Nutritionist REVEALS Diet Mistakes Causing STRESS, ANXIETY & DEPRESSION | Drew Ramsey & Mark Hyman

if if uh someone's listening and their depression anxiety mental health issues um what are the ways of eating that actually cause a problem and then when we'll get into what are the ways of eating that actually can fix the problem yeah then we'll get into the such a great question let's start with the problem at the end of your fork before we tell you the solution and the problem that you're under your fork a lot of people know those words that you know everybody knows i'm about to say sugar everybody knows i'm about to say trans fats everybody knows i'm about to say processed foods and so the surprise it causes everything after diabetes alzheimer's and depression and i think what's really been striking to me as a psychiatrist interested in behavioral change and as an eater and as a parent how do you change those from being concepts to being behavioral and action-oriented items in your own life and so what's causing the problem very simply is is not getting enough of the right nutrients and i would argue for a lot of americans missing a set of nutrients americans are not americans are not getting phytonutrients because they're not eating plants americans are not getting seafood because they eat 14 pounds per year period and it's fish sticks it's not the seafood that we would want them to eat they're not you know this is not shrimp ceviche and wild salmon and they also there's i think a problem that isn't just around the food choice but is around uh i would say the missing spirituality of food and that that people have we've lost our soul about food and when you tell people to eat well there's a notion that well that costs too much or it takes too much time or i don't know how to do it and i think those are our missing lies yes and and i think it's just i mean i have my my mama taught me how to cook and she's taught me that recipes start with olive oil or butter garlic and onions and then you add in what you put in some vegetables in that and and you're good right you put in some meat in that you're good you um and so it's pretty much hardcore yeah i mean i think it and what i'm i'm shocked by things like when we make our lentil soup at home we make a lentils carrots celery and that's it we put it in a crock pot and i love serving that dish for people like wow what's in here right it's like it's lentil food yeah carrot celery a little bit of pinch of sea salt so anyway those are what's on the end of the fork that's causing the problem is first of all people aren't eating with a fork right people aren't taking a deep breath and engaging their digestive system and people aren't in any way offering up gratitude or thanks for the most people some of you all are out there doing that but the number of times as we did when we were we had that wonderful dinner with well and good and we sat there and i'm sitting there next to abby bernstein and i'm thinking like i've been out in the midwest like you don't eat until you say grace right and i said let's let's have a moment and everybody's ready to give thanks and bow their heads for a moment she said such a wonderful uh gray store food for us so those kind of things it's not just that that garbage is on the you know it's not even your fork it's in the package that you're eating or that it's on the go it's that we've lost that notion of where it comes from and and valuing that and honoring that and we're doing a better job as you know honoring the farmers who grow it you know who are you know these silent heroes you know talking about a health care crisis i mean talk about physician suicide i mean the biggest threat to farmers right now is farmer suicide i mean we're just losing dozens of farmers a day it's the number actually came out there was like a little confusion like what's the top uh risk group for suicide was it farmers or doctors and i was like you know either way it's just awful so is there data of science proving that sugar and processed foods cause mental illness well let's talk about the data set that there is the the big data set and there's controversy about this data set is correlational data and the controversy is that's really misguided us with a lot of nutritional policy per you know smart folks looking at that i really like the writing of gary tabbs and peter etia who kind of look at the science behind correlational studies and have some serious questions but but if we're going to think about that data as being useful that data is very clear when you eat more processed foods which means simple sugars trans fats and a lot of simple carbs and all those ways that you know it's not just sugar folks it's like you know what you know fructose syrup and i love corn corn syrup solids right now they changed the name of high fructose corn right it was like it's like sounds like a corn kind of like corn syrup or it's like maple syrup yeah and so uh those are you know the things that certainly we want folks to to avoid and what does the data say if you eat highly processed foods you have you know 50 to 100 increased risk of clinical depression oh if you eat high glycemic index foods there's a great uh study that came out a colleague at columbia uh looking at high glycemic index foods so those are foods that just spike your blood sugar more those have a significant increased risk individuals have an increased risk of depression the women's health initiative so big big study of women ages 45 plus and so there's that correlational data and it's just consistent when you look at the meta-analyses of it it's consistent that the food that we've created in the last 100 years leads to an increased risk or increased risk in that population of depression same data for adhd yeah not as much data for anxiety disorders which is interesting uh but but certainly feels true to me clinically then we move on to randomized controlled trials and the reason this is of interest is is on the molecular side like in the mouse models you know this in the i mean you know not having enough nutrients and putting lots and lots of fuel in any sort of marshmallows look like yeah i mean what the responsibility i mean there's a very it's very clear what depressed mice look like is you stick them in little cages and they don't try and uh and you put them into swim it's a forced swim test and when mice are depressed they don't fight to get out they just stop swimming they drown we don't let them drown but but they would drown if you didn't fish them out whereas non-depressed mice they're fighting to get out yeah that's what a depressed mouse looks like so the randomized controlled trials that came out recently are exciting because we can say it makes common sense we can say on a molecular level it makes lots and lots of sense we can say it makes sense in the correlational data but you and i know mark medicine's not going to change until we have randomized clinical trials and that's where folks like felice jacka and michael burke and the food and mood center in australia they're really i would say the leaders in this where they've completed a number of trials natalie parletta is also not part of that group but it's a part of the leaders in this and now they're putting down numerous randomized trials and creating resources for patients with mental health concerns like depression yeah to make sure food's part of the equation and their data looks quite strong and what i love about this is when the data comes out i was finding one of the big leaders in psychiatry um one mentioned it by name but been very critical it gets really critical there's a big big post about how and some you know one of these health medicine review websites about you know how how bad the trial was or how small it was or it's like fighting everybody's always criticizing each other about the study and i was like so when we don't have data you say there's no data and then when people do a really good trial you want to pick it apart yeah and there's some feeling that it it's it's it's almost like you know folks have really people don't like paradigm shifts well i mean is this how bad it's gotten mark that we're at a paradigm shift we're suggesting that our our patients our neighbors our families eat well for things like uh when they're thinking about their brain and their mood and their dementia risk and depression like we've gotten so far down the rabbit hole of medicine that that's a paradigm shift yeah like that that's crazy it is absolutely nice and there's you're right there's so much data like you might be aware of hiblin's work which was from the united states captain joe kevin joey of luna is like he's a pretty cool guy he's the uh he's the leader of the what he calls himself the uh he is the uh servant he's the surgeon generals he's a soldier in the surgeon general's army there you go and he did these amazing studies looking at the rise of omega-3 omega i mean the rise of omega-6 fats refined oils and the decrease in omega-3 fats lead to violence homicide suicide uh and that changed behavior and i remember once coming back from you know somewhere and i had a letter on my desk in my office and it was from a prisoner who wrote me a letter wrote read my book culture metabolism way back when and said you know i was a violent criminal in my life and i realized you know i that when i changed my diet after reading this book in prison i don't know how he did that that he realized he was a very different person and they've done prison studies where they p p prisoners healthy diets and they reduce violent crime by fifty six percent of human multivitamin it reduces crime by eighty percent well you can in prisons yeah you can just see that the notion that we you know we don't approach that right what is criminal activity violence so some of it's stuff we don't understand some of it certainly horrible character pathology but some of it when we think that this is a population that in general does not have good nourishment in general um you know does not learn a lot of mental health skills uh yeah there's there's a way that that some of what's going on there is certainly just a result of a broken system of mental health care and and i would say a broken system of our culture i've been really uh i've been inspired this month by benjamin uh the benjamin rush biography and the reason is that i didn't know anything about benjamin rush and benjamin rush is one of our youngest founding fathers he is the second youngest son of the declaration of independence and the only i think one i think the only physician signer yeah and he is our original american physician they called him uh the american hippocrates back in the day and he's also our original psychiatrist and he founded the first mental hospital and he helped us found this country on a very very simple principle which is that when we think about mental illness we can't put people in asylums and say that they don't have spirituality or they're sinners or they're bad people that we as physicians are going to treat them as patients and we are going to care for them and that is just inspired me to really think about what's happening in our country and how bad our mental health has got and how we all know about it and we're just finally starting to talk about it but we were we were founded as a place where we should have freedom to talk about this yeah i'll get you a cup of the benjamin right yeah it sounds fantastic every doctor should read it so so so drew uh you wrote this paper was published september 2018 in the psychiatric journal and and it was really quite detailed in terms of its analysis of the types of foods and nutrients so help us take this home what are the things that you learn from there that are the most important nutrients we need and one of the most important foods to help us get those nutrients and just in general to help us for sure mental illness and so the simple the paper is called antidepressants foods and and folks can and check it out and it's an open source article and and i did this with my colleague dr laura lachance and quite simply it's it's arithmetic it's bean counting and we went through all of the literature looking at all of the the essential nutrients uh vitamins and minerals and did a literature search to say well which of these have significant evidence that they can help prevent depression and that they can be used to treat depression and there are 12 that we found and i bet you could name all 12 more okay they're the 12 we would expect omega 3 fats and zinc and b12 vitamin e magnesium all right and then iron and so then we looked at uh just as simple what a nutrient profiling system is is it just tries it's just a system for looking at what foods have the most of those nutrients per calorie and then what a good nutrient profiling system does and dr lachance and i really wanted to create a good one because oddly there are i think 27 nutrient profiling systems in the world that have been created some people have seen ones like the andy or new valve you know how many have been about mental health none none and so what we a good nutrient uh trifling system does looks at food categories so we're not saying koko kale kale and people say well i don't like kale you can't eat too much of it exactly oh no it's toxic now now it's toxic work but what we say is leafy greens and so what we did is we scored um we looked at all of the all of the the top foods for these nutrients scored them and then created a list of the top plant animal foods and so they're they're you know first of all they're the foods that top the list which i just think are interesting like oysters clams and mussels are in the top five on the animal side and the reason we did animal foods is that no nutrient profiling system usually has any meat or any animals in it because it's all based on calories usually and plants always have fewer calories but most people eat meat or seafood so we wanted to give folks a list of which which had the most nutrients and why why would this shellfish the top ones top ones because they think about oysters why do they top the list you got 10 to 15 calories per oyster so let's just say you know six oysters 60 calories and for those 60 calories you're getting 768 milligrams of launching omega-3 fats you're getting 340 of your vitamin b12 you're getting uh gosh at least a third of your iron you're getting 500 of your daily need of zinc you're i mean on and on and on you're getting in some vitamin c and oysters okay let's go get some oysters yeah exactly all that for 60 calories and that's just and on the other side looking at plants like things like watercress top the list and why just watercress lots of nutrients no calories or very few calories and so that's a great example of nutrient density those foods and so the food categories that people should be looking for things like leafy greens the rainbow vegetables more seafood and if you're eating meat and red meat to look more towards wild red meats or grass-fed red meats so this is fascinating so the diet that prevents cancer heart disease dementia depression and fixes most chronic illness is the same diet it's it's really it's well it's where we got off in medicine we kind of separated out mental health and brain health from the red like like you're saying kind of like somehow the blood blame brain barrier was like thou shall not pass like we we didn't think that sure those same all the same activities that we we think about in terms of our general health and the foods we want people to eat and the things we want people to do move their bodies uh connect be part of their community yeah that that's key to your brain health in your mental health yeah and and the trouble with you know our food supply is that it's often depleted even if you're eating the best foods you know you have an organic farm the soil matters in the food yeah and if you're going on a depleted soils which most of our soils are more like dust and dirt well they're just like chemicals and chemicals out i mean it's really you know if you if you if you live you know if you if you live by the food you grow you don't you know you don't do it the way that a lot of food is grown and even you know even organic food it's funny as you as you drive through the produce belt and i encourage people to do this and you look out you know you'll see organic stuff out there yeah but it doesn't look like a it doesn't look like a healthy farm somehow it's got a lot of food on it but it doesn't smell right the people working it they they i don't know they don't seem happy in a certain way the the it's it's because of their big mono crop organic yeah yeah yeah it's a big monoculture you know you look at a big kill the soil we should produce great soil they they there's a ton of tillage there's a ton of diesel spent there's a ton of compaction and and it's a real i think it's a challenge right now because industrial organic is what michael pond calls it it is and and in a lot of ways you know that's been a huge victory because we have a conversation about organic right it's better that and the organic was just found to reduce cancer by 25 people who had it this french study right i mean so there's you know there there's something there so it's a step in the right direction but when you think about where i'm from and you drive around we we our soil is pretty rough in crawford county but boy you wanna i would say that a lot of places mark where we live if you'd take a lot of americans they wouldn't know they were in america because it's just that whole central notion the central america or middle american notion of a small farm and what that looks like and how that functions some cows couple pigs not a monoculture a nice garden for all your food and for sharing with your neighbors that has died in a way and and i i i think wayne o'barry calls it the unsettling of america yeah and i think that you know maybe dead is not that's on life support and and maybe we're seeing a shift now it seems like it's coming back there's more small older farms i hope so i mean it's definitely coming back you see it you see it on the coasts and you see it around urban centers but there's still a lot of places that don't um you know where it's not uh it's not happening and that kind of combo of um you know uh i would say agri-tourism and interest in food but also just interest in farms but i'm i'm hopeful so so so my question was going down the path of okay if our even organic isn't the best that it could be if the foods have been bred in a way to create more starch who are a lot of the phytochemicals have been bred out of it the nutrients aren't there because the soil even if it's the best organic farm uh and by the way dan barber and uh and walter rob a former ceo of whole foods to create a seed company to actually reinvent new seeds to breed them so they have flavor and they have nutrient density and they're phytochemical rich it's a very different idea than breeding them for yield or for pest resistance or water a drought but they're doing all that too but they're they're doing both so the question is if that's true then do we need supplements and do you use supplement nutritional supplements in your practice to treat mood disorders so i think even with the food we have today you can still get all the nutrients you need it's actually challenging if you look at all the recommended daily allowance and you think what you would need to eat to meet that yeah it's a little challenging it requires some thinking about it i always got to tell people no just eat nutrient dense food you'll be fine but if you start scratching your head and adding enough it can be tough yeah i just stopped i had a patient once who was like i don't think supplements so i literally looked every food up and i'm like okay selenium it's in brazil so i have two brazil nuts a day like that i have 17 pumpkin seeds i have you know two cups of you know broccoli or whatever it is i was like okay fine if you want to do that go ahead let's check your nutrient levels well i have that problem where i i don't like the idea of turning a meal into a math equation and so yeah i myself i mean i'm i'm 44 and i stopped taking all supplements probably about maybe 10 or 15 years ago i guess that's not entirely true i'll take i'll take a little omega-3 sometimes and certainly in my practice for non-seafood eaters or for individuals who are just kind of eating seafood every now and then especially for individuals who don't want to try a you know a medicine and they've never even for individuals who do i'll put them on a one to two gram milligram grams of fish oil i mean the trials that that you know fish oil is very in the science in the sort of studies of depression is one of these things that has statistical significance but it's not able to show clinical significance in the meta-analyses that you get about a point reduction on a you know hamilton d uh depression rating scale that said uh well you can't take fish oil and be eating like processed oils exactly which is the place this place is you keep eating piles of sugar yeah yeah it that you know and you wonder this is the way the studies are designed well you wonder what do they control for that and two you know we have all these snips now in the elongated genes in terms of how we process omega-3 fats those are genetic variations yeah i mean there's that there's also that you know if you have somebody who's a seafood eater versus not but the the um the bottom line is i think that there are certain supplements uh that that should be tried especially when people are struggling with traditional like antidepressant response like a lot of people see they've been on a medicine it works some like with tearfulness with sleep but they're not eating well and for whatever reason they're not gonna start eating well so that's a really good example of somebody who a multivitamin or something with zinc or magnesium certainly anybody who's low i mean i always have that feeling like if you're low i i definitely do you test your patients yeah yeah i test i i don't do as extreme or not extreme maybe it's thorough but i certainly test everybody i mean i think what you were saying earlier i think any mental health clinician who misses i mean this is malpractice if you miss a thyroid problem a b12 deficiency syphilis i mean there's a bunch of biological causes of depression yeah and i think you and i see that get missed sometimes where it's like this is not this is not even functional medicine this is just basic medicine yeah it's all good yeah it's good medicine i mean i i you know in my practice i see the common deficiencies you're testing our vitamin d magnesium omega-3 fats sometimes iron yep and the b vitamins particularly around homocysteine and methylation issues which is this cycle of folate b12 and b6 and so i find that giving people a multi and fish oil and vitamin d and maybe a little magnesium usually has enormous impact and well you think it's that even if you're going to get them to change their food right away there's some you know that takes a little bit in in even way changing the food i i feel something i feel like we're so depleted it's just yeah well it's hard and it's also it's really hard when you're depressed yeah you know so i think what uh it also gives people something to do yeah because you do i mean depression causes a lot of carbohydrate craving and a lot of you know we eat we call it comfort food for a reason because we eat it when we want to be comforted right i mean i know when i'm in that bad spot man i'm i'm a mac and cheese guy yeah gives you a little serotonin yeah don't give me don't give me any talk about carbs i need like my comfort food but it's um i think it's something also the other one that's i think exciting is the l methylfolate it's just exciting in the idea that it's actually a prescription drug for depression well it's a deployment but yeah it's a beaver it's a b vitamin right by am i allowed to say it's a b vitamin that got you served by big pharma is the way i think about it which is you have l-methylfolate which is folate that has a methyl group added onto it and instead of that being five bucks it's 200 bucks yeah but you can get it for five bucks you can you can get but the idea that we're just now because this is gonna be the next frontier mark as you know which is we're gonna start really getting into precision psychiatry that's my most my favorite news center at columbia is the center for precision psychiatry there is that there's a center for precision psychiatry there's a center for practice innovation there's a center for women's mental health i mean we there's there's going to be there's a new center for media and mental health that's coming online and precision psychiatry is just that which is there's no i mean one of the things i think it's interesting is there's nobody that's more critical of psychiatry than ours like than ourselves yeah because nobody sits with the family and sees the failure well nobody sits with it like you know until you sit with getting an antidepressant prescription wrong [Music] and then getting it right and knowing that somebody suffered because you didn't make the right choice when you sit with that you want to get it right more than anybody else because that's that's your job and so it's an exciting time between the new knowledge of the microbiome the psychiatric genetics which it's not there yet but man it's getting close we're we're i hope going to see the tide turn on our methyl mental health epidemic we are going to see the tide turn on our mental health epidemic mark yeah we won't rest until it does deal oh no we can no it's it's i mean it's the food stupid as you know to paraphrase a former president but it's like it's it's people don't get how powerful it is and how impactful and how quick it works how do you get people to see it the more because i feel like when we tell people hey eat right feel right they get that when we say you know you know what i do i i just i think you know often incrementalism doesn't work because people don't see a change so people are eating a crappy night they just stop the soda but they're eating like garbage right they're not going to feel better right so i put people usually for i said 10 days you can do anything so i put them on a basic elimination diet i call it the 10 day detox diet for 10 days and they can experience without me telling them the changes that happen in their body in their brain and their mood their energy their sleep and it's quick so usually you can get people to do anything for 10 days and then they go oh okay well they have to admit that you any good behavioral change it's okay we can't tell you you can't read about it the study's not going to help the sound bite the science i think you have to experience it working and as soon as you experience that that extra energy that that better what i find the better sleep quality yeah you know i'm expecting to hear like more move more energy and people like you know doc but i'm really sleeping better yeah and all those ways that you know that difference that then makes nothing affects mood i would say like sleep so it's uh yeah it's amazing well uh if you were able to change psychiatry and you had sort of an autocratic you know wand that you could wave and i got to be the emperor of psychiatry i mean would you throw out the dsm-5 would you say every psychiatrist needs to get trained in functional medicine nutrition and well i do i do a few things one is i'd want america to really meet psychiatry because i think so often when they think about psychiatrists they think about freud they think about some old white guy with a beard and they don't think about like our current president although stewart first african-american female president of the american psychiatric association or they don't think about my colleague christina mangurian who's she was like one of these stellar she's my medical student now she's the vice chair for health equality and diversity at ucsf and so these are women who are leading psychiatry and we are diverse and we we are desperate to find uh well we're desperate for a few things when we're desperate to better we have a lot of solutions we have for example i just you know the number one way to treat schizophrenia or to keep people with schizophrenia really well it's not an antipsychotic that helps for a lot of them with symptoms but it's a job and so there's a program uh spirited by the office of mental health and lloyd cetera in new york and in columbia center for practice innovation that that looks at that and now makes sure that there are i think there are 7 000 families in new york who are getting employment support when they have early so so basic simple things that are medical care that are things that happen outside the hospital yeah and so i would wanna i would wanna see more programs like that um i think that uh there needs to be certainly training and i would say not just nutrition but also in um lifestyle and lifestyle modification i think that gets dumbed down in medicine in general and we don't we don't know how to do it and i think a lot of times doctors don't think they should do it and maybe that's true maybe it's not but what doctors need to do yeah and but even writing a prescription for food and exercise some systems that's all they're going to do but building out that capacity um i would want us to i guess then you want to hear my number one change i guess i've come up on this this week is i've been really thinking about innovation and mental health the number one change i want to see is i want us to stop meeting patients when they're mentally ill i want us to start meeting patients and helping them stay mentally well because the most powerful tool that i have as a psychiatrist is the power of prevention and no one comes to talk to me or think about talking to me or fights the stigma to talking to me until they're late in the game and and that's great i'll i'm going to get them better wherever wherever you meet me i'm going to help get you better but i'm going to help you get yourself better actually is the way to put it but but i hope that what changes and what is changing is that we start having a language to talk about our mental health and recognize that we all have this that i think people think about folks like you and me one of the things i love about you is you talk about being depressed and people think oh you're a brilliant successful physician you're an innovator like you don't have depression and it's like no you know you do and you have and that's what that's what i hope is going to change in terms of the field and the dsm the diagnostics i mean there are smarter guys than me thinking about that i think that's just yeah we we're gonna we're gonna have a reckoning that the way we've been doing it it has been necessary yeah without the dsm we that's a way of labeling people based on symptoms yeah what mental illness they have it doesn't tell you why it doesn't tell you why it's a symptom-based diagnostic approach because we you know it's it's hard we don't know why like what i love is now just now there's a big idea in psychiatry not a big idea but a new idea the inflammation has a lot to do with depression yeah now that's been an idea in functional medicine and and wellness for 15 years so that that's changing and i think that we're going to see more of an integrative model the other thing is i would just hope that we come out of the shadows a little bit and that we're collaborating and integrating more and more um especially with wellness yeah i agree i think rethinking mental health and then changing our meaning we attach to a lot of it which isn't necessarily always psychological often is but it's not always and how do we combine that with the psychological approach that's that's the original you know the original psychiatry the model they teach us is the bio psychosocial model and except they usually leave out the bio well you know the bio is they leave out some of the violence it's serotonin right that's given any impression like that's like the worst brainy thing that happened for psychiatrists one of you know hundreds of of molecules in the brain it doesn't nobody even knows about bdnf like bdnf is a hormone that makes your brain grow that's what we care about like that's what food and exercise and psychotherapy all have in common right hung up on serotonin step number one is you get rid of the term mental illness and you call these things what they really are brain health issues that steal your mind get your brain right and your mind will follow so the end of mental illness really begins with a revolution in brain health just like you and i did with the daniel plan so it wasn't just those 15 000 people who got no right thousands of churches around the world did our program and we've got 30 in cleveland doing it now and they decreased their medications for mental health issues it improved their moods their energy their memory their relationship i mean the stories you and i have heard i remember that woman who came up to me after six weeks when we went back to the church and she had been depressed her whole life in and out of psychiatric institutions on medications her marriage was struggling she didn't know she could work anymore and she said dr hyman is it possible that my depression could go away in three days and i'm like well yeah if it was related to something you were eating and it was and she not only lost like 45 pounds but she was able to get her life back in a way that that she really hadn't in decades and decades of traditional psychiatric treatment we heard that story just over and over again get your brain right your mind will follow but in order to get your brain right you actually have to get your body right so step number two is once we get rid of the term mental illness you have to fall in love with your brain but before we before we go into that i just want to spend a minute on this because it's such a big paradigm shift you know if if you think about you know all the labels we give people we call it the dsm-5 which is basically the psychiatric manual that categorizes people according to their symptoms it's it's a way of describing mental illness that doesn't actually represent the biology of what's going on it doesn't represent the causes and it guides people down a treatment path that really has been a massive failure for the most part right our outcomes are no better than they were in the 1950s yeah and mental illness is on the rise i mean when i looked recently at the cost of health care over the next 35 years it was 95 trillion dollars and the most expensive disease was mental illness and depression why not because you're in the hospital but because you lose quality of life you lose productivity you can't work you can't function you can't be a happy member of society and so you know we have to sort of get over the idea that mental illness is a psychological and emotional problem and start with the premise that it's a brain problem fix that and then yeah you might have to deal with some psychological and emotional issues but you can't do it in the reverse order it's very hard i always say you know it's i can give you a lot of morphine if you have a broken ankle might help you walk a little bit but it's not going to fix your ankle right so i think of it in four big circles that we all have a biology so that's the hardware of your brain the actual physical functioning of your brain if you try to program that without fixing the hardware it's not going to work so there's the biological circle there's this psychological circle how you think it's really important so i think of that as software yes there's a social circle which is who you hang out with so in the computer analogy think of that as network connections right you become like the people you hang out with and one of the things i i may have gotten from you is if you want to get healthy find the healthiest person you can stand right and then spend as much time as him or her as possible while your friends are you know eating mcdonald's and having french fries and beer and watching tv all day you're going to be probably overweight and unhealthy if they're all drinking green juice and going to yoga class they're probably going to be healthier and then there's the spiritual circle which is why the heck do you care why are you on the planet what's your sense of meaning and purpose both you and i work really hard because we're both very purposeful people and we believe we're here to do something important and if you don't have meaning in your life it's sort of hard to if you don't know the why it's hard to do the what yes and so but um going to therapy and i'm a huge fan of therapy once your brain works right makes the most sense otherwise it demoralizes you there's actually side effects to going to therapy with a troubled brain because it won't work and then people spent money they spent time they spent energy and it's not working so they get demoralized and wonder what's the matter with them and it could have been the head injury it could have been the toxic exposure like you talked about what happened to you in china when you were there um it it's so many different potential causes it could be because your body's chronically inflamed because your gut's not healthy right and get your body right get your brain right your mind's better your mood's better and we're going the wrong way just like you said tom insult who is director of the national institute of mental health said the dsm that you mentioned is 100 reliable what that means is if you make a diagnosis with depression today using the dsm you'll make the diagnosis tomorrow but then he went on to say it was zero percent valid right uh because it's not based on any underlying neuroscience so you see and that's why my profession dismissed scans because it didn't fit their diagnostic model so rather than throwing out the bible and going with neuroscience they threw out neuroscience and said oh imaging's not helpful and you know it's like michael pollan said once that uh psychiatry is brainless right it is and i'm trying to change that because why should i be a diminished medical profession that other people make fun of um i'm not okay with that because it hurts millions of people you try and kill yourself today in every major city in the world and no one will look at your brain yeah that's insane yeah scary so thank you for reframing mental illness to be primarily a brain disorder that can be fixed by fixing your body and then fixing all these other circles right because it's much easier to fix your other circles if your brain's working if you're not mercury poisoned or your thyroids were not working or you're you're not b12 deficient or vitamin d deficient or you're not pre-diabetic all those things will mess up your brain right so it's much easier to do the work of actually creating meaning and purpose in your life and being happy and dealing with the psychological issues if your brain's working properly no question about it and if you've been traumatized and so many people have because they've been raised by parents who have brain issues then it changes your brain in a negative way so put the brain in a healing environment the psychological work becomes so much easier so why is this so prevalent today i mean every 14 minutes someone commits suicide every eight minutes someone dies of a drug overdose 51 of the population at some point in their life have some mental issue a quarter of the women population in this country are on antidepressants like what's going on well there's a part in the book a writing device that i just love it's called if i was an evil ruler and i wanted to create mental illness in america how would i yeah and basically the food system we have basically our great american society where our food system you know more about this than anyone our food system is broken right i mean 70 of us are overweight 40 of us are obese i publish two studies that show as your weight goes up the size of your brain goes down which should scare the fat off anybody size and function of your brain size and function and because the fat on your body is not innocuous it increases inflammation it stores toxins and it takes healthy hormones and turns them into unhealthy cancer promoting forms of estrogen and so if you just think about that that one thing by itself our food i actually think is responsible for almost half of the mental health challenges in america there's this fascinating study from australia where they looked at two outer islands one of them had fast food restaurants the other one didn't and then they looked at their omega-3 index and the island with fast food restaurants had significantly lower omega-3 index and five times the level of depression think about that yeah of course just with the food there was some kid recently that went blind from eating pringles and french fries because he was so vitamin deficient he basically had xerophthalmia which is from vitamin a deficiency i mean think about it junk food is going to make you blind not just fat and demented and diabetic well that's one of the reasons i'm a fan of multiple vitamins because we're basically a vitamin deficient society with deficiencies in magnesium and vitamin d and choline and vitamin b and c b's and c and so i just think it's a smart thing to sort of hedge your bat 97 of the population is low in omega-3 fatty acids they have sub-optimal levels actually did a study of 50 consecutive patients who came to our clinic we're not taking fish oil 49 of them had sub-optimal levels i mean it's striking when you start to look and test which most doctors don't i mean you you actually are scanning people's brains i scan their bodies through testing that looks at all these variables that most doctors don't look at right how many doctors look at omega-3 levels in your body most don't but it's essential for my practice because i can't tell what's going on if i don't know what's happening no it's 25 of the membranes in your brain are made of omega-3 fatty acids and so if they're low your brain's not going to talk very well to itself yeah i mean if you're listening i think most people and i think this is true i've seen in my family i've seen it in my patients most people with some type of mental disorder there's a stigma there's a sort of a blame game going on and there's a shame about it what your work is really doing is stopping that saying that's just nonsense it's like would you shame somebody for having cancer or diabetes or an autoimmune disease no you wouldn't you would try to sort through what's going on and look at the biology and that's what you've done so tell us why people suffering from things like depression anxiety bipolar disease add panic disorders bipolar you know schizophrenia even addiction why why should they be hopeful now because if they see it from a brain perspective what we've learned is you're not stuck with the brain you have probably the biggest advance in neuroscience over the last 20 years is this concept of neuroplasticity that you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and every day you're making about 700 new hippocampal cells so the hippocampus has stem cells and the hippocampus you know is greek for seahorse so every day you're making about 700 new baby sea horses and your behavior is either helping them grow or it's murdering them and what one of the things i think is really interesting my 16 year old daughter she and i i'm 65 we're both making about 700 new baby stem cells in our hippocampus um hers are more likely to stick around than mine because of blood flow so new research nerd brain cells don't age it's your blood vessels that age yeah so anything that damages your blood vessels damages your brain so if you know how to increase blood flow so things like exercise and ginkgo and beets and rosemary and pepper i mean really simple things um can actually help improve the function of your brain that's your thing table tennis but you're not stuck with the brain you have you can make it better and most people don't know that i was just in florida by the way dr ehman is a mean table tennis player who whips my ass every single time it's embarrassing and there's actually study from england on who lives the longest so they looked at sports and so if you don't play any sports you don't live long tennis players live seven years longer if you play football or soccer you don't live longer than anybody else because you're putting your head with the ball people who play racket sports live the longest and that's why i play table tennis because you got to get your eyes hands and feet all to work together while you think about the spin on the ball yeah yeah i picked up tennis when i was 45 and i work at it as much as i can and it's just makes me so happy and i think it has kept me younger and well it activates your cerebellum and the cerebellum you know you're the young people listening you're not going to know who this is it horrifies me i call the cerebellum the rodney dangerfield part of the brain it gets no respect even though it's 10 of the brain's volume it contains 50 percent of the brain's neurons and the cerebellum is not just involved in coordination it's involved in processing speed and thought coordination and so when you play tennis you're activating the cerebellum which o has reciprocal connections with your frontal lobes so it's actually making you smarter more focused it's really a great game yeah i get so and there are no head injuries with no tennis or table tennis then you're not paying attention the ball hits you so sometimes actually when i'm really clumsy i'll hit myself in the head with a racket but that's not usual um so this this conversation is fabulous because we're reframing mental illness to brain health and you have in your book the end of mental on this simple way of thinking about this you call bright minds the 11 risk factors that steal your mind and how you avoid them can you take us through that so a number of years ago i realized if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it if it's headed to the dark place you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and bright minds is the mnemonic we came up with and the b is for blood flow low blood flow's the number one brain imaging predictor of alzheimer's disease it's also associated with addictions it's associated with depression it's associated with adhd and schizophrenia so you want to do everything you can to protect your blood flow and 40 of 40 year old men have erectile dysfunction do you know what that means 40 of 40 year old men have brain dysfunction if you have blood flow problems anywhere it likely means they're everywhere right and so you know you have blood flow problems if you get a scan because spect is a blood flow study uh if you have hypertension if you have any form of heart disease if you don't exercise so it just gives you some very simple things to do the r is retirement and aging when you stop learning your brain starts dying and you know i turned 65 this year and i've seen thousands of 60 70 80 year old brains and the news is not good it's sort of like you know as we age our skin begins to fall off our face the same process happens in the brain unless you're serious about it right i mean i have your scan 10 years apart and as you got older your brain got better yeah well how exciting is that that you're not happy i'm very competitive with the brain the brain you have um the eye is inflammation that i mean both you and i know it's a disaster inflammation is a disaster for every organ in your body that's true including your brain and uh so people can measure their omega-3 index it's important to underscore this we know from the research today that depression is inflammation in the brain that autism is inflammation in the brain that add and dementia are inflammation in the brain and if that's true then the question is what's causing the inflammation how do you stop it and how do you fix it so tell us about that so if you have a low omega-3 index taking omega-3s can be really helpful you have to get your gut right because having this thing and i'm a psychiatrist i didn't know one thing about leaky gut until i read the ultramine solution and then i'm like oh you have to get your gut right because if your gut's not right your brain's not right you're likely to have things get inside your body that have no business in your body which causes an autoimmune or an inflammatory response so food really matters sugar is pro-inflammatory and foods that quickly turn to sugar bread pasta potatoes rice you want to you often say eat them like a condiment right that lasts recreational is a recreational drug it's it's it's fine but didn't you say the four white powders yeah the deadly white color the deadly white powder white flower white sugar cocaine and too much salt that so diet really does matter and our processed foods are loaded with pro-inflammatory omega-6s so corn and soy it's we're overloaded with them i mean not that they're evil but they're not the right choice as uh primary staples in our diet um but also things like infections and mold and we're going to get there so the eye is inflammation and so get your gut right omega-3 fatty acids the g is genetics and the big lie with genetics is i have obesity in my family and that's why i'm fat well the fact is i have obesity in my family i have a brother and sister who are 150 pounds overweight but i'm not why you're wearing a skinny suit because i know the behaviors that make it likely to be so so genes are not a death sentence what they should be is a wake-up call and tell you what you're vulnerable to so that you get serious about prevention i mean you're in better shape now than when i met you 15 years ago sure you lost more weight you get more muscle and you're 15 years older and i work on it right but because i love what i do i'm and quite frankly i have four children i never want to live with them i love them i want to be independent for as long as possible i don't want them being worried about taking away my driver's license that means i have to take care of my body because my body will then take care of my brain but that causes you to think ahead which is of course a brain function the h is a national epidemic that nobody knows it's head trauma head trauma is a major cause of psychiatric illness and nobody knows about it because psychiatrists psychologists marriage and family counselors counselors they never look at the brain and so that fall out of a second story window that caused you to be angry and depressed nobody's thinking about rehabilitating the damage that occurred that's why you really shouldn't let your children hit soccer balls with their head play tackle football and if you've been in a car accident and then you got depressed somebody should look at your brain and then you should go about rehabilitating it that's what i did with the big nfl study yeah um and we published a study eighty percent of our players get better in as little as two months it's amazing by putting them on our bright minds program so i'm pretty excited about that the t is toxins and when i first started scanning people i mean it was really clear that marijuana alcohol cocaine methamphetamines heroin are bad for your brain but then i would see these toxic scans of people who never use drugs and i'm like oh no and i had not one lecture on mold exposure when i was a psychiatric resident or heavy mercury or mercury poisoning or lead exposure and none of that and so we often find ourselves working up a toxic brain and did you know 60 of the lipstick sold in the united states has led in it so i think it that it's the kiss of death and so i know you know this app think dirty and when i downloaded it you can scan all of your personal products i threw out half of my bathroom because it was basically toxic yeah the things like parabens and phthalates they're called hormone disruptors which we're going to get to in a second but you don't want whatever goes on your body goes in your body and affects your body so you have to get rid of the toxins and basically it's decrease exposure and support the four organs of detoxification kidneys drink more water god eat more fiber liver stop drinking i'm just not a fan i mean we can talk about it um but it disrupts liver function and sweat with exercise or takes saunas people who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of alzheimer's disease so m is something i call mind storms it's abnormal electrical activity in your brain so if you have a hot spot in your temporal lobes or cold spot what we see it's akin to seizure activity so sometimes anti-convulsants can really help a ketogenic diet has anti-convulsant yes properties there's this great book it's written in 1980 by jack dreyfus who's the founder of the famous dreyfus mutual fund and he said a remarkable medicine has been overlooked and it was dilantin which is an old anti-convulsant he'd been going to see psychiatrists forever he said three days on dilating he didn't need a psychiatrist anymore um because it had balanced his brain and so the second eye is immunity and infections if you look at a map of the united states and you look at the highest incidence of schizophrenia overlay the highest incidence of lyme disease they're identical incredible anybody in the west or the northeast or the northern midwest should be screened for lyme if they have a psychotic disorder and just need to screen them for it because if they have it treating it may actually treat their quote mental illness that is not mental it's how do you treat the brain yeah and his neuro hormone deficiencies d is diabetes you know as your blood sugar goes up and your weight goes up your brain gets smaller as we talked about it's getting your weight right your blood sugar right and s is sleep this is how you keep your brain healthy what would be uh the major reasons that we're seeing this pandemic of brain dysfunction and brain fog today so you know brain fog is really a symptom sort of like cough so cough can be caused by a cold bronchitis pneumonia post nasal drip asthma a whole bunch of things so you got to figure okay what's driving it and there is no icd-10 code for brain fog uh you know you might call it you know altered mental status but oftentimes it's transitory and that's the really interesting thing and i've seen patients where they'll uh you know get brain fog when they're in a certain building they'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal you know though certain foods may uh trigger brain fog um and it is something that i think is intimately connected to the gut i think the uh uh and we'll talk about that at this particular case is gut fermentation uh is oftentimes a cause for brain fog that means like bugs fermenting the food you're eating creating all those nastiest by products yeah and i i i don't know i don't know mark if you've had patients who've had this is a really interesting thing because i have patients come in they say i feel like my gut is just like bloating and i'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening so there's there is a condition i just recently had a patient who had auto brewery syndrome yeah and i've seen you have your own like beer factory exactly so when you want to make beer what do you do you take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol and i've had a couple of cases where it was missed and it's actually not just the recent findings it's not just yeast in the gut that do this but also klebsiella bacteria so both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds which are toxins alcohol is a toxin that's when you get drunk you're intoxicated and uh you you'll actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain it's interesting i never really had that insight before you said that word intoxicated you're toxic you're toxic yeah toxic exactly that's right yeah okay that's how i explained it to the baby six years to figure that out exactly but i think that you're what you're saying is very true i mean i've had two times in my life when i've had severe brain fog one was when i had mercury poisoning 30 or 25 years ago and my gut was a mess then because the mercury poisoned my god i had terrible bloating distension diarrhea and the second time was more recently when i had mold toxicity and i had c-diff and i also had colitis and gastritis and my whole gut was a mess and i had severe brain fog and it was pretty debilitating you could barely focus answer an email talk to somebody oh yeah you can't consciously concentrate at all uh and people think oh that's just sort of in your head it's not in your head maybe in your stomach well it's manifesting in the head that's the whole thing is it's and we you know we have these artificial boundaries between the the the brain and the body and the mind and they're all interconnected and and and brain fog is a real uh it's a real phenomenon and then you have to sort of figure out what is what's doing it the other thing that's uh is uh interesting i see with some people with brain fog is uh just gluten and dairy yeah and i tell patients that you know the most one of the most addictive foods is pizza and the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it that's true you can eat a whole pie right oh yeah i it's one of the foods that i i'll occasionally indulge in but uh it's i don't have it that often because it's not not the best food for you but you have my cauliflower pizza with your cheese you can make a healthy pizza exactly yeah but but i the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down the proteins in those uh get broken down into caseiomorphins and gluteomorphins and caseomorphins are the ones from dairy and glutenomorphans are from gluten and those have morphine-like effects so you literally become a little high you get a little you get a little high you get a little foggy in the brain uh and it also can cause cravings and and um it can sort of make you sleepy you know you eat it and then you get a little little sleepy from it also and that's you know when when children drink breast milk they go to sleep after they you know they conk out i mean that's because of the morphine-like action in milk yeah so that's true i think you know it can be our diet it can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy which are really common and often people going on elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore sometimes people just think this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function they're not realizing that it's actually uh something that can be reversed and it can be reversed very quickly so yeah the second thing is you know the the factors that that are in the gut right bacterial overgrowth yeast overgrowth we call dysbiosis that can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues because your gut's connected to your brain and that causes this this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation and then you get inflammation in the brain essentially is what causes brain function absolutely well the other the other important thing i think i talked about this last time is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver and the reason for that is is to filter all of the toxins that are there so there's a meat there's a lot of immune cells the copper cells and liver and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the gut uh then going into the systemic circulation so sometimes you'll have in addition to uh a leaky gut you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself and that's you know an example of that is uh the condition of uh hepatic encephalopathy which is brain fog that's that's essentially we'll talk about that what is that for people who don't know what that's something so i learned and i think i mentioned this before and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is uh when i worked at the va hospital there's a lot of alcoholics and when you're an alcoholic you basically turn your liver into into a pickled pickled liver you trash your liver you trash your liver and then you're not able to detoxify and i would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and their liver was not able to detoxify and then when they they would eat foods especially high protein type meals they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma so they would literally get delirium confusion absolutely brain fog brain fog that's brain fog and the reason is it was coming from their gut and what i found so striking when i started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut we gave people antibiotics yeah to sterilize their gut to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts that made people have you know basically delirium or encephalopathy and brain fog yeah so it's like wow the gut is connected to the brain totally totally connected to the brain absolutely and you in some cases you know there have been cases of of people actually having uh psychosis from uh uh gut dysfunction yeah you mentioned auto brewery syndrome i remember reading a case of a woman who um was arrested for driving under the influence and it turned out she wasn't drinking but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut yeah yeah it is it's a very real phenomenon you have to think about it and uh the way that you actually test for that is you you can it's actually quite simple as you just have somebody do what i call a pancake challenge you basically some pancakes full of carbs but throw some maple syrup on it eat it and get a blood draw at point zero yeah you know eat them eat the meal and then half an hour hour later check your alcohol level that sounds that sounds like a fun medical test today it's a cake challenge pancake challenge so so we talked about the gut we've talked about gluten dairy food sensitivities uh there are other reasons too uh so infections infections can can uh do that uh another one that is tick infections oh absolutely uh tick infections yeah oh that those are yeah those i would say that that that's in addition to brain fog you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction too memorization it's more severe it's much more severe the the one thing that i see a lot is allergies i call it the allergic brain and you can have food allergies um that can potentially do that or even environmental allergies or mold um and the high levels of histamine because histamine is actually acts as a neurotransmitter and i've seen this in a number of patients um i've had some patients with another condition which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome it's sort of a buzz you know buzz diagnosis now but it's a very real phenomenon and that is related to the mast cells which are the types of immune cells in the body in the interstitial the sort of the spaces between the cells uh where they reside and they release lots of histamine and if any of it has ever had hay fever you see that the typical picture of a person with hay fever they're like like this like half asleep and like they're walking through a fog it's like hay fever is an example of a of a brain fog yeah uh and antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that um naturally uh things like horse and nettles can can also be very helpful and you probably have used it this is something that i use um i've been using more is the drug chromal and sodium yeah which is i've had some amazing uh success with that in more difficult cases i wouldn't necessarily go to that for my first choice what todd's talking about is this is a struggle that's used for asthma and allergies that is usually inhaled yeah usually inhale but there's a version you can take orally that before you eat inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response and i've often found it extremely effective for some patients yeah so todd uh talk about this patient that you had that had really bad brain fog this was a a guy come to see you who worked a lot it was a little less stress and that could be you know easily dismissed as though you're just stressed and tired but you went deeper what did you find well he actually came into me and he had already seen a variety of different doctors um and the the the background is is that the gentleman as a child had lots of allergies and asthma so he had you know ear infections bronchitis uh also developed some sinusitis type symptoms she had multiple rounds of antibiotics and i always emphasized to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction look for the gut because 60 to 70 percent of your immune system is in the gut and just like you know with what's going on with the covid uh virus and or the cova 19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus is it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problem it's our immune system's response to it yeah and um in general we want to have a i call it a balanced immune system so we want our immune system to be idling yeah so basically just sort of sitting there and okay we're enjoying planet earth we're going out for a walk we're not reacting to this not under reacting or overreacting exactly or overreacting and when you overreact that we call that an autoimmune disease when you under react we call that aids right now so aids are cancer aids or cancer or overreaction is allergies or autoimmune right and then and i think you know we talk about like you know a weak immune system or a strong immune system it's really i think an intelligent and a balanced immune system that's how i like to think about it um and that's you know related to uh immunotolerance which is what the gut uh does so when we have a healthy gut we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things and you can eat certain things you can go out in the environment you're not going to react to dog dander and all these other things there are some genetic some people have genetic predispositions towards being more atopic or allergic but having a healthy gut especially early on the priming of the gut is so critical you know uh having a vaginal birth being um uh breastfed uh not introducing uh certain foods like gluten early on in in living on a farm living on a farm exactly being exposed both a lot of it and crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt and you know i call it you know your your body's immune system samples planet earth planet earth is a very dirty place there's lots of bugs and all kinds of things and your body learns to be immunotolerant and and uh one of the things that is really i i'd also focus on is part of this immune system is called the t-reg cells the the t-reg cells are like the conductor in the boston symphony orchestra so you've got you know the wind section over here and the horns over here and they keep everything in balance yeah and the t-regs are really really critical and what we're finding regulatory they regulate they regulate the whole you know the whole balance of the immune system and the t regs that we find out um the two things that are really simple that people can use to up regulate your t regs to keep things in balance are fibers fibers in the diet fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that and then also uh which i use it quite a bit in my in the in the patients that i see is vitamin a vitamin a helps to down regulate uh the immune system and helps to keep the t-reg cells uh in in in place so this this guy came in with brain fog and he had a lot of stress but he also had other things he had mold exposure yeah he had he was working in a in a building and uh they found out that he was in a water damaged building unknown to him and he had mold exposure which you've been uh experienced yourself and lucky enough to have yeah exactly yeah and and you know and we live in in you know a lot of people are in older buildings um they you know and you don't know you might buy the building and there's water damage you don't even know what's there i mean 50 of buildings have water damage in america that's a lot really yeah wow wow it is that's a lot yeah so he was actually he came to me and he was he had the diagnosis of uh mole detox in fact he actually learned about this through one of your podcasts i think it was you're talking with david asprey oh yeah i was trying exactly it was a moldy moldy uh uh podcast so that's how he sort of went down that road and he got treated uh you know with a variety of different therapies he got some uh iv glutathione he got some ozone therapies and other um uh interventions and he got about 50 better and then within several months he sort of went back to where he was he was also again not um sleeping much because he was a you know uh he was a doing a lot of uh litigation it was a lot of stress he wasn't sleeping well the big thing that i see with patients with conditions like immune dysregulation is stress and lack of sleep is a stressor probably the number one stressor so if people aren't getting a deep restorative sleep yeah that is a stress to the immune system and i was trying to sort of emphasize that you can't you know you can do that for like one or two days but you can't do that on an ongoing basis uh so really really important i always emphasize getting good deep restorative sleep with patients um so i emphasized uh that with him so when he came in um he also had a lot of digestive symptoms um he was actually on a whole bunch of inhalers he was on like uh uh brio spiriva ventiland on zolair injections flonase uh uh for his uh uh sinuses he also had uh solar is a very expensive like twenty thousand 000 a year oh tense immune suppressing medication yeah it still wasn't better it still wasn't better no exactly and that and that actually worked by stabilizing mast cells which um you can actually naturally do uh quercetin actually can help uh high dose squares and can be very helpful for a master system also goes for a coven exactly exactly yeah yeah um so uh so when he came in here um you know i did a thorough work up on him and i did re-test him for mold and he did have some mold but i compared it to his previous labs and it wasn't that bad so i empirically treated him with some binders to sort of help but he had already moved out of the quote the moldy building that he was get out of the moldy environment and then use these binders to help get the mold toxins out of your system right because the mycotoxins they they do tend to uh recirculate in the body the intraopatic recirculation so they'll get reabsorbed uh by the body and what are the kind of binders you use um in him i actually use very natural things i used uh clay medic clay and i also used to activate charcoal that was pretty much it these are these are things that don't get absorbed that suck and suck all the bad stuff out oh yeah exactly and well when you worked in merchant right somebody would overdose on drugs we'd give them charcoal yeah that's right you make them drink black charcoal it's terrible and every time then they vomit up on you we've been there done that yes right yeah so so this guy uh had also other stuff right he had gluten issues oh yeah yeah yeah and so so and unfortunately when he went to the the previous doctors who did help him out they didn't go deep enough they didn't sort of you know get all the pieces of the puzzle so uh they they did not uh check him for gluten sensitivity which he would markedly was gluten sensitive and also uh did the cyrex testing on him for uh gluten and cyrix for leaky gut and both of those were markedly possible those are tests that we use at the ultra wellness center that are a little bit different than traditional food testing that looks at antibodies that aren't true allergy but there are reactions that our immune system is having against foods and we can tell what you should and should need based on this what's causing an immune response exactly exactly and then also did uh did stool testing on them i uh did the uh what i think is sort of the state of the art the uh the gi map test which uh does quantitative pcr for the dna of bacteria yeast viruses parasites and he had probably one of the worst cases of dysbiosis i've ever seen that's imbalance yeah imbalance yeah a lot of a lot of imbalances you know my i tell patients that everybody has you know hundreds of different kinds of bugs in their gut and uh they're a little bit like weeds in the garden no garden does not have weeds you just don't want too many weeds and the interesting thing about uh the the digestive tract and bacteria is that there is a phenomenon which is known as quorum sensing and quorum sensing means that when certain bacterias reach a critical level they start acting as as bad actors an example of that is like clostridium difficile so when patients get antibiotics and they wipe out the good guys the bacteria the seed of a seal somehow another sense that there's not enough cops around and they take over the place and they start producing toxins same thing happens in this in this particular case he had one of the highest levels of pseudomonas bacteria that i've ever seen and we typically see that uh in patients with cystic fibrosis um so he had uh bacterial dysbiosis that that organism plus other organisms he had a lot of gut symptoms right yes yes yes exactly yep exactly very yeah a lot of mucus and that's that in my opinion that that mucus that sticky mucus is a biofilm that's that's where the bacteria live they live in that that biofilm layer and antibiotics and such are very difficult to penetrate that you're not having a smooth log that just comes out clean there may be some problems in there exactly yeah and uh he also had yeast overgrowth which was i you know not unexpected because of all the antibiotics he had oh yeah absolutely the acid blocker he was taking he was on a proton pump inhibitor oh that's one of my you know i hate i hate them i they are they are good and bad they they i they can say be helpful but i remember when i was in medical school we talked about from the podcast we were told they just came out and they were like these are very powerful drugs you don't want to give them to any patient more than six weeks it shuts downs acid production it's risky long term and now everybody's on it they're allowed to count they're over the counter over the counter and for life and it causes all sorts of disruption the gut it causes you to not absorb your nutrients it causes overgrowth of yeast it changes the ph leaky gut leaky gut i mean it causes irritable bowels osteoporosis see osteoporosis and pneumonia deficiency yeah there we go we can keep going it's not there it's a great it's a great way to keep the business going yeah i wrote a textbook chapter on reflux and it was like looking at all the data it was like holy cow this is not good exactly yeah and unfortunately they're handed out like pez candy yeah hey youtube if you like this video you're gonna love the next one click on it to check it out today air pollution can affect cognitive function and put us at increased risk for alzheimer's disease uh 20 of alzheimer's cases might be owed actually to heavily polluted air and today 52 percent of americans live in environments with heavily polluted air like the

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

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Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: igeql2H0PJo

Length: 74min 51sec (4491 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021