"Fueling Your Mind: The Role of a Healthy Gut and Microbiome in Brain Health & Nutritional Wellness"

Hey, everybody. In this video, we're going to talk about diet and your gut and feeding your microbiome and why this is so important for your immune system, for working with toxins and headaches, inflammation, fibromyalgia, all these types of things. So I'm Dr. Diane from my Lime Doc, and diet is such a pivotal thing and something I get asked about a lot, like what diet really encourages practice proper digestive health, really encourages, proper energy, proper toxin removal, all of these different things. So one of the key fundamental things I want you to take away from this is that this is really unique. This is not a video to say, okay, everybody needs to be on this diet. I do not work that way. I do not think that's the best way to advise people. I think it's better to understand the pros and cons of different types of diets, really get the diet that's right for you. Because in the grand scheme about diet and health and the gut and health is we want your gut to be out of inflammation when the gut is not, is out of inflammation. With the microbiome is working correctly, this actually impacts brain health. It actually impacts when your microbiome is working correctly, it impacts the blood brain barrier. So when the microbiome is not working correctly, the blood brain barrier leaks, you get toxins into the brain, leading to a wide variety of mental health problems, brain fog, other cognitive issues, sleep hormone dysregulation, and so much more. Because of our course, our brain runs our body, right? And so we really want to take a step back then and say the diet that is right for you is the diet that's going to support your intestinal tract. It's going to keep you out of inflammation and it's going to help the microbiome. Now we can talk about like, the microbiome tends to want to be fed for most people. And so the things that feed the microbiome are things like probiotics or, I'm sorry, prebiotics. Probiotics are the microbiome. Prebiotics are the food for the microbiome. And so things that feed the microbiome from a prebiotic perspective. And the reason to feed the microbiome is because when the microbiome is fed, the good guys are fed that they work correctly. And the microbiome does things like our immune system, like helping prevent against leaky gut, like lowering inflammation, like helping our blood brain barrier be strong. And another thing the microbiome does is helps to activate vitamins and minerals so we can absorb and Use nutrients. You see, when we get nutrients from food, our body has to change the nutrients around into a usable form. There's different processes involved in this, but the microbiome is a huge component of that. So the prebiotic foods are things like dandelion greens, potato starch, like literally white potatoes. But you want potatoes that are actually in the cold form that feeds the microbiome better. So when you cook potatoes and let them cool like in a potato salad with healthy avocado based mayonnaise, and not the crap mayonnaise you find at most stores. When you do that, you feed the microbiome. You can also get like Bob's red mill potato starch and take a little bit of that and water every day just tastes like potato water. It's pretty neutral. And you can do those kind of things to feed the microbiome. There's other things out there in supplements like inulin and fructooligosaccharides. Fos for short, are prebiotics that can help feed the microbiome that you can find in supplements. Now here's a tricky part. When it comes to prebiotics, you want to make sure that you are only giving yourself the amount that you can tolerate. Some people, due to a tendency to have overgrowth in their intestinal tract due to to genetic anomalies with their microbiome, they might not need a lot of prebiotic types of foods. And if you give somebody that doesn't need that much too much, what will wind up happening is you'll get gas or bloating or constipation or diarrhea or abdominal pain and you're going to cause inflammation that's going to basically get in the way of this. So that's what I want you to really hear. And one of the uniquenesses of this from a dietary perspective is we want to feed the microbiome. But here you want, you know, for some people, that's a very, very small amount of feeding. Other people can handle a lot of these foods and a lot of fiber, fiber feeds the microbiome and other people can handle a lot of those foods and do really well. So follow kind of what your body is telling you. You want to feed the microbiome a little bit to help it grow, but you want to do that at the amount where you're not negatively impacting symptoms. And sometimes it's like one of these things where, where you're at right now with the health of your body and your gut might not be the right time to feed the microbiome much. And you might try that again later. Now, from a standpoint about like, okay, what type of diet really supports health? What supports brain health? What supports energy? This is where we need to really break things down. So I do recommend that most people do eat meat. Not saying that vegetarian and veganism is impossible to be healthy on. You can be healthy on those types of diets. But, but if you're on a vegan or vegetarian diet, most of the time you're either going to want to supplement nutrients such as B12 and an iron, there's other nutrients as well. And you're going to want to make sure that you're testing, you're doing micronutrient level tests to make sure that you have enough nutrients in those types of diets. So for most people, having a level of omnivore of eating plants and vegetables, eating in a balanced way is really what does best. Then you want to think about, okay, are you getting inflamed by food? So it's like the biggest thing I hate is when people get online and they read about oxalates and lectins and autoimmune like night shades and these types of things, and they're combining all these different things and they come to my office and they're on five foods. Now, occasionally there is somebody that is so sensitive and reactive to everything that their diet has been dwindled down to that. But a lot of times what will happen is people can be reading about all of these different types of diets and then you limit yourself. And then if you're only eating five foods, the likelihood is that the immune system is going to start reacting to those five foods and you're going to develop allergies to those foods is really high because we're not really designed to eat the same things over and over and over again. So from a standpoint of kind of the big bad inflammatory foods that most people should not be on, kind of across the board, you'll be very, very careful with industrial seed oils. These are our sunflowers, our safflowers, our canolas, our soy, our peanuts, right? So those types of oils have a high amount of omega sixes in them. It is the average American has 25 times too many omega 6s in their diet. And that will really cause a lot of inflammation in the cardiovascular system, in the brain. So you want to be very careful about generally you want to be using your avocado oils, your olive oils, your coconut oils, your butter, your ghee, these types of oils. For your cooking and for your just enjoyment with your food. So really be careful about those kind of across the board because those are very inflammatory. Make sure at a very minimum from food quality, like if you can do all organic, grass fed, grass finished food, you want to be doing that. But if you can't do that, make sure you're at least not eating genetically modified food, right? Because genetically modified foods, like the corn industry, right. Like the sugar cane industry, these types of foods have glyphosates in them. And we want to lower the glyphosates as much as possible because they are really, really destructive to so many different parts of our body. They're really seen in research as causing a lot of brain impairment and cognitive problems, mood problems, leaky gut, so many more things. So we want to make sure we're staying away from those. And then it really depends upon a lot of other things. So, for example, you want to pay attention, like nightshades for some people, especially with autoimmune disease, bother them, right? But then cruciferous vegetables, things that are like broccoli and cauliflower and kale, that whole family, you have a tendency to ibs. Those foods might bother you. So your goal is to basically choose the diet that is going to inflame you the least, right? You want your body to be in a state of health, so you want to make sure that you are thinking about, okay, well, if you're going to try a low oxalate diet, try that in isolation, see how you feel after a few weeks, okay? Then move on to trying a low histamine diet, right? Or an autoimmune paleo diet. And what you're looking for, you want to be on something like that for a few weeks. And it's a kind of a little bit of a trial and error in these types of diets to say what is going to inflame you the least, what is going to make you feel the best? Because there's not one diet right, for everybody. And the diet that's going to be right to you, for you is the one that is going to be as broad as possible and as healthy as possible, but also is not going to inflame you. So I don't recommend combining a lot of these different things unless you're truly actually reacting to those things. Right? It's very, very important we don't become over, over limited. So let me know if you have any other questions on this. Please subscribe to this channel if it's been helpful. If you individualized care on these sorts of things. We can help you that with that in my clinic, in the show notes. And we'll see everybody next time.