How To Use Nutrition To Heal The Body & Prevent Cognitive Decline | JJ Virgin

And the worst sugar of all for the brain and for the body overall is fructose. It makes you more insulin resistant. It goes straight to the liver and starts turning into fat. Dr. Hyman says the phrase, I'm gonna steal here because I love it so much that sugar is our number one recreational drug of choice. Like it is the worst for your brain. It's gonna create inflammation. So that's, you know, what do you wanna have not happen? Inflammation. But the other thing that it does is Eating a high sugar impact diet causes insulin resistance. And that really causes problems in the brain because in the brain you need insulin to come up to trigger all the communication, all the firing. And so without that it's like your brain just got slow, old, inflamed and angry, right? And the other part that sugar does is it triggers the reward center in your brain. So this is how we create this whole drug of choice situation is it triggers dopamine and so you just keep coming back for more and more and more. In fact, they did this rat study where they gave the rats the choice between-- first they gave them some kind of an opiate, I think it was morphine, and let them have as much as they wanted. And then they had Oreo cookies and they got to have those. And then they got to choose between them and they chose the Oreos for their reward. So, triggers the reward center in the brain and that's what they saw in that study is that lit up-- they both lit up the same reward towards center in the brain. But the other thing that it does, besides triggering that, so you want to keep going back for that dopamine hit, is that it will drive up serotonin and then deplete it. So then it creates this really bad situation where you just keep needing more and needing more and needing more. So you're needing more, you're creating inflammation in the brain, and then you're creating insulin resistance. So now you don't have the insulin you need up in the brain for the communication. So again, slowing you down, making you inflamed and making you angry. Nothing you want your brain to be. You know, the big challenge we have with sugar is that we've really been looking at it all wrong. I mean, you just don't see that many people nowadays going out and getting a candy bar. We know better than that, but yet they'll get one of those energy bars and they're still loaded with sugar or they'll go drink one of those. The ones that kill me are where it's hiding or disguised as something healthy, like a lot of these smoothies or green drinks that are just a big sugar load. And the big challenge there is that they're a fructose load. and the worst sugar of all for the brain and for the body overall is fructose. It's used a lot because it's sweeter than glucose is, but the challenge is it makes you more insulin resistant. It actually can make your gut more permeable so you're more sensitive to foods and you become food intolerant. It's more aging and it makes you fat. It goes straight to the liver and starts turning into fat. One of the key things, and I think back early on when Grant was a kid in school with bipolar disorder and ADD and all these things, now who knows what those those are all titles. All I know is that if his blood sugar was balanced, everything was good and if it wasn't, things blew up. I still remember when he won some contest, some little reward at school and they gave him a pound bag of M&Ms. Like they give this to a kid. I go, you, don't give a kid pound bag of M&Ms. And then he'd eaten them and they go, He's climbing the walls. Come get him. I'm like, I'm not getting him. He's all yours. So as long as we keep things blood sugar balanced and that goes for all of us. In fact, one of the key things that you can do to tell if you've eaten kind of a hormonal winner for your meal is how long you can go till you need to eat again. This idea that we need to snack every couple of hours is absolutely ridiculous. If you're eating a meal that's very balanced, and I'll talk about what that is, you should be able to go four to six hours before you need to eat again. And so what you want to really look at is the trifecta of protein, fat, and fiber. Because the protein and the fiber are going to slow down stomach emptying and help keep you fuller longer. And then the fat works to trigger the release of some chemicals in the brain to say, oh, we've eaten. and that's why fructose is really problematic because it doesn't trigger that release. So you're eating sugar, you're getting fat, and you're still hungry, which is a rotten way to be. So it's actually really simple to do this. All you need to do is make sure you're getting some clean protein. And this is where we really want to think, you know, there's such arguments right now over vegan and paleo and Pegan and high fat and low fat. And it's like, here's the thing that we know. You can put all of us in a room and we'd all agree that you should unprocess your process your diet. Like we should be eating real food. And that ideally you want to make sure you're getting a lot of non-starchy vegetables, right? So that's key and important and we don't want to go get genetically modified food because that creates its own set of problems. But beyond that, we also need to make sure that we're eating animal sources of protein, if we're eating animal sources of protein, that have eaten the right foods too. So while we're choosing the right foods, which is loads of non-starchy vegetables, a great rainbow of colors so we have these antioxidants that reduce inflammation, and then it will give us some fiber, some low sugar impact carbohydrates, things like squashes or pumpkins or wild rice, especially staying away from things like gluten that are toxic to the brain. And then make sure that the animal protein sources are wild or sustainable or pastured so that Not only is it that you are what you eat, it's you are what you eat eight. So if you're eating these factory cows and factory chickens that are fed genetically modified corn and soy, now you have a problem too because this is getting into you too. So remember it's not just you are what you eat, it's you are what you eat eight. So you're getting the fiber from the non-starchy vegetables and the low sugar impact carbs. You're getting the clean protein from things like pastured pork and chicken and grass-fed beef and wild fish. And then you're getting healthy fat some from that. and that's why that's key, because toxins are stored in fat. So if you're eating animals fed toxic feed, you're getting toxins. It also changes the fatty acid profile to favor inflammatory fats, not non-inflammatory fats. But then in terms of healthy fats, I think, like avocado is one of the most miraculous foods on the planet. So is coconut oil. I know there's all this bashing right now of coconut oil, and, and actually people saying you should eat corn oil, which I In a state of shock when I saw it, because if you just look at the pathways and the science tells you everything, that's an inflammatory fat and it's one of the most genetically modified crops there are. So that's a no-go. Nuts and seeds, especially if you could soak them and dehydrate them or low roast them, wild fish, olives and olive oil. So healthy fats are key because they're going to help you feel fuller longer. So it's gonna help again keep your blood sugar stable with the protein and the fiber and then stretch that meal time out. So when my son was 16, he was crossing the street and he was hit by a car. We estimate maybe 40 miles an hour, though no one saw it happen. And he was literally left for dead in the street. The woman got out of her car, gasped, and drove off. And thankfully a neighbor pulled up, called 911, and he was airlifted to the local hospital. When we got there, The doctors told us that we needed to let him go. He had a torn aorta, which kills 90% of the people on the scene, and it had to be repaired. But the challenge was they couldn't repair it at that hospital because he had a severe traumatic brain injury. And in order to fix it, they had to do it without a blood thinner. So they had to airlift him to another hospital. And the doctor said he would never survive another airlift. And even if he did, he wouldn't survive the surgery. And even if you were managing survive both those things, the chance he'd ever be normal was minuscule. And my then 15-year-old son looked at that doctor and said, so maybe like a 0.25% chance he'd make it. And the doctor said, that sounds about right. And he goes, we'll take those odds. And he said to me, he goes, well, you know, 0.25 is not zero, and what do we have to lose? And any parent watching this, I think, would say, hey, I'm gonna fight. Right, I'm going to fight for my son's life. So we get to the next hospital. He survives the airlift. We have an amazing surgical team, five different surgical teams working on him. He survives the surgery, and then he is in a deep coma. And the neurosurgical team says, you know, we don't know if he'll ever wake up. We have no idea if he does, you know, what his life will be like. And I remember standing there hearing this and holding my son's hand. and telling him, and there were like two fingers I could hold. Everything else was either bandaged or covered with road rash. He had 13 fractures, bones literally sticking through his skin. And I said, Grant, this is gonna be the best thing that ever happened to you, which is a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, this was looking so bleak, but I had to have hope. And I said, you,'re going to be 110%. And from that point, I was scared to death. I mean, this was like the worst thing a parent could ever face, but I just went with this, how do I get my son to be 110%? Now, the doctors thought I was crazy, but it's interesting because when you start to lead with that rather than let's just get him to survive, I think everybody starts to treat it a little bit differently. Some of the doctors just kind of let me do some of the things I was doing. Like immediately, I put an SOS out to all my friends on Facebook, and I had incredible help coming into the hospital early on. I had Dr. Hila Cass coming in right away, Dr. Daniel Aman. And so we were able to kind of start to do some things that you wouldn't normally get to do and that the hospital actually wouldn't let us do, but we did sort of circuitously, that I really believe are the reason that he's not only here today, but he's actually 110%. So right away, the first thing, the very first thing that I did was I started taking things to help me with stress. So I started doing some some stuff to support myself because I knew that in order to show up for my son in the hospital, I couldn't get sick. He was in the ICU and we had to go in there fully gowned and masked and gloved. So I made sure I put my self-care first and I think that's so important for every parent here because we tend to put ourselves last. And I knew if I was making life or death decisions, I had to be totally focused and game on. Then one of the first things that we were able to do was use essential oils and it wasn't something I was remotely familiar with. Someone came in and started using them with him and all I knew was that for the first time I started to see some response from him. He wiggled his nose, he wiggled his fingers, which gave me some hope. We started using progesterone cream, which we were able to rub on him because it was a cream. And there was some research out of Emory by Dr. Donald Stein showing that it helps reduce inflammation, which is the big thing you've got to do right now is your brain is just so inflamed. He looked like the Incredible Hulk in the middle of the pediatric ICU. You'd walk in and he was so blown up. up from all the swelling from 13 fractures and all of the road rash. But then the next thing that I wanted to do, and this is where it became quite a challenge, was he'd been on five grams of fish oil prior to the accident. And I'm on a mission to get everybody on fish oil because I know that one of the reasons he's actually with us today was because his brain was protected going into this. because fish oil protects your brain from injury. And you never know when you're going to hurt your brain. And the chances we're going to hurt our brain is almost 100%, you know, we all hit our heads. But I knew I wanted to get him back on his fish oil, and that's where the battle began because he was bleeding and they were afraid that the fish oil was going to increase his bleed time, and so they didn't want to do it. And I got them to go to 2 grams, but I knew we needed to be much higher than that. The doses that they do in this situation is anywhere from 10 to 20 grams. and I brought them all the research. Dr. Barry Sears actually sent it to me. And I had Dr. Michael Lewis who wrote, When Brains Collide, helping me with this. And they just, I had all the research and they go, nope, we won't do it. It's going to cause increased bleeding even though there was nothing to show it would. So when he spit out his feeding tube, which he did himself, we started doing it ourselves. So first I got him up to five grams and we would always do it right around when they were going to test his bleeding time. so I could check that. We never saw any change in his bleeding time. We got him up to 10 grams at the first hospital. And then when we went to the second hospital, we got him up to 20 grams. And it was very interesting because as we increased his fish oil, you could, when I went to the higher dose fish oil, he went from barely speaking to speaking in sentences. So it's very interesting because when I went through all of this, what I was told when Grant was coming out of the coma was that there was nothing that you could do. That the brain has its own time schedule and now we wait. And I remember, you know, I'd already sent the SOS out to all of my friends in the medical community and I'd been so fortunate to get all of this information back. And so I knew that waiting was not the right thing to do and it just doesn't ever make sense. First of all, I'm not patient so I'm not gonna wait. But I said to this doctor, I said, so there's nothing we can do? And she goes, Nope. Not a thing. And that's when I knew that I was just going to have to take responsibility. And I think that a key through line for all of this is that we've got to take responsibility for our health and the health of our loved ones. No one's going to care as much as we do and no one understands our own body and are the people closest to us like we do. So I was able to communicate, especially when we went to the second hospital where they were much more open. I got to the second hospital, Children's Hospital, Los Angeles. And I said, he's on 20 grams of fish oil. And they go, okay. They actually didn't check it. By then he had massive files, so it would have been a nightmare to look for it. But they were like, okay, that's great. And they put him on it. And they were letting me do a lot more integrated approach. And I actually got into all the meetings with the entire team and talked about what I want to do from my side. Because, you know, here I am. I'm a mom. I'm a nutritionist. I've been working with my son and helping him with his bipolar disorder for years. So, you know, as he was coming out of this coma, I knew best what to look for. I knew when he was going to get irritated, when he needed to rest more than they would. So we all worked together on it. But I think the frustrating thing here is no one person is alike, no one brain injury is alike. To try to do one single protocol with a study, I don't even know how you would do it. And so the obvious thing to do is to look at the pathways and make the decisions. And here I looked at risk/reward. There wasn't any risk for putting them on the high-dose fish oil. Their perceived risk of increasing bleed time was not real. And the reward, the payoff, was huge. And there were already cases that had been out, the coal miner, Bobby Gazimy, that had shown huge success, so why not try? So when you look at this, and again, you know, this is the most extreme case, but that's where you really can learn. And I've told my son, Grant, I said, you know, honey, you're going to be a lab rat here. He goes, okay, you know. So he's one who can really show us, because if it works in an extreme case, think what it can do for all of us. One of the things that we have to look at is our brains are easily injured. you know, kind of think of like having an egg into a hard head. And we hit our head, we've got vibration injuries, we've got all sorts of toxic substances that we're breathing or drinking or ingesting, not that we're trying to, but they're in so many of the foods that we eat and the air that we breathe. So we're damaging our brain and it gets inflamed. And one of the key things that fats can do is help put that fire out, is help reduce that inflammation. But the other thing that they're key for is, you know, you can't make, you can't communicate well without having good flow. So they help with cell membrane fluidity and you've got to have that in order to have your brain working well. So it's interesting because so many people as I was going through this, because this whole time I'm going through this with my son and it was four and a half months in the hospital, that actually was easier than the four and a half years since then of helping someone come through a traumatic brain injury. But during that same time, I'm the primary financial support for my family. I've got two kids. I had a big book launching and three more books. I'm running a company. I'm doing all of this. And people are like, How the heck are you doing this? I could never do that. And I said, you, know what? Yes, you could and you would. We're never better than when we're challenged. And when people are saying, well, how did you do that? I really realized that it all came down to mindset. So many people ask me, what's the number one thing that's helped your son? Well, the number one thing that helped my son was, first of all, my younger son saying, we'll take those odds, us not going along with the first doctor who, you know, on his, he did a lot to keep my son alive. But he looked at the situation and to him he didn't see that there was a miracle possible, right? My mindset said, Hey, you know, let's be open to possibility. He's not dead yet. We've got to try. And the big change for Grant was standing in that hospital and saying, what do we need to do to help him be 110%? It's a question that I've asked every single day since then. And this hasn't been an easy path. He's been suicidal multiple times, which 25% of people with brain injuries are suicidal. This is a major problem out there. We tend to think of it as something that happens to our soldiers or football players, but it happens because of domestic violence. It's leading cause of death in children. It's 1.7 million people a year getting a traumatic brain injury. This is a major problem. Over 5 million people are disabled at any time in the US with it, and you can turn it around. And you can turn it around any time. If you hurt your head five years ago, you can still massively improve it, but it's got to start with asking the right question. So for me it was how do I get my son to be 110% and then looking at every single thing that's out there that I could bring in to help him. And you know I was looking as in preparing for this of like what did we do? And it's this huge long list of things. Now within that I can tell you the things that were most successful for us, but that's us. It may be different for someone else, but it's asking that right question. that made all the difference. My son, prior to this, early on had bipolar disorder. He still has bipolar disorder. But that led me down the path in the first place and ultimately probably saved his life because he was on high-dose fish oil to start with that we'd done for the bipolar disorder. Here's the thing, we've all got something. Everybody does. Everybody's got something. I look at some of these things and I go, what if his bipolar disorder is actually an advantage? what if ADD is actually an advantage? What if there are things about that that are going to be their advantages and we can, you know, deal with the rest? The first things that I think we need to always start with are cleaning up the diet and helping the gut as much as possible because there's so much that we can do that make a major difference and even if it only made a 10 or 20% difference, hey, that matters. And so whether you are a parent with a child with ADD or autism or bipolar disorder or you are, or whether everyone's totally what we'd call normal, which I don't know what normal is, you actually still want to do all the same things. Eat a diet that helps you maintain good blood sugar control and blood sugar balance. Eat good healthy fats to help nourish the brain and reduce the inflammation. Exercise, because if you look at the one thing that's probably the most key thing for having a healthy brain, My gosh, exercise is so key for that. In fact, there's a great study that UCLA did where they showed that if rats don't exercise, their memory goes down, they slow down, but the minute they're exercising, they have better executive function, they have better memory, their brain's working well. So this is one of the key things that we can do. And then really giving your child a sense of connection and purpose, so it's the same things that we all need that are good for everybody. And it's interesting as Grant's gone through this process over the last five years intuitively he started doing so many things along with all the stuff I was doing. He started meditating, he started gardening and getting into the ground and earthing, he started doing high intensity interval training, he started doing the things that he needed to heal his brain too. It's like his body knew best. The simplest thing that exercise does to help the brain is it gets a little bit blood flow to the brain, and you want more blood flow to the brain. So even though you think, oh, I'm out there exercising and it's making blood flow go to the working muscles, yes, it does, but there's also a shunt of blood to the brain. So you want more blood flow to the brain. That's key. Another key thing that it does, it's the single best, like, happy drug out there, because it will help raise endorphins so you'll feel better and lower stress hormones, which is the key component. You're raising up the good guys and lowering some stress hormones so you'll feel better. And it helps you, of course, with better all the things that can happen when you have a brain injury where you get very fixed and you're not very flexible and your cognition goes down and you can't remember things. Exercise helps counteract all of that. Now, the research for that is all done on aerobic exercise, but I like to do aerobic exercise in the form of high intensity interval training. And I think that I've seen some studies now showing that that actually just gets you those effects faster and more intensely, and that makes sense to me because high intensity interval training gets all of the good from aerobic training and takes out the bad. When you do endurance style training, you create more oxidative stress. You're breathing heavier over an extended period of time, and you create stress on your body and you lower your immune system. You can still get the benefits of what you would with aerobic training, which is all the blood flow and lowering blood pressure and blood flow to the brain with high intensity interval training. But you train your sympathetic nervous system to handle stress better because you go hard and then easy and hard and then easy. Like all contrast endurance training would be going out for a 60 minute jog and high intensity interval training would be walk for a minute, sprint for a minute, walk for two minutes, sprint for a minute and do that to accumulate four to eight total minutes of sprints. so you're going to do it in 10 to 20 minutes. When you do that, you actually raise growth hormone, you raise anabolic hormones, you don't have the oxidative stress that you had from the other exercise, you don't impact your immune system like you did with the other exercise. And the key most important thing about it is that it doesn't take much time. And I started out in this world as a personal trainer 30 years ago, and the number one reason people didn't exercise is because they they didn't have time. And back then we used to tell them that you had to do it for at least 30 minutes or it didn't matter, which is ridiculous. But the second reason was they didn't want to go to the gym. And so this is something you can do anywhere and you don't need a gym. So that's, to me, the foundation for exercise is to do aerobic training in the form of high intensity interval training. And again, because of the blood flow, because of the impact that it does to all of the great brain chemicals, and because it really gets, it also increases your brain volume, it increases your growth factors, so it gets everything growing, moving, and communicating in your brain. So it was interesting when Grant was in the hospital at Children's Hospital, LA, they had such an amazing program and one of the first things they started to do with him was take him into this gym. Now, I actually snuck in there with him and then I got in trouble because I was having him do push-ups on his knees, all sorts of stuff. They're like, he's not ready. I go, yes he is. He likes to be challenged. But, you know, it's interesting. He was still in a wheelchair at the time because he had a crushed heel and there were things that we found that we could do. You can use bands, you can use balls. So I would say look for whatever you can do if you can get the person in the pool. We had Grant early on when they, we got him out on furlough, we took him to the pool and we put him in there and he swam completely coordinated. It was amazing, things he couldn't do yet on land he could do in the pool. So what I always say is always look for the way and if there is no way to do that, then the next level would be to go to meditation. So it's interesting, I have never been a meditator. I'm actually about to take my first class with Emily Fletcher and I do tapping instead. I'm a big fan of the Ortenzis and Nick Ortner taught me tapping. So I do tapping and that's one of the things that got me through a bunch of this stress with Grant. But Grant found meditation and he started doing it himself. And what was so interesting is one of the things that happens as you come through a brain injury is you lose your internal editor. You tend to be really into your amygdala and into flight or fight. And so he was easily triggered and it was really difficult to get him out into any kind of social situation, yet he needed that. that isolation was really damaging. It's damaging to everyone. They actually, there was a study that showed that social isolation is more damaging than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. So he needed that connection, but it would trigger him. And what meditation does for him is actually calm down that amygdala, get him out of flight and fight. So he now can tell when he's getting there, and he goes into his room and meditates. and it's incredible. So that's what I see. I'm gonna now learn how to do this. But for those of us that are anxious or start to get that fear up, this is one of the ways that we can cool that down and get out of our flight and fight. As someone comes out of a brain injury, here's what I was told. I was told when he comes out of this brain injury, it's gonna be ugly. Now, I'd never been around this. All I'd seen was television shows where people wake up and they go, you know, oh, I love you. Hi. You know, I thought Grant would wake up out of his coma, just open his eyes, look at me and say, hi, Mom. That's what I thought. I did not think that he would open his eyes, stare off into space and move his arm repeatedly for days on end. He didn't talk. He couldn't make any eye contact, nothing. He came out of a coma over time. But as he started to become more aware, he started to become super agitated. And I would see this little this thing coming up here. And it was like. It was like the Incredible Hulk starting to turn green. And when it did, we had to shoot him basically with tranquilizers to keep him from going berserk. When I first walked into the hospital, when he was starting to get like this, he actually was in a straight jacket. And that's when I knew I was like, okay, we have to do something here. This is not how he's gonna get better. And so one of the things that happens as someone comes out of a brain injury is they are in. flight or fight. That's the first thing that starts to wake up. And it's happened to us now repeatedly because we've been doing stem cell injections into a spine. And when we do them, that's the first thing that comes back up online, is that comes up more. And what it does is makes you, it's like you lose your filter. You're gonna say or do whatever you think. If you think someone's attacking you, you'll hit them. If you feel like, you know, you're scared, you'll yell. And that doesn't work in society very well. So what he's done to counteract that is meditation and learning how to control his brain back. That combined with he's been doing neurofeedback and that's helped a lot too because now he can recognize when it's coming and he knows what to do. You know, you look at anything. I come from the weight loss world and while there's never one diet that's perfect for everybody, that's why I always look at this whole thing like the current fight over all this stuff. I'm like, okay, there isn't one diet for everybody. And, you know, when you have a brain injury, it's like, what's the extent of the brain injury? Was this the first brain injury? Was it a vibration brain injury? Was it a hard hit? What else was going on with Grant as he was waking up? We knew that I had a son with bipolar disorder waking up, which bipolar brains are less stable brains to begin with. Brain injuries are unstable brains. I was you know, who's going to wake up here? We didn't really know. And so there was things specific that we needed to do there to really help stabilize his brain. CBD has been an amazing thing for him. But when you look at it, there's still common factors for everybody that we can look at. Number one, you must reduce the inflammation. So what things are going to be key there? That's where, like, if I could pull out my key most favorite things, fish oil, of course, would be the number one. exercise, CBD, besides helping with brain stability, it also helps with reducing inflammation, and then curcumin. So those were some of the key things that we started to do there. And then you've got to stabilize the brain. And in fact, you know, we've had them on medications to start with because it's, that is so key they can go into seizures. But ketogenic diet has been a key player here to help in MCT oil. So what things I always looked at, I went, okay, what were the pathways? how do we get them off the medication as quickly as possible? And then what things could we do diet-wise there? So we've got to do stuff to help stabilize the brain quickly. Ketogenic diets have been used for decades for seizures. So that's another one, an MCT oil there to help. And then inflammation and stabilizing the brain and balancing your blood sugar is another key one. And then of course, getting the blood flow to the brain. So we were doing ginkgo, fish oil is going to help there with cell membrane fluidity and exercise is key, and recovery and rest. When he first was coming out of the brain injury, it was like raising a really big baby. It reminded me of when he was six months old, he just was now 150 pounds and six feet tall, and he needed to get stimulated and then rest. and stimulated and then rest. So he was sleeping, gosh, you know, about 18 hours out of the day. And he would sleep throughout the night and then throughout the day we would go and stress him and then let him recover and stress him and recover. And so that's another key thing that you have to look at with the brain injury is really giving adequate rest and recovery. You do want to stress them, so that they can start to get better, right? Just like you have to stress the muscle, but then you have to give them adequate rest and recovery. And still today now, he sleeps about 10 hours a night. He's still getting through it. And that's another key thing is you hear that, okay, you've got, it's whatever happens in the first six months or whatever happens in the first year, and that's not true. Yes, it's super important to get in this and start reducing the inflammation and help the healing as quickly as possible. But you can do these things to help heal your brain years later. It's never too late. You can always do these things. The most important thing that I've seen with Grant is that it's never too late and there's always something else that you can do. When Grant was going through this process there was a bit there where he was really suicidal and he was like, I don't know why I'm here. I don't know what my point is, and I said, you know, Grant, your purpose is to show people what's possible. My son was basically dead on the street. The doctors told us to let him die. They didn't think he'd ever wake up. They didn't think he'd ever walk. They didn't think he'd ever hear. And he's now better than he was before the accident. And he'll continue to get better. And now he knows his purpose is to show people what's possible. The biggest limiter to what's possible is our mindset. that tells us can't do it. But if you flip that around and go, okay, what do I need to do to be 110% and you open yourself up to possibility, anything is.

The brain is made of fat, but not just any fat. It's made of a type of fat that is most prone to oxidation, most vulnerable to what's called oxidative stress. And so, when you eat an avocado, which is rich in vitamin E, a fat-soluble antioxidant, it literally is one of the most powerful brain anti-aging foods that you can consume. It's also loaded with fiber, which makes it satiating and it helps support gut bacteria, which is promotive of a healthy gut microbiome. It contains potassium, which we know is really important for helping maintain a healthy level of blood pressure. And it also contains compounds called carotenoids, which we know protect neural tissue both in our eyes and in our brain. This is one of the reasons why avocados and dark leafy greens are protective against age-related macular degeneration. They contain these carotenoids, which we now know also protect brain health. So that's one of my favorite foods, avocados.

Yeah, the thing, my problem, my problem with that is it often comes in the form of guacamole. And unless you order the vegetable sticks instead of the chips, it's a danger zone for me because I can, I just kind of like, those chips are, I don't like crack.

I don't know why, but if anybody else has had those corn chip thing, it's like I can't eat them because I just can't stop. Yeah, I'm the same way. I think it's better to, for me, well, it's that slogan, once you pop, you can't stop. We know now, thanks to scientific research, that's a slogan with scientific backing at this point. That is a truism at this point, right? Because foods like tortilla chips are hyper palatable. They combine salt, fat, flour, and they're so calorie dense that it would have actually been a life saving food potentially for a hunter gatherer, right? Well, that's why, that's why I actually.

Am afraid of Mexican restaurants now. I'm like, oh, Mexican, I'm gonna, and then someone orders, I don't order that, I usually don't order the chips and guacamole.

Then someone's like, bring the chips.

I'm like, oh no, I'm the same way.

I'm the same way. You wanna be a crack addict and crack.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing is we feel as though we, I feel like there's this innate sense that we should be able to moderate our consumption of those foods. right? That's part of having a healthy relationship with food. However, I think what most people fail to realize and what's certainly not acknowledged by even our most esteemed healthcare professionals and, and, and those in the nutritional orthodoxy, it's that these foods are not designed to be consumed in moderation. They're hyper palatable and by the time you've filled yourself up on them, you've already over consumed them. Unfortunately, people tend to experience a sense of moral failure when they're not able to stop eating the chips, right?

Yeah.

At a reasonable level of consumption. But that's because your brain has been honed by millennia where food scarcity was a real problem. We didn't have food security the way that we have now for the vast majority of our evolution. So, as I mentioned, those chips, as calorie dense as they are, would have been an amazing food for a hunter-gatherer who didn't have access to GrubHub on their phones or a supermarket on every corner.

And, that's why it's easy to eat an entire bag of corn chips, but no one's going to be binging on 12 avocados, right?

There you go. Because avocados are, they're satiating in a way that, in a way that ultra processed foods simply aren't. Another example of a, of a brain food.

Before you, before you jump on the next example, I just want to highlight what you just said because There's been an elegant study done by Dave, by Kevin Hall looking at feeding people an unlimited amount of ultra processed food or nourishing whole foods. And they let them eat whatever they want and they tracked over a few weeks, they tracked their, their consumption and their, and their actual weight gain. And they found that the ultra processed food group essentially ate about 500 calories more a day. to the people eating whole foods and they gain obviously more weight. So, you know, it really speaks to this whole idea that, that there's some nutritional intelligence that we have that causes us to seek nutrients in our diet. The problem is when we don't find them, we keep eating more. It's like looking for love in all the wrong places, you know? And we, we end up just over consuming because we're not getting the nutrients we need. And we see this, like with kids, for example, we've talked about this on the podcast. who are iron deficient, they'll eat dirt. They'll eat dirt because dirt has iron. So in animal studies, and we've had Fred Provenza on the podcast, there's an innate nutritional wisdom where they're sampling maybe up to 50 to 100 different plants to get the medicinal properties of each of these plants to heal their body, to make it work properly, and they know when to stop. We don't, we don't have that nutritional intelligence anymore. And there was a study done decades ago, I think in the 20s maybe of orphans. And I've talked about this in the podcast too, but the orphans were led to eat whatever they want, brain, kidney, liver, weird vegetables. Kind of they give them an array of foods that were nutritionally dense that you think kids wouldn't eat, right? But kids are gonna eat liver on their own or kidney. And then they, then they, then they kind of track what they did. And these kids were far at the end of this study were far more healthy. and far more robust because they chose all this variety of weird foods that actually their body's own nutritional intelligence told them to eat. But we lose that as we get older because our brain chemistry, metabolism, immune system, microbiome, all of it's been high, hormones have been hijacked by the food industry deliberately. So when you, when you have that deliberate usurping of your own kind of internal guidance system and wisdom about what eat, we end up in this chaotic state of constantly searching for ingredients and nutrients and compounds that we're needing to survive, but we can't get from the food. So we just keep eating more and more and more. That's, that's really the problem.

Yeah, that's the, the movement to, towards in what's been called intuitive eating. That's why I think that that's such a short-sighted and, and not very evidence-based initiative, because When I sample the pint of ice cream that's sitting in my freezer right now, intuitively what my body wants is to eat the whole pint.

Oh, yeah.

So, I agree with you that we need to get back to, we need to get back to foods that are less industrially processed. And you bring up an interesting point. I mean, the tendency to over-consume ultra-processed foods, I think it's really important for people to know the three things that make a food satiating. Yeah. Because then they can use this as a tool in their own lives. The first thing that makes a food satiating is its protein content. So there's actually the protein leverage hypothesis, which stipulates that our hunger mechanisms are driven in large part by our necessity for protein, which is an essential nutrient.

Right.

And not just any, any type of protein, high quality protein. And the protein leverage hypothesis. I mean, people should remember that protein can be used powerfully to leverage. as a way to kill hunger. And unfortunately, ultra processed foods are depleted of protein in part because protein is the most expensive macronutrient. So typically with ultra processed foods, what you get is just carbs and fat, some combination of energy rich carbs and fat, right? And so protein, protein is crucially important. One of the major factors that makes a food satiating. The second aspect would be its fiber content because fiber mechanically stretches out the stomach. It's not an essential nutrient, but it does draw water. It does absorb water and so it stretches out the stomach, which turns off the release of the hormone ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone. Usually ultra processed foods are depleted of fiber, right? It's one of the reasons why your average American today consumes between six to 10 grams of fiber every day, whereas one of our hunter-gatherer ancestors probably consumed.

About 150 grams a day. Yeah, that, that that reminds me of that study by Dennis Burker, where he looked at hunter-gatherers who'd moved to the city and became urbanized in Africa compared to their hunter-gatherer neighbors. And the hunter-gatherers had stool weights of four, of two pounds, and the city dwellers had stool weights of four ounces. So their poop was just a little hard poop. And the reason is all the fiber and the tubers and the nutrient-dense food. So you said fiber is not an essential nutrient. It, it isn't for us. But it's essential for the microbiome. Our microbiome is essential for us to stay healthy.

So in a sense, it is really an essential nutrient. It is, yeah, through the lens of the microbiome. Absolutely. It is. And it certainly makes life better. Studies show that people who consume more fiber have reduced inflammation. They live longer. So it's definitely, I would call it a conditionally essential nutrient. Absolutely. That we definitely want to look to consume. more of. And then the third factor that makes a food satiating is its water content. Because when water ceased to be available for hunter-gatherer, the second best place that they would look to get their, to meet their requirements for hydration would be food, right? Food is actually a viable source of water and shelf stable, ultra processed foods are, are depleted of water because water impedes a food's shelf stability because it allows mold to grow. And so these are the three factors that are, that are all but missing in ultra processed foods and, and all, always very present in, minimally processed whole foods. So definitely worth, worth seeking out, you know, any of those nutrients, ideally.

Didn't you, didn't you miss the most satiating nutrient of all on our, which is fat.

Fat is, is satiating. Yeah, it slows, it slows the absorption of food. It, it slows gastric emptying. so that's why, well, most, most high protein foods are gonna come with a, are gonna have a fat source, right? Grass-fed beef, for example, is a good source of healthful fat. Wild fatty fish, great source of fat. And so fat is fat basically. Here's the, here's what fat does. Fat prolongs the satiety effect. The protein fiber, very, very satiating, but fat prolongs that effect so that you're not hungry 30 minutes later. So it's definitely good to to look and find healthful sources of fat.

And by the way, the thing that makes you hungry is sugar. Is basically when you, when you eat a lot of carbs and sugar, you just get hungrier and hungrier because you produce more insulin, which triggers all these secondary downstream biochemical challenges, changes that actually lead to increased hunger. So the more you carbs you eat, the more you wanna eat. And the less you eat, the less you wanna eat. I mean, you know that from your own experience. So do I. It's like, wow. God, that bagel doesn't look like food to me anymore. Or that muffin doesn't look like food or cookie. Why would I ever eat a cookie? It's not that you're depriving yourself, it.

Just stops looking appealing. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Dr. Hyman, there was this really fascinating study that I'm sure you're familiar with. You might have even talked about it on your podcast, but they basically took, scientists took two porridges. They were controlled for carbohydrate content and calorie content. It was just two wheat porridges that were identical in terms of their overall nutrition facts. But the difference was the degree of processing. So one was a more coarsely ground porridge and the other was a more finely ground porridge. And it's the finely ground porridge that sent subjects blood sugar through the roof and led to a higher release of insulin. But what was most interesting about that study was that in the post-absorptive state, so after they consumed the more finely ground porridge, the finely ground porridge sent their blood sugar below baseline. which the more coarsely ground porridge didn't do. And when your blood sugar goes below baseline, what that is is reactive hypoglycemia. And that can trigger in people that are susceptible to anxiety, it can trigger anxiety, it can increase hunger, that sensation of hanger. And that was, the capacity for the food to do that was driven purely by the degree of processing that the food had undergone. The more finely ground porridge was more akin to a sugar Right? Because it was just so easy for the subject's bodies to assimilate. Whereas the more coarsely ground, the less processed version of the porridge actually sent, brought subjects blood sugar back down to baseline really smoothly and evenly. So that's why you definitely want to avoid added sugar to the best of your ability and also reach for foods that are, that are less processed because this is not about calories. This is not about carbohydrate content. This was purely about the the degree of processing that that food is undergone.

Yeah.

So it's, so great point.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, it goes without saying, people listening to the podcast understand by now that, you know, the ultra processed food is the number one killer on the planet. Like if you want to do one thing to improve the quality of your health is never eat ultra processed food. And what is ultra processed food is basically anything that comes from a factory unless you recognize the ingredients. And then, and I always, the rule is if you, if you can basically cover the front of the package and just read the ingredient list and know what it is, it's probably okay to eat. If it says tomatoes, water and salt or sardines, olive oil and salt, you know what's in the can. But if it's got 45 ingredients, most of which you can't pronounce or in Latin, and you have no idea what.

It is, they can't tell if it's a corn dog or a Pop-Tart from the label, then you shouldn't eat it.

Absolutely. Real foods don't have extensive ingredients lists. They are the ingredients. They are the ingredients. I said, yeah, exactly. Like an avocado doesn't have a nutrition facts label or an ingredient list. It's an avocado. No, it should have, it should have.

An ingredient list of phytochemicals so people can see what they're actually getting. It should, you're right. But I mean, the, the, and the biggest irony is that they don't make health claims either, like avocados, grass-fed beef, wild salmon, eggs, the, you know, they don't, they don't make health claims.

It's the, it's the ultra processed foods, the kinds of foods that have ads on TV, right? Those are the ones that, that are making all the health claims and yet those are the worst foods for you. It's generally true.

Yeah.

So we've got, we've got a really beautiful insight here, which is one, that we should be eating phytonutrient dense food. We're gonna talk about some more genius foods, but two, the quality of our food and the ability to understand what makes us feel satisfied really are key principles. So protein, fiber, water, fat are kind of the secrets to keeping your metabolism healthy. and you said that, you know, there's, there's no biological requirement for grains. It's even a step further. I would say there's no actual biological requirement for carbohydrates. There's no, there's no essential carbohydrates. So there's essential fatty acids, essential amino acids, but there's no essential carbohydrates. So you literally don't have to eat any carbohydrates. But with that said, I often also say that carbohydrates are the single most important food for long-term health and longevity. and what I mean by that is that vegetables are carbohydrates. And they, they do contain some protein and sometimes fat, depending on the vegetable, but essentially they're phytochemically rich foods. So phytochemical richness is such a key principle that most of us don't pay attention to. And, and when you talk about a genius foods, you're often talking about the phytochemical richness of the food. So tell us some more about other genius foods that we should be focused.

On, particularly in terms of the brain. Yeah, so I mean phyto phytochemicals are, are abundant in avocados, dark leafy greens, but because we already talked about avocados, I feel like it's, we should ping pong and talk about a, a good protein source, like a grass finished beef, I think is a, a powerful brain food, for people. It's, it's actually one of the more controversial recommendations, but when you look at, at grass fed and finished beef, it's a, it's a great source of vitamin E, which I talked about as being a powerful fat protecting antioxidant. You find three times the vitamin E. in grass finished beef, as you find in grain finished beef. It's also a great source of a compound called creatine, which supports brain energy metabolism. So people who don't regularly consume creatine, which is found naturally in beef and fish, and you give them supplemental creatine, you see an improvement in their cognitive function. So we know that dietary creatine plays an important role in good brain health and good brain function. our brain's level of creatine tends to decline with age and is also apparently depleted in carriers of the APOE4 allele, which is the most well-defined Alzheimer's risk gene. So I'm a big advocate of, in general, foods that contain creatine naturally. Grass-fed beef is a viable source.

So let's pause there for a minute because I agree with you. I'm just, just putting it out there. I think there's so much confusion about meat. And as we were joking before the podcast, it's not the cow, it's the how. Can you, can you break down for us the conversation that, that is raging today, which is that one meat, if we eat it, is going to cause heart attacks, cancer and death and shorten your life. And two, that it's the worst possible thing we can do for the planet.

Mm-.

And it's obviously very inhumane. So how do we, how do we, how do we tackle those three arguments against meat? Because you just said something that was really important, which is that meat is an essential part of our diet for keeping us healthy, particularly our brain health and our muscle health and so many other things in our immune system. How do you navigate this land minefield of controversy between, you know, meat eating and veganism?

Yeah, it's a great question. And it's a question that requires a nuanced answer, but the reality is that we have no good evidence to say that beef is unhealthy, right? We have lots of evidence to the contrary. We have mechanistic plausibility suggesting that beef provides very important nutrients, nutrients that in particular tend to be under consumed today. like vitamin B12, zinc. The problem is that much of our nutritional recommendations come from their origins are what's called nutritional epidemiology, which is one of the primary tools used in nutrition science because getting people to adhere to various diets as part of clinical trials, it's just not feasible for the human animal, right? So that's just the, that's not a tool that's very viable with regard to nutrition science. So instead what we look at is nutritional epidemiology, observational studies. We look at populations, we see what they eat, and then we associate those observations with their health outcomes. And the problem with meat is that it's mired by the observations associated with meat consumption is mired by what's called healthy user bias. So people who consume more meat tend to smoke more, they tend to be more sedentary. and this is true with all meat, but it's certainly true and especially true, rather, with processed meat consumption. So processed meat consumption, if you would imagine what processed meat, the form that processed meat takes in the standard American diet, it's hot dogs, it's chicken nuggets, it's Subway sandwich. That's processed meat, right? So you take a meal, what is.

There 38 different ingredients in a chicken nugget or something? Yeah, most of which are not chicken.

And people are consuming these food products, right? These food-like products with an abundance of white refined flour, with a soft drink, with a large fries. They're doing unhealthy things in their lives, generally speaking, because I mean somebody who's eating fast food on a regular basis, I mean is probably not adhering to the most optimized lifestyle, right? So, that's observationally, that's what we tend to see. But now, observational research is getting better and better and better, and we're able to control for those different variables. And what you see is what is that when people consume meat and overall diet quality is high, meat consumption is not associated with any of those bad things, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, nothing like that.

Yeah.

And, and, and that, and that makes perfect sense because meat is a, is a, a, a pristine source of protein, an abundance of micronutrients, which we know support metabolic health, which only one in 10% of the US population has metabolic health, right? Because nine in 10 have some degree of metabolic illness. And, and I'll just, you know, to cap it, there's no, there has been no randomized control trial to show us that red meat consumption is, is, is causally related to any negative health outcome. Again, the opposite is true.

So, I mean, the only, the only mechanistic thing that's been looked at is TMAO, which is looking at a metabolite that comes from eating certain compounds in meat that are produced by certain bacteria in the gut that's going to be linked to increased risk of heart attack on a mechanistic level. What do you think of that data?

TMAO is also abundant in fish and fish consumption is associated with better cardiovascular health and certainly better neurological health. So we can't, we can't just isolate these mechanisms and then make these leaps in terms of our assumptions about those foods.

Well, at Cleveland Clinic, when they did this study, it was fascinating because they looked at what happened, you know, when they, you know, fed vegans meat, like nothing happened because their microbiome was already pre-built up with, with healthy microbiome because they're eating a lot of plant foods and plant rich foods and fiber, which is good. And, and also he found that if you drink wine and have false vinegar and olive oil, you actually mitigate the effects of meat on TMAO production. meat because of all the various kinds of phytochemicals in there. Also, if you marinate meat, it actually decreases some of the compounds that can happen when you grill it, although grilling isn't probably a good idea in general around meat. Slow cooking is better. And also, the data really ignore some of the conversations, ignore some of the data that really is contrary to what we're hearing around the badness of meat. For example, there was a large study looking at 11,000 people half of who are vegetarians, half meat eaters who all shopped at health food stores. So if you're shopping at a health food store, you're more health conscious, you probably have better health habits. You also, you know, are eating more plant foods. And within a plant rich diet, meat actually isn't harmful. And they found that the risk of death for both groups was reduced in half. The PURE study also was done that looked at large meat consumption on a protein. It was the carbohydrates that really were driving so much of the, of the problem. And so the problem with these observational studies is they're one, they're, they're not causative in terms of their conclusions and it's, in, in, they're often confounded by a lot of problems that, that make it look like there's a problem, but there isn't. And in these studies, you know, we, we've had probably studies before, like the nurses health study that showed that all women who took hormones, Premarin, had reduced heart attacks and strokes and didn't have an increased risk of cancer. when they actually did a randomized controlled trial, the Women's Health Initiative, which was a billion dollar study over a hundred thousand women, they found that gosh, it was the opposite. That actually the hormones were killing women. They were causing cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and all the earlier data from the observational study was completely overturned. So I think we have to be really cautious. They can often point to problems, but the, the, the, the effect size has to be big. For example, smoking. the effect size for smoking and lung cancer was a hazard ratio of 20 to 1, which means a 2,000% increase. When we talk about changes in meat, you're talking about for colon cancer, for example, you're talking about with processed meat only, you're talking about a 1% absolute increase in risk. 1%. And if you go from five to six, you go, oh, that's a 20% increased risk. Sounds bad, but 20% is meaningless unless the hazard ratio is at least to two, you know, two, which is basically 200 increase, it's pretty much garbage and I wouldn't pay attention to it.

Yeah, it's relative, it's relative versus absolute risk. And you see these studies or you see, you see the headlines all the time that egg consumption is associated with a 14% increased risk of cancer, for example. And so that, and that, that makes, that puts people on high alert about egg consumption. But as you mentioned, I mean, that, that leads to such a tiny increased risk of absolute in terms of their, with regard to their absolute risk that we almost can't take it seriously, right? Because nutrition, because the tools of nutrition science aren't foolproof, right? We use food frequency questionnaires, which are not the most reliable way to ascertain this kind of data to begin with. So it's very tenuous at best, and that's why I think it makes more sense to integrate a food that we know that our ancestors have been consuming since we've had ancestors, right? Since the dawn of humanity, humans have been omnivorous. And also, I would add that beef consumption, the dreaded beef consumption, has actually declined in the United States over the past 40, 50 years.

And yet, chicken consumption's gone up, which may be worse for you actually.

Yeah, I mean, it's factory farm chicken.

Was high in Omega-6s. It's full of antibiotics, it's full of arsenic. It's not food.

Yeah, and most people consume it as fried chicken, right? Chicken dishes, which who knows what constitutes a chicken dish, but rates of obesity, rates of type 2 diabetes, rates of Alzheimer's, keep climbing.

Exactly, and I think the meat conversation is a much more nuanced conversation. And one of the exciting things to me lately is looking at regeneratively raised beef. Because grass-fed beef is fine, but grass-fed they could be eating one kind of grass, right? They could just eat hay, let's say. But when you look at an animal that naturally seeks out food, it usually picks three or four main courses, right? Main plants for their protein and their nutrient needs. But then they select from, you know, 20 to 100 different plants in small doses. that are their medicine. And so they have an innate knowledge, like those little children eating organ meats and brain of what they need to keep their bodies healthy. Now we've lost that. We've lost our nutritional wisdom. And, and there's a wonderful book, Fred Provenza wrote it called Nourishment, which I talked about and have him on the podcast a couple of times about how do we reclaim our nutritional wisdom from animals and understanding how we can reset our brain chemistry and our hormones and our metabolic function and our microbiome. to actually crave the right food and using a wide sampling. And so when these regeneratively raised cows that are sampling from dozens and dozens of plants, we eat them, it turns out that they have a very high level of phytochemicals, which you think, wow, phytochemicals means plant chemicals. Well, why are there plant chemicals in meat? Because they eat the plants and it ends up in their meat. They even get, they're even metabolites of those compounds that may be more beneficial. So for example, I was in Sardinia last summer. and all the goats and sheep were eating all these wild plants. And they, they knew that they actually had to take them to eat this plant and this plant and this plant and this plant because they knew the milk and the cheese would taste better if they actually fed them these different phytochemically rich wild plants. Now they weren't thinking, oh, these are phytochemicals. This is food is mess. They just like, if they eat this, it tastes better. But the beautiful thing about flavor, this is where our flavors senses have been hijacked. If you think about flavor is is phytochemicals follow flavor. That's what gives the plants their flavor is these phytochemicals. And so the more phytochemicals, the more flavor. So if you eat a vine ripened tomato in August grown in your garden with cherry tomato and pop it in your mouth, it's like an explosion of flavor. If you buy some cardboard square tomato that's been sitting in the warehouse for a year and it's like grown in.

These shitty soils, I mean, it tastes like cardboard. It looks like a tomato, but it doesn't actually taste like a tomato.

Yeah.

And I'll add that it's absolutely true that animals are actually a great source of phytochemicals. But what I think is worth adding is that they also provide a very highly bioavailable source of these phytonutrients, which are not otherwise all that bioavailable. So, for example, when an animal, when a cow eats grass that contains carotenoids, plant pigments like lutein and zeaxanthin, which we know protect our eyes, and protect our brain and help preserve our brain function. You can ingest those same compounds in dark leafy greens, but they require fat to be absorbed. So if you're eating dark leafy greens without a fat source, you're not actually absorbing any of those important phytochemicals that we know help protect our brains, right? But when they are metabolized and stored in the adipocytes, the fat tissue of animals, they're highly bioavailable because they're stored along with fat. They're stored in their fat tissue and they become highly bioavailable to us. In fact, there was a, a great study that showed that egg yolks, egg yolks are a wonderful source of these kinds of compounds as well. Oh, my God. Cholesterol.

Yeah.

The dreaded, dreaded dietary cholesterol. But an egg yolk is literally, I call eggs a cognitive multivitamin. A multivitamin for your brain because nature has packaged everything required to grow and sustain a healthy brain within the egg yolk. It's no wonder that egg yolks are a rich source of cholesterol because the brain is a rich source of cholesterol. 25% of the cholesterol in your body is accounted for by your brain. Now, you don't have to eat dietary cholesterol to support brain health, certainly not, but foods that have dietary cholesterol in it foods that are a source of cholesterol also tend to be a source of nutrients that are particularly supportive of brain health. And that's absolutely true for egg yolks, which contain, again, a little bit of everything required to sustain a healthy brain.

If you love that last video, you should check out the next one for sure on getting to the root cause of all disease.

Alzheimer's is inflammation of the brain. Like Parkinson's is inflammation of the brain.

So we have to do everything we.

Can to recognize that, not necessarily.