Beat Brain Fog with Diet: Simple Eating Tips

Everybody. Dr. Diane, chronic illness expert here. Welcome back to our Brain Fog series. We are on episode four of Brain Fog Month and we're talking about diet and what diet is best for brain fog. So one of the first things to say as far as brain fog, I would not go out and say you have to do Paleo or you have to do keto or you have to do Mediterranean. It's about finding what is unique for you. So essentially, the biggest thing with Brain Fog, if we're going to make a blanket statement, the biggest thing is not eating foods that inflame you, right? And so that's obviously a very, very complicated thing, right? So you're probably listening and might be like, well, how do I know what inflames me? Dr. D. So essentially, there's a couple different ways. One is you could definitely get food or sensitivity tested, food allergy or food sensitivity tested. The difference between these two types of tests, food allergy versus food sensitivity, are basically the different types of ways the immune system can react to food. So allergies and sensitivities are different. And so essentially you could have inflammation from food, whether it's an allergy or a sensitivity. So technically speaking, you should test for both. Test for that would be an IGE E food Set Food Allergy test. If it's a sensitivity, then you're going to look for something that's like a combination of something called an IGG, an IGA and a CD3. Now, in addition to this, another thing that you can certainly try, if you can't work a food test into your budget and if you don't know how to get a good, proper food test, make sure you join my upcoming masterclass where we're going to be going into Brain Fog. All this information and more. It's coming up. It's free information in the show Notes is about it. And I'll be teaching you on there where you can find really good quality tests that you can order. Because I don't find that most conventional medicine docs order tests like this. Most of the time you just find that they order allergy tests, which is a good start. But if you have brain fog and we're trying to figure out if your food is causing it, you could certainly have a sensitivity, not an allergy. The allergy test would miss that. So also, when we're talking about diet, another thing you can do is you can pick a clean diet. You can pick something like Paleo or Mediterranean. You can look those things up. There's tons of information on recipes Online. But essentially this would not be a forever thing, but it would be a starting point for you to see how you feel on the diet. And, and then you can play with adding foods in if you feel good on the diet. And the idea is you play with foods that are not on the diet, adding them in to see how you do. I find most people with brain fog do a really, really, really good as far as symptom relief when they eliminate gluten, corn, soy, dairy and sugar. So as far as taking things out and adding them back in, those are the top five to absolutely consider. Making sure you're eating organic is obviously extremely important because as we had talked about a little bit in episode number two of Brain Fog, one of the things that we sometimes see with brain fog is there's toxins that are actually accumulating in the brain, leading to inflammation and creating the problem. So getting those toxins out is essential. And part of getting them out is not putting them in with pesticide laden food. Other things you want to consider is you want to consider foods that are really high in good fats. So good fats, I mean, fish, right? Because fish has a lot of omega 3s, and in particular salmon, sardines, mackerel and herring. These types of cold water fish have a lot of omega 3s in it. Omega threes are a very important component of nutrition for the brain, but they're also super inflammatory. We want about a one to one ratio of these types of fats as compared to omega 6 fats. Omega 6 fats are going to be in our nuts and seeds, in a lot of our industrial seed oil, such as safflower, sunflower, canola, vegetable oils. And essentially most Americans are getting 25 of the omega 6 to 1 of the omega 3 in that ratio. We want a one to one ratio. So a ratio that I'm like, what I'm talking about can really throw off inflammation in the brain. And so if you can't get cold water fish into your diet regularly, it's really important to be taking supplementing with a pure fish, fish oil or cod liver oil. And by pure, I mean a good quality brand, something that is free from impurities, something that something that is free from heavy metals and other things we need to be worried about with fish. So we want a company that is third party purity testing, meaning they hire an outside company not interested in their bottom line to test their product so that you have a quality assurance that another company has vetted that they don't have these contaminants in them. So that's how to generally think about this person particular diet. So again, staying away from your top bad five. When I say sugar, usually people with brain fog as a general rule now remember the idea is to pick a diet, try it, see how you do on it. And as a general rule I find that many people with like with brain fog they can do as far as sugar. They're safe with natural sugar such as fruit and honey on dates, for example, making sure you're staying away from things like corn syrups and cane sugar. These types of really condensed sugars can be very, very inflammatory to the body and can absolutely contribute to brain fog. So again, make sure you write down your questions, bring them to the masterclass, the free masterclass that I'm doing on brain fog coming up this month, information in the show notes, make sure you check that out and I hope to see you there.