Micronutrients for the Prevention of Age-Related Diseases and Brain Dysfunction

good evening first of all I would like to say selamat to dr. Ted a Chico so for inviting me here to speak at your evening lecture series and for allowing me to see Manila and a part of the world that I have not yet seen so I'm very excited to be here this evening so thank you and as Ted mentioned I'm going to be talking a lot about aging and how we can influence the way we age because let's face it we're all aging right now as you're eating and metabolizing the food that you're eating you're aging and we're all going to get old so we need to we need to focus and think about how we can age better and that's that's an interest of mine and also how we can improve our aging brain so that our brains can function better when we're older so this is a snapshot of your metabolism it's really not complicated at all thousands of metabolic pathways are going on inside of each and every one of your organs it's running everything from how your immune cells are able to fight off with virus or bacteria or kill a cancer cell to how your heart is pumping blood throughout your body so that it can bring oxygen to your tissues whatever it is that's happening it's your metabolism that's actually running you it's allowing you to live well all of those complicated metabolic pathways 22% of them actually require a micronutrient as a cofactor a cofactor means something is needed for the metabolic pathway to work properly so if you can think about your metabolism as of a piece of pie then a big big slice of it is actually needed you need micronutrients to to regulate that and micronutrients are about 30 essential vitamins minerals amino acids and fatty acid we know that at least in the United States globally probably as well people are not getting enough of these micronutrients so around 70% of the population United States is not getting enough vitamin D or on 60% is not getting enough vitamin E magnesium half the country's not getting enough of calcium vitamin K it goes on and on so what are the consequences of not getting enough of these micronutrients we don't see people walking around with rickets very often we don't see people walking around with scurvy I mean their gums aren't falling out so you think well what are the consequences of these micronutrient deficiencies we don't see them our TAS have been set rdas or recommended daily allowances they've been set to ensure that we don't get you know that we're basically getting enough of these micronutrients the RDAs are usually set around two standard deviations above what would cause a death in a mouse so even if you're not getting enough of a certain vitamin mineral you still have a lot of room before you actually become you know clinically sick but there are a lot of sub clinical effects there are effects that are causing insidious types of damage so back to our metabolism there are metabolic pathways that are essential for survival right now that require micronutrients to function for example if you are making energy in the form of ATP well that requires magnesium and if you can't make energy you simply can't live so that's pretty much a short-term survival function but there are also metabolic pathways that require micronutrients that are needed for long-term health for example repairing damage to your DNA well you don't really have to repair damage to your DNA to live but you do need to repair it to avoid getting cancer five decades down the line so what happens when you have two metabolic pathways that both require the same micronutrient but you're not getting enough of that micronutrient what happens that micronutrient well my men or dr. Bruce Ames proposed that the metabolic pathway that is essential for survival right now we'll get that micronutrient at the expense of long-term health pathways so he calls this the triage theory and essentially what the triage theory proposes is that during times of micronutrient deficiency or micronutrient inadequacies there is a very strategic allocation of these micronutrients there are going to the pathways that are essential to keep you alive right now and the pathways that are not essential for survival right now sort of get the short end of the stick they're not going to get that micronutrient and what happens is it leads to insidious types of damage that accumulate over time and can lead to diseases of aging such as neurodegenerative diseases cancer for example so let's talk about an example of the triage theory vitamin K vitamin K refers to a family of fat soluble vitamins vitamin k1 and vitamin k2 we're going to talk just about vitamin k1 I'll circle back to vitamin k2 in a minute but vitamin k1 also known as Filipino is actually required for plants in order to do photosynthesis which is how plants make energy so dark green vegetables are a great source of vitamin K because you know they need vitamin K to make energy well about 65% of the United States population does not have adequate levels of vitamin K which is around 90 to 120 micrograms a day according depending on whether or not you're male or female so vitamin K actually has a lot of important functions inside the cell one of those functions is it's required for the activation of proteins that are involved in blood clotting so coagulation and without vitamin K those proteins cannot get activated and you won't be able to clot your blood which could be pretty bad because you could internal bleeding and have a hemorrhage so vitamin K is very very important for this short term survival function of you know coagulation vitamin K goes to the liver where all these proteins involved in coagulation are and it activates them so that it can that they can then proceed with their function in blood clotting but there's another function of vitamin K and that function is involved in pulling calcium out of the blood vessels and arteries and bringing it to places where it should be like the bones and muscle and other organs calcium is a important signaling molecule in many pathways so these proteins that pull calcium out of the vascular system are also activated by vitamin K but that's not really an essential function for short-term survival I mean you can have calcium buildup in your blood vessels and arteries and be just fine for several decades but calcification of the blood vessels does lead to cardiovascular diseases in fact calcification of the arteries is associated with a four-fold increased risk of cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis it also increases vascular dementia because it's cutting out blood flow to the brain and dietary calcium is very very important however dietary calcium also very very easily forms precipitates when it's in the contact with phosphorus in the blood vessels and so if you're getting all this dietary calcium but you're not allowing those proteins that are important for removing that calcium from the bloodstream and bringing it to your bones and bringing it to your muscle then you can have a problem because you can have buildup of calcification of the arteries we know from studies in humans that if you take a human and you cut vitamin K one out of their diet so you're making them deficient in vitamin k1 you don't take it all out but you're you're really really limiting the amount of vitamin k1 that they take in we know that there's absolutely no change in blood coagulation your blood blood clotting still occurs just fine however the proteins that are involved in pulling calcium out of the arteries and blood vessels they don't get activated which really suggests that there is a triage when a human is deficient in vitamin k1 that vitamin k1 is going to go to that function that's important for survival right now coagulation blood clotting and wait we do know that this is the case there is a tissue specific allocation of vitamin k1 vitamin K readily goes to the liver and the liver is where all these proteins that are involved in blood clotting are activated once enough vitamin k1 gets to the liver to activate all those proteins involved in blood clotting then vitamin K stays around in the blood stream in the blood vessels and activates proteins involved in removing calcium and bringing it to your bones so it really requires that you get enough vitamin k1 to make sure it's serving both functions for coagulation and for removing calcium from your blood vessels and blood order in your arteries we also know from looking at mouse studies there are about five different coagulation genes involved in coagulation that are conserved mice have them humans have them well if you get rid of that gene if you knock it out in a mouse the mouse dies it dies actually during embryonic development its embryonic lethal meaning you simply cannot survive without these proteins that are involved in blood clotting coagulation which really does suggest that these vitamin K dependent proteins are essential for survival there's about six other proteins that are also dependent on vitamin k1 for activation but these when you knock these proteins out of a mouse when you genetically get rid of them these mice don't die but they end up having diseases of age so for example osteocalcin which needs vitamin K to be activated those animals when they gets knocked out they have brittle bones they have you know very weak bones gas 6 or matrix claw matrix claw these these animals have calcification of the arteries tgf-b one these mice get cancer earlier so these are all diseases of aging that that show up if you knock out these genes proteins that are important for for removing calcium and bringing it to to other parts of the body so I really think that's nice evidence that there is a triage effect that occurs if you are deficient in a certain vitamin in this case vitamin k1 there is another fat soluble vitamin K which is vitamin k2 vitamin k2 is it does not go to the liver to activate blood clotting proteins it actually stays around in the in the blood stream the vascular system where it activates those proteins involved in removing calcium from from the vascular system so it's kind of like a backup system you can convert vitamin k1 into vitamin k2 in your gut certain bacterial microbiome bacteria are able to do that however antibiotics will wipe out about 75% of those bacteria so there are also food sources of it the Japanese eat fermented soybeans so vitamin k2 is made by bacteria so fermented foods habit natto is very rich source of vitamin k2 an organ meat is also a good source that we we organ meat more than we eat natto in the United States so as another example I want to talk about magnesium magnesium is a cofactor for over 300 different biological processes inside of yourself 300 different biological processes half of the United States is not getting enough magnesium so magnesium is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule chlorophyll is what get plants their green color so again green dark green leafy vegetables are a great source of magnesium just like they're a great source of vitamin k1 the RDA for magnesium is around 350 milligrams to 400 milligrams depending on if you're male or female well as I mentioned there's 300 different processes that require magnesium one of those processes is really important it's called energy you need magnesium to make ATP and to use ATP magnesium has to be bound to an ATP molecule in order for your body to be able to use it so you can imagine if you're deficient in magnesium whatever magnesium you do have that's going to get it because if you don't have that you can't survive you used to can't live without being able to make ATP but that's not the only process that requires magnesium there's 300 different processes well one of those processes is also involved in repairing damage to DNA so right now we're all damaging our DNA because as a byproduct of metabolism we're making damaging reactive oxygen species our immune systems being activated at a low level and these immune system our immune cells make byproducts that also damage our DNA so DNA damage can be repaired and it can be repaired by DNA repair enzymes and if that happens then you're going to have a very happy cell because it's not going to be damaged however if your DNA repair pathways are not working properly the DNA damage will not be prepared and this can lead to mutations that could potentially lead to an unhealthy cell and those unhealthy cells can replicate and eventually form cancer so DNA repair enzymes actually require magnesium as a cofactor they need magnesium to be able to repair damage to DNA there's been studies that have shown for example for people that are in have the highest quartile of red blood cell magnesium they have a 50% lower cancer related mortality compared to people in the lowest quartile of magnesium so that's pretty significant also as dr. Ted mentioned there has been a study that was recently published showing that people for every hundred milligrams of magnesium decrease in magnesium intake there was a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer so magnesium is very important for repairing damage that happens to your DNA it's happening to all of us it's just a matter of how much of that damage we can repair and again it's insidious type of you can't wake wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and go I've got DNA damage no you can't see the innate damage but it's happening so it's the kind of damage that's going to show up in your fifth sixth seventh decade of life by the time it's too late so it's important to be able to give your your your metabolism the right micronutrients that it needs to run optimally but there are many many people that are not getting their green leafy vegetables they're eating a diet that is very caloric dense and and high and lots of calories but very low in micronutrients so processed foods fast foods you know these are refined carbohydrates refined sugars they're eating lots of these packaged foods and they're not getting their greens and the greens are a delivery system for all these very important micronutrients so this obesogenic diet this diet that's high in refined food refined packaged foods but low in micronutrients it leads to obesity for one and we know that obesity actually itself accelerates the aging process on a cellular level I think most people know obesity is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease it's associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes but it's also associated with a much higher cancer incidence in fact several different types of cancer obesity increases the risk two times as much it's also associated with an increased risk for neurodegenerative diseases obesity takes seven years off lifespan and an extreme obesity can take 14 years off of your lifespan that's a long time 14 years I have been very interested in looking at DNA damage as a biomarker of Aging so as we age we accumulate more DNA damage I mentioned it because we're all doing I mean every time you eat food you metabolize the food and byproducts of that metabolism or damaging your DNA it's just a matter of how much you can repair that damage and how much damage you're actually getting it's a balancing act but we can actually measure this in people by using a proxy it's called phosphorylated histone to ax or gamma h2ax so what happens is immediately after you have damage to your DNA particularly two strand breaks so a double-stranded break in your DNA this this protein gets phosphorylated and it serves as a marker a molecular marker and it amplifies immediately after damage happens because it's signalling to the cell hey come on bring some DNA repair enzymes here repair this damage we can use this marker as a proxy for DNA damage and so for the past 3 years I've been measuring this marker in people people that are young people that are old people that are lean people that are obese as a proxy for looking at health so the more DNA damage you have the less health you are DNA DNA damage accumulates in stem cells and it's associated with aging of your stem cells so your stem cells start to age quicker they die causes them to die quicker when you deplete your stem cell populations and it's hard to replenish your cellular populations in a certain organ and also it's associated with cancer as I mentioned so what I found I've been doing some preliminary work over the past couple of years is that if you look at lean people that have a body mass index which is not a great marker for for obesity but you'll do if they have a BMI of less than 25 and you compare their DNA damage to people that have a BMI of greater than 28 it's almost twice as much DNA damage these are the same age people same age so they should not have I mean this looks like an old person usually you see that you see this much of a difference when you're looking at like a 30 year difference in age so you're talking about accelerating the aging process on a cellular level and this is not something that people can see but it happening and what it's going to do is it's going to increase their risk of cancer it's going to increase their risk of cellular aging of getting neurodegenerative diseases but there is a simple solution eat your greens the greens have all the things you need they have the magnesium they have vitamin k1 they have calcium you know there's lots of types of fiber in there vitamin C slowly there's so many different important micronutrients and I think that a good way to do it is I like to make a smoothie but you can also eat your salads try to get your greens with every meal there it's it's important to get these micronutrients they're running your metabolism so I like to make a smoothie once a day has kale leaves rainbow chard some spinach tomato avocado apple some frozen blueberries and it's pretty good okay so I'm going to shift topic just a little bit and talk about some of my other research involving vitamin D about 70 percent of the u.s. population does not have adequate levels of vitamin D and I was told that about half of the Philippines also don't have enough I don't have adequate levels of vitamin D which at first surprised me because you know you're so get so much Sun here but then as I came here yesterday I looked around I noticed that everyone is walking around with an umbrella so they're actually not getting the Sun they're blocking themselves from the Sun so that that's now I understand why possibly the half the Philippines also is not getting enough vitamin D well the Sun is a primary source of vitamin D so anything that blocks out UVB radiation like sunscreen dark pigment like melanin which protects you from the burning rays the Sun also can filter out UVB which you need to make vitamin D age so a 70 year old makes four times less vitamin D in their skin from the Sun than their former 20 year old self and also latitude so where you live but here in the Philippines it's not much of an issue but in many parts of the world but they can people can't even make vitamin D from the Sun five to six months out of the year body fat also regulates the bioavailability of vitamin D so vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin and it's stored in fat but more fat you have the less it can be released in the bloodstream to be activated into a hormone which I'll talk about in just a minute but why should we care about vitamin D well vitamin D actually regulates the aging process so these mice right here are the same age the mouse here on the left has had genetically knocked out it's vitamin D receptor so it cannot respond to vitamin D at all so it's essentially like vitamin D deficient but these are the same mice four months later look look at that Mouse I mean it is rapidly aging its lost all its hair its skin looks awful its organs or aging and it's the same it's the same age as that Mouse there on the right which is about I guess they're about eight and a half months old there okay so how do you know if you are getting enough vitamin D blood levels of vitamin D according to The Endocrine Society what's considered deficient is blood levels less than 20 nanograms per milliliter what's considered inadequate is less than 30 between 20 and 30 milligrams per litre and adequate is between 30 and 60 nano grams per milliliter why do I say 30 and 60 well there's been about 33 meta-analyses studies dating back from 1966 all awaited in 2013 that have looked at all cause mortality so people dying of cardiovascular disease cancer and neurodegenerative disease respiratory disease all non accidental deaths and people that had blood levels of vitamin D actually between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter had they lowest all cause mortality so they were less likely to die of all these diseases and in fact there was there's also been some other studies that have looked at people that have genetically low by levels of vitamin D because of a certain gene polymorphism in in a gene that makes them not make enough vitamin D as well and they also have a much higher all cause mortality so as I mentioned UVB radiation is the primary source of vitamin D you actually convert something in your skin called 7 D hydro cholesterol into vitamin d3 a vitamin d3 that gets released in the bloodstream it goes to the liver and the liver it gets converted into 25 hydroxy vitamin D and that's what we measure as a marker for vitamin D levels but that's not actually the active vitamin D so 25 hydroxy vitamin D then goes to the kidneys and the kidneys it gets activated into a steroid hormone so vitamin D is actually hormone and this hormone is regulating about five percent of the human genome so that's a lot of genes here that vitamin D is controlling it is controlling five percent of the physiological processes going on inside of each and every one of your organs including the brain so it all it the way it's controlling these physiological processes is vitamin D binds to the vitamin D receptor and once it binds to that receptor vitamin D receptors partners up with its friend here the retinoid receptor and these guys go right into the nucleus of your cell into your DNA and they recognize this little telltale sequence called a vitamin D response element and this little telltale sequence is it's six nucleotides separated by a three nucleotide spacer and the nucleotide sequence itself can tell this complex to either turn genes on and said do your do your function get active or it can say turn genes off and that sequence itself just the way the sequence that that occurs in a gene can actually tell this complex is vitamin d receptor complex whether or not it wants to activate a gene or whether or not it wants to deactivate a gene one of those genes that vitamin D regulates is the gene called tryptophan hydroxylase tryptophan hydroxylase is important because it converts the essential amino acid tryptophan into serotonin and what my research identified is actually vitamin D is regulating humans have two forms to have to separate tryptophan hydroxylase enzymes we have one in the brain and we have one in the gut and also in in our immune cells and what I found is that is that the sequence itself the sequence itself in this gene one sequence was actually associated with activation and one sequence was associated with deactivation so vitamin D is actually regulating these two genes that are important to make serotonin it's regulating them in opposite direction so it's turning one on and turning the other off so that one gene is in the gut so we have a tryptophan hydroxylase in our gut and actually around 90 percent of the serotonin that we make in our body happens in our gut so most of the serotonin in our body is actually made in the gut the serotonin made in the gut does not actually cross over the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain it can't you can't get into the brain tryptophan can get into the brain and be converted into serotonin but that's that's done by the other enzyme so in the gut tryptophan hydroxylase one converts tryptophan into serotonin and this is important because your platelets your platelets can't make serotonin but they need it because serotonin is what causes your platelets to coagulate when you have an injury it causes your platelets to clot together so the serotonin made in your gut has a very important function and that function is to give it to your platelet so that they can clot when you have an injury however too much serotonin in the gut also causes inflammation because it activates t-cells so if you have too much serotonin in the gut it can also cause GI inflammation gut distress and this has been shown in several different studies well I found that vitamin D has this gene has a sequence of vitamin D sequence that vitamin D recognizes that turns it down turns it off so it's not as active there's another gene tryptophan hydroxylase gene in the brain and this gene is responsible for converting serotonin in your brain which is what most of you're probably familiar with serotonin in your brain is important for mood it's important for a lot of functions we'll talk about in a minute but what I found is that vitamin D actually turns on this gene and makes it active so that it converts tryptophan into serotonin so I started to put these pieces together it had been known that vitamin D deficiency was associated to autism and also had been known that serotonin deficiency was linked to Austin autism but no one had sort of put these two together so I started to realize that once I found vitamin D was regulating serotonin that this may explain in some of the characteristic characteristics associated with autism for example it can explain the low association to vitamin D it can explain how autistics have low serotonin in the brain but they have high serotonin levels in the gut it can also explain the high Mel prevalence of autism so males are about five times more likely to get autists autism than females and also it can explain the presence of autoimmune antibodies in mother of mothers of autistics blood so as vitamin C levels have been decreasing over the past few decades autism levels have been increasing in fact there's been about a six hundred percent increase in autism since the 1970s and genetics only accounts for a small percentage in fact over 70% of all autistic cases cannot be linked to a genetic cause now autism increased autism awareness obviously plays an important role for for increased diagnosis of autism but there has to be some other underlying mechanism so as vitamin D deficiency has gone as vitamin D sufficiency has gone down autism incidence has actually increased as I mentioned vitamin D regulates the gene that makes serotonin in the brain from tryptophan so you guys probably are familiar with serotonin and how serotonin is important for mood but also serotonin plays a very very important role during early brain development it's actually called a brain morphogen because during early fetal brain development serotonin shapes the structure and the wiring of the developing brain serotonin tells the neurons where to go and what types of neurons to become and in fact in mice when you get rid of the ability to make serotonin in the developing brain it causes abnormal wiring and structure of the brain and it leads to abnormal behaviors which are considered autistic like behaviors in animals so serotonin plays a very important role in in brain development so this is where I published a paper on how vitamin D hormone regulates the production of serotonin and how this may relate to autism because this gene is important to make serotonin and there was another paper that was published shortly after that that validated my my paper and did show biochemically vitamin D does actually increase tryptophan hydroxylase to in neurons and so it is regulating the production of serotonin so how does this relate to the male prevalence well as I mentioned males are five times more likely to get autism well estrogen actually activates the same gene tryptophan hydroxylase to in the brain that vitamin D does actually can increase it by like almost tenfold which is quite a bit so how does this relate to autism well you know sex hormones aren't made you don't make sex hormones during during fetal development but it has been shown for example like the amniotic fluid of a female of a feat of a female fetus has higher levels of estrogen than of a male fetus and then immediately after birth so neonates females have much higher levels of estrogen in the core in the frontal cortex so it's possible if you have a mother that was deficient in vitamin D if it was a female fetus maybe it was protected from that vitamin D deficiency because estrogen was able to sort of rescue that phenotype by activating the same gene that vitamin D activates I also think it explains how the the autoimmune related how autoimmunity is related to autism so we know that low maternal vitamin D levels so we know that mothers of autistic children have these Auto antibodies in their blood that are against fetal brain proteins in fact there are 3 times more likely to have these antibodies in your blood that are against fetal brain proteins what is that doing that you're not supposed to have antibodies in your bloodstream against brain proteins and there's a group at UC Davis that showed if you take monkeys and you cause them to have an autoimmune response those those pregnant monkeys will make will have a strong autoimmune response and the antibodies will cross into the fetal brain and will cause abnormal brain development so how does this relate to vitamin D well I mentioned there's two different genes involved in making serotonin one gene the trippity hydroxyl is one is the one that vitamin D actually turns off it turns it down well tryptophan can be converted into serotonin and this happened this can happen in your gut and also in your placenta percentage issue also has this enzyme so if you're making this if you're converting all the tryptophan into serotonin it's not able to go into this other pathway which also can convert tryptophan into something called kynurenine which is very important to make a certain type of immune cell called T regulatory cells T regulatory cells are very important for preventing an autoimmune response in fact in mice if you get rid of the ability to make chimera nning the pregnant mice have such a strong autoimmune response that the fetus is aborted so it's just it's too strong so it's been shown that this is very very important for preventing autoimmunity specifically during pregnancy so what we think happens is that under conditions of low vitamin D the tryptophan is being sucked into this pathway to make serotonin in the placenta and the reason for that is because tryptophan binds much more tightly to tryptophan hydroxylase and it does the other enzyme I do so it's kind of acting as a sink for the tryptophan it's sinking up all the the tryptophan to be converted in serotonin and not leaving enough tryptophan to be converted into canyoning and therefore t-regulatory cells go down when your don't happen up to regulatory cells during during embryonic development which by the way is a foreign you have a foreign thing in your body so the mother's immune system is going whoa what's this what's this you know what's this here and it starts to mount an immune response we think that it's possible that the immune response could then affect the the fetal brain development and lead to abnormal field brain development so I think this has a big take home for prevention of autism specifically that is have a maternal a woman who is going to conceive or a woman who is pregnant get her vitamin D levels measured make sure she has adequate levels of vitamin D and supplement accordingly we know that around 1000 iu z' can raise blood serum levels of vitamin d by about five nanograms per milliliter so if you have a person that has a mother that has levels of 20 nanograms per mil if you want to bring her up to 30 she's actually going to need around 4,000 IU's a day so I think that's a pretty easy take home vitamin D supplements are cheap they're almost a penny a pill so there's really you know no no reason why people should be deficient in vitamin D that's my that's my two cents but if we're going to talk about serotonin there's another micronutrient we need to consider and that is the marine omega-3 fatty acids I Costa pentanoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid so epa and DHA leading up to my second publication i began to ask myself why do the marine omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin d seem to kind of help treat help prevent the same constellation of symptoms how does that happen now I believe this is all happening through the serotonin pathway so as I mentioned vitamin D is regulating the gene that converts tryptophan into serotonin and serotonin in addition to being a brain morphogen during early brain development it also regulates many many different behaviors it regulates social behavior it regulates impulse control it regulates decision-making aggression it regulates so many different behaviors and we know this because many different experiments have been done in normal humans you can actually take a person and give them a shake like a big drink of branched-chain amino acids like leucine and isoleucine branched chain amino acids compete with tryptophan for transport into the brain and they win so if you're eating a bunch of leucine and isoleucine then you're come out competing your tryptophan to be transported into the brain and what ends up happening is about six hours later 90% of your brain serotonin levels drop so you're you're working on around 10% of your brain serotonin levels and what's been shown is that normal people when they're depleted of their brain serotonin levels they become very impulsive their long-term planning shuts down they get aggressive irritable moody they have problems they have trouble recognizing facial expressions so empathy is is also affected and sensory gating so sensory gating is the ability there's lots of things going on in this room right now and I'm still focusing on my talk but that's because my sensory gating is working I'm able to filter out extraneous sensory stimuli that's happening all our brains are doing this all the time well serotonin is important for that process and when you don't have serotonin you can't do that properly and so you end up having sort of like a sensory overload where you just everything you can't focus everything's coming in at once and you get this sensory overload so serotonin is playing a very very important role in a lot of different brain functions and a lot of different behavioral functions so I'm where does the omega-3 come in so I mentioned the vitamin C again regulates the synthesis the production of serotonin from tryptophan so now we're in the brain here tryptophan goes gets into the brain it's being it's being made into serotonin well well serotonin then has to be released from a presynaptic neuron into the synapse and once it's released into the synapse then it binds to a serotonin receptor on the postsynaptic synapse and then that it then serotonin you know does this function so it has to bind to that receptor in order to have exert its effects its enable to so it's able to regulate all those processes I just talked about well it turns out that inflammation inflammatory molecules which can be generated in the gut by your immune system they can cross over the blood-brain barrier and stop serotonin from being released and this has been shown so the e2 series prostaglandins for example they can they cross over the blood-brain barrier and they actually inhibit serotonin from being released from the presynaptic neuron well EPA one of the marine omega-3 fatty acids actually inhibits the production of these et series prostaglandins and it allows more serotonin to be released the other marine omega-3 fatty acid DHA is very important because it's it makes up your cell membrane and it's that's very important because for neurons all your receptors are on the cell membrane and so you want the structure of that receptor to be functional you want it to be correct well when you get rid of DHA the membrane becomes messed up the fluidity of it's kind of altered and what happens is the the serotonin receptor can't bind to serotonin very well and that's also been shown so under conditions of let's say low vitamin D and you're not getting enough of you're a marine omega-3 fatty acids you're having compound effects because you have now first of all you're not making enough serotonin and serotonin is not being released from the presynaptic neuron because the inflammation and then whatever is released isn't isn't it can't find that receptor because the receptor structure is all messed up so now you're having multiple problems with the serotonin pathway and and you can imagine in combination with gene polymorphisms there are many different gene polymorphisms involved in the serotonin pathway people you know people have gene polymorphisms in this tph to gene so they're already genetically predisposed to not making enough serotonin in those cases when you already have someone not making enough serotonin and then on top of that they don't have enough they're not getting enough vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids I mean it's like a nuclear bomb for you know low serotonin so again where what's the take home for this and the take home is get your vitamin D and you can also take eat your fish or take fish oil both of those things are you know easy take homes and there's there's really widespread affects there's been shown there's been a lot of different widespread vitamin D and omega-3 deficiencies throughout the United States and I'm not sure I'm not sure about the Philippines in terms of the mega three you guys might eat some more fish than we do but people are not eating enough fish back in the United States so I think that raising your vitamin D and your omega 3 fatty acid levels will be a positive thing for affecting your serotonin system and for the way your brain is functioning and with that I will say thank you and I'll take any questions

Channel: BioBalance Wellness Institute

Views: 366,492

Rating: 4.8804975 out of 5

Keywords: biobalance, lecture, cbme, continuing basic medical education, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, nutrition, disease, brain health, epigenetics, disease prevention, vitamins, micronutrients

Id: CEsonu2kFjY

Length: 43min 16sec (2596 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 29 2016

Reddit Comments

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Lecture highlights: HOW ARE OPTIMAL LEVELS OF MICRONUTRIENTS CRUCIAL TO AGING AND BRAIN FUNCTION?

• Vitamin D controls over a thousand genes and ties into longer lifespans
• Depression correlates with inflammation and omega-3 fatty acids
• Internal gut environment affects mood and immune system
• Magnesium is essential in DNA repair
• Caloric restriction impedes cardiovascular disease, cancer, brain atrophy, and nerve degeneration
• Gene expression is influenced by food, stress, and exercise (epigenetics)

About the speaker: RHONDA PERCIAVALLE PATRICK, PH.D. Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s research is in molecular mechanisms that interrelate aging, cancer, and nutrition. She shares insights from her academic studies and research on the best ways to increase healthspan using a proactive, preventive approach.

• Ph.D. Biomedical Science, University of Tennessee Health Science Center; B.S. Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute with Dr. Bruce Ames
• Research and publications in the links among mitochondrial metabolism, apoptosis, and cancer, in micronutrients, inflammation, and DNA damage, in Vitamin D, brain function, and behavior, and in insulin signaling, protein misfolding, and neurodegenerative diseases
• Co-Founder, “Found My Fitness” online platform promoting optimal health and performance through deeper understanding biology

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Dr Patrick is so sharp. Love her talks!

[u/fragrance-free]

Thank you! I love her lectures also.