Everybody Who Eats Needs To Hear This Warning | David Perlmutter on Health Theory

in today's episode of hell theory with dr. David Perlmutter we discuss how to reverse the damage your lifestyle is causing your gut the four metrics you must know to call yourself healthy the real cause of Alzheimer's and the secrets to effective aerobic exercise everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is dr. David Perlmutter he's a board-certified neurologist and the four-time New York Times bestselling author of grain brain brain maker and several others he witnessed his first brain surgery at the age of 13 and went on to publish his first paper and give his first lecture on the brain at just 19 since then his innovative approach to medicine has made him one of the most sought-after minds on the planet in the fields of nutrition and brain health he's won countless honors and awards and has been interviewed by everyone from Oprah and dr. oz to 20/20 and Larry King Live and as somebody who's existed on the cutting edge basically your entire career what I want to know is what is the cutting edge now what are you thinking about this may be a little bit controversial that you're exploring that you think is going to have a big impact we said five years ago maybe you should stop stop eating gluten and cut back on your carbs and eat more dare I say fat and boy did people's feathers get ruffled with that so I found that it felt good to be disruptive and challenge the status quo Ronald Reagan said that status quo is a Latin term for the mess we're in and I think that what I foresee is that we are going to see a virtual explosion in the ability to harness big data and moving forward manipulate that data using artificial intelligence to really be far more specific about making recommendations for Tom what do you need based upon who you are what does your genome look like what does your microbiome look like what are your lifestyle choices today where do you live geographically what's available to you and therefore be very specific individually in terms of what your needs are what's really important I think is we are now seeing unexpectedly the ability to leverage personalized medicine biometrics to the larger audience you know which it kind of gets back to the idea of looking at the few to extrapolate to the many I mean that's how drug trials work for example we know that at most 3 percent of people are ever sampled and utilized the data wise to make recommendations for the remaining 97 percent in terms of a drug and yet now with this ability to crunch this data and move forward I think we're gonna really understand the larger the bigger strokes that you know frankly we know that not everybody today and certainly moving forward is going to be available to participate in specific personalized medicine but I think we're gonna learn what really has traction with respect to the broad strokes and what do you think people should be tracking now like what's a meaningful Oh should I be wearing an aura ring or a constant glucose monitor like what are what are the data points now that that you collect or that you recommend that people collect well it's a good question because you know as you well know there are so there's such incredible availability right now to look at changes in your microbiome on almost a daily basis for example certainly your genome is a great place to start that doesn't change or does it we in reality we know that our day-to-day lifestyle choices are hugely influential on the expression of your life code that we thought was really locked up in a glass case and we now recognize absolutely it's not so I think that to start with we should all understand our genomes whether it's 23andme or any other service that's out there it's not just getting your genome sequence but then manipulating that data to understand what your current needs are before you even begin tracking as you move forward how do we manipulate it I have actually there when somebody said that before yeah there are several online sites that are available to upload your 23andme data you just drag the file and drop it into various sites dr. Ben Lynch author of a book called dirty genes has a terrific site and from that you learn not just what your genome but more importantly what does it mean mm-hmm I learned some things about myself that I never knew that did change my lifestyle choices to some small degree one thing I learned is that I Tom I'm a poor methylate er what does it mean it means that I have not the most favorable genes in a pathway called MTHFR along with about 20 to 22 percent of Americans people need to know that what's the impact of that like if you were not to address it right you outcomes so one of the most common things that we see with people who are poor methylate errs is for example that my homocysteine level can go up and why is that an issue while homocysteine is a powerful risk factor for Alzheimer's so it really takes us away from the notion of Alzheimer's being a genetic issue either you have the Alzheimer's gene or you don't - Alice hammers being related to modifiable lifestyle factors now other things that are important I think people should be following their homeless system-level as mentioned vitamin D level I think knowing your fasting glucose level on a pretty regular basis whether you have an on board a glucometer or not I think to me I find that to be a little bit of an overkill I think you can get a good sense if you measure blood sugar maybe once or twice a week with a finger stick I think you should know your ketone levels your hemoglobin a1c or so-called average blood sugar I think is hugely important what do you think is a good number there well I've learned in the few years that I've been at this that you know I'm the kind of guy and I think you probably are too who says well some is good more is better but in terms of medicine it's not always the case at a lower insulin level a lower hemoglobin a1c or a lower blood sugar it's necessarily better for you I mean I five years ago popularized the idea that we really have to get our insulin levels low because it would be a an indication that we were eating less carbs having less blood sugar elevations and B it would ultimately help restrict our risk for developing insulin resistance and now we see publications that at the very lowest ranges of insulin there is actually at least in women an increased risk risk a profoundly increased risk of becoming demented and is it the same risk so they see it on the low end do they see that same risk then on the high end well the the risk on the low end and again this is just in women but that's very important since you know two out of every three Alzheimer's patients is our women but it's important that at the lowest range the risk was increased about two point three eight X at the high range it was increased about 1.7 X so they're actually worse off if they're two really really low things how would you depress your insulin that low well I think this gets to the point of gene expression I think people have certain what we call polymorphisms of genes that might not code for adequate insulin activity so a plus being of course on an extremely low sugar low carbohydrate diet so it gets to again back to dare I say the sweet spot it's a terrible misnomer I think as it relates to blood sugar and our diets we shouldn't opt for the sweet spot but you know it it's it's relevant for us to understand in the context of this discussion that as we get together and talk about this 2018 we have no treatment for Alzheimer's none nothing works nothing reduces the the rate at which people decline and to me it's very compelling that last month the Journal of the American Medical Association put out a study by a dr. Richard Kennedy which was actually a a meta-analysis of some of the the top 10 best evaluations of the efficacy of so-called Alzheimer's drugs though there is no drug that works yet Alzheimers drugs you know are selling at the rate of close to a billion dollars in our country annually we've known that the don't work but what was published last month was really quite compelling by the Journal of the American Medical Association not only do the drugs not work but they speed the cognitive decline of patients who are taking them what are they attacking what's the the notion behind the drug must be something that it what lower their drugs or none of the drugs are involved in in dealing with beta-amyloid the first class of drugs representing the lion's share about 76 percent are what are called cholinesterase inhibitors and these are drugs like aricept or donepezil that inhibit an enzyme that degrades a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine because it was noted decades ago that the Alzheimer's brain is a brain that is low in acetylcholine and the very simplistic approach would be hey we can bump up your siegel choline that'll be a good thing and it'll help people well it never has shown any efficacy and yet it receives FDA approval another story for another time but now it's not just that it doesn't work but it's hastening cognitive decline and the very people who can't afford that and you think of the families who have dad or mom or husband or wife on these drugs and they're actually making people worse it's like giving somebody a treatment for their diabetes that is raising their blood sugar and you bring up the idea of getting rid of plaque it's been noted since the the naming of Alzheimer's disease after a doctor or a Louise Alzheimer who first described the pathology of what this looked like in the brain of a woman dying of that disease that now bears his name and the plaques were noted then and since that time scientists and clinicians alike have really focused on the plaque as being the thing we've got to get rid of and it turns out that researchers like dr. Rudolph tansy at Harvard have made it very clear that the plaque is the response to the problem not the cause of the problem the plaque is what we call an antimicrobial died and it's the brains way of responding to perhaps infectious agents like herpes simplex virus or chlamydia infection so you know it is said that the enemy of my enemy is my friend we need to embrace beta-amyloid as being therefore in a very important reason when we rid the brain of beta amyloid as has been tried in clinical study after clinical trial patients declined much more quickly that might underlie why Pfizer in February of this year said no more we're just not going to pursue the notion of an Alzheimer's drug anymore we've got to leave the beta amyloid alone there was a move a couple of years ago for the FDA to approve brain scans that would measure the amount of beta amyloid load in a patient as a way of being diagnostic do you have Alzheimer's or are you on the way to that and they didn't prove it because they realized that people can have a head full of beta amyloid and be cognitively perfectly intact whereas others with very little batum amyloid actually would demonstrate the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease so looking at you said that ok Pfizer's pulled out they're no longer making Alzheimer's drugs but the one thing that is recognized to help is exercise we know that exercise has a sort of what I'll call a real-time effect on blood sugar and you're the first person that I've heard anyway talk about the knock-on effect of insulin doing more than just shuttling blood sugar out of your cells what are the the factors you think that are at play here and what are the behaviors that we should take to make sure that we stay voff dementia as long as humanly possible what a concept what a concept that this disease affecting 5.4 million Americans 40 million people globally costing us a trillion dollars higher than the market values of Apple or Google predicted to triple by the year 2050 that our lifestyle choices can be leveraged to reduce our risk that will affect 50% of people aged 85 or old or the flip of a coin so in that through that lens let's go back to where we were the the value of exercise and I'd say your points about insulin sensitivity are well taken very important and keeping blood sugar down enhancing the sensitivity of the insulin receptor I want to come back to that because I think I'm seeing a big elephant in the room that we need to talk about and that is that physical exercise changes your gene expression you are able to change the expression of this previously thought to be immutable life code for the better and lead to the expression of what we call atrophic hormone or growth hormone for the brain BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor there are many things you could do to amp up BDNF you can use turmeric in your cooking take a DHA supplement even CBD has been demonstrated recently to increase BDNF but the most important thing you need to buy to improve your BDNF is a new pair of running shoes because aerobic exercise is able to manipulate the expression of his BDNF why civically aerobic well to a lesser degree resistance exercise as well but I'm simply telling people 20 minutes a day five days a week hopefully more at a heart rate value of 180 minus your age as a target of course consult your health care practitioner but what a powerful way to reduce your risk for dementia how can i connect those dots and make that statement to you as we sit here well the Journal of the American Medical Association has wonderfully correlated baseline BDNF levels with future risk for dementia you want to have more of this chemical that does two important things it increases the growth of new brain cells in your brains memory Center which is a powerful target for Alzheimers and it also increases the connection of brain cells one to the other a process called neuroplasticity that we can actually allow our brains to take advantage of the experiences that we then choose to pursue to build a better brain and that is the BDNF a building block of that although it is not it's as signaling as a signaling molecule I mean our brain cells want to connect to each other and our lifestyle choices that are highly stressful that are deprived of restorative sleep that are higher in sugar in terms of diet that our overall stressful increased cortisol for example that inhibits the growth of new brain cells actually compromises our brain cell population in the very areas that we need them most like the memory Center the hippocampus so we can we can reverse that we can tip the scales in our favor and say I'm not going to continue losing brain cells I'm actually going to repopulate my memory center with new brain cells that study was done out here at UCLA in collaboration with researchers at University of Pittsburgh led by a dr. Erickson demonstrating two groups of people a hundred people in each group one group stretched for a period of a year the other group was involved in aerobics they found that those who stretched have lower levels of BDNF declining memory function and shrinkage on very sophisticated brain scans in terms of their hippocampus size which is the let's pause it because I want to walk through this and make sure that I understand this yeah this is incredible and potentially very useful but I want to make sure that I understand the sequence of events right okay so first of all this BDNF triggered the regrowth of brain cells across the brain or just the hippocampus good point we used to say the brain doesn't grow new brain cells and a story right I mean you're probably too young to know that I don't know that's what I was taught when I was in medical school we were told that your brain grow maxes out at about age 18 then every beer you drink after that it's 40,000 brain cells or whatever the match gram was for whatever reason I don't remember that but how incredible that in your 90s you were still growing new brain cells you have this gift of regrowth of neurogenesis it's a choice you can make you can make it today after watching this podcast by dragging those sneakers out and if only going to the mailboxes as far as you can go then have at it tomorrow you'll do that twice and the sequence is you're doing the exercise the exercise of creating BDNF BDNF is then triggering hippocampal cell growth hippocampal yes but beyond that another area - called the subventricular layer of the what's called the ependymoma in the layer of cells that underlies those fluid-filled compartments that you see when you look at a brain scan but for our purposes the synaptic plasticity and the neuroplasticity the connection of brain cells happens throughout the brain we also depend on a process called synaptic pruning what does that mean it means that also for brain function we have to have the ability as we are in our childhood and adolescence to cut back on the number of connections that we have in order to kind of refine the the computer to make it work at its optimal level so which it's doing I'm assuming based on repetition what you do the most is going to get the most connections it's going to get the most the highest degree of insulation exactly all of that neurons that fire together will wire together and those that don't will atrophy will fall off the tree and so you're saying that that process the firing together and wiring together is one repetition - you get the BDNF if you're exercising that washes the brain in some way signals to them hey - in some way that makes them more active more likely to connect so what is the advantage then the evolutionarily coded or selected advantage that exercising people should have higher levels of BDNF and ultimately let's just say be more able to survive and cognitively superior in evolutionary terms right and I guess it's the people who were healthy enough to hunt and gather and to lead you know the expedition's in our Paleolithic times so these individuals and I've never thought this before just was having a bit of a free association while you're talking these are our ancestors and evolutionarily they were selected because they were leading the group so we can play upon that now that we understand that it's interesting do you think that there's any relation between movement and memory because of the if you're moving and you're hunting or whatever you gonna need spatial relations you need to understand sort of where you are so I ask all these questions because one like even when people talk about exercise I never do cardio I hate cardio it's painful but I lift all the time but if you're telling me that that's actually not as powerful then I'll start doing cardio so I guess understanding like the the nuanced level so that I know how to act is ultimately the the driving force behind my questions so I think I understand BDNF which is fascinating in the last 10 minutes my understanding of why that matters is skyrocketed I want to go back to the ha1 sea levels I want to pin you down for a number and I'll tell you why so on staff we have a vegan and I once watched him cane an entire package of blackberries and as he was doing it I could feel my blood sugar rising and I was like there's no way this kid's gonna die like he is he's too good at his job for me to let him die so I'm like you have to go get your levels checked and he did and they fall with when in what I would consider normal ranges so I want to know if I'm delusional on that if they're just as that much genetic variability because that would have spiked I know because I take my blood sugar levels quite frequently that would have spiked me to over 100 for short it may have pushed me closer to like 120 to have you can't imagine how many blackberries he ate but his his ha1 sea level was 5.1 and he eats like that all the time so well three things come to mind first I want it not to be missed that our time together may have compelled you to engage in aerobic exercise that that's great I mean that is huge and you know what compelled me was the science the data my personal risk for Alzheimer's having lost my father to that disease and then just understanding how pervasive and preventable the situation is but if if you've changed your exercise routine based upon our time together then I'm grateful that I came out here that's great next point on both the ideal being in the normal range you brought up that term and III just really recoil at the notion of a normal range was normal really by definition is average it's you know whatever the number is a thousand samples and then one standard deviation on either side the normal range and that doesn't work in terms of my messaging I want optimal so a normal range of vitamin D between thirty and a hundred so a patient will say well my levels in the normal range doc I'm at thirty-one there's a term for that it means it is that sucks not that I use it that often but it really does we need optimal well then you know I'm good enough normal range is not where we are we want tip top and so as it relates to hemoglobin a1c tempering my next commentary with the notion of the u-shaped curve I would say a range would be between let's say five to maybe about five point three five point four now to get to your third point of your friend who's eating a lot of berries first of all it's a lot of sugar it's a lot of fruit sugar called fructose which has almost no effect on insulin as you know there is glucose in there and ultimately he will to some degree glycated is blood sugar to protein in the case of hemoglobin a1c hemoglobin and ultimately will increase that activity that'll be measurable but you say he does it all the time he's eating whole fruit with fiber to help offset the blood sugar spike so I think you have to look at many things in terms of looking at an end of one what did his a1c turn out to be based upon what you've observed there are a lot of variables here we don't know his what his microbiome looks for example I think a vegan diet can be a very salubrious approach however with certain caveats you're not going to have great sources of vitamin D b12 fat you know a lot of vegans don't get enough dietary fat and it's a huge huge issue yeah it's interesting when I heard this story I was like whoa that you you did a fecal matter transplant with a child that was suffering from pronounced autism I while I have certainly heard the through line of hay c-sections lead to a microbiome that's wildly disrupted which increases the potential of somebody developing autism I certainly had never heard of using a fecal metal transplant to reduce some of the symptoms of that one walk us through that story which i think is utterly fascinating and two I'd love to hear what the pushback is on that where you think fecal matter transplants are in terms of efficacy in terms of safety and I'll say that knowing that or you should know that I'm sitting here waiting for the answer because my wife has struggled profoundly with antibiotic induced microbiome disruption and if I thought that that was going to work I would do it immediately but I'm worried about the safety well let's address the safety first I think with a properly screened donor that is negligible I mean it is the treatment of choice being carried out at more than a hundred hospitals in America today for an another disruption of the bowel flora called Clostridium difficile or c diff the standard of care treatment using antibiotics is as an efficacy of approximately 28% FMT fecal microbial transplant has an efficacy without recurrence north of 96 percent whoa think about I mean the reason that people get c-diff in the first place is from antibiotic exposure frequently other drugs can do it as well and they're treating that the mainstream approach is to treat it with further antibiotic you talk about a fighting fire with fire but fmt now has really become a national well accepted approached treating a CSI I wouldn't be concerned in the least with respect to safety of that procedure provided the donor is screen so a woman arrived in my office with her child and I observed him that he couldn't make eye contact and he was repetitive motion in a very characteristic autistic child and I asked her how did you come to see me today and I think as I recall she was from Mississippi and she she said you know I need to tell you the story how it all happened she was in the parking lot of a grocery store and she couldn't get her child out of the car and next to her was parked a gentleman in a truck and he apparently apologized to her and said that he didn't mean to get and get involved this but maybe you ought to take him down to Florida to see me of all yeah and and she asked him why and apparently I had helped somebody in his family so she comes to see me with her son and it was right then that I was deeply immersed in the literature that was revealing that these kids have a profound disruption of their gut bacteria I mean it's almost like an autism fingerprint and this was many years is several years ago that we see very powerful correlations between these patterns of gut bacteria and the manifestation of autism that we see children who are born by c-section you alluded to that earlier have an increased risk of autism and that c-sections disrupt their microbiome one researcher clinician actually a dr. Feingold actually was treating autistic children using vancomycin to help brie an antibiotic to reestablish some balance and was getting good results so I said let's at least start with some probiotic enemas I instructed her how to give her child probiotics from the health food store putting him in an enema and administering them he improved he doesn't sound like a big deal but he was able to tie his shoes for the first time in his life and he was able to spend the night out at a friend's house a mate I mean those are major landmarks they don't seem like much but they were as we continued to work with him he plateaued maintained his improvements but it was not continuing to get where she wanted and I said well we ought to consider fecal microbial transplant what is that identifying a healthy donor taking the fecal material and transplanting it into your son's : she identified a healthy 12 year old girl and I got on the phone with her and I said I know it sounds really strange and it's way out there but we just need to do this and she said if it'll help him I'm in well and she did and he began FM teased his mother did them at home and I was getting ready to give a talk in Germany his mother sent me a link to a video of this kid presenting presenting of book report at school on Benjamin Franklin and I I got like that getting ready to give my lecture like I'm getting right now it took the wind out of my sails I just couldn't believe it and he's down at regular school at in the top 10% of his class he was always bright but he had this inflammation the way it was cognitive performance you know it's like listening to a FM radio station in a lightning storm it was always there so you know that was one of the things that we did that was certainly disruptive and etc since then the University of Arizona did an interventional trial on 20 autistic children demonstrated profound improvement in these kids where nothing has helped them ever in collaboration with researchers from Harvard validating the notion of fecal microbial transplant as a treatment for autism we know that we can measure the permeability of the gut by looking at levels of something called LPS lipopolysaccharide it's a chemical that enshrouds that got many of the gut bacteria if the gut lining is leaky for whatever reason typically because of disruption of the gut microbiome then we can measure that LPS in the bloodstream where it doesn't belong we see dramatic elevations of this LPS meaning inflammation and breakdown of the gut lining in Alzheimer's autism major depression and even Lou Gehrig's disease my point is that we focus on the brain when there's a heck of a lot going on in the gut that were just beginning to unravel the beginning of our time together you challenge me you say well what does the future look like and really as we understand this relationship between the gut and the brain we've got we've we've moved to a new stadium and there are new rules written because there's a neurologist I have had traditionally very few tools in the toolbox it was very much an adios diagnosan adios situation it doesn't really help anybody to go to the neurologist office and he or she comes up with a very exotic name or something not as exotic like Alzheimer's is a word that has incredible gravitas in a negative way when family members hear that and we have no treatment and yet it's preventable and it's like John Kennedy said in his inauguration that the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining and you know that really has been you know a fundamental aphorism for me that to prevent these situations for which we have no treatment is the call to action and there's no doubt that to a significant degree this epidemic is preventable and that's the message that we want to shout out because we are inculcated with the mentality we should live our lives however we choose and come what may there'll be a treatment right eat crap and we'll give you a diabetes pill to get your a1c below 7 what kind of goal is that but the reality is treating your diabetes to lower your blood sugar has other downstream effects that may not be good lowering your cholesterol level with a statin drug may not be the best thing to do and your deeper on that I've heard you talk about that statins effect on insulin receptors which was what put it on my radar that there are potentially other issues or other things that insulin is doing cuz I was just thought of it as the you know taking the blood sugar out and putting it in the cell or let me see if I can connect those to the notion of diabetes and and statin drugs for example and why I'm really so dot seemingly dialed in on diabetes because if you become a type-2 diabetic which is by and large a choice you have quadrupled your risk for Alzheimer's did I say a disease for which there is no treatment yeah so that's why you don't want to become a type-2 diabetic in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2012 was the publication of a study called the women's women's collaborative study and it involved a hundred and fifty thousand women and demonstrated that those women taking a statin drug had an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 71% whoa in men according to a more recent study 2015 journal is diabetic ageia their risk is increased about 46% taking a statin drug that's ostensibly the good thing to do for your heart is actually associated with a significant increased risk for another situation for which guess what we've got another pill for you so now you're on your statin and we're going to add in your diabetes pills so this is diabetes that did I say quadruple is your risk for Alice numbers a disease for which there is no treatment so we connect dots and this is the information that people need to know before they capriciously acquiesced to taking that drug because my doctor said my cholesterol level is too high and truthfully I mean I think we all well understand that it is a pathway of this cholesterol number gets me to write that prescription for this patient and I'll explain that well high cholesterol is going to give you a massive heart attack well that isn't true that at least 50% of myocardial infarctions in America today occur in people with normal so-called normal cholesterol levels beyond that we have this idea of what is called the statin brain we're taking a statin drug is associated with cognitive issues memory issues and this is called out on the jaw of the bottle of medicine that this drug can affect memory why so well your brain loves cholesterol it's a very important fat as a lining of your brain cells it acts as a brain antioxidant and equally important is the notion that we talked about vitamin D and how critically important that is in your entire body that there are more than 900 receptors in your body for vitamin D that's how pervasive its actions are and most of those are in the brain where does it come from vitamin D oh come from the Sun the sunlight shining on your naked body changes a chemical into vitamin D what is the chemical it's cholesterol I actually did not know that well cholesterol is from which we make vitamin D as it is from which we make testosterone and progesterone and estrogen and cortisol so this vilification of cholesterol is very much off base but you got to give somebody credit it sure paved the way for the notion that it's bad and that if you eat eggs your children will be born naked or some horrible thing will happen and that we should lower cholesterol to incredibly low levels the lower the better so the notion of the u-shaped curve has yet to find its way to that level of pharmacology understanding that we need our cluster we love our cholesterol the issue that relates to risk for coronary heart disease is unrelated to cholesterol cholesterol shows up when the coronary arteries are inflamed it shows up to heal the coronary arteries it's why what a person dies of a heart attack and you section their coronary arteries you look at under the microscope you'll see cholesterol is there it's trying to heal this inflammation it's like blaming the firemen because they're on scene blaming the firemen because they're there at the fire does it work that way it has a lot to do with not the number of LDL its value but whether it's been damaged or not oxidized or not or bound to sugar how do you check that you have your doctor check a glycated LDL or oxidized LDL and maybe your doctor is gonna go well I'm not sure I've heard of that or that our lab will do will do that in which case you need to move on because that's what is very clearly correlated to risk for coronary arteries the oxidized level of LDL which is directly related to blood sugar we're back where we started yeah which I don't think in this interview we've really put our finger on that what I'm sure most people know but I think it were is worth saying what are the lifestyle choices that are causing this cascade of essentially inflammation mostly food and that should be empowering meaning you can break the cycle so inflammation is what Alzheimer's is Alzheimers coronary our disease Parkinson's disease autism diabetes cancer these are inflammatory diseases the brain in the Alzheimer's patient is virtually on fire with inflammation the word comes from the Latin inflam RA meaning fire and inflamed so our lifestyle choices by having higher levels of blood sugar bind to our proteins called glycation that's what a 1c measures when we bind sugar because it's always elevated to our proteins that challenges our immune system and the immune system says something's going on here and that increases the production of these chemicals called cytokines that mediate inflammation there's a very interesting study that was published in the journal Neurology back in 2014 and this is a study that looked at a group of individuals and a couple of several decades ago and did a simple blood test measuring inflammatory markers it followed these individuals for 24 years and it found that those individuals who 24 years ago had the highest level of inflammation in terms of their blood markers had a dramatic decrease in the size of their brains and at the time they came back to get reevaluated had poorer memory function we know that there is a very powerful correlation between markers of inflammation in the blood and Alzheimer's disease so it's very clear that we've got to do everything we can to reduce inflammation and that brings us back to the gut because the lining of the gut that one cell lining that separates stuff in the gut from the rest of your body is the gatekeeper basically for inflammation in your body whenever we threaten the gut lining and that chemical LPS and other things gets in and challenges our immune system we amp up inflammation and that sets the stage for every bad chronic disease that you don't want to get and when the World Health Organization is now telling us that chronic inflammatory degenerative conditions are the number one cause of death on planet Earth we've got to pay attention to that metric because it's something over which we have control based upon our lifestyle choices now like the foods we eat we want to eat much more primitively much more locally and and as such reduce inflammation you wrote an article when you were 16 or a letter to the editor in the paper I guess is a more accurate way of saying it I don't know if you remember this but came across it in my research and it basically said speaking of you know Western lifestyle it basically said we're all sort of running this experiment and we're each contributing to seeing who's lungs can evolve to handle pollution and I don't think that spending Sunday at the beach or going on a week trip to the mountains is going to be enough and basically intimating that our current lifestyle is so far removed from what we've evolved to handle that there's a just a fundamental problem and before we started rolling you and I were talking about the your notion of brainwash the new book that you're working on and I just want to hear a little bit about that about you know what are some of the things that are happening from a lifestyle perspective and a broader level than what we've just been talking about you know just what we eat but what we're engaging with you know negativity and how that influences the brain and you know the way that media is presented and the kinds of influences that they're having like what are you finding as you look more deeply at that I think that there is a lot of traction of the the paleo ideology but at its core the notion of paleo is one that says let's get back to sending the right signals to our genome which is it hasn't changed and let's say 70,000 years and fundamentally and it gets back to our original conversation and we started today about how our lifestyle choices are interpreted by our genome how our food beyond the macro nutrient content is actually information sending up-to-date signals as to our environment to our genome so that our genome can then in time to respond to maintain our health by responding to the signals to that it receives our evolution cannot keep up with the environment to which we are exposed and the environment to which we choose to expose ourselves so the idea that we can change that by going back and trying to think about what it was that our ancestors lifestyles must have been like and therefore cause our genome to express genes for longevity reduction of inflammation in stabilization of immunity is I think really very very important so I think that you know this is really becoming an area of great interest for a lot of people it's you know instead of trying to patch up these problems I think the idea of letting our genes keep us healthy is really it's it's it's kindness it's really about about reconnecting to that incredibly beautiful gift that we've received from all who have come before us and it's very instructive to recognize that the genes of our gut bacteria are influencing our genome expression that those little critters that live within us our moment-to-moment changing our gene expression there's a very interesting piece of this puzzle that was just solved for me last month in a journal cell host and microbe the researchers name is Yun Tang D and G for University of Louisville and he gave us information about the idea that plant cells contain RNA we know that who didn't know that and that they are able when we digest plant cells that microsomes that then are extruded from plant cells called exosomes that contained plant RNA work their way into our gut bacteria and change the expression of the genetic material of our gut bacteria so food is running the show plant food is changing the expression of our bacterial gene that leads to three important things as it relates to about bacteria it changes their rates of multiplication it changes the metabolic products that they produce like vitamins and neurotransmitters and it changes their location in the gut hopefully closer to the gut lining so they can help us keep that intact so that was a very intriguing couple of dots to connect therefore our food is changing our gene expression and we should think about that you know we say when a woman is pregnant she has to be careful because now she's eating for two well Tom you're eating for a hundred trillion right now this morning before we came here I was having breakfast at the hotel and that the women next to me one woman was had skim milk in her coffee because we don't want dietary fat uh and to which she put several pink packets of sweetener which the research shows is profoundly damaging to the microbiome associated with a profound increased risk of obesity in a French study of tens of thousands of was seventy thousand women and also dramatically increases your risk for avoiding sugar in the first place type two diabetes her brain has been hijacked by media that would let us believe that this is the right choice but that media doesn't have her health at the core of their interest what that media has it is their end up bottom line right now and she is simply a pawn on that chess board being manipulated that is the focus of this new work called brain brainwash we're trying to wash people's brain and push the reset button and really call out all the ways that day-to-day our lifestyle choices are being manipulated you know learning that all of our online areas that we explore are being leveraged to create advertising that's appealing to us that's not telling you something that your audience isn't certainly aware of but it has health consequences it's not just that you happen to buy you know the latest pair of glasses or a shirt it has to do with your health like this woman this morning choosing this artificial sweetener and I will say that we had a premise for the book about calling out how our brains are in place and beyond that how reconnecting with nature how dietary changes how meditation how various things can help undo what's been done how we can harness this notion of neuroplasticity and we talked about earlier by having higher levels of BDNF to then allow the good pathways to stick allowing us to connect back to the prefrontal cortex and act in a more empathetic way in a more compassionate way in a way that recognizes that our decisions today are going to affect what happens tomorrow the notion that we can do that is is a heck of a gift that we need to raise awareness of especially these days when impulsivity and narcissism seems to be you know the way things are done today and we've certainly got to pay attention to what what will tomorrow bring how will our actions today affect ourselves tomorrow and affect the world tomorrow so the Dalai Lama said that if you want to be happy practice compassion and if you want others to be happy practice compassion so in a very real sense what we choose to do rewires our brain and changes our thinking what I'm saying is that we presuppose that our thoughts determine our actions but in a very real sense our actions determine our thoughts yeah let that sink in that is absolutely fascinating in the perfect place to get to my last question but before I ask that working these guys find you online and and I more than ever I want to stalk you I've spent the last couple days just living in your world and there's some amazing stuff there so where can people find more about you I'm dr. Perlmutter calm oddly enough is my website dr Perlmutter calm and I have facebook which is a David Perlmutter MD David Perlmutter is a Twitter and Instagram I have a newsletter that goes out every week on dr. Perlmutter calm Oh I have a YouTube channel the empowering neurologists yes there's a lot of amazing content there cool my last question what is the one change that people could make that would have the biggest positive impact on their health it's a it's a very difficult question to answer because there's so many levels of things we talked about I would say [Music] embrace the recognition that connection is the most powerful notion that that can we can leverage for health and for our future connection to other people I'm gonna leave it open connection to our genome connection to our microbiome connection to our family's connection to our neighbors connection to those who live in other countries and connection to the planet I love that amazing answer dr. Perlmutter thank you so much for coming that was absolutely extraordinary guys he is shaping my thinking I think more than anybody else right now I cannot encourage you enough to go in he's making connections other people aren't making he's talking about things that are certainly going to rile some people up but I think are backed by cutting-edge science to be sure but certainly he always speaks from a place of what's coming out in the studies it's absolutely extraordinary I just have really been blown away with his ability to go into the hard science talking at a cellular level and then also like his last answer about connection and the way that for him that really is taking everything into consideration and not just connecting to other people but also connecting to the things you could find out about yourself bringing us back to the beginning of the interview where he was talking about understanding your data and understanding really who you are at a much deeper level than I think most people really understand themselves and I think it's utterly fascinating that the man that's given us so many books on dietary impact on the brain is now showing us a broader perspective on what's impacting our brain in the ways that we can really begin to shape our lives to shape our genetics which i think is such an interesting idea it's absolutely breathtaking and I will for sure put my stamp on every second that you spend in his world learning from him as a second well spent that the highest compliment that I can pay somebody in his field is to say that I really believe it will help you live a longer more productive happier and healthier life so dive in you will not regret it all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary - take care I don't matter thank you again so much everyone I hope you loved that episode now I want to take a quick second to share about our awesome friends at butcher box butcher box delivers 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef free-range organic chicken and heritage breed pork straight to your door every month when it comes to cooking it is really hard to find high-quality meat that you can actually trust and with what Lisa's gone through I have realized just how important it is that the food you eat is raised and sourced properly and that's why Lisa and I are so passionate about butcher box every box comes with at least nine to 11 pounds of meat and that's enough for 24 individual size meals and the ship for free nationwide except for Alaska and Hawaii sorry guys we have an awesome offer for you right now to give butcher box a try get $20 off your order by using the link in the description below that's $20 off enjoy and be legendary thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,338,294

Rating: 4.878377 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, health theory, david perlmutter, david perlmutter interview, grain brain, death by sugar, everybody who eats needs to hear this warning, empowering neurologist, neurologist, autism, fecal transplant, perlmutter brain maker, david perlmutter md, david perlmutter breakfast, david perlmutter fasting, dr. perlmutter

Id: KRXl_N0OtX4

Length: 54min 54sec (3294 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019