to get so much benefit for your metabolism and your hormones and another one of those hormones is human growth hormone right hgh is radically increased the production and mobilization utilization of hgh when we have a period that we're not eating all right fasting increases the production and so that's another benefit and lastly one of the most powerful benefits is autophagy right so your body's kind of metabolic waste management system specifically in talking with jim quick specifically with the human brain and helping your body to get and click to click to keep your brain clean we need times where we're not constantly adding in more things for your brain to try to process if that makes sense so easing up and putting the brakes on a little bit more often giving your body a little bit of a window of fasting which can include the overnight sleep you give your brain and your body significant increases in its metabolic performance and also your cognitive performance as well what's that what's the frequency then if you're going to intermittent fast or you're going to do full-on fasts for multiple days is is there a what's what's this science or what what what do you practice there's i've got a full disclosure i cannot talk about any of this with uh with good ethics if i didn't do it myself and so i've done some of the most insane experiments you know various types of fasting for years you know 21 day fast you know just having juice or you know water fasting um days at a time of like micronutrient fasting where i'm just like bringing into micronutrient resources and nothing else uh intermittent fasting and the cool thing is and i go through this also in my in my new book eat smarter that you get a lot of the same benefits from doing different types of fasting you know so it doesn't have to be one flavor of it but the most in alignment with humans today and what our ancestors were doing is intermittent fasting you know this daily fasting is small having these small breaks from eating have incredible benefits that can mirror a lot of things that happen with longer term fasting you know so there's so many different forms of fasting so let's make that clear but for myself personally what i found to be the most advantageous because now the big conversation today in the final frontier what it's looking like is the health of the microbiome and so having these long times of fasting and like maybe you're just having juice cleanses and different things like that they can be absolutely miraculous for healing for so many different aspects of health but we have to be mindful of feeding our healthy bacteria the food that they want so they stick around and this is not talked about enough because all of that experimentation caused some dysbiosis for me after all of that stuff because your gut microbiome your your gut bacteria and viruses fungi all this cascade they're only going to stick around if they have the food they want to eat you know just like any of us when i came to jim's house for a party and you know he's got the iron man up he's got you know it's like a good vibe happening people having a good time but if there's no food i gotta go jim i i gotta go eat you know so we've seen today the western microbiome has about four times less diversity of someone who's eating more of an indigenous kind of hunter-gatherer diet we have so many species of bacteria in our guts that are either endangered or extinct because we're not feeding them the stuff that they need and so that leans itself towards having doing the intermittent fasting so we can continue to provide the prebiotics for your probiotics to stick around and proliferate and also get some of the fasting benefits so that's what i've been doing personally for i don't know maybe four or five years now i've been just doing and when i say this trust and believe again this does not mean it has to be something so stringent and ridiculous like if i want to have an early breakfast if we got something going on it's cool yeah for the most part you know and you don't have to turn your life upside down it's just having a little bit more intentionality like i said going to bed finishing your last meal at 8 p.m and then having your first thing 8 am the next day that's not a big deal it's not a big change for most people you know what i mean so and also throw this in there there are fast mimicking nutrients that you can actually have in that window that can improve the the effects of the intermittent fasting all right so there's so much wonderful you know nuance and dynamics to this conversation uh but i think everybody can benefit from a little bit of strategic uh intermittent fasting i love that so it's not just what you eat uh but it's also how you eat because some people are so stressed over their diet so you could actually break beef which can negate on the benefits that come from it but you can bring joy to it and it's also when you eat so you know when you eat matters especially for your gray matter also as well john stevenson his book eat smarterbook.com pre-order it and make sure you get your copy and your your 10-day video of course congratulations again my friend thank you jim hi quick brand it's your brain coach i want to thank you so much for watching this video three things to do number one make sure you share this because when you teach something you get to learn it twice update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well number two make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing because if you miss a video you miss a lot and finally make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out we put out the latest and the greatest one extra thing if you want really close attention then text me here is my phone number three one zero two nine nine nine three six two did you remember that number three one zero two nine nine nine three six two shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch ask me your burning question and i wish your days before lots of life lots of love lots of laughter and always lots of learning i'll see you in our next video

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 22,766

Rating: 4.9305859 out of 5

Keywords: kwik learning, Jim Kwik, Kwik Brain, Memory, brain, reading, speed reading, mind valley, jay shetty, focus, success, improvement, motivation, habit, method, mindset, limitless, book, memory

Id: 93Cjg1-MK3M

Length: 43min 35sec (2615 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020