EAT THIS To Boost Brain Health, Prevent Disease, & LIVE LONGER | Drew Ramsey

Between 10 to 25% of Americans are on an antidepressant. There is a wave that is crashing on our country and it's a wave of mental health. So my background begins in rural Indiana. I grew up on a really small farm, which actually my family and I would just move back to. And so I'm a farm boy and became a New York City psychiatrist. I came out to Columbia after med school at IU and I got interested in food mainly as a lot of the medications I prescribed as a psychiatrist cause changes in weight, changes in appetite. So I have patients who say, symptoms were getting better on a medicine, but they gained 20 or 30 pounds. And so it felt like I really needed to give them a set of tools on how to deal with that. And as I started to give the standard nutritional advice that so many of us in medicine were trained with, don't eat fat, don't eat cholesterol, first of all, it doesn't work. And secondly, it just isn't helpful advice. And I really began an exploration around food and brain health and how can I add this as a tool for my patients? Personally, I'd really been interested in health. It's one of these fascinating things, right? Where as a physician in your personal life, a lot of us are so interested in wellness, but just really recently it feels like we're now starting to be able to integrate that into our professional work. And I think that's what happened to me. I was like a fit, you know, trying to eat really lots of plants and super healthy, and I wasn't incorporating that into how I evaluate and how I work with my patients. So I radically changed that and it's been, I would say it's been some of the richest information I get to learn about people. This little secret move I have in my interview that now I get to teach to the residents at Columbia, which is how do you engage a patient around food and how do we shift our stance to really help people find joyfulness and use food to feed their brain and improve their outcomes? So I do a simple food evaluation and it's what we've been teaching at the American Psychiatric Association for the past five years. It's simple, right? It's really about moving through the life of an eater and the day of an eater and understanding more of the details. So, a lot of people will say, well, you know, I eat a pretty healthy diet. And then what they describe is not that healthy, right? They'll be focusing on low-fat foods or they'll be really proud they're eating a lot of chicken. And what's missing are some of the most nutrient-dense foods, those foods that are supercharged in nature where there's an incredible number of nutrients and concentration of nutrients for not a lot of calories. like a muscle or an oyster. The bivalves are incredible. And so I like to walk through each meal, snacks, preferences. It's been really important for my clinical work to understand people's cultural backgrounds. So I have a patient who grew up in Morocco and is separated from their food. One of the ways to really both understand their dynamics but I think really help them passionately and joyfully connect is to help them reconnect with more of the traditional foods that they find in their culture. And so those types of questions and then a lot of people have different rules and morals and ethical guidelines for how they eat. And so I'm really a believer that I'm here to help you feed your brain, no matter what tribe of dieter you are, eater, whether you're a vegan or vegetarian or you're eating gluten-free or you're eating paleo or whole 30, it's my job to help you make sure you're getting all the nutrients you need for great mental function from your food. So let's talk about some of the statistics. When you think about the health epidemic in America, we don't talk enough about the mental health epidemic. And the reason that's so important is it really takes a lot about our bottom line as a country, but also just these are disabling illnesses. So if you look at what's called a disability adjusted life year, which is a measurement of how much does an illness disable an individual, The top causes for sure are mental health disorders because they hit us when we're younger. So as opposed to heart disease that you get in your 60s, when you get depression or an anxiety disorder or schizophrenia, that strikes you when you're young, usually 15 to 18. The statistics are grim, no matter what way you slice them. We see that right now between 10 to 25% of Americans are on an antidepressant. And part of me thinks that's great in the sense that which is not maybe a very popular view, but at least people are engaging in getting treatment. I think it's something that we in mental health and in psychiatry, we're constantly working to improve the efficacy of our treatments. In terms of disability, depression is the top cause of disability worldwide. It is going to be or already is the top cause of disability in America. When you look at the most common mental health disorders in America, it's been like 40 million Americans have a diagnosable anxiety disorder, and then just look at things like, what, there's now 60,000 overdoses in the opioid crisis. There were 40,000 suicides last year. These numbers are growing. So when I look at those numbers, I feel like there is a wave that is crashing on our country, and it's a wave of mental health disorders, which are rooted in brain health. And When you take the mix of really not a lot of parity, meaning we don't reimburse and sort of value mental health in the same way medically as we do physical health. Then we think about the stigma. I mean, even my patients who do great and do wonderfully in treatment, they're completely ashamed that they've ever done what so many of us do, which is to spend time with a mental health professional understanding ourselves and the complexity of our emotions and who we are. I think the most exciting statistic that's come out about mental health actually was from a trial that came out in January 31st, 2017, which is the first ever randomized controlled clinical trial using diet to treat depression, like a real randomized trial. And that's what we've been missing in some ways in the data. There's been a lot of correlation. A modified Mediterranean diet was found to get 31% of patients into full remission. and these are patients who had pretty severe depression and were already on meds and in psychotherapy. So that's a statistic I like, people getting better using food. How do we combat stigma and what does it take for us to feel comfortable sharing this very personal part of ourselves, right? And I think in my training, one of the first things I realized, I was just so ashamed when I was scared. Remember being in the ER with somebody who's really psychotic. And I was an intern or second year resident. And I just remember being frightened. And it makes sense, right? You're watching someone, I was a young man, he looked like me, he sort of, you know, we were in the same drawer as it were, but his brain was just not working, right? Completely psychotic, terrified, paranoid, hearing voices. And so I think we have to confront that, that mental illness scares us, and it scares us for a very good reason, which is that we're all vulnerable to it. This isn't something that you get in your genes. Depression is nearly ubiquitous in the sense that unlike something like heart disease and cancer, which you've not really ever experienced, I think everyone has experienced sadness and a low mood. Everyone's experienced crippling anxiety. Everybody's had a touch of insomnia. So it's sort of striking that even though we have this shared experience of struggling with having a human brain, which is like a fragile thing, I mean, human brains and psyches are very complicated and they break kind of easily. And, you know, sometimes for all of us, they don't make perfect sense. I think what it takes for us to have that frank conversation is increasing conversations. And all of us who are in the mental health field or have mental health disorders, doing the brave thing and being open about that. And it's, that's a hard thing for us to do. I think the tide is turning. What I love is hearing of all the wonderful, amazing, gifted, successful people who also are telling us, yeah, I have depression, I have ADHD. My family has bipolar disorder. That's been a really exciting development, I would say in the last 10 years, where we're talking about it. And I think that that's the only way we save lives. If we agree this is something, is that something that like you have or like she has, like something we all have. I mean, I don't know a single family in my personal or professional life who doesn't have some stuff going on, right? That when they see me at a functional kind of like, hey, I got this cousin, right? I think one of the things in the American Psychiatric Association that we're quite concerned about is there's this gap between great treatment and getting people better. I think that's one of my main messages is that people get better. I'm not in the business of not getting people better, right? But we really want that message getting out to the public more and shifting from, I think, a traditional view of psychiatry, right? That we push meds and we just want to talk about your mom, I want to put you on the couch for like a million years to what we actually are. And we're experts in brain health. We are the medical specialty that focuses on emotional health. And we take that very seriously. And so there's a lot of, I think, great science coming out and a new revolution about to happen where we're going to begin to use genetic data to better tailor treatments. And man, I am, The reason I went into psychiatry is I thought, gosh, a lot's gonna happen in this field because we don't really know anything about the brain. And I feel like that's paying off much earlier than I thought it would because it's just getting really nuanced and interesting in how we understand how the brain works and how we help people fix their brains. The mad diet is the modern American diet. You also hear it called the sad diet, but I refer mad because it makes me personally mad that we we got here, right? So I grew up on a farm. I was standing out back in one of our big gardens with one of my buddies. Actually, it's a photographer from 50 Shades of Kale. And Ian looks out and he's like, man, how is it people go hungry in this country? All this food growing. And it's an incredible amount of food. I left the farm on Monday. I dropped in a bunch of sunflower seeds, a bunch of squash. I came back on Thursday. Friday we eat sunflower sprouts, the squash is up. We're gonna, I mean it's just, so that's not the mad diet. The mad diet is not food that we grow in the ground on our great small American farms and share with each other. The mad diet is a diet that got created for efficiency and it got created on bad, bad science. And that now is 100% clear. We moved from living in rural America and eating food from small farms and eating a lot of plants, to eating highly processed foods that really consist of very few ingredients. They get mixed together all kinds of different ways, but you're talking about cheap vegetable oils, so soybean oil, corn oil, lots and lots of sugars, every single way you can say it. Sugars from corn, sugars from sugarcane, sugars from beets, right? And then a variety of things to make that more palatable, fake colors, fake flavorings. And what then gets created is A diet that is missing the most important nutrients for the brain. If you look at what happened, for example, to long-chain omega-3 fats, and these are really a great example of one of the most important things that I tell my patients to focus on eating. That's what I focus on. I look at my week, how do I judge it? Did I eat fatty fish that has long-chain omega-3 fats? One of my sort of top criteria for eaters who are looking to support brain health. Omega-3 fats just got entirely stripped from our diet. We actually move from having an omega-3 fat-based diet, a grass-based diet, to a diet that's based much more in seed oils and what are also essential fats but are thought to be much more inflammatory. So the MAD diet is a diet that is very clear in the data. It increases your risk of depression between 50 and 100%. It increases your risk of dementia, right? Some studies doubling the rate of dementia. It doubles the rate of attention deficit disorder. So, these are strong correlations we see across the board between modern diets or the Western diet that consist of empty calories, which is the opposite of eating for brain health, where you're getting nutrient density, lots and lots of nutrients per calorie. And so, when we meet eaters in our nutritional psychiatry here in New York City, We do our eater evaluation and we see eaters kind of fall into a few categories. Like there's the beige diet or we call it the 12-year-old boy diet where it's like people are like, I just, I eat pasta, pizza, chicken fingers and martinis. That's my diet. It's like the 12-year-old diet plus alcohol. That's like some New Yorkers. And we look at that and what we've really worked to do is create a method where we help people find joy in their food. That's really our goal. and to do that through enjoying real whole foods, enjoying them in a simple way, and focusing not on singular foods like kale or wild salmon or blueberries, but to focus on food categories. And food categories help people really think more broadly and more creatively about their diet. If you're only eating kale, well what about that great Swiss chard or those amazing sunflower sprouts or some purslane? Those are all wonderful leafy greens and they all have great health benefits. So that's really the hope is that the Mad Diet will be undone by this new movement we're seeing, where by last count there were 8,144 farmers markets in America. And I don't think there's better medicine for our country. If you think about what happens there, right? These local communities that are just being ravaged, absolutely ravaged in America, have a new source of income, right? There's food being grown, which means there's food being passed around. You have a feeling of being part of a community as opposed to dependent on all these outside sources bringing your food. So, the Mad Diet is an anathema of, I would say, bad agriculture, bad science, and bad choices, all packaged in an absolutely delicious, heavily branded and marketed way. that has created a set of habits for a lot of eaters that really leads them to a bad place in terms of their overall health, but specifically in terms of their brain health. Our brain runs on sugar, right? If you think about blood sugar, right? That's very important stuff. 99% of the brains on the planet are running on blood sugar, on glucose. If you think about kind of primal society, right? There were periods of fasting, right? There were periods of plenty. naturally triggers us to lay down fats, right? In the sense that we eat sugar, we have an insulin spike, and then we lay down some fat stores. And you can see that, you know, kind of worked when we were more seasonal. Happens to me in the winter, I get a little differently, I get a little puffier, I sleep a little more, I eat more carbs, right? In the summer, super lean, super fit, eating differently. And we really lost that natural rhythm of our foods. We're addicted to sugar for a number of reasons. One, it's in everything. A second reason that I think is overlooked is we've shifted our palate. So I haven't eaten sort of simple sugars, I haven't had them in my house for a long time. And when I get something, boy, it's so sweet, like a candy bar is out of control. It's supersaturated, right? And we kind of lived in this milieu of very salty, very sugary, very kind of powerfully flavored foods. And so people's palates have shifted. towards sort of craving and desiring that. Third, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere. You can't pick up anything without sugar in it. I mean, toothpaste has sugar in it. I mean, it's sort of in everything. There are a billion names for it. And the reason that we like it is our brain responds to it. Because if you think out there in the natural world, so go to my farm, where is the sugar? There's only one place that there's actual concentrated sugar, that's in my beehives. And boy, that's hard sugar to guess. And when you do get it, I don't know that anybody's out there tried to eat a teaspoon of honey, you don't. It's too much, right? All the other sugar on my farm is in all my rainbow vegetables and in the plants because I love sugar in the sense that that's the basis of our food supply. Every single molecule of our food, if you think, starts with a very simple chemical reaction of photosynthesis. by which our lovely friends, the plants, turn sunlight into sugar. So there's a way that as we talk about sugar being toxic, part of me feels like people have gotten quite confused. Sugar is a nutrient that our brain is quite dependent on and uses every day, and maintaining healthy blood sugar is absolutely critical. And cutting out simple sugars from your diet is one of the most important steps, I think, for people to take to reclaim their eating. At the same time, when you eat a plant-based diet, you're eating a lot of sugars, but they're a slower burning, lower glycemic index sugar, and they come again with all these nutrients. What's really, I think, hurting us are the sugars, the empty calories that don't come with any nutrients. It's like having lots of gas and no way to deal with the exhaust. So low-fat diets and vegetarian diets are interesting in the sense that some of the ideas behind them are great. We overall eat too many calories. Now, I tell my patients I never want people to turn calories because I think it's a really big waste of good food to turn into a complicated math equation. You know whether you're eating too many calories or not based on one simple factor, whether you gain weight or not. I've actually eaten the exact same number of calories every week, year in, year out, since I was 18. I know that because my weight's been stable. There's no other sort of measure that in some ways matters. So vegetarian and low-fat diets focus on helping people reduce calories, getting more plants, and those are great. The problem becomes that when you exclusively eat plants or when you cut all fats out of your diet, first of all, you only eat about 15% protein. So if you cut all of the fats out of your diet or many of them, you're just eating carbohydrates. And again, most people are going to trend towards the simpler starches and sugars because they're the easy and the cheapest. What happens clinically, what we see is people just, first of all, they get depressed, right? Your brain is made of fat. It needs fat, it needs certain fat-soluble nutrients. Certain fats, like the omega-3 fats, highly correlated with depression. We actually have a reasonable data signal you can use them to treat depression. Most recent meta-analysis by the Cochrane Group found that there was a statistically significant improvement if you pull all the studies. Not hugely clinically significant, but statistically significant. So again, a really important signal that while this is a fat that we want people to eat, I think the thing I hate about all this messaging and it's just gotten me really frustrated is it's not nuanced and it focuses on the wrong things. Because when you think about the average kind of knowledge base of the average American eater, and a lot of patients are sheepishly look at me on the couch and they're like, where do I find protein? what's a fat? And if I'm honest, if I think about even after medical school when I started really intensively struggling nutrition, I didn't know that stuff either. I talked to some of the smartest doctors I know and it's like, Hey, what's the top source of folate? I don't know. So I really hope in my work to help people focus more on nutrients and foods. So you know it's a good choice without knowing all the numbers behind it. If you eat an oyster, you get a massive dose of zinc. If you eat six oysters, you get 500% of your daily need of zinc. What does that mean in my life as an eater and what we prescribe? It means we want you eating bivalves on a regular basis. Again, not a recommendation I think a lot of people get. They get a recommendation like eat fish, don't eat meat. And again, I don't think that's a very joyful way to present food around the same thing with the cholesterol argument. If you look at the science behind dietary cholesterol, it's not in any way conclusive. And as a clinician, I see patients all day, every day. But you tell people not to eat cholesterol, that leads to zero action. The only way to do that is to just stop eating animal products. And there are lots of ways to eat animal products and eat seafood that are very, very healthy and correlated with all kinds of positive health outcomes. Quality of food is something that people don't focus on enough. Where the idea that we talk about beef, like beef's one thing. That's not true or meat, red meat. All right, you're talking about venison that we killed in our woods that's lived wild and is some of the leanest meat around or are you talking about grass-fed beef like one of my buddies, Jim Fiedler, who dedicates his life to having a thousand acres of beautiful pasture and raising grass-fed cattle. If you think about a grass-fed steak versus a grain-fed steak, the grain-fed steak first of all has a third more calories. It's a fattier cut. So again, there are more fats in it and they're not exactly the fats that we hope for, right? Whereas you look again at a grass-fed cut leaner, some more omega-3 fats, about eight times as much vitamin E, about six times as much beta-carotene. So more nutrients in that beef. And then as a quasi farmer, if you look at what happens on a farm, it's clear where you want to spend your food dollars. You go to a grass-fed farm, usually you see a happy farmer, you see pasture, you usually see a kind of dynamic rotational system where you're really restoring the land, caring for that topsoil like it's our mother because it is, right? And you go to a traditional cattle operation or go out to the feedlots and it's mainly it's sad. I mean, I drove out to Dodge City Kansas when we were researching the happiness diet and, yeah, like there are tears in your eyes, not because it's just like so much like gas and methane and stink and, you know, so it's not like meat packing is particularly happy industry, right? It's so it's where quality makes the difference. If you think about salmon, there's the difference between farm salmon, which is fed soy and corn and then given a pink dye so it looks like wild salmon. and real wild salmon, just a huge nutritional difference. Farm shrimp and wild shrimp. And so really, I think, focusing on helping individuals spend their money wisely and pick foods that are good for the planet, good for their brains, and good for their family in the sense of creating a lot of joy around the dinner table. That I feel is a really important intervention. and an intervention that we feel is increasingly happening in mental health. It's important to eat locally for a number of reasons. One of the things that causes people to struggle with their mood and to struggle with their emotional health is isolation. And the world is very isolating now. We feel connected on social networks, right? But we don't look each other in the eye nearly as much. We, living here in New York City, It was actually the first time I went to a farmer's market a lot. I was living down in the West Village. We were about to have kids and I didn't even know. I moved into this cute little place and opened my door on one Saturday and there was like 10 farmers and like a seafood monger. And suddenly, I'm really far away from our farm, but I'm eating more farm fresh food than I ever have before. And I start to love that Saturday morning. I go out and I shake farmers Dave's hand and talk with him and I get some seasonality back into my diet. And there are new foods that he's excited about growing that like, that's actually where 50 shades of kale came from. The Abington Square Farmers Market, Muddy Farm, Farmer Dave had like six shades of kale. And I don't know, 50 shades of gray was going up and I thought, well, like, you know, put those things together. So the reason local communities should support their local farmers is it's a dying profession and it's a noble profession. There is no feeling I've ever had like planting seeds on my farm and harvesting that food. And I'm always overjoyed to spend time with people who haven't done that because if there is a very clear visible miracle on earth for me, it is that you take this tiny, tiny little seed, like the tiniest little seed, a speck, and you put it in the ground and literally days later you have a sprout. and 50 days later you have a giant plant and it's just giving you a plethora of food. That is just to me wild. So farmers markets help people enjoy that, they help you connect with your community and they help us eat the right foods. If you think about it, what's in a farmers market? If you're eating whole fresh local produce as the base of your diet, supplementing that with really, really well chosen seafoods, mainly bivalves and the wild fatty fish, you know, some good grass-fed meat occasionally and some other things, nuts, lots of beans. I grew black beans for the first time. We have this like jar of black beans like this big. We'll just put some plants in the ground. I have like more black beans than I could eat in like a year. So that's what I think Farmers Market gives you is that, yeah, that window into what's happening in your community and a place to come together and keep our food dollars local. I think that's, I think the saddest thing for me is to be seeing so many small farms in America disappear. It's because there's nothing that can be done and I think our local food movement is changing that. A colleague of mine, Laura Lenchance and I have created the first nutrient profiling system called the Mood Food Scale. And we looked at all of the scientific literature that's out there related to food and depression and tried to find the nutrients where there is substantial epidemiological data. So looking at populations, right? People who don't eat zinc get more depressed, for example. And then looking at clinical data. We gave some people zinc when we gave them an antidepressant and they also got better and saying, well, seems like zinc has some antidepressant qualities. What are the foods that have the most zinc? So we went through this and found eight to 10 nutrients, really the evidence supported that those nutrients play a significant role in the pathophysiology of depression. And so when we think about mood foods, what I really focus on what's missing in most people's diets are those long chain omega-3 fats and the fatty fish. But there are lots of other ways to think about mood. If we think about mood, a good mood is not just an emotional state but as a state of brain growth. There are six nutrients that are clearly have a clear role in promoting BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. So one of the reasons zinc and omega-3 fats and some of the phytonutrients, the flavanols come up a lot in our work is that in the science, it looks like they promote the molecule that really helps the brain grow and be resilient and recover. So when I think about foods like that, I think those are, you know, we call them brain foods or mood foods. In terms of eating for other specific symptoms or conditions, there are a lot of moves that we have in our clinic. For example, when people have anxiety, there's a number of foods that we really want to add in that surprise people like eggs. Eggs have a lot of choline, which is like a B vitamin, and choline is actually one of the only nutrients that is highly correlated with depression. So actually really, even though anxiety disorders are the most commonly diagnosed disorders, there's actually almost no science when it comes to how food and anxiety relate. But again, one thing we tend to see a lot is people have anxiety disorders getting anxious, not having a regulated eating, beginning to get a little hypoglycemic. And oftentimes people with panic disorder and anxiety disorders, they have a kind of heightened sensitivity to somatic and bodily sensations. So as they feel that rumble in their tummy, their anxiety gets tweaked in their brains differently than the people without anxiety disorders. So, that's where a food intervention can be very helpful in terms of helping people really be mindful of what they're eating and think about the structuring of their intake is really vital to their mental health. I would say the strangest thing for me in all these years is the number of smart people that I've met, doctors, the whole even who don't in their mind have any connection between brain health and food. Like I'll be asking, like, you know, Dr. Brown, why are you asking me about all this food stuff? And it's just, I didn't start talking about food to my patients until maybe a few years into my career. So there's this natural gap, I think we have to help people bridge to think about not our food as something that it's just about weight gain or cancer risk or heart disease risk. Because those messages have just really been given to us wholeheartedly. But to really think about depression risk, if you think the most dangerous illness for you and your family, it is not cancer and heart disease. The most dangerous illness for you and your family is depression, by far. It's more prevalent, it's easier to get, and unfortunately it's more lethal, right? I mean, and so the good news in that is that the science is really clear that the biggest factor under your control to influence your risk of depression is in what you eat. That's what we just launched an e-course called Eat to Beat Depression. And it revolves around this idea that by focusing on a few foods and a few nutrients, you can radically and rapidly shift how someone eats. and that's very satisfying to see. I think all of us who are talking more with patients about food, one lovely part is how much people engage when you partner with them, right? When it's not a set of rules, don't eat all this bad stuff, you're gonna die, and it's more like, let's have fun together. What kind of salads do you love? What do you, I had a patient show me the picture of her sunflower sprouts. bought in the farmer's market. And it was like, I was like her homework. And it was, it's so, it's a, it's a really rewarding medical experience to have to be more in the conversation than just therapy and, and meds and, and coaching. Right. To really have this piece very focused on food. So I'm a general psychiatrist, do lots of Psychotherapy. I do med management for people, but increasingly over the years, I've gotten to be a real nutritional psychiatrist where an individual will have their med person, their psychopharmacologist, and someone doing their therapy, and I just get to run the show on food. And so we actually had a woman came in just about a month ago, really struggling. She told me she ate 14 cookies the night before she saw me just to make sure I got it. And she was just really dealing with a lot of emotions from emotional eating, leaning towards those Very satisfying carbs. If you look at the fastest way to boost serotonin in the brain is eat pure glucose. So there's something physiological about that kind of carb craving that happens to people. But she was living on a very beige diet, simple carbohydrates, a lot of treats, a lot of soothing herself, and struggled in terms of didn't really know how to cook. Had someone in her home helping her cook. She sort of guiltily admitted to me and I think that's great. It's like help them cook more of the foods that we know you should be eating. Started keeping a food journal, went through a few simple food categories. And like a lot of people, what I love about this work is you know what a good brain food is. If I held up a plate of beautiful rainbow vegetables and a nice piece of fish versus a hamburger and fries, everybody knows that's brain food. So what's really fun is it's almost like helping people discover these foods that they hadn't thought about. I said, what about avocados? She's like, I love avocados. Can I eat avocados? I'm like, oh my God, you should eat an avocado every day. Now she eats an avocado every day. Every day she started with an avocado, some eggs, some mushrooms. You look at her food journal and sure, it's a little occasional brownie, a little chocolate donut here and there, but mainly it's real food. What's happened is we've also given her some cooking instruction. That's something that we do that I think is a little unique to our practice as we take people to the farmer's market. We have a great food therapist, Samantha, who's a chef and a social worker and she sort of diagnoses what the problem is. And it might be like, you don't know how to cut vegetables very well. You don't have to chop food. Let's help you with that. Or you have anxiety that anytime you cook fish you're gonna get food poisoning. Let us help you with that. Let us help you feel safe and fearless and joyful about your food. And so this woman is now, she's about a month in and you look at man, she is just eating differently. And so part of it is the food sibo effect where as we care for ourselves, we feel better about ourselves. Everybody knows that you go to the gym, doesn't matter how you feel going in, you come out, you just feel better. You know you did something for yourself. Along with all the nutrients, there's this very powerful factor when we care for ourselves, when we care for our families, when we care for our table. And that is very powerfully antidepressant. Think about the last time someone cooked you a thoughtful, caring meal, right? And said, oh, hey, come over. I remember you love fish. I made this for you. Well, that just like we feel so nourished and cared for. and I guess my hope is that we increasingly see more of that. We see local food, meals together, and the idea that it's not a million miles away. It's not this heavy lift that you have to eat all these specific things. It's really simple. I'm not a great chef, but I love cooking simple food, and this is something I think attainable to everyone. All the times we hear, oh, the brain food costs too much. like, nah, nah, that's not true. Look at a can of wild salmon. Like three bucks, right? A lot of wild salmon in there. I'm a little scared of canned fish. I was, well, you take that out, put on some pickles, celery, a little touch of mayo, some mustard. All of a sudden you've got this amazing instead of tuna salad. You've got amazing salmon salad. Make a little salmon burger, right? Three bucks and 50 cents. So there are all, I think, all kinds of ways to make it quite affordable to eat right. The exercises that I really encourage in all of my patients struggling with emotional health, wanting to improve their brain health, certainly there's the food part, which is, I tell people it's simple. Seafood, greens, nuts and beans, right? It's not a complex equation. The core of behavioral change for all of us is being mindful. Part of changing your food is looking at your plate and thinking with intention. what is that I'm putting in my body? Where did it come from? How does it line up with my values? It doesn't always, right? You're stuck in an airport somewhere, you gotta eat. But as much as possible, can we be more intentional? And so increasingly over the years, I really have focused on helping people be more mindful and more present with themselves. I think communication skills are a big thing that improves brain health when you look at the kind of toxic effects of stress and stress often have a root in people struggling to have authentic communication and be clear with themselves about who they are and own that and be clear with others in terms of what they need. Of course, we all like to say exercise. I'm a little bit of a stickler. I think a lot of people are out there like jogging away, not doing very much for their brain health. I think that as we understand more about how you're optimally healthy, I increasingly feel that I do a lot of more interval-based training where I'm really in a lot more just kind of regular daily activity. It's one of the perks of living in New York. I mean, I love all my farm work, but boy, you know, always doing 10,000 steps in New York. Yeah, so I guess to summarize, my brain prescription for people starts with food. It includes a healthy serving of mindfulness. I really love working with people on how you say things and how you connect with the people in your life, both using food, but also simply to decrease stress and improve the clarity of your relationships and the quality of those relationships. And then I hope everybody spends more time moving. I mean, I think when we can think about the joyful moments in our life, moments where we transcend the angst of being human. For many of the patients I treat and people I know and for myself, That's when I'm in a full run, right? Or I'm sitting at a table with a set of good friends, laughing and enjoying the food. I think that those really are the keys to solid emotional health. And there's something that we all have to work to build and work together to build. Food can be used in all kinds of ways. One of the patient populations that I work with are people who are struggling with addiction. And if you think about addiction and how it relates to food, I mean, they're very related, right? So especially people struggling with alcohol and alcohol abuse, actually we're beginning to understand some of the genetic changes that drives those individuals towards simple sugars, alcohol being a simple sugar. Food is great for people struggling with addiction because it helps you care for yourself, right? And it gives you something to do that is meditative and thoughtful and it gives you structure. For people with the direct addiction struggle once we help get them into a period of sobriety is sort of filling their time in managing stress and filling their time with productive activities. And so this is where, you know, I love using food, the notion of what do you feed yourself when you're stressed? What do you feed yourself when you're craving? What do you replace alcohol with? Or in some of our patients who aren't gonna go towards sobriety and they want a more harm reduction model, how can we help you, you know, instead of having like eight drinks, have like a drink and then some kombucha, right? That we can reduce the load. So food becomes a really big part, especially look at what a lot of people struggle with addiction eat, right? I mean, it is the mad diet. Simple carbs, cheap food, easy food, because being wrapped up in addiction, you don't have the kind of time, mindfulness and focus to really engage with the self-care. and so it's a very handy tool. So chronic fears, thinking about in terms of phobias or anxieties or past trauma, we often see is this influences how people eat and care for themselves. So, again, one of the ways that food can be used is this something, I like it because it's very concrete. If you think about as a mental health professional, as a psychiatrist, I've got meds, I've got my interpretations about your parents and your life and your dynamics and your unconscious. But in terms of something to go home and do today, we don't do such a great job sometimes in mental health. And that's where food can help, that if people are really having a lot of trauma, to make a meal that soothes them. That's the type of recommendation increasingly I've been doing. And then really following up. Send me a picture of that special dish your grandma made. Tell me about it. What does it evoke for you? What was it like cooking it? What was it like sharing it with your family?

So.

In some ways, the food becomes a vehicle for people's self-expression, for their ability to kind of grow and enhance their own self-care. And I think most importantly, the part that I really love about food is it gives us the ability to concretely love and nourish people. that idea that I want to care for you in a cellular way. I want to help your cells. And that's how much I love you. And so that's what, again, that's part of the excitement of this food movement that we've seen in America over the past 10 years. Everybody's thinking about it. Everybody's talking about it. I think that's eventually going to lead to better mental health for all of us. Epigenetics is this very exciting concept, and I think about it a little bit like a card player, right? Your genes are the cards. You get dealt your cards, and you're sitting there with your little hand of cards. But a skilled poker player, no matter what they get dealt, they're gonna beat me. They're better at me than poker. They're gonna win. It's how they play the cards. And I think about epigenetics like that. Epigenetics is the idea that your genes, the expression of your genes, are controlled by environment. factors. And if we put in environmental factors like lots of zinc, B12, omega-3 fats, a dietary pattern that is based in plants and the right fats and good healthy seafoods, we turn on genes that lower inflammation. We eat lots of plants, we turn on genes that help us fight chronic disease. So that's how food works at the most kind of fundamental level. And it's powerful, right? It is the factor that is under your control that really has a very, very powerful genetic and cellular impact. And what's nice is you're already doing it every day, right? You're already influencing your genes. And so, can you help each decision that you make be a little bit of a better decision, right? And you know, I'll sometimes look and I'll think, what is the best thing for me to eat? And it will be both the nutrients and also like, what's going to give me the most pleasure? Because having a pleasurable experience, I think is, you know, I guess it's horrible, but as a doctor, I'd much rather people have a really joyful, rich, delicious life and die at 70 than have like a horrible, low-fat eating, miserable, angstridden, where they're counting calories and they die at, I don't know, 85. I just feel like I'm about quality of life, I guess. The most important piece of advice I would want people to hear is my message of hope. That I've treated thousands of people with clinical depression and I am shocked at how much people can transform of being on my couch, ready to kill themselves with nothing to live for, tearful, not able to sleep, right about to head into the hospital. And some weeks later, months later, be there as a bright, vibrant, loving human being, all of what a human can offer. And I think people are frustrated because I don't perfectly know how to get from A to B. But I do know through engagement, through good clinical treatment, for good alliance that you can get from A to B. So, I think the first thing I would want people to hear is a message of hope, which I know when I've struggled with my mood, that's hard to believe. The next part, because I'm a nutritional psychiatrist, is I think people need to incorporate food into their plans. What are you eating tonight? What are you eating for lunch? And to focus on what I think most people already know. Let's eat whole foods. Let's think about where your knowledge gaps are. A lot of people don't know how to cook vegetables, right? Like, Brussels sprouts for most people is like, oof, like a bad PTSD experience from the high school cafeteria. That is not what Brussels sprouts are like in my house. They're like, wow, amazing, crispy deliciousness. So figuring out where those knowledge gaps are around food and pushing yourself, I didn't eat or cook sea food at all until I was 30. It's kind of late. I smelled yucky and fishy to me. I cook everything in the sea now. And so that notion you can evolve as an eater, and specifically if you're struggling with depression, if you're struggling with anxiety, there are a core set of foods that you should be eating as part of your treatment, as part of you caring for your brain. That I think is the message I want people to hear and I've tried to spread that far and wide, both in the books but also two other psychiatrists and mental health professionals to utilize this very simple tool. We are what we eat. Your brain certainly depends on you having a healthy gut and a healthy diet. Your brain is made of food. Think about it. Every molecule in your brain, besides oxygen, starts at the end of your fork, period. That's how it gets there. So, that's like a lot of control at the end of that. for it. And so I would encourage anyone listening struggling with depression or anxiety or who has that in their family and is nervous to feel hopefulness and to start feasting on brain food and know that you are nourishing your most important organ and that all of the science tells us and all of my clinical experience tells me it works, really helps. Eat to Beat Depression is an e-course that I created to help people get these fundamental tools It's a modular video course that goes through the latest science relating to neuroplasticity and brain growth in food and depression. It really focuses in on depression and then it really works with individuals for them to assess their own diet just as we do in our clinic and walk through the important food categories and help people set small, weekly attainable goals. And so Eat to Beat Depression is really aimed to be a resource for individuals to to get some of this knowledge and then to get encouragement. We've run a number of people through the course and our first group, it was interesting. About 80% of those individuals were already using food to treat their depression, but 0% had ever been talked to by a mental health professional about food. So that's the gap that I'm hoping we really see shrink, that this is increasingly viewed as something that can help individuals and empower our patients. And so the course is the course is my first effort to have there be a product other than a book to really give people another set of resources.

And as you well know, we do a deep dive in listening to the history. And I think that's one of the things that probably distinguishes us when we do functional medicine is we have the time and we take the time to actually listen and listen to the patient's story. And there's a saying in medicine, if you listen long enough, the patient will tell you what the problem is. but you have to allow the patient to talk and you have to be able to listen and piece together the puzzle. So it's really about mapping out the timeline of when did the patient's symptoms start? How old were they? What was happening around that time? Did they get a vaccination? Did they take an antibiotic? Were they bitten by a tick? Were they exposed to some kind of a toxin? Did they have dental work? I mean, there's all different kinds of things that that can trigger inflammation. And that's where you really have to play medical detective. And, you know, sometimes you're going to find it on the first time, sometimes you're not. It might take you, you know, a lot of uncovering, you know, lifting up stones, leaving no stone unturned. And that's where a functional medicine approach where, you know, we do a lot of advanced testing to look for, you know, not necessarily an infection per se. It's not like you have a fever and you're you're sick, but what we would call a stealth infection, where you have a bacteria or a virus or an atypical bacteria present in the body that is causing this immune activation. And in the process of the immune activation, the brain gets inflamed and then can manifest as having a whole bunch of different types of neuropsychiatric conditions or potentially even memory issues or motor conditions or other neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis. So, it's a real, you have to play detective.

It is. And the key things that really drive.

The problems are the usual things we see that drive inflammation in general, whether it's autoimmune disease or anything else, it's toxins. So, it could be all the environmental toxins. We see this in Parkinson's with pesticides and chemicals. We see evidence of heavy metals playing a role in many of these brain disorders that drives inflammation as well as toxicity. We see the microbiome playing a huge role. I just recorded a podcast with Emeran Mayer for the Doctor's Pharmacy and he's all about the gut immune connection and how it affects the brain and the gut-brain connection. And he's written a lot about the biology of this. This is not some abstract idea. It's something that's really becoming fleshed out in literature and that people are coming to grips with as a force to be reckoned with in terms of the brain. And so we have to understand the microbiomes are all toxins. foods. For example, gluten can be very inflammatory for the brain for many, many people because it produces both inflammatory antibodies that affect the immune system and autoimmune disease, but also it can be a direct irritant in terms of the proteins that get digested and inflame the brain. And then, of course, there's infections that you were talking about, like viruses or tick infections and so forth. These all can be driving brain inflammation. So in functional medicine, what we do is we go, wait a minute, what is the story behind this person's particular illness? As you said, we go into a deep history. And if we don't do that, we will miss often the real keys to figuring out the root cause of their problems. And that's really what's so beautiful about functional medicine. We have a set of tools and a set of therapies that'll allow us to one identify the causes and two to actually treat them directly. And it's pretty exciting because we do.

See a lot of changes from people's health. Absolutely. And you were talking about, you know, the connection with the gut and there's really some fascinating stuff. You know, when I was in training, you know, we talked about Parkinson's and Parkinson's is the old, old person's disease. As you get older, you slow down and part of that slowing down is Parkinson-like features. But what we're finding out is that Parkinson's is a spectrum illness and there is a big connection between patients who have Parkinson's and gut disruptions, leaky gut, gut dysbiosis without actually both bacteria and yeast. And there's a fascinating literature on the microbiome and the metabolites of the microbiome. And there's a woman whose husband has Parkinson's. And believe it or not, she actually diagnosed his Parkinson's by how he smelled, which is to say that when you eat certain food, the bacteria in the yeast actually do a metabolism of those foods and will produce these chemicals, which are called the metabolome or the gut micro metabolome. And those metabolites in some people can affect the brain. And so in essence, you can sort of sniff out Parkinson's. And she actually did that. She actually could, she sensed that there was some, something going on with him and then had him examined. and he was then diagnosed with Parkinson's. And in fact, they're actually training dogs.

To sniff out Parkinson's. Dogs can tell you if you're gonna have a seizure or if you have a low blood sugar or if you have Parkinson's or cancer.

It's pretty fascinating. I prescribe dogs all the time. It's one of my, on my prescription.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's interesting. The body knows. And I, you know, I think maybe we can just sort of share as a way of illustrating the power of addressing inflammation on the brain with some cases. I have a bunch of cases from autism and Alzheimer's, but it'd be good to get sort of a sense from your experience. What are the, what are the things that show up and how, how did you treat it and what happened?

Well, you know, I, I've had a whole, a whole variety of cases. In fact, a couple of cases that we've had at the clinic. where we had some patients who presented to psychiatric hospitals. And when it came out, you know, you know, when somebody has psychosis or a breakdown, if you will, they call that, you know, a psychotic break or a manic break or whatever you want to call that. And we've had a couple of recent cases where the patient's underlying trigger was Lyme disease, which is a spirochetal condition. And always remember, this is something that I really like to emphasize to my patients is that way back when doctors used to treat syphilis, we don't have a lot of syphilis in a private practice today. It's just, it's a condition which was readily treated and it's pretty much gone, although there's still some recurrences of it. But syphilis was caused by a spiro or is caused by a spirochetal bacteria, and that's the same thing as Lyme disease. and Lyme disease is the great mimicker and it also can cause dementia and psychosis. So that's one of the conditions that can trigger neural inflammation. And then also there was a recent case of Bartonella also causing neuropsychiatric conditions and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. So it's really a fascinating fascinating field. And, the problem is that psychiatrists are not trained to think this way and neurologists are not trained to step over into psychiatry. So, they're two different fields, but they're really the same field. So, it's neuropsych and neuropsychiatry. This is an area that is actually really quite fascinating to me. And, people always ask me, what kind of doctor are you? And, I have my own.

How do you answer that question?

Yeah, I'm a psychoneuroimmunoendo gutologist and basically looking at the whole connection between the brain, the gut, the immune system, and all of the body when it's all sort of interconnected. It's really, really fascinating, and you can really help these people who are having significant conditions.

So, what happened? You saw this patient with schizophrenia, and you found the tick infections. What happened then?

Were able to get their symptoms down by treating the underlying cause, which is the underlying spirochetal infection. I also had another patient who had mycoplasma infection. And it's actually known in the literature, mycoplasma is an atypical bacteria. And it's another infection which can cause the brain to be on fire. So it's a really fascinating thing. One of the tests that you can do that can check for this, it's not a common test, and I don't know if you've done this, Mark, is the NMDA receptor antibody testing. This is looking at the parts of the brain that are stimulatory. This is something that any doctor who has a patient who has gone crazy or had a psychotic break, They should have an NMDA receptor antibody test because if you have this, it tells you that there is some type of neuroinflammation that's driving their symptoms.

Yeah, it's quite incredible. So, I've had patients who have schizophrenia before or bipolar disease and you think these problems are just so intractable and so difficult to treat and they can be. But, in fact, the whole field of functional medicine came out of the field of psychiatry with Abraham Hoffer's discovery that you could treat schizophrenia using nutrients and helping to improve the biochemistry of the brain. And then Linus Pauling wrote his seminal paper, Orthomolecular Psychiatry in Science Magazine in 1969, which talked about the perspective of how do you straighten molecules? In other words, how do you correct the imbalances or dysfunctions in your biochemistry? that's called Orthomolecular, which means to straighten. And that has really led to the whole field of functional medicine. And we then sort of expand on that with our understanding of the role of inflammation in the brain. And I, and I, you know, many schizophrenic patients have high levels of, for example, gluten antibodies. About 20 of schizophrenics have any gliding antibodies in their bloodstream. When you take the gluten away, they do better. That causes brain inflammation. And when you do autopsy studies on people with Alzheimer's or autism or schizophrenia or depression, you find that their brains are inflamed. So, you know, when you start to think about that, it's like, wait a minute, we are treating this completely incorrectly. And this is what was classical of traditional medicine. You treat the symptoms, not the cause. And functional medicine is really about the cause and why, not just what disease you have, but why do you have it? And, and in the case of these brain disorders, it's often not obvious. And the problem may be far away from the brain. It might be in the gut or it might be in your diet or it might be a toxin or it might be an infection or it might be mold and it might be all sorts of things that we are kind of missing the boat on. And so we have this potential to sort of rethink our whole approach to brain science. That's what's so exciting when we see the work of guys like Dale Bredesen or others and nutritional psychiatrists like those at Harvard and metabolic psychiatrists at Stanford. They're doing work in this field, understanding the connection between the brain and some of these systemic processes.

Yeah, absolutely. And when you take a schizophrenic and you look at them with a PET scan, the positive emission tomography, what you'll see is their brain lights up, and that's because their microglia, which is their immune cells in the brain, are literally on fire. And unless you actually treat that, a schizophrenic is at high risk for developing dementia down the road because their fire is not being put out. And this, Mark, I'm going to mention this because I actually have done some lectures for American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine on neuroinflammation. And in the process of preparing for that, I came up against some really fascinating things. One is that when you look at the genetics of schizophrenia, they did this whole genome-wide association studies of saying, well, what gene or what genes are associated with schizophrenia and they did what's called a Manhattan plot. And on chromosome 6, it sort of stood out like the Empire State Building. And what they found out is that on chromosome 6, chromosome 6 is highly involved with the immune system. So that tells us that a lot of patients who have schizophrenia have an issue on chromosome 6 related to the immune system. And what I'm going to tell you next is absolutely positively fascinating and this sort of blew me away. There are two case reports and remember, case reports are just like a doctor observing, okay, this is interesting, look what happened, why did this happen? And the two case reports were this and this tells you how the immune system is intimately involved in schizophrenia. One is a patient had refractory schizophrenia and developed some type of cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant. the refractory patient with schizophrenia got a bone marrow transplant. Well, bone marrow transplant is basically giving you a new immune system. After he got the bone marrow transplant, guess what happened to his refractory schizophrenia? It was gone.

What happened?

Gone. Wow. It completely cleared up because it changed his immune response to whatever it was responding to, I don't know, but his refractory schizophrenia went away. On the flip side, there was another gentleman who also needed a bone marrow transplant. He got his bone marrow from his brother who had schizophrenia. Guess what happened to him?

He caught, he got schizophrenia.

He got schizophrenia.

Wow.

Goes both ways. Pretty amazing.

That's pretty amazing.

Yeah.

I was blown away by that. And I think that, you know, in, you know, people who are doing, I'm, you know, I'm a clinician. I'm seeing patients, but the, you know, those, those Case reports are really, really seminal to change how we think about how we see these conditions. And, the fact that that can happen. I also found it fascinating that we talk about the gut microbiome and how that's so important related to the immune system is that when you do stool transplants, you can literally transplant or infect a person and make them skinny or you can transplant stool and make them fat.

We go through this with autism, Parkinson's, right? They're actually doing fecal transplants with autism and with Parkinson's and seeing real changes in their brain function. That blows my mind when you think about that.

It does blow my mind. And, the thing about this is we are still in the nascent period of really understanding this because it's not like, you know, you take this one chemical or you take this one probiotic and everything's fixed. It's a very, very complex array. And, you know, we have hundreds of different microbes and bacteria and viruses in the gut. So it's going to take us a while to figure this all out. But, you know, with, I think we're also in a very good stage where, you know, we have, you know, massive computing power and we have artificial intelligence. And I think that we're going to probably approach these areas of understanding neuroinflammation and really difficult to treat conditions like ALS, like schizophrenia, like Parkinson's and such, and we're going to be able to biohack them and Alzheimer's. You're right, Alzheimer's. That's another thing. Now, this is, you're bringing up one of my favorite things. So, for years, Mark, what did neurology focus on with Alzheimer's?

It was what?

It was amyloid plaque.

Right?

All you got to do is get rid of the amyloid and you get rid of part of Alzheimer's.

That's right.

So, get rid of cholesterol. Heart disease.

Right.

So guess what? The plaque, the beta amyloid plaque that was found in the brain, guess what that actually is? That's an antimicrobial peptide. The brain is producing beta amyloid in response to some type of organism, be it a virus, a bacteria, or a fungus. So when we see that, those are the footprints of a organism that the body is trying to attack.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we actually probably should have Rudy Tanzi on the podcast. He's a scientist at Harvard who specializes in Alzheimer's, and he has discovered the microbiome of the brain. So, literally, there are.

Yes.

Viruses, yeast, bacteria in the brain, which we thought was sterile, that may be triggering this Cascade of inflammation. And then the question is, where does this come from? and it seems like a lot of it may come from the gut, which is crazy. How does it get from your gut to your brain? But it does, and it triggers this neuroinflammation that's driving things like Alzheimer's. You know, I think, I think we often get stuck on one thing, though, right? In, in medicine, we stick, it's stuck on. It's this or it's that. And, and I think the important thing people remember is whatever your diagnosis is, it doesn't immediately tell you what the cause is. So you could have 10 people with Alzheimer's. They could have 10 different causes. and in one person, you could have three or four or five different causes, right? And, I just remember one patient I had who was seven years old, really pretty significant. Alzheimer's, not bedridden at this point, but pretty non-functional, also depression and was struggling really badly. He was former CEO of his company, a family-run business, couldn't function anymore. His behavior was changing. His kids, grandkids, family didn't want to hang out with him anymore because he was acting inappropriate. And, it turned out he had so many things going on. I mean, the biggest thing he had was high mercury, which he lived in Pittsburgh and had exposed to all the steel plants and they used coal ash for fertilizing land and they put it on the streets in the winter instead of sort of salt for the icy roads. And, he also had a mouthful of fillings. And, he also had a terrible history of irritable bowel for 30 years. And, it was on stellazine, which is just like an antipsychotic. So, it's like a relaxant for your gut. which is terrible. But he had terrible gut issues and bacterial overgrowth and leaky gut and gluten sensitivity. And he also had insulin resistance. He had pre-diabetes so essentially, essentially he had all these problems, heavy metals, microbiome issues, and he had insulin resistance or pre-diabetes which we know drives inflammation in the brain. They're calling Alzheimer's, you know, often type 3 diabetes. and he had all these other biochemical issues genetically like methylation problems, which are the B vitamins that were also driving inflammation in his brain because he wasn't able to produce antioxidants and glutathione. And, when we started to address all these things, we got the mercury out, we fixed his gut, we cleaned up his diet, we got rid of the sugar and starch, we optimized his B vitamins. He literally came back from the dead, like Rip Van Winkle, and was able to function, go back to work, be a functioning member of his family again. This is someone who would have just been said, okay, you have Alzheimer's and you are going to be in a nursing home and that's the end of that. And it was pretty miraculous to see that. It sort of woke me up to how by really being diligent with these patients, you can really help them either completely recover or dramatically recover. And I've seen, you know, the spectrum from, you know, the tough cases of autism, Alzheimer's, you know, depends how much they're, they've got going on, how far down the road they are, but you see amazing stuff. with things like depression, bipolar disease, you know, mood disorders, it's often remarkable how quickly the brain responds, ADD, and it's something that we just, you know, unfortunately are not thinking about that well in traditional medicine. That's really why we do what we do at the Ultra Wellness Center. And we've treated nearly thousands and thousands of patients in this way, and we now do stuff virtually, too, which is kind of fun. So we can see people from all over. We have a great team of physicians and and nutritionists and practitioners who really help guide people through this, this space. Because, you know, what kills me, Todd, and I'm sure it kills you, is you hear a story after story, and I'm sure you get this all the time. Hey, could you help this one? Could you help that one? My mom or my dad or my sister or my friend. And, and, and people are just struggling to find answers. And, you know, when you hear the story, you go, oh, God, I know what's wrong with this person, but it's.

Because we have a certain set of.

Filters or lenses that we look at, and It's so gratifying.

If you love that last video, you.

Should check out the next one for sure on getting the root cause of all disease. Yeah, the easiest trick is just don't eat anything processed. Unless you know what's in it. I mean, if you have to have a list of ingredients, I mean, yes, there's some packaged food that's fine, but if you have to know what it's in it.

So if it says some big chemical.