Tailor Your Brain’s Neurotransmission with Nutrients — William J Walsh, Ph D #

Foreign.

A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that nutrition during pregnancy and up to age 5 is shown to have really significant impacts on children's behavioral and emotional health. And the reason I want this to be our cool fact of the day today is that it's pretty shocking to me. When I go to restaurants, they have a kids menu and frankly, that's stuff that I wouldn't feed to my dog because it would cause my dog to be inflamed and have food cravings just like it does to children. And this data is coming from a nine year Norwegian mother and child cohort study of 23,000 women and their kids. And they collected data during pregnancy when the kids were six months, one and a half, three and five years of age. And they basically did some really careful math analysis to say the diet was healthy or unhealthy. In other words, they weren't saying, this is testing paleo versus semi, whatever. This was basically, are you eating like crap? Are you not eating like crap? And they found higher intakes of unhealthy foods during pregnancy meant what they called externalizing problems among children independent of other potential factors like their family health and things like that. Children with a high unhealthy diet had both problems with the space of the voice in their head. They're internalizing problems and they're externalizing problems. And they have the same effect whether it was during pregnancy or whether it was post pregnancy. And this is a really big study that came out. So what this comes down to is if you're going to spend money on quality food, feed it to pregnant women and babies first. And if we just get that right, everything gets easier for that entire generation. And that's a, that's a really important thing. I like to look at what I do for health and what specifically I do for nutrition. It has a ROI return on investment. And the investment is how much does it cost? How much energy did it take to make the food for you to, to, for you to take your own energy to make the food? And how much energy does it take to eat it? Because eating things like raw kale actually doesn't feel good. It's not something that, that usually makes you happy, but you do it because it makes you know you'll be healthier. At least you think you will if you do it. So that's what the investment is. And what's the return? Do I feel good now? But when your return is Measured in an entire lifetime change for a human being, that's just an absurdly high return. And that's why you feed kids the best food and the adults get the scraps, even though throughout history it's been the adults eat the best food and give kids the scraps. It's just backwards. Now, you might know, because of my incredibly predictable habit of foreshadowing that we might be talking about nutrition and we might be talking about health of children as well as with adults. In this case, with just a luminary in the field, an international speaker on brain chemistry and behavior, learning and mental health disorders, and a guy who spent three decades as a research scientist and engineer looking at how you can fix brains, even brains with bipolar disorder, using nutrients and foods is an episode. He's been on episode 132 of Bulletproof Radio and Amen. I just genuinely respect as someone who's gone really deep on the science and spent a lifetime learning how to get control of your own biochemistry. And we're talking about none other than Dr. Bill Walsh of the Walsh Research Institute. Bill, welcome back to Bulletproof Radio.

Well, hi, Dave. Glad to be with you.

Last time you came on the show, we talked about Nutrient Power, your most recent book that talks about things like methylation and biochemical imbalances. But that was about 400 episodes ago.

Yes.

And you've been continuing to do your work, really an incredible work on nutrients. And you've, I think, discovered some new things or maybe just had more clarity on things around some of the more difficult to treat and scary things like bipolar disorder. I would love to know, what have you discovered since we last talked?

Well, let me first talk a little bit about what you were just speaking about, namely what one can do with diet for pregnant women in early childhood. There have been some studies that other studies that have just recently come out of the psychiatric research field, one I read just last week, and they have actually done studies of what foods can tend to help with cognition and physical ability and which ones can tend make you predispose you to mental disorders. And there were some surprises there. They found out things like vitamin D and zinc and other things that tended to strengthen the brain in many ways, but they found some pretty important nutrients that actually could predispose to problems like schizophrenia.

Interesting.

It's very interesting. And so we're learning more and more about what we can do to help help the newborns become more capable and have a better life. One thing that's especially important is what the mothers do before they're Pregnant?

Yes.

One thing we've learned is that the critical time during the nine months of gestation is between days 16 and 22 of gestation, and that's before many women even know they're pregnant. I know when my wife had her first child, she. She didn't want to be around anybody that was smoking. She or she stopped drinking alcohol. She was a nurse, so she was pretty healthy to begin with. But, you know, it was too late for many things, really. They have to be healthy before that critical time in gestation. It's when the neural tube closes. So I think that. And also there's many studies that show that diet during pregnancy means so much and even in early the first few years. So you're right about the ROI and the return on investment, and it's just something that is just critically important. But since we last talked, which was a really long time ago, we have learned a lot. Neuroscience advances, and my interest has always been on the brain and on people with brain disorders. Depression, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, the whole litany of brain science. And my focus has to be on the neurotransmitters themselves. And there are about more than 100 neurotransmitters in the brain, of which there are about five or six that seem to be especially important in mental disorders. And we all have biochemical individuality, as you know. And we are born different, in a sense. We're all mutants. We share 99.9% of our DNA, but it's that tenth of a percent. The ways in which we're different. These mutations are differences in gene expression that have come up over centuries and millennia that really make us different. We're now learning so much about what we can do. We've now learned that for the first time in the last 10 years, we now are able with nutrients to directly affect neurotransmission of many of the most important neurotransmitters. For example, with serotonin, we know that people with low serotonin activity are prone and predisposed to depression and obsessive compulsive disorder and a few other nasty problems. We now are learning that for years, people thought, hey, what you really need to do if you're low on serotonin is, is get tryptophan and take nutrients that help you synthesize the neurotransmitters. Well, it turns out that's not a bad idea. But really, the dominant. The dominant factor is reuptake, the rate at which your neurotransmitter, your. Your serotonin and the synapse goes back into the original neuron. It's called reuptake. And we now, with the advent of epigenetics and knowledge, we now can tailor neurotransmission with nutrients. And we're really quite good at that for serotonin and dopamine and norepinephrine. But what's really new is the recent research on the NMDA receptor. That whole system, that's where memory exists and that's where people who have problems with their NMDA are the ones who are prone to addictions and obsessive compulsive disorder. We, for many years, for more than 25 years, we discouraged drug addicts like cocaine addicts and heroin, people who were abusing alcohol or alcohol or these substances. We discouraged them from coming to the clinic. We now know, we now, because of advanced science, we now know how we can help them. And it all has to do with the nmda. If they, they, that particular group of people, they're, they, they need to reduce the activity of that neurotransmitter. And guess what works the best. People have been trying for years to find a billion dollar drug that would really help them. They're finding that there are nutrients that seed the beef far better than that. And this is in peer reviewed journals, things like N acetylcysteine for example.

This is a long standing nutrient that everyone in anti aging has used for 25 years to raise glutathione levels in the body, which is profound. They're figuring out, oh yeah, it helps the brain of addicts too.

Well, we thought that the reason that N acetylcysteine called NAC is helping these people was because of the, the, it's a precursor of glutathione and because it's a great antioxidant itself. But there's something else we now know. It's something called an antiporter. What happens is it has a unique capability to lower NMDA activity. And we now know the exact, and it's a very beautiful, you might say, system and mechanism by which it works. It works on the glial cells that surround neurons and it acts as what's known as an antiporter. It shoves cysteine into the glial cells and shoves glutamate into the synapse. Well, you would think that would increase activity, but it doesn't. It actually shuts down and lowers the activity. And what they're finding is even shopping disorders and gambling disorders and trichotillomania, but especially Severe OCD and even people with addictions. These are very, very helpful. So now we are able to accept patients who are on serious drugs and have severe ocd. And we are quite sure we can help them and give them a better quality of life. So that's an example of, of new neuroscience giving us nutrient therapies that are far better than we had just a few years ago.

Now, NMDA is interesting. I think a lot of people listening probably haven't heard of it. You might be saying, well, I don't have OCD or any of these other things. Number one, you might have a little bit of it and not really realize it. I actually had meaningful amounts of OCD as a young man. Like I had stimming behaviors and facial tics and things like that. Just for instance, this is weird. I could not serve a volleyball to save my life unless I bounced it three times. I do not know why. All I know, I couldn't do it right. Bounce it three times, I'd nail it. The rest of the time it was like, why even try? And a bunch of other just strange things that as I repaired my brain and got my neurotransmitters working and all, I'm like, wow, I don't have that anymore. I don't sit there and count all the time and do all these weird little things that you might not even see unless you're a trained psychiatrists or neurologists go, oh, that's a weird, that's a weird nervous system. Number two, a lot of the anti aging drugs and some of the nootropics, the cognitive enhancers that I've been using for quite a while, they're NMDA receptor agonists or they change the NMDA thing. So if you want to live a long time, you want to raise your IQ or you just want to run at the level that your body's designed to run, but may not be nmda. It's probably as important as some of these other neurotransmitters like acetylcholine that we've maybe all heard of. At least if you've dabbled in nutrients, you probably have heard of that. Do you agree it's that important?

Yeah. NMDA is where memory resides, the miracle of memory. And we're beginning to understand how one can actually have memory. And there's something called memory extinction that resides in the nmda. And that's what the problem that addicts and OCD people have. It's a matter of getting able to transition from one thing to another. And Sort of get rid of the memories you don't want to retain and actions you don't want to repeat. It's also where plasticity comes. People are really looking at plasticity to help the brain improve in many ways. That's all in the NMDA receptor. And we're learning that it has everything to do with the neurons at the NMDA receptors, but also the partnership with glial cells. That's another major advance in neuroscience. We're now knowing that, that the glial cells are almost like another brain, and we have as many glial cells in our brain as we do neurons, and they collaborate in marvelous ways. And, wow, is that leading to better and better understanding and better therapies.

I'm so happy that you're talking about glial cells, because in my last, or I guess two books ago, headstrong, I went sort of deep on that. And I look at glial cells in a very simplistic way as being sort of the cells responsible for the immune system in the. For pruning synapses and for maintenance. And a lot of the current revolution in ketosis, it paralleled a lot of the early writing that I had done on ketosis as a state of high performance. And ketones feed neurons better than sugar, does better than glucose. Neurons will preferentially eat ketones. There's just one little problem. If you're in ketosis all the time, guess what likes glucose a lot more than ketones? It's your glial cells, right? So you can starve the glial cells if eat carbs. And this is why cycling in and out of ketosis might be good. Adding ketones like brain octane to your food, that's a good idea maybe. At least I think it is. But the idea that you're going to never eat a carb again, what's that going to do? I mean, you tell me, Bill, right?

Zero carb diet is not a good idea. I mean, we evolved from the caveman. And of course, to do something that radically changes that original diet that people had for millions and millions of years is not a good idea, because our body is adapted to that. The glial cells are really interesting because first of all, that's where our brain cells come from. Neurons come from glial cells. And I've often wondered. We have these 80 billion brain cells, and yet they're being nourished every day. Nutrients come in and trash leaves. Well, guess how it happens. Well, the glial cells do that. The glial cells, especially the astrocytes, which are a form of the glial cells. They've got end feet that wrap around our blood capillaries and they have gap junctions. And there's a really great system whereby the nutrients from your blood flow through those glial cells right into the neurons and the microglia, the form of glial cells that are tiny. Well, those are the ones that, that are the immune system. And they also are the trash collectors and the garbage collectors that get the junk out of the brain. And then you got the oligodendrocytes with this funny name, and they're the guys that make the myelin sheath. And it's just a. They have to rewrite the neuroscience books. I just bought a book called the Neuron and it's a famous book, it's about the third edition and it just came out and I started reading it and it's obsolete already. It's obsolete. It's so exciting. The field of brain science is moving so fast. The disappointing thing, the disappointing thing is that it's not leading quickly into therapy. And it seems like all the research is still aimed at finding the next billion dollar drug that can help people. And we now have enough knowledge that from, from the new research, when you put it all together, we're learning that with nutrients and with diet even, we can make radical improvements in people with depression and anxiety and problems like that. And that we don't necessarily need a drug, because the problem with drugs is they're, they're abnormal molecules or foreign molecules, and they're powerful in your brain and they don't lead to normality. Well, I think that within 30, 40 years we'll have a society where I think drugs will be on the way out, we won't need them, and we'll learn how to normalize the brain.

Are we going to be normalizing the brain using lasers, electrical stimulation, neurofeedback, and some combination of nutrients and food that's personalized based on genetics and epigenetics and other things like that. Like what does the future look like? I'm asking because you have 30 years of experience. Your lens is more honed by wisdom than the average person. And you also discovered that nutrient deficiencies are tied to emotional disturbances and mental illness. So given your lens, you're probably the best guy I could think of to ask what it's going to look like in 20 years.

Well, I have to say I believe I see the future and it's a beautiful future. And I hope I live long enough to See the beginning of it. I think that the next big, real breakthrough is going to be preserving the integrity of our DNA. I think that's going to be the really big thing thing. And when we learn how to do that, we're going to. I think that conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder, I think they're going to disappear from society. It might be that we won't be able to die unless we get hit by a truck, or at least we might be. And I think lifespans will get into the 150 and 200 years quality lifespans. And now what you mentioned, the techniques you mentioned, I think are short term. And they're going to be. I think they're going to be useful for the next five, 10, 20 years. And they will help people. But we now have the ability to change gene expression. CR we have about 20,000 genes, and they work for us all day, every day. I mean, people think of it as that's why I'm tall or why I've got blue eyes. But really our genes have the code and the recipe and the blueprint for sending special proteins and chemicals and enzymes into every cell in our body. And that system tends to deteriorate with time. And that's why people age. Aging is nothing more than our DNA getting old and changing and deteriorating. We're learning how to protect the brain. The three guys got a Nobel Prize about five years ago because they worked out all the details on DNA repair. We have 30 trillion DNAs in our body. There's an enormous amount of information there, and it's vital to our health as much as anything. Every one of our DNAs is ripped apart and massacred every day between 10,000 and a million times a day. Every one of our DNAs that are vital to our health is torn apart and ripped apart. And one of the most remarkable aspects of human life is DNA repair. It's like we got every single tiny little cell we have. It's like we got 100 or a thousand repairmen. And they're constantly fixing these breaks, including just ripping the DNA apart. It immediately goes back together. And this has led to something that is truly exciting called crispr. Have you had any programs on crispr?

Absolutely.

We now have the ability to edit our genes. And this is probably the fastest grown growing technology I've ever seen in the field of mental health. Just five years ago, people were just talking about it, and they now have the ability. There are sort of fingerprints for every gene we have. And they're developing what they call guy RNA and there are companies making this and selling it and competing with each other already that you can put into the body and it will go straight to the gene you want to affect. And they bind that to another gene that's called the scissors gene, that cuts the DNA and separates out the gene, which of course the body quickly puts back together. But of course, what they do is they introduce a proper gene. And so they can take a defective gene, which might cause some nasty disorder for someone, and they can change it, put it a good one. They started working with rodents and were successful in correcting severe illnesses in rodents with it. Then about two years ago, I started seeing data on chimpanzees, and that was very promising. Then they started working on human embryos in Europe and in China. And just two weeks ago, there was a child born using CRISPR to improve and to perfect a couple of genes that looked like that child was going to run into real trouble. So now we don't know for sure whether we can solve all the ethics problems. But they are able to. For example, if a woman has the burka gene and she's prone to cancer, they will be able to get rid of that dysfunctional gene and put in a proper one that I think might become standard in 10, 20, 30 years. There are already billions of dollars going into this field. That's kind of exciting. It's kind of scary too, but. And what we don't know is if it'll ever really be done safely because of what they call the off target effects. They might want to be affecting one gene, but you don't want to affect another hundred and maybe screw things up and make things worse. But that's just an example of how technology is moving. But to me, I think that we know what healthy is. And there are diseases and conditions that I call epigenetic disorders. And these include cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia and autism, and bipolar and a few others. And these are incredibly complex diseases. And they occur because of environmental insults, usually together with a genetic predisposition. And it's an event, cancer is really an event where suddenly your DNA gets overwhelmed, usually by oxidative stress, excessive oxidative stress, operating on the guanine part of your DNA, which is the weak link in your DNA, and it changes. It can change dozens or hundreds of genes. And so then you have a condition like cancer, and when that happens, you then have a cancer stem cell that nobody can get rid of. And anyhow, we're understanding exactly why this happens. And I think what it's really leading to more than anything is prevention. I really believe prevention. We're going to learn how to prevent. We're learning more and more about the predisposition for these diseases. We know that so many of them are involve oxidative stress. We are all. We all have a dozen or so really great natural chemicals like glutathione and you know, and catalase and others that, that protect us against oxidative stress. We have cosmic radiation and environmental insults all the time. And some people. So these are genetically expressed protectors. We have an army of protectors. Some people are born with weakness in that they're born with a weak weakness. They might, may not be able to make enough glutathione, for example.

I'm one of those, by the way, which is why I manufacture a glutathione supplement and I take a lot of it. It just seemed like in my self interest. Plus it helps a lot of other things too. Like if you're going to have alcohol, you might want to have some glutathione present to detox it, right?

You're trying to make yourself bulletproof.

You called it. It's interesting because you are one of the game changers who made it into my book Game changers and Law 28. And the game changers are people have done really big things to change the world, just achieved at the top of their field. And the law that I cite your research in is Law 28. It says if you get toxins only from nature, you get nutrients only from food. If you. If that's how the world worked. And the, the broader way of saying that is you evolved in a clean environment to feel great and live long enough to reproduce as long as you had enough high quality food. Those days are gone. High performance now requires that you overcome the decline of clean air, food and water by going beyond what you get from eating even the most nutritious food. The highest performers use supplements to perform better now and live longer too. Take your vitamins. Now. The reason I'm bringing that out is you're talking about epigenetics, the study of how environment changes DNA. But everyone listening to the show now we're breathing air that has stuff in it that was never there before we put it there. We're eating food that has artificial molecules like glyphosate and has less nutrients and all of that. Do you still stand by your. We're going to live to 150 to 200 years. Given the decline in food quality, soil quality, air quality, water quality, et cetera.

Et cetera Well, I think I'm optimistic. And the reason is, I think. I think we can sharpen our protection against those nasty guys. We know what the protectors are, and most of them are genetically. Some of them are things that you can give nutritionally, but some of them also. And some of the nutrients can affect gene expression. That can really sharpen our defense. And so I think it's like a war. And yes, we do have increasing amounts of nasty guys trying to hurt us, but I think we could strengthen our defenses.

So what are some things that people listening today might do in order to strengthen their defenses? Given what we know, most of us won't crispr edit our DNA at least.

For a few years.

If you're thinking about doing that and you're listening, think twice. But if you decide to do it, tell me about it.

I want to know right now. It's more of a dream than a reality. You're right. But what can we do now? Well, the first thing is to recognize that, is that every human being is biochemically unique. And for many years, I thought the biggest problem was deficiencies and was just a matter of finding out what you're low in and providing these really important nutrients that you're missing. But probably the first thing I learned that really surprised me, working with hundreds, and then later thousands of patients, was that the greatest mischief is caused by nutrients that are in overload.

Right.

And things like copper. Like copper, yeah. We have a beautiful system that's supposed to regulate copper in our body. So even if you chewed on a copper bar, you'd be normal in your bloodstream. But if you can't do that and your copper escalates, that's why people get postpartum depression, causes anxiety. It's associated with violent behavior, mental illness. So. So what we do at our clinic. And by the way, I have a team that travels around the world training doctors how to do this. It's one of our best programs. We now have 630 doctors, psychiatrists, medical doctors, that are now evaluating patients with severe problems, what might be anxiety or depression or behavior disorder. And we're learning what their individuality is, and we're learning how to showing the doctors how they can normalize these chemistries and these chemical imbalances and these brain imbalances with nutrients. And we're going to have. We. We're going to have our next training program in April, late April of 2019, right here in the Chicago area.

That's the Walsh Research Institute.

Yes. And it's really a growing and A popular program. We've also done more than 300 doctors in Australia. We've had programs around. It's just growing and growing. Our most enthusiastic doctors, by the way, are psychiatrists. They're not as a group. They're not the happiest group that I run into. I just came from the American Association Psychiatric association annual meeting with 18,000 psychiatrists. And what's happened is they go to medical school all these years and learn all kinds of important stuff. And then a patient comes in, maybe with schizophrenia or depression, and they spend their 30 minutes, which is about all they're allowed by insurance, wondering, what drug am I going to give them? So the psychiatrists that we see, we show them how when a patient comes in for the first time with a serious problem, they can do some blood studies and do some very careful medical history, and they can identify which neurotransmitters are misbehaving. And we can show them how to. How to fix it with nutrient therapy, sometimes together with. With drugs. We're not. We're not opposed to, you know, medication, which are now called biologics. That's supposed to be a softer name than a psychiatric drug. But we show them how sometimes severe problems can be corrected without having to use a drug. And sometimes we can show how drugs can be enhanced. We could also our testing, show them and guide them to which drugs are the right ones to give to people. Like, we know that there are some young teenagers who, if you give them an antidepressant, they're likely to become suicidal or even homicidal. And that seems to be the reason why we've had school shootings are people, teenagers, who inappropriately have been given the wrong drug. So, anyway, I think we've made a lot of progress, but the future, I think, is really bright. And there are these literally thousands of really wonderful neuroscientists around the world making advance after advance. The only problem is they don't seem to talk to each other. And there's little pieces of information here and there. About four years ago, I got really frustrated about bipolar disorder. And the main reason is I didn't understand it. I had more than 1600 patients that I saw with our doctors with bipolar. But I didn't understand it. And when I wrote my book, I had a chapter on schizophrenia and on autism, on behavior. I did not have a chapter on bipolar. I didn't think I knew enough about it to write a chapter, so I decided to delve into it. And I spent years studying neuroscience around the world. And guess What I found, I believe I have discovered exactly what it is. There's all these mysteries of bipolar that have plagued people for more than 100 years. For example, people don't understand why it's a late onset disorder, usually comes after the age of 16, and it often comes suddenly. And once a person develops bipolar disorder, it doesn't go away. It's there as a problem to challenge the rest of their lives. And why, for heaven's sakes, do they suddenly start with mania? Why does the mania get worse early on? And then why do they cycle? Or why do they switch between mania and then sort of an opposite condition of depression? After several years of doing this, I think it's all right there. The neuroscientists have that, the answers. And we have, I believe we have solved all the mysteries of bipolar and we now know exactly what it is. And I'm writing a book on it. And I went to the annual meeting of the apa, the world's, you know, the big meeting of the world psychiatrists. And I presented this in a new research section. And I was really disappointed. Nobody seemed to care a lot. A psychiatrist would come up to me and say, well, this is really interesting, but I've got this patient coming next week who's got bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. How is this going to help them? Well, the answer is no. We now understand what causes it, we know the mechanisms, and this should lead directly to far better therapies.

Are you allowed to say, give me the layperson's view of what's causing bipolar?

I'd be happy to. And basically it's what it amounts to is that our brain neurons are remarkable little guys. We've got these 80 billion of them. They have a remarkable ability to develop a high voltage called a potential, psychiatric potential. We have all of these billions of neurons, but if you took 20 of them and strung them together in series, you'd have enough for a flashlight battery. There's an enormous amount, really high potentials, and there are about three or 400 genes that collaborate to enable that potential. So that's critical to brain function and to living. What we found is that the cause of bipolar is when local parts of the brain lose the ability to form complete voltages.

So it's an electrical problem in the brain.

Yeah, caused by some combination of these hundreds of genes that are needed to make that voltage. And so what happens is that when the voltage drops, the neuron becomes hyperactive. When neurons fire, some chemicals rush in, some ions rush into the neuron and some rush out the ones that rush out are potassium ions. Well, the potassium and the sodium ions rush in, and that's how brains work. And what the interior of a neuron, it's not a problem of clearing out the excess sodium. In fact, they call it a drop in the ocean. It's really not hard to do. The problem is getting rid of the potassium that's outside the neuron. And so it tends to collect, and it can flood in certain parts of the brain. And when that. When you have. When the potassium outside the neuron collects, the voltage drops additionally. So those parts of the brains get to the point where they. It gets more. You get more and more hyperactive, more and more manic. And then you get to a point where it shuts down. It seems to include the area called the raphae nuclei, which is what makes serotonin. So the serotonin supply in the brain shuts down rather quickly. And so that's why they go into. Into depression. It's a channelopathy. It has to do with ion channel movements and being able to. Because that's where the voltage comes from. It comes from the voltage gradients inside and outside. So that's basically it.

And if that sounded really technical for you listening to this, and I apologize. No, no, no need to apologize. I think that was a great descriptor. It's a complex thing. I would just say read. Read Head Strong, the book that I wrote where I describe mitochondria in your brain. They're what's making that voltage potential.

Yep, exactly.

All right, so a lot of people, okay, maybe have a little bit of this going on, even if you're not bipolar. But a lot of us have some problems with the electrical potential in our brains. I think it's. Well, 48% of people under age 40 have mitochondrial dysfunction, and everyone over age 40 has some of it, unless they're doing radical things, like I am. And maybe I still have some too. I probably do, given my 300 pounds of former obesity in my health history. But is this something that you could solve just by having more salt? I mean, sodium potassium ratios seem pretty important, unfortunately.

No. Basically, it's hard to fight an enemy if you don't know who it is. If you don't know who an enemy is or what it is, it's really hard to combat it and fight it. I think our contribution is that we've now unveiled what it really is. I think we've now disclosed what it is, and I think it's going to take researchers and clinicians. I think it's going to lead to greatly improved therapies. We even know why lithium works. I mean, there are about eight or nine theories of why lithium helps some bipolar patients. And these are all plausible theories. But I think we know why it really works. And so it really helps to have that kind of an understanding. I do believe that the real answer will be in prevention. And the reason is we now understand why bipolar strikes and why it strikes late onset. I think we already have lab tests that can identify people who are about to become bipolar. And we know how, with nutrient therapy to prevent it. That's what's coming, I think.

What are the nutrients that work when it's about to happen?

Primarily antioxidants. See, what happens is that the weak link in your DNA for some people who are predisposed to this problem, is the guanine. Well, we have 30 trillion of these DNAs containing that. That's one of the four nucleotides that make up DNA. And when that starts to deteriorate, it shows up in a bloodstream. There are blood tests you can do right now. And I think in the future, when a guy goes in for a checkup, they're going to check his guanine level, because if it gets high, that means, wow, you're on the verge of a epigenetic disorder, of a permanent disorder, which is going to involve many genes suddenly doing the wrong thing. And that's what cancer is, it's what most of heart disease is, it's what schizophrenia is, it's what autism is. I think we're going to learn how to prevent every one of those disorders. I think they're going to disappear from society. It's going to take a while.

I fully agree with your assessment there. And when you say that, though, probably 80% of the normal population and only 50% of bulletproof radio listeners hear that and go, you're crazy. And there's actually a couple other laws and game changers about dealing with critics and people who, who do the things that change the world somehow. Just don't worry about the naysayers and say, well, hey, here's the data, here's the facts. This is going to be what it is. When you say a statement like that, do you have a little voice in your head that says, oh, people aren't going to believe me, or are you just old enough and wise enough that you just don't care?

Well, the first thing I do is I ask myself, could I be wrong? I have to do that first. And, but, but after many, many Years of having, you know, experienced different ideas. I'm quite confident this is what's going to happen. And really all I want to do is speed up the process.

Yes.

There's so much human misery out there. I really would like this to, to, you know, become available earlier.

When we talk about antioxidants, I mean, I do some really radical things. I started out way coming from behind in terms of arthritis in my, my teens, and a lot of what I would term the diseases of aging, or at least things like them before I was 30. And I've gotten rid of most of them. But I'm a huge fan of using ozone therapy. And ozone naturally turns up your cell's ability to make their own antioxidants inside the cells. Things like sod and catalase, which you mentioned earlier. When I'm flying a lot or I'm particularly biologically stressed, I actually supplement with sod and catalase, which you really can't take. Take orally. They don't work very well. Sod you can get in a little bit, but catalase gets destroyed in the gut.

Are you doing that because of the increased cosmic radiation?

Increased.

It's a lot higher up there. It's a lot higher up there.

That is a big part of it. And I take a bunch of our eye armor, a supplement I make that's full of a bunch of things that are protective. Massive doses of astaxanthin, lutein, xanthine, other things like that, and a bunch of mitochondrial things like one we make called Keto Prime. It's a, it's a part of the Krebs cycle. And I feel better when I land. I'm less puffy when I land. My brain still works when I land, which is pretty objective evidence that something I'm doing works. So I figure by increasing my natural antioxidant capacity, taking my polyphenols, my antioxidants, and doing intravenous glutathione after I land when I can, I'm able to travel at a way that, that is biologically destructive. If you don't have these things at your, at your, at your disposal. And I would say the healthier thing would be to do that stuff and not fly as much as I do. But I feel like by flying around and giving talks to large groups of people and educating about these things, I'm helping a lot more than I'm harming.

I think that antioxidant therapy is going to become mainstream. We now have vitamin D is mainstream. I think that soon we're going to have zinc and all kinds of antioxidant therapies. That's going to be a mainstream thing and it's going to really benefit so many people. It's going to slow down aging, it's going to help prevent a lot of diseases. And yeah, I think that that's what the future is.

I believe one of the things that is of concern to me, there's some pretty good studies out there that show, I think the technical term is willy nilly use of antioxidants. It reduces the beneficial impact of exercise because you never get the oxidative wave that comes from lifting heavy things or sprinting because the antioxidants you took orally took away the pro oxidants. Like a brief exposure to high oxidative stress like with ozone therapy, causes your cells to get healthier. Are you concerned that chronic use of antioxidants without an opposing force might have negative effects?

Well, I'm absolutely certain that exercise is going to continue to be essential to everybody. I'm not. No, I'm not. I think that's a good question. But I don't worry about that. I don't worry about that. And even if that was a real threat to well being, I think you could alternate, couldn't you?

Yeah, that's what I do actually. I don't overwhelm myself with antioxidants every day and sometimes I intentionally expose myself to more accidents. It's the chronic ones or having pollutants in your body like heavy metals, things that are creating just free radicals, having glyphosate incorporated into your collagen matrix because you still eat industrial animal products instead of pastured ones. I think things like that that are chronic are just horribly destructive. But you know, occasionally telling yourselves if you can't make antioxidants, could you just die already and make some fresh cells that can make antioxidants? That seems like a good strategy.

It does. And some people simply don't make enough natural antioxidants and they're the ones who die young and develop all kinds of diseases. And, and I think that the good news is nutrient supplements can do that job for us.

I think that at this point, if you're in a position to be able to listen to a podcast which puts you in rarefied air amongst all humans on the planet, that you probably ought to be taking your basic supplements if you're not getting your magnesium and things like vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin K and certainly the right forms of vitamin E, probably the gamma form you're just missing on a low hanging fruit that has a high likelihood of being beneficial but isn't terribly expensive compared to any of the bad effects of not having those. Do you agree with that assessment? It sounds like you would, but almost.

Almost. I agree with it with respect to certain nutrients, but there are some nutrients that can cause mischief in some people, for example folates, folic acid, vitally important. However, if a person has low serotonin depression or obsessive compulsive disorder or movement disorder, it'll make them worse. Supplements of that will make them worse. So there is a handful, maybe six or eight nutrients you have to be really careful of. But in general I agree with what you said. In general with a few of these exceptions, you also would not want to do any methylation therapies on people who are born with over methylation. 8% of Americans are born genetically with too much methylation, so.