Long life depends on this: Gary Wenk at TEDxColumbus

well I'd like to welcome everybody to the brain cafe as you can see there's a bit of a theme going on on the menu today are some what I think are some tasty insights and some things I've cooked up in my lab and I'll stop the metaphor in a moment um but what I want you to take away from this is that the things that you consume at our cafe are going to affect how your brain functions and how you age we've just got a taste of that in one direction and I want to deal with something of the other direction related to overeating and what controls that so now that you've you know what's kind of on the menu let's go shopping at my favorite place here in central Ohio when you drive up to I know Kroger's is more popular than my store but when you do drive up to this the front in this parking lot you've all seen signs like this where it says you know there's food and drugs the pharmacy the grocery when you go there next time and think about my talk what I want you to do is see this I want you to see that nah food is drugs and I want to show you why food acts like drugs so the next time you're driving in I want this image to change for you all right so the takeaway point is right here drugs are foods food should be treated as drugs and they're both just chemicals and when I teach my undergraduates at OSU I tell them I'm going to treat them just like a bag of chemicals and I wanted to view themselves just like a bag of chemicals and what you add in is going to affect how you think how you feel and how you age so keep this this motif in mind as we go along I'll have cups you know and t-shirts out in the hallway later ah the key thing to recognize and always get this question is how does food affect how I feel and the answer is in three ways first there are short-term effects such as a cup of coffee and many of you dabbled in some coffee when you came here this morning you know the effects tend to be minute mediate in minutes may last for a few hours and then there are the intermediate effects of food and I'll talk about some of those the amino acids the nutrients the vitamins things that you take today so that you'll feel better tomorrow next week and then the long term things things you do a little bit every day make these smoke cigarettes eat a lot of chocolate or use drugs of some kind licit or illicit so I want to touch on those and talk about how they affect how you feel minute to minute year year and how they affect how you age in the long run because those two things are intimately connected to each other now to begin here we go I want to deal with one of three transmitter systems that food interacts with and all of you have just been manipulating the first one I want to talk about it you can see from this cartoon that was on our students cafeteria tables when there was a concern they weren't drinking enough coffee so they put these things out to say drink coffee and like any good drug pusher we were giving coffee away free first then when you're addicted we'll ask you to pay for it so in this case the transmitter is acetylcholine now acetylcholine is enhanced by coffee that's why I'm showing it to you why would you use the seat of choline for well see the choline in your brain is used that and it allows you to pay attention it allows you to learn and in order for you to learn and pay attention you need to enhance its function what coffee does that to make acetylcholine in your diet you need choline which comes from lecithin which is in baked goods and you need sugar for the acetyl groups so think about this now the ideal breakfast the thing that that drives you every morning is to Tim Hortons to get a doughnut and coffee there's probably nothing you can do better for your brain then donuts and coffee in the morning so don't listen to these these people these dietitians and thing you know your brain has a demand now if you think about this there wouldn't be Tim Hortons and McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts in every corner if we didn't want them to be there why do we want them to be there because our brain tells us to and what you're going to see as I go along is that many times your brain asks you to do things that the rest of your body would prefer it didn't do and you all know what I'm talking about right the little angel and the little devil on your head all right so acetylcholine is a transmitter that is made from the components of your diet and allows you to pay attention so you can learn and study like this young man in this picture or it allows you to pay attention to the man who's learning and study like the young woman in this picture so she's in here for mr s degree he's in here for a PhD possibly but you know what it happens sometimes this is an old dated picture as you can tell the other transmitter that many of us are familiar with is our brains happiness transmitter the one that is released and enhanced when we eat or consume chemicals that make us feel euphoric so all the things on the list here are your four genic compounds so we've heard of in fed amine and cocaine and opiates in MPCP and alcohol and chocolate and coffee and the reason we love these things is because they induce the release of dopamine and in the past year scientists have uncovered the fact that food addicts us in the exact same way that these drugs do the same mechanisms you become addicted to coffee and when it's not in your brain your brain craves it you become addicted to nicotine or chocolate when it's not there your brain craves it now so that's why when you look at people who've eaten a lot of fat they're happy so this is an ad by the lard Council and notice the motif again chemicals that lard is a chemical that we call a food that is in fact a drug because it releases dopamine and sodas in fed Amin and cocaine so lard is cocaine it's just a lot cheaper and you can get it at John Eagle all right so with that in mind let's go to the other transmitter system many of us spend our days manipulating serotonin possibly intentionally with the the drugs that we take like Prozac and Zoloft effexor and others manipulate serotonin levels by what we eat so eating a lot of different foods but the interesting thing with serotonin as you've seen is that serotonin levels make you feel anxious they make you feel relaxed they make you feel a little happier your mood is influenced significantly so if you consume foods that effects they are tonin your mood modifies accordingly and the issue here is balance you don't want to have too much as you've seen or too little it has to be just in the Goldilocks range it's just right enough serotonin so the things you eat the nutrients the chemicals in your diet are manipulating the levels of these transmitters on the short-term you've manipulated the action of acetylcholine so you can learn and pay attention in here and hopefully you had a donut or some high glycemic food like a bagel or hashbrowns this morning because you need those things quick fast nutrients carbon bond energy to get into your brain the intermediate things like the amino acids and vitamins that allow you to make these transmitters and then the long-term effects of drugs what is it that a food or nutrient or drug does to you every day that makes you feel better healthier as you get older and what does it do to harm you well that's what I want to get into the long term effects so when you think about the fact that you're just a bag of chemicals you are essentially chemicals made out of carbon bonds and we are all carbon bond consumers we eat these little these little white balls or carbon bonds and what you do is you consume them fats carbohydrates or proteins and zap you get calories this is what you all want this is why you've had your doughnut this morning those vital calories you woke up after fasting you need quick calories and we all do that all through the day what I want to point out to you is that there's a bit of a problem there is a problem of debris you've now used your calories and you've got a couple of carbon atoms what do you do with them you can't do anything with them you've consumed the energy between them so you do something really intelligent you breathe nice air and oxygen into your body and you go aha the oxygen has come to rescue my carbon and so as we all know we bind carbon dioxide there you are and we go ahead and exhale it and we've got another problem there's some leftover oxygen now nothing ever balances our right so the oxygen is a problem it's in your body you need to get rid of it so why do you have to get rid of it we all remember in biology in high school that we learned that oxygen is critical for you to live and if you didn't breathe you would die and that's certainly true but what I want to point out is that the villain in this story in the villain in your life is the fact that these things turn to the dark side and they become really nasty oxygen is carried by hemoglobin yes the job of hemoglobin is to keep the oxygen levels low enough in your body so it doesn't outright kill you so oxygen is going to quickly cause injury and inflammation the little pulsating up there oxidative stress and your job then is to protect yourself from it somehow so you eat protective foods or you simply don't take in the calories in the first place avoid the carbon bonds that's one way you just heard what an example of that so protect yourself from the oxygen by eating what colorful foods you've heard this vegetables colorful foods berries colorful foods it's the color that's going to absorb the oxygen that you want to carry it out of your body that's what an antioxidant is protect me from my breathing if you ever wonder what is it about my life that makes me get old it's because you eat and breathe if you could just stop doing those things you would live a few minutes right okay so obviously that's not a solution you have to eat so but but there are ways around this back to coffee I can't help but it strengthen the other concept in you every morning drink coffee as much as possible because if you happen to be have you've grown up in a rural environment you're at risk of Parkinson's so please 5 cups of coffee a day the antioxidants in coffee as you can see the 5 cups a day decreases your chance of getting Parkinson's by 85% that's amazing that's a drug Coffee is a wonderful chemical drug that some of us view as a food now something you don't often view as a food is marijuana and that's an issue in many ballets of course here in Ohio as well and what you're looking at is a cross-section of a brain from an animal and from some of my laboratory research here at OSU and we've discovered that marijuana is able to reduce inflammation what you're looking at there all those blue dots are inflammatory cells angry oxidative inflammatory cells chewing up the hippocampus oh you can't learn in memory all you need do is smoke one puff of marijuana a day one puff alright maybe a patch maybe a nasal spray and look what happens the information goes away neural Genesis we started these animals are smarter 35 years I've been looking at chemicals to try and make old animals smarter you can make any young animal smarter who cares you know they're six they're smart but an old person it's really tough to reverse things this is the first compound in the hundreds that I've tested that has ever worked in an old brain so my recommendation to you is to yes Donuts coffee lots and lots of coffee and just one puff a day and chocolate wonderfully dark rich colorful antioxidants and chocolate the great news is that the more chocolate you eat the longer you live and the sad news is that it only works in men yes thank you my work here is done ok uh so chocolate has antioxidants in it it has estrogen alkaloids and the wonderful thing about chocolate is that men don't have much estrogen so they benefit from that estrogen it has marijuana like compounds in it it has fats it releases opiates if it wasn't already illegal eagle it would be made illegal at least you know in some states probably Kentucky but anyway uh what we know is that if you don't want to eat chocolate and if you're a woman and it's not going to help anyway then caloric restriction just eat a little less that's the idea so let's take a look at a couple of friends of mine this is Owen and Kanto they were involved in a study um where Owen as you can see was allowed to visit McDonald's and eat all he wanted every day Kanto his brother know 30% less he didn't eat 30% as many calories you've heard of these kinds of things in the past 50 years hundreds of studies have looked at everything from single-cell organisms to primates and never humans yet and what we find is that they're healthier in the studies i've done their hair doesn't turn gray they're they don't develop cataracts they're smarter the inflammation doesn't happen in their brain so if you you do eat less food you don't have to eat so much chocolate you have to smoke so much dope you don't need to drink so much coffee keep eating um so what's the recommendation just eat less take in fewer carbon bonds you won't need as much oxygen so with the brain cafe we serve breakfast and lunch because if you eat breakfast and lunch we find that even if you ate the same number of calories and skipped dinner or had minimal dinner you don't gain as much weight you don't develop metabolic disorder there's something about eating late in our bile rhythm that's so hazardous so eat less eat about 1/3 less like canto and eat it early in the day breakfast like a king lunch like a prince dinner like a pauper you've heard that before why what good is it going to do to you well if we look at the the human studies and even studies with animals like rats and monkeys which is like this is a compilation of that work what you can see is that cancers are significantly reduced so you're not going to live longer but you're going to be healthier while you are alive so you kept automa as liver cancers lymphomas all tumors and even if you don't get a tumor your the function of your organs is better so kidney function is better muscle function doesn't decline these animals are stronger so the idea is that eat less taking a few carbon bonds need less oxygen your tissues suffer less so there is obviously a point that you don't go beyond now the sort of extrapolation of this advice would be to eat nothing right eat very very little I'm not suggesting that because you need strength in your bones right you need to move around you want to have the strength to live a life in the quality that you want to live it so eat enough exercise a little bit and but just keep in mind all those carbon bonds you take in to move you around through the world have a cost and that cost is the burning of oxygen and the oxygens presence in your body is harmful and the consequence of it is that your hair turn gray you get cataracts you develop metabolic disorders kidney failure muscle failure all right so that's the alternative so when you come to the brain cafe we're welcoming you in and say please come in have a seat order nothing we don't serve large glasses of sodas like New York City doesn't alright we will offer you some chocolate and some coffee and some doughnuts and some marijuana in the backroom but please use it wisely so the idea the takeaway point eat wisely meaning try to eat colorful things to protect you from the oxygen that you must breathe to survive and eat less taking fewer carbon bonds so that you don't need so much oxygen why because in the hour that you've been here this morning 2% of all the oxygen molecules that you've inhaled have been converted into free radicals two percent in one hour that's like almost one-and-a-half lungfuls of air alright so you've all aged a little bit just sitting here we know we do that but when you ask the question how can I slow it down this is the answer all right eat less very simple it'll save you money you can throw away those tennis shoes save a lot of money all right thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 346,461

Rating: 4.659503 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, ted, tedxcolumbus, diet, food, tedx, columbus, ted talk, health, ohio, tedx talks, ted x, gary, wenk, nutrition, ted talks, cosi

Id: 4SvkaK2Al0o

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 14 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Thordensol]

This shows a good reason to smoke some weed.

[u/Thordensol]

Come on guys please watch it. The good shit is at 10.45