Nutritionist REVEALS Diet Mistakes Causing STRESS, ANXIETY & DEPRESSION | Drew Ramsey & Mark Hyman

If someone's listening and they have depression, anxiety, mental health issues, what are the ways of eating that actually cause a problem? And then we'll get into what are the ways of eating that actually can fix the problem.

Yeah, that's such a great question. Let's start with the problem at the end of your fork before we tell you the solution. And the problem at the end of your fork, a lot of people know those words that everybody knows I'm about to say sugar, everybody knows I'm about to say trans fats, everybody knows I'm about to say processed foods. And so the surprise, it causes everything.

Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and depression.

And I think what's really been striking to me is a psychiatrist's interest in behavioral change and as an eater and as a parent, how do you change those from being concepts to being behavioral and action-oriented items in your own life? And so what's causing the problem very simply is not getting enough of the right nutrients. And I would argue for a lot of Americans, missing a set of nutrients. Americans are not not getting phytonutrients because they're not eating plants. Americans are not getting seafood because they eat 14 pounds per year, period. And it's fish sticks. It's not the seafood that we would want them to eat. They're not, you know, this is not shrimp ceviche and wild salmon. And they also, there's, I think, a problem that isn't just around the food choice but is around, I would say, the missing spirituality of food. and that people have, we've lost our soul about food and when you tell people to eat well, there's a notion that, well, that costs too much or it takes too much time or I don't know how to do it. And I think those are our missing lies.

Yes.

And I think it's just, I mean, my mama taught me how to cook and she's taught me that recipes start with olive oil or butter, garlic and onions.

Pretty much.

And then you add in, you put in some vegetables in that and you're good, right? You put in some meat in that, you're good. It's pretty much how I cook.

Yeah.

I think, and what I'm shocked by things like, well, we make our lentil soup at home, we make a lentils, carrot, celery, and that's it. We put it in a crock pot. And I love serving that dish to people who are like, wow, what's in here? It's like, it's lentil soup. Yeah, carrot, celery, a little bit of pinch of sea salt. So anyway, those are what's on the end of the fork that's causing the problem is, first of all, people aren't eating with the fork, right? People aren't taking a deep breath and engaging their digestive system, and people aren't in any way offering up gratitude or thanks for the most people. Some of you all are out there doing that. but the number of times as we did when we were, we had that wonderful dinner with well and Good, and we sat there and I'm sitting there next to Gabby Bernstein and I'm thinking like, I've been out in the Midwest, like you don't eat until you say grace. And I said, let's have a moment. And everybody's ready to give thanks and bow their heads for a moment. She said, such a wonderful Grace Store food for us. So those kind of things, it's not just that that garbage is on the, you know, it's not even your fork, it's in the package that you're eating, or that it's on the go. It's that we've lost that notion of where it comes from and and valuing that and honoring that. And we're doing a better job as, you know, honoring the farmers who grow it, you know, who are, you know, these silent heroes. You know, talking about a health care crisis. I mean, talk about physician suicide. I mean, the biggest threat to farmers right now is farmer suicide. I mean, we're just losing dozens of farmers a day. It's the number actually came out a bit. There was like a little confusion, like, what's the top risk group for suicide? Was it farmers or doctors? And I was like, either way, it's just awful.

So is there data, science, proving that sugar and processed foods cause mental illness?

Well, let's talk about the data set that there is. The big data set and there's controversy about this data set is correlational data. And the controversy is that's really misguided us with a lot of nutritional policy per smart folks looking at that. I really like the writing of Gary Taubes and Peter Attia who kind of look at the science behind correlational studies and have some serious questions. But if we're gonna think about that data as being useful, that data is very clear. When you eat more processed foods, which means simple sugars, trans fats, and a lot of simple carbs in all those ways that, you know, it's not just sugar folks, it's like, you know, fructose syrup and, I love corn syrup solids.

Right, now they changed the name of.

High fructose corn syrup. Right, it sounds like a corn kind of, like corn syrup, or, you know, like maple syrup, you know? And so those are the things that certainly we want folks to avoid. And what does the data say? If you eat highly processed foods, you have 50 to 100% increased risk of clinical depression. Oh. If you eat high glycemic index foods, there's a great study that came out, a colleague at Columbia, looking at high glycemic index foods. So those are foods that just spike your blood sugar more. those have a significant increased risk, individuals have an increased risk of depression, the Women's Health Initiative. So big, big study of women ages 45 plus. And so there's that correlational data and it's just consistent. When you look at the meta analyses of it, it's consistent that the food that we've created in the last 100 years leads to an increased risk or increased risk in that population of depression, same data for ADHD, not as much data for anxiety disorders, which is interesting, but certainly feels true. to me clinically, then we move on to randomized controlled trials. And the reason this is of interest is on the molecular side, like in the mouse models, you know this. Not having enough nutrients and putting lots and lots of fuel in any sort.

Of mouse look like.

What does mouse look like? Yeah, I mean, it's very clear what depressed mice look like, because you stick them in little cages and they don't try and you put them into swim, it's a forced swim test. and when mice are depressed, they don't fight to get out. They just stop swimming. They drown? We don't let them drown, but they would drown if you didn't fish them out. Whereas non-depressed mice, they're fighting to get out. Yeah, that's what a depressed mouse looks like. So the randomized control trials that came out recently are exciting because we can say it makes common sense. We can say on a molecular level, it makes lots and lots of sense. We can say it makes sense in the correlational data, but you and I know, Mark, medicine's not going to change until we have randomized clinical trials. And that's where folks like Felice Jacka and Michael Berk and the Food and Mood Centre in Australia, they're really, I would say, the leaders in this, where they've completed a number of trials. Natalie Parletta is also not part of that group, but they're part of the leaders in this. And now they're putting down numerous randomized trials and creating resources for patients with mental health concerns like depression to make sure food's part of the equation. And their data looks quite strong. And what I love about this is when the data comes out, it's funny, one of the big leaders in psychiatry, won't mention him by name, but it's been very critical. It gets really crit, it's funny, there's a big post about how in some, you know, one of these health medicine review websites about, you know, how bad the trial was or how small it was.

It's like fighting, and I'm- Everybody's always.

Criticizing each other about the study. And I was like, so when we don't have data, you say there's no data. And then when people do a really good trial, you want to pick it apart.

Yeah.

And there's some feeling that it's almost like folks have really- People don't like paradigm shifts. Well, I mean, is this how bad it's gotten, Marc, that we're at a paradigm shift? We're suggesting that our patients, our neighbors, our families eat well for things like when they're thinking about their brain and their mood and their dementia risk and their depression. Like we've gotten so far down the rabbit hole of medicine that that's a paradigm shift. Yeah, like that, that's crazy. It is absolutely not.

And there's, you're right, there's so much data. Like, you might be aware of Hiblin's.

Work, which was from the internet show, Captain Joe. Captain Joe Hiblin is like, he's the leader of the, he calls himself the, he is the servant, he's the surgeon.

General'S, he's a soldier in the surgeon general's army.

There you go.

And he did these amazing studies looking at the rise of omega-3, I mean, the rise of omega-6 fats, refined oils. and the decrease in Omega-3 fats lead to violence, homicide, suicide, and that changed behavior. And I remember once coming back from, you know, somewhere and I had a letter on my desk in my office, and it was from a prisoner who wrote me a letter, read my book, Ultra Metabolism way back when and said, you know, I was a violent criminal all my life and I realized, you know, that when I changed my diet after reading this book in prison, I don't know how he did that, that he realized he was a very different person. And they've done prison studies where they feed prisoners healthy diets and they reduce violent crime by 56%. If you give them a multivitamin, it reduces crime by 80%. In prisons.

Yeah, you can just see the notion that we don't approach that, right? What is criminal activity violence? So some of it's stuff we don't understand. Some of it's certainly horrible character pathology. But some of it, when we think that this is a population that in general does not have good nourishment, in general does not learn a a lot of mental health skills. There's a way that some of what's going on there is certainly just a result of a broken system of mental health care and I would say a broken system of our culture. I've been inspired this month by Benjamin Rush biography. And the reason is that I didn't know anything about Benjamin Rush. And Benjamin Rush is one of our youngest founding fathers. He is the second youngest signatory to the Declaration of Independence and the only, I think, I think the only physician signer. And he is our original American physician. They called him the American Hippocrates back in the day. And he's also our original psychiatrist. And he founded the first mental hospital and he helped us found this country on a very, very simple principle, which is that when we think about mental illness, we can't put people in asylums and say that they don't have spirituality or they're sinners or they're bad people, that we as physicians are going to treat them as patients and we are going to care for them. and that has just inspired me to really think about what's happening in our country and how bad our mental health has gotten and how we all know about it. And we're just finally starting to talk about it. But we were founded as a place where we should have freedom to talk about this. I'll get you a copy of the Benjamin Rush book.

Yeah, it's fantastic.

Every doctor should read it.

So, Drew, you wrote this paper. It was published September 2018 in the psychiatric journal. And it was really quite detailed in terms of its analysis of the types of foods and nutrients. So help us take this home. What are the things that you learned from there that are the most important nutrients we need and what are the most important foods to help us get those nutrients and just in general to.

Help us for sure. For mental illness. And so the simple, the paper is called Antidepressant Foods and folks can check it out and it's an open source article. And I did this with my colleague Dr. Laura Lachance and quite simply it's arithmetic. It's bean counting and we went through all of the literature looking at all of the essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and did a literature search to say, well, which of these have significant evidence that they can help prevent depression and that they can be used to treat depression? And there were 12 that we found. And I bet you could name all 12, Mark. They're the 12 we would expect, omega-3 fats and zinc and B12, vitamin E, magnesium, iron, and then iron. And so then we looked at, Just as simple what a nutrient profiling system is, is it just tries, it's just a system for looking at what foods have the most of those nutrients per calorie. And then what a good nutrient profiling system does, and Dr. LaChance and I really wanted to create a good one because oddly there are, I think, 27 nutrient profiling systems in the world that have been created. Some people have seen ones like the ANDI or NuVal. You know how many have been about mental health?

None.

None. And so, a good nutrient trophic level system does looks at food categories. So, we're not saying kale, kale, kale, kale, and people say, well, I don't like kale. You can't eat too much of it. You'll go into hypothyroidism. Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, it's toxic now. Now it's toxic work. But what we say is leafy greens. And so, what we did is we scored, we looked at all of the top foods for these nutrients, scored them, and then created a list of the top plant and animal foods. And so, first of all, they're the foods that top the list, which I just think are interesting. Oysters, clams and mussels are in the top five on the animal side. And, the reason we did animal foods is that no nutrient profiling system usually has any meat or any animals in it because it's all based on calories usually and plants always have fewer calories. But, most people eat meat or seafood so we wanted to give folks a list of which had the most nutrients.

And, why were the shellfish the top ones?

Top ones because think about oysters, why do they top the list? You got 10 to 15 calories per oyster so let's just say six oysters, 60 calories and for those 60 calories, you're getting 768 milligrams of long chain omega-3 fats, you're getting 340% of your vitamin B12, you're getting, gosh, at least a third of your iron, you're getting 500% of your daily need of zinc. I mean, on and on and on, you're getting in some vitamin C in oysters.

Okay, let's go get some oysters.

Yeah, exactly. All that for 60 calories. And, that's just and on the other side looking at plants, like things like watercress top the list. And, why just watercress? Lots of nutrients, no calories or very few calories. And so that's a great example of nutrient density, those foods. And so the food categories that people should be looking for are things like leafy greens, the rainbow vegetables, more seafood. And if you're eating meat and red meat to look more towards wild red.

Meats or grass-fed red meats. So this is fascinating. So the diet that prevents cancer, heart disease, dementia, depression and fixes most chronic.

Illness is the same diet. It's really, well, it's where we got off in medicine. We kind of separated out out mental health and brain health from the rest. Like you're saying, somehow the blood-brain barrier was like, Thou shall not pass. We didn't think that sure, all those same activities that we think about in terms of our general health and the foods we want people to eat and the things we want people to do, move their bodies, connect, be part of their community, yeah, that's key to your brain health and your mental health. Yeah.

Trouble with, you know, our food supply is that it's often depleted. Even if you're eating the best foods, you know, you have an organic farm. The soil matters. It really is in the food.

Yeah.

And if you're growing in depleted soils, which most of our soils are more like dust and dirt.

Well, they're just like chemicals in chemicals out. I mean, it's really, you know, if you, if you, if you grow, you know, if you, if you live by the foods you grow, you don't do it the way that a lot of food is grown. And even organic food, it's funny, as you drive through the produce belt, and I encourage people to do this, and you look out, you'll see organic stuff out there. But it doesn't look like a healthy farm somehow. It's got a lot of food on it, but it doesn't smell right. The people working it, I don't know, they don't seem happy in a certain way.

It's because of their big monocrop organic farm.

Yeah, it's a big monoculture.

You look at a big-- till the soil with your tractor, great soil.

They, they, there's a ton of tillage, there's a ton of diesel spent, there's a ton of compaction. And, and it's a real, I think it's a challenge right now. Industrial organic is what Michael Pong calls it. It is. And, and in a lot of ways, you know, that's been a huge Victory because we have a conversation about organic.

Right. It's better that, and organic was just found to reduce cancer by 25 people who had it.

This French study.

Right.

I mean, it is, so there's you know, there's something there. So it's a step in the right direction. But when you think about where I'm from and you drive around, our soil is pretty rough in Crawford County. But boy, you want to, I would say that a lot of places, Mark, where we live, if you take a lot of Americans, they wouldn't know they were in America. Because it's just that whole central notion, that Central America or middle American notion of a small farm. and what that looks like and how that functions. Some cows, couple pigs, not a monoculture, a nice garden for all your food and for sharing with your neighbors. That has died in a way. And I think- the Wendell Berry calls.

It the unsettling of America.

Yeah, and I think that maybe dead is not, that's on life support and maybe we're seeing a shift now.

It seems like it's coming back. There's more smallholder farms.

I hope so. I mean, it's definitely coming back. You see it on the coasts, you see it around urban centers, but there's still a lot of places that don't, you know, where it's not happening and that kind of combo of, you know, I would say agritourism and interest in food, but also just interest in farms. But I'm hopeful.

So my question was going down the path of, okay, if our Even organic isn't the best that it could be if the foods have been bred in a way to create more starch, a lot of the phytochemicals have been bred out of it, the nutrients aren't there because of the soil, even if it's the best organic farm. And by the way, Dan Barber and Walter Robb, the former CEO of Whole Foods, have created a seed company to actually reinvent new seeds to breed them so they have flavor and they have nutrient density and they're phytochemical rich. It's a very different idea. breeding them for yield or for pest resistance or water or drought. But they're doing all that too, but they're doing both. So the question is if that's true, then do we need supplements and do you use supplement, nutritional supplements in your practice to treat mood disorders?

So I think even with the food we have today, you can still get all the nutrients you need. It's actually challenging if you look at all the recommended daily allowance and you think what you would need to eat to meet that. Yeah. It's a little challenging. It requires some thinking about it. I always tell people, no, just eat nutrient dense food. You'll be fine. But if you start scratching your head and adding it up, it can be tough. Yeah.

I had a patient once who was like, I don't want to take supplements. So I literally looked every food up and I'm like, okay, selenium, some Brazil nuts. I have two Brazil nuts a day. I have 17 pumpkin seeds. I have, you know, two cups of, you know, broccoli or whatever it is. I was like, okay, fine. If you want to do that, go ahead.

Let's check your nutrient levels. Well, I have that problem where I don't like the idea of turning a meal into a math equation. And so, I myself, I mean, I'm 44 and I stopped taking all supplements probably about maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I guess that's not entirely true. I'll take a little Omega-3 sometimes and certainly in my practice for non-seafood eaters or for individuals who are just kind of eating seafood every now and then, especially for individuals who don't want to try a medicine and they've never, even for individuals who do, I'll put them on a 1 to 2 milligram grams of fish oil. I mean, in the trials that fish oil is very, in the science, in the studies of depression is one of these things that has statistical significance, but it's not able to show clinical significance in the meta-analyses that you get about a point reduction on a Hamilton D depression rating scale. that said, well, you can't take fish.

Oil and be eating, like, processed oils. Exactly. Which displaces it. You can't be eating piles of sugar.

Yeah. You know, it that, you know, and you wonder a lot of. This is the way the studies are designed. Well, you wonder, one, do they control for that? And two, you know, we have all these SNPs now in the elongase genes in terms of how we process omega-3 fats. Also genetic variations.

Yeah.

I mean, there's that. There's also that, you know, if you have somebody who's a food eater versus not.

But.

The bottom line is I think that there are certain supplements that should be tried, especially when people are struggling with traditional antidepressant response. Like a lot of people I'll see, they'll have been on a medicine, it works some, like with cheerfulness or with sleep, but they're not eating well and for whatever reason they're not gonna start eating well. So that's a really good example of somebody who a multivitamin or something with zinc or magnesium, certainly anybody who's low. I mean, I always have that feeling like if you're low, I definitely like... Do you test your patients? Yeah, yeah. I don't do as extreme or not even extreme, maybe as thorough, but I certainly test everybody. I mean, I think what you were saying earlier, I think any mental health clinician who misses, I mean, it is malpractice if you miss a thyroid problem, a B12 deficiency, syphilis, I mean, there's a bunch of biological causes of depression. and I think you and I see that get missed sometimes where it's like this is not, this is not even functional medicine. This is just basic medicine. It's all good medicine.

Yeah, it's good medicine. I mean, I, I, you know, in my practice, I see the common deficiencies you're testing are vitamin D, magnesium, Omega-3 fats, sometimes iron. Yep. And the B vitamins, particularly around homocysteine and methylation issues, which is this cycle of folate B12 and. B6. And so I find that giving people a multi and fish oil and vitamin D and maybe a little magnesium usually has enormous impact. And well, you think it's that even.

If you're going to get them to change their food right away, there's some, you know, that takes a little bit in, in, I mean, we're changing the food.

I, I feel, I feel like we're so depleted. It's just.

Yeah. Well, it's hard. And it's also, it's really hard when you're depressed.

Yeah.

You know, so I think what, it also gives people something to do. Yeah, because you do. I mean, depression causes a lot of carbohydrate craving and a lot of, you know, we call it comfort food for a reason because we eat it when we want to be comforted. I mean, I know when I'm in that bad spot, man, I'm a mac and cheese guy. It gives you a little serotonin. Yeah, don't give me any talk about carbs. I need like my comfort food. But it's, I think it's something else. The other one that's, I think, exciting is the L-methylfolate.

It's just exciting in the idea that.

Which is actually a prescription drug for depression. Well, it's a deploin, but it's a B vitamin that gets you served by, am I allowed to say that? It's a B vitamin that gets you served by Big Pharma is the way I think about it, which is you have L-methylfolate, which is folate that has a methyl group added onto it.

And instead of that being five bucks, it's 200 bucks.

But you can get it for five bucks. You can get it. But the idea that we're just now, because this is going to be the next frontier mark, as you know, which is we're going to start really getting into precision psychiatry. I mean, that's my most, my favorite new center at Columbia is the Center for Precision Psychiatry. There is that? There's a center for precision psychiatry. There's a center for practice innovation. There's a center for women's mental health. I mean, there's a new center for media and mental health that's going online. And precision psychiatry is just that, which is, there's no, I mean, one of the things I think is interesting is there's nobody that's more critical of psychiatry than ourselves. Because nobody sits with the- and sees the failure. Well, nobody sits with it, like, you know, until you sit with getting an antidepressant prescription wrong and then getting it right and knowing that somebody suffered because you didn't make the right choice. When you sit with that, you want to get it right more than anybody else because that's your job. And so it's an exciting time between the new knowledge of the microbiome, the psychiatric genetics, which it's not there yet, but man, it's getting close. We're, I hope, going to see the tide turn on our mental health epidemic. We are going to see the tight turn on our mental health epidemic mark. We won't rest until it does, deal?

No, no, we can. No, it's, I mean, it's the food stupid, as you know, to paraphrase a former president. But it's like, people don't get how powerful it is and how impactful and.

How quick it works. How do you get people to see it though? Because I feel like when we tell people, hey, eat right, feel right, they get that. When we say, you know, food is.

Medicine, you know what I do? I just, I think often incrementalism doesn't work because people don't see a change. So people are eating a crappy diet, I said just stop the soda, but they're eating like garbage. They're not gonna feel better. So I put people usually for, I said 10 days, you can do anything. So I put them on a basically elimination diet. I call it the 10 day detox diet for 10 days. And they can experience without me telling them the changes that happen in their body, in their brain, in their mood, their energy, their sleep. and it's quick. So you usually can get people to do anything for 10 days and then they go, oh, okay.

Well, they have to, I mean, any good behavioral change, it's like we can't tell you, you can't read about it, the study is not going to help, the sound bite, the science. You have to experience it working. And as soon as you experience that, that extra energy, that better, what I find, the better sleep quality, where I'm expecting to hear like more mood, more energy, people are like, you know, Doc, but I'm really sleeping better. And all those ways that, you know.

That make a difference.

That then makes nothing affects mood, I would say, like sleep. So it's, yeah, it's amazing.

Well, if you were able to change psychiatry and you had sort of an autocratic, you know, wand that you could.

Wave and I got to be the emperor of psychiatry.

I mean, would you throw out the DSM-5? Would you say every psychiatrist needs to get trained in functional medicine? nutrition and... Well, I do a few things.

One is I'd want America to really meet psychiatry because I think so often when they think about psychiatrists, they think about Freud, they think about some old white guy with a beard, and they don't think about our current president, Altha Stewart, first African-American female president of the American Psychiatric Association, or they don't think about my colleague, Christina Mangurian, who's, she was one of these stellar, she's my medical student now, she's the vice chair for health equality and diversity at UCSF. So these are women who are leading psychiatry and we are diverse and we are desperate to find, well, we're desperate for a few things. One, we're desperate to better, we have a lot of solutions. We have, for example, the number one way to treat schizophrenia or to keep people with schizophrenia really well, it's not an antipsychotic. That helps for a lot of them with symptoms, but it's a job. And so there's a program spearheaded by the Office of Mental Health and Lloyd Sederer in New York and Columbia Center for Practice that looks at that and now makes sure that there are, I think there are 7,000 families in New York who are getting employment support when they have early...

Basic, simple things that are aren't medical care that are things that happen outside the hospital.

Yeah, and so I would wanna see more programs like that. I think that there needs to be certainly training in, I would say not just nutrition, but also in lifestyle and lifestyle modification. I think that gets dumbed down in medicine in general. And we don't know how to do it. And I think a lot of times doctors don't think they should do it. And maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but what doctors need to do. Writing prescriptions is easy. Yeah, but even writing a prescription for food and exercise, some systems, that's all they're going to do. But building out that capacity, I would want us to, I guess you want to hear my number one change, I guess I've come upon this this week as I've been really thinking about innovation in mental health. The number one change I want to see is I want us to stop meeting patients when they're mentally ill. I want us to start meeting patients and helping them stay mentally well. Because the most powerful tool that I have as a psychiatrist is the power of prevention. And no one comes to talk to me or think about talking to me or fights the stigma to talking to me until they're late in the game. And and that's great. I'm going to get them better wherever you meet me. I'm going to help get you better. But I'm going to help you get yourself better, actually, is a way to put it. But I hope that what changes and what is changing is that we start having a language to talk about our mental health and recognize that we all have this. I think people think about folks like you and me. One of the things I love about you is you talk about being depressed and people think, oh, you're a brilliant, successful physician. You're an innovator. You don't have depression. and it's like, no, you know, you do and you have. And that's what, that's what I hope is going to change in terms of the field and the DSM, the Diagnostics. I mean, there are smarter guys than me thinking about that. I think that's just, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna have a Reckoning that the way we've been doing it has been necessary. Without the DSM, we could, that's a.

Way of labeling people based on symptoms.

Yeah.

What mental illness they have. It doesn't tell you why.

It doesn't tell you why. It's a symptom-based diagnostic approach because it's hard. We don't know why. What I love is now there's a big idea in psychiatry, not big idea, but a new idea. The inflammation has a lot to do with depression. That's been an idea in functional medicine and in wellness for 15 years. So, that's changing. And I think that we're going to see more of an integrative model. The other thing is I would just that we come out of the shadows a little bit and that we're collaborating and integrating more and more, especially with wellness. Yeah, I agree.

I think rethinking mental health and changing our meaning we attach to a lot of it, which isn't necessarily always psychological often is, but it's not always. And how do we combine that with a psychological approach? That's the original, you know, the original.

Psychiatry, the model they teach us is the bio psychosocial model. And except they usually leave out the bio. Well, you know, the bio is they.

Leave out some of the biology. Serotonin, let's give an antidepressant.

Serotonin is like the worst brand anything that happened for psychiatry. Why does serotonin get put up? Hundreds of molecules in the brain. Nobody even knows about BDNF. BDNF is a hormone that makes your brain grow. That's the one we care about. That's what food and exercise and psychotherapy.

All have in common.

We're hung up on serotonin. Step number one is you get rid of the term mental. and you call these things what they really are, brain health issues that steal your mind, get your brain right and your mind will follow. So the end of mental illness really begins with a revolution in brain health, just like you and I did with the Daniel Plan. So it wasn't just those 15,000 people who got that right. Thousands of churches around the world did our program and- we-ve got 30 in.

Cleveland doing it now.

And they decrease their medications for mental health issues. It improved their moods, their energy, their memory, their relationships. I mean the stories you and I have heard.

I remember that woman who came up to me after six weeks when we went back to the church and she had been depressed her whole life in and out of psychiatric institutions on medications. Her marriage was struggling. She didn't know if she could work anymore. And she said, Dr. Hyman, is it possible that my depression could go away in three days. I'm like, well, yeah, if it was related to something you were eating. And it was. And she not only lost, like, 45 pounds, but she was able to get her life back in a way that. That she really hadn't in Decades and Decades of traditional psychiatric treatment.

We heard that story just over and over again. Get your brain right, your mind will follow. But in order to get your brain right, you actually have to get your body. Right. So step number two is once we get rid of the term mental illness, you have to fall in love with your brain.

But before we go into that, I just want to spend a minute on this because it's such a big paradigm shift. If you think about all the labels we give people, we call it the DSM-5, which is basically the psychiatric manual that categorizes people according to their symptoms. It's a way of describing mental illness that doesn't actually represent the biology of what's going on. It doesn't represent the causes and it guides people down a treatment path that really has been a massive failure for the most part, right?

Our outcomes are no better than they were in the 1950s.

Yeah, and mental illness is on the rise. I mean, I looked recently at the costs of healthcare over the next 35 years, it was $95 trillion. And the most expensive disease was mental illness. and depression. Why? Not because you're in the hospital, but because you lose quality of life, you lose productivity, you can't work, you can't function, you can't be a happy member of society. And so, you know, we have to sort of get over the idea that mental illness is a psychological and emotional problem and start with the premise that it's a brain problem, fix that, and then, yeah, you might have to deal with some psychological and emotional issues, but you do it in the reverse order. It's very hard. I always say, I can give you a lot of morphine if you have a broken ankle. It might help you walk a little bit, but it's not going to fix your ankle, right?

So, I think of it in four big circles that we all have a biology. So, that's the hardware of your brain, the actual physical functioning of your brain. If you try to program that without fixing the hardware, it's not going to work. So there's the biological circle, there's a psychological circle, how you think, is really important. So I think of that as software. There's a social circle, which is who you hang out with. So in a computer analogy, think of that as network connections, right? You become like the people you hang out with. And one of the things I may have gotten from you is if you want to get healthy, find the healthiest person you can stand and then spend as much time with him or her as possible. If all your friends are eating McDonald's.

And having french fries and beer and watching TV all day, you're going to be probably overweight and unhealthy. If they're all drinking green juice and.

Going to yoga class, they're probably going to be healthier. And then there's the spiritual circle, which is why the heck do you care? Why are you on the planet? What's your sense of meaning and purpose? Both you and I work really hard because we're both very purposeful people and we believe we're here to do something important. And if you don't have meaning in your life, it's sort of hard to if you don't know the why, it's hard to do the what.

Yes.

And so but going to therapy and I'm a huge fan of therapy. Once your brain works right makes the most sense. Otherwise it demoralizes you. There's actually side effects to going to therapy with a troubled brain because it won't work.

Right.

And then people have spent money, they spent time, they spent energy, and it's not working, so they get demoralized and wonder what's the matter with them. And it could have been the head injury, it could have been the toxic exposure, like you talked about what happened to you in China when you were there. It's so many different potential causes. It could be because your body's chronically inflamed, because your gut's not healthy. and get your body right, get your brain right, your mind's better, your mood's better. And we're going the wrong way, just like you said. Tom Insel, who is director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said the DSM that you mentioned is 100% reliable. What that means is if you make a diagnosis with depression today using the DSM, you'll make the diagnosis tomorrow. But then he went on to say it was 0% valid. because it's not based on any underlying neuroscience. So you see, and that's why my profession dismissed scans because it didn't fit their diagnostic model. So rather than throwing out the Bible and going with neuroscience, they threw out neuroscience and said, oh, Imaging's not helpful. And, you know, it's like many, Michael.

Pollan said once, Psychiatry is brainless, right?

It is. And I'm trying to change that because why should I be a diminished medical profession that other people make fun of? I'm not okay with that because it hurts millions of people. You can try and kill yourself today in every major city in the world and no one will look at your brain. yeah, that's insane.

Yeah, scary. So thank you for reframing mental illness to be primarily a brain disorder that can be fixed by fixing your body and then fixing all these other circles, right? Because it's much easier to fix your other circles if your brain's working, if you're not mercury poisoned or your thyroid is not working or you're not B12 deficient or vitamin D deficient or you're pre-diabetic, all those things will mess up your brain, right? So, it's much easier to do the work of actually creating meaning and purpose in your life and being happy and dealing with the psychological issues if your brain's working properly.

No question about it. And if you've been traumatized and so many people have because they've been raised by parents who have brain issues, then it changes your brain in a negative way. So, put the brain in a healing environment. the psychological work becomes so much easier.

So why is it so prevalent today? I mean, every 14 minutes someone commits suicide. Every eight minutes someone dies of a drug overdose. 51 of the population at some point in their life have some mental issue. A quarter of the women population in this country are on antidepressants. Like, what's going on?

Well, there's a part in the book, a writing device that I just love. It's called if I Was an Evil Ruler. and I wanted to create mental illness in America. How would I do that?

Yeah. And basically create the food system we have.

Basically create American society where our food system, you know more about this than anyone, our food system is broken, right? I mean, 70% of us are overweight, 40% of us are obese. I published two studies that show as your weight goes up, the size of your brain goes down. which should scare the fat off anybody.

Size and function of your brain.

Size and function of your brain. I've heard you say that many times. And because the fat on your body is not innocuous, it increases inflammation, it stores toxins, and it takes healthy hormones and turns them into unhealthy cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. And so, if you just think about that, that one thing by itself, our food, I actually think is responsible for almost half of the mental health challenges in America. There's this fascinating study from Australia where they looked at two outer islands. One of them had fast food restaurants, the other one didn't. And then they looked at their omega-3 index. And the island with fast food restaurants had significantly lower omega-3 index and five times the level of depression. Think about that.

Yeah, of course.

Just with the food.

There was some kid recently that went blind from eating Pringles and french fries because he was so vitamin deficient. He basically had xerophthalmia, which is from vitamin A deficiency. I mean, think about it. Junk food is gonna make you blind, not just fat and demented and diabetic.

Well, and that's one of the reasons I'm a fan of multiple vitamins because we're basically a vitamin deficient society with deficiencies in magnesium and vitamin D and choline and vitamin B and C, Bs and C. And so I just think it's a smart thing to sort of hedge your bet. 97% of the population's low in omega-3 fatty acids. They have sub-optimal levels. I actually did a study of 50 consecutive patients who came to our clinic were not taking fish oil. 49 of them had sub-optimal levels.

I mean, it's striking when you start to and test, which most doctors don't. I mean, you actually are scanning people's brains. I scan their bodies through testing that looks at all these variables that most doctors don't look at.

Right?

How many doctors look at omega-3 levels in your body? Most don't. But it's essential for my practice because I can't tell what's going on if I don't know what's happening.

Now, it's 25% of the membranes in your brain are made of omega-3 fatty acids. And so if they're low, your brain's not going to talk. very well to itself. Yeah.

I mean, if you're listening, I think most people, and I think this is true, I've seen it in my family, I've seen it in my patients, most people with some type of mental disorder, there's a stigma. There's a sort of a blame game going on and there's a shame about it. What your work is really doing is stopping that, saying that's just nonsense. It's like, would you shame somebody for having cancer? or diabetes, or an autoimmune disease? No, you wouldn't. You would try to sort through what's going on and look at the biology, and that's what you've done. So tell us why people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, ADD, panic disorders, bipolar, you know, schizophrenia, even addiction, why should they be hopeful now?

Because if they see it from a brain perspective, what we've learned is you're not stuck with the brain you have. Probably the biggest advance in neuroscience over the last 20 years is this concept of neuroplasticity, that you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And every day you're making about 700 new hippocampal cells. So the hippocampus has stem cells and the hippocampus is Greek for seahorse. So every day you're making about 700 new baby seahorses and your behavior is either helping them grow or it's murdering them. And one of the things I think is really interesting, my 16 year old daughter, she and I, I'm 65, we're both making about 700 new baby stem cells in our hippocampus. hers are more likely to stick around than mine because of blood flow. So new research, brain cells don't age. It's your blood vessels that age. So anything that damages your blood vessels damages your brain. So if you know how to increase blood flow, so things like exercise and ginkgo and beets and rosemary and pepper, I mean really simple things, can actually help improve the function of your brain.

Ping pong, that's your thing.

Table tennis. But you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And most people don't know that. I was just in Florida.

By the way, Dr. Amen is a mean table tennis player who whips my ass every single time. It's embarrassing.

And there's actually a study from England on who lives the longest. So they looked at sports. And so if you don't play any sports, you don't live long.

Tennis players live seven years longer.

If you play football or soccer, you don't live longer than anybody else.

Because you're butting your head with the ball.

People who play racket sports live the longest. And that's why I play table tennis. Because you got to get your eyes, hands, and feet all to work together. while you think about the spin on the ball. Yeah. Yeah.

I picked up tennis when I was 45, and I work out as much as I can. It just makes me so happy. And I think it has kept me younger.

And, well, it activates your cerebellum. And the cerebellum, you know, the young people listening, you're not going to know who this is. It horrifies me. I call the cerebellum the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. It gets no respect, even though it's 10 of the brain's volume. it contains 50% of the brain's neurons. And the cerebellum is not just involved in coordination, it's involved in processing speed and thought coordination. And so when you play tennis, you're activating the cerebellum, which oh, has reciprocal connections with your frontal lobes, so it's actually making you smarter, more focused, it's really a great game. And there are no head injuries with tennis or table tennis.

You're not paying attention and the ball hits you. So, actually, when I'm really clumsy, I'll hit myself in the head with a racket. But that's not usual. So, this conversation is fabulous because we're reframing mental illness to brain health. And you have in your book, the End of Mental Illness, a simple way of thinking about this. You call bright minds, the 11 risk factors that steal your mind and how you avoid them. Can you take us through that?

So a number of years ago, I realized if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And bright minds is the mnemonic we came up with. And the B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's disease. It's also associated with addictions, it's associated with depression, it's associated with ADHD and schizophrenia. So you want to do everything you can to protect your blood flow. And 40% of 40 year old men have erectile dysfunction. Do you know what that means? 40% of 40 year old men have brain dysfunction. If you have blood flow problems anywhere, it likely means they're everywhere.

Right.

So you know you have blood flow problems if you get a scan because SPECT is a blood flow study. If you have hypertension, if you have any form of heart disease, if you don't exercise. So it just gives you some very simple things to do. The R is retirement and aging. When you stop learning, your brain starts dying. And, you know, I turned 65 this year, and I've seen thousands of 60, 70, 80 year old brains. And the news is not good. It's sort of like, you know, as we age, our skin begins to fall off our face. The same process happens in the brain unless you're serious about it, right? I mean, I have your scan 10 years apart. And as you got older, your brain got better.

Yeah.

Well, how exciting is that? That you're not me happy.

I'm very competitive with the brain.

The brain you have, the eye is inflammation that, I mean both you and I know it's a disaster. Inflammation is a disaster for every organ in your body.

It's true.

Including your brain. And so people can measure their omega-3 index.

Before you go on to what you can do, it's important to underscore this. We know from the research today that depression is inflammation in the brain. that autism is inflammation in the brain, that ADD and dementia are inflammation in the brain. And if that's true, then the question is, what's causing the inflammation? How do you stop it? And how do you fix it? So tell us about that.

So if you have a low omega-3 index, taking omega-3s can be really helpful. You have to get your gut right because having this thing, and I'm a psychiatrist, I didn't know one thing about leaky gut until I read the UltraMind Solution. and then I'm like, oh, you have to get your gut right, because if your gut's not right, your brain's not right. You're likely to have things get inside your body that have no business in your body, which causes an autoimmune or an inflammatory response. So food really matters. Sugar is pro-inflammatory and foods that quickly turn to sugar, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, You want to, you often say, eat them like a condiment. That lasts longer than a recreational drug. Recreational drug.

It's not even a condiment. Sugar is a recreational drug. It's fine, but you- Didn't you say.

The four white powders?

Yeah, the deadly white powders. Deadly white powder, white sugar, cocaine, and too much salt.

So diet really does matter. And our processed foods are loaded with pro-inflammatory omega-6s, so corn and soy, we're overloaded with them. I mean, not that they're evil, but they're not the right choice as primary staples in our diet.

But also things like infections and molds.

And we're gonna get there. So the eye is inflammation. And so get your gut right, omega-3 fatty acids, the G is genetics. And the big lie with genetics is I have obesity in my family and that's why I'm fat. Well, the fact is I have obesity in my family. I have a brother and sister who are 150 pounds overweight, but I'm not. Why?

You're wearing a skinny suit.

Because I know the behaviors that make it likely to be so. So genes are not a death sentence. What they should be is a wake up call and tell you what you're vulnerable to so that you get serious about prevention.

I mean, you're in better shape now than when I met you 15 years ago. You lost more weight, you get more muscle, and you're 15 years older.

And I work on it. Right, but because I love what I do. quite frankly, I have four children. I never want to live with them. I love them. I want to be independent for as long as possible. I don't want them being worried about taking away my driver's license. That means I have to take care of my body because my body will then take care of my brain. But that causes you to think ahead, which is of course a brain function. The H is a national epidemic that nobody knows. It's head trauma. head trauma is a major cause of psychiatric illness and nobody knows about it because psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage and family counselors, counselors, they never look at the brain. And so that fall out of a second story window that caused you to be angry and depressed, nobody's thinking about rehabilitating the damage that occurred. That's why you really shouldn't let your children hit soccer balls with their head. play tackle football. And if you've been in a car accident and then you got depressed, somebody should look at your brain and then you should go about rehabilitating it. That's what I did with the big NFL study. And we published a study. 80% of our players get better in as little as two months.

It's amazing.

By putting them on our Bright Minds program. So I'm pretty excited about that. The T is toxins. And when I first started scanning people, I mean, it was really clear that marijuana alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin are bad for your brain. But then I would see these toxic scans of people who never use drugs. And I'm like, oh no. I had not one lecture on mold exposure when I was a psychiatric resident or heavy mercury or mercury poisoning or lead exposure. None of that. And so we often find ourselves working up a toxic brain. And did you know 60% of the lipstick sold in the United States has lead in it? I didn't know that. So I think that is the kiss of death. And so I know you know this app, Think Dirty. And when I downloaded it, you can scan all of your personal products. I threw out half of my bathroom because it was basically toxic.

Yeah.

Things like parabens and phthalates, they're called hormone disruptors. which we're going to get to in a second, but you don't want whatever goes on your body goes in your body and affects your body. So you have to get rid of the toxins. And basically it's decrease exposure and support the four organs of detoxification. Kidneys, drink more water. Gut, eat more fiber. Liver, stop drinking. I'm just not a fan. I mean, we can talk about it. But it disrupts liver function and sweat with exercise or take saunas. People who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's disease. So M is something I call mind storms. It's abnormal electrical activity in your brain. So if you have a hot spot in your temporal lobes or cold spot, what we see it's akin to seizure activity. So sometimes anti-convulsant can really help. A ketogenic diet has anti-convulsant properties. There's this great book, it's written in 1980 by Jack Dreyfus, who's the founder of the famous Dreyfus Mutual Fund. And he said, A remarkable medicine has been overlooked. And it was Dilantin, which is an old anti-convulsant. He'd been going to see psychiatrists forever. He said, Three days on Dilantin, he didn't need a psychiatrist anymore. because it had balanced his brain. And so the second I is immunity and infections. If you look at a map of the United States and you look at the highest incidence of schizophrenia, overlay the highest incidence of Lyme disease, they're identical.

Incredible.

Incredible. Anybody in the West or the Northeast or the Northern Midwest should be screened for Lyme if they have a psychotic disorder. You just need to screen them for it because if they have it, treating it may actually treat their mental illness that is not mental. It's brain.

You treat the brain. Yeah.

N is neuro hormone deficiencies. D is diobesity. You know, as your blood sugar goes up and your weight goes up, your brain gets smaller. we talked about getting your weight right, your blood sugar right, and S is sleep. This is how you keep your brain healthy.

What would be the major reasons that we're seeing this pandemic of brain dysfunction and brain fog today?

So, you know, brain fog is really a symptom sort of like cough. So cough can be caused by a cold, bronchitis, pneumonia, post-nasal drip, asthma, a whole bunch of things. So you've got to figure out, okay, what's driving it? And there is no ICD-10 code for brain fog. You might call it altered mental status, but oftentimes it's transitory and that's the really interesting thing. And I've seen patients where they'll get brain fog when they're in a certain building. They'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal. Certain foods may trigger brain fog. and it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. I think the, and we'll talk about that in this particular case, is gut fermentation is oftentimes a cause for brain fog.

I mean it's like bugs fermenting the food you're eating, creating all these nasty byproducts that you can't see.

Yeah, and I don't know, Mark, if you've had patients who've had, this is a really interesting thing because I have patients come in and they say, I feel like my gut is this bloating and I'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening. So there is a condition. I just recently had a patient who had auto-brewery syndrome.

Yeah.

And I've seen that. So you have your own beer factory. Exactly. So when you want to make beer, what do you do? You take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol. And I've had a couple of cases where it was missed and it's actually not just the recent findings is it's not just yeast in the gut that do this but also Klebsiella bacteria. So, both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds which are toxins. Alcohol is a toxin. That's why when you get drunk, you're intoxicated. And, you'll actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain.

It's interesting. I never really had that insight before. You said that word intoxicated.

You're- Toxic.

Toxic.

Yeah, toxic. Exactly. That's how I explain it to people.

It took me six years to figure that out.

That one out.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But I think that you're saying is very true. I mean, I've had two times in my life when I've had severe brain fog. One was when I had mercury poisoning 30, 25 years ago. And my gut was a mess then because the mercury poisoned my gut. I had terrible bloating, distension, diarrhea. And the second time was more recently when I had mold toxicity and I had C. Diff, and I also had I had colitis and gastritis and my whole gut was a mess and I had severe brain fog. And it was pretty debilitating. You could barely focus, answer an email, talk to somebody. You can't concentrate at all. And people think, oh, that's just sort of in your head. It's not in your head, maybe in your stomach.

Well, it's manifesting in the head. That's the whole thing. And we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind and they're all interconnected. and brain fog is a real phenomenon. And then you have to sort of figure out what is doing it. The other thing that is interesting that I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy. And I tell patients that one of the most addictive foods is pizza. And the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it.

That's true. You can eat a whole pie, right?

Oh, yeah. It's one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in. indulgent, but I don't have it that often because it's not the best food for you.

You have my cauliflower pizza with goat cheese.

You can make a healthy pizza. Exactly. But the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down. The proteins in those get broken down into caseinomorphins and glutamorphins. And caseinomorphins are the ones from dairy and glutamorphins are from gluten. And those have morphine-like effects. So you literally get a little high. You get a little high, you get a little foggy in the brain, and it also can cause cravings and it can sort of make you sleepy, you know, you eat it and then you get a little sleepy from it also. And that's, you know, when children drink breast milk, they go to sleep after, they conk out. I mean, that's because of the morphine-like action in milk.

Yeah, so that's true. I think, you know, it can be our diet, it. It can be food sensitivities like gluten and dairy, which are really common. And often people going on an elimination diet will have an immediate relief of brain fog, which is something that you don't know you have until you don't have it anymore sometimes. People just think this sort of slow decline of their cognitive function. They're not realizing that it's actually something that can be reversed and it can be reversed very quickly. So the second thing is, you know, the factors that are in the gut, right? Bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, we call dysbiosis. That can also lead to a lot of cognitive issues because your gut's connected to your brain and that causes this effect when the bugs are out of balance and it drives inflammation and then you get inflammation in the brain essentially.

Is what causes brain fog. Absolutely. Well, the other important thing, and I think I talked about this last time, is that the blood flow from the gut has to go through the liver. And the reason for that is to filter all of the toxins that are there. So there's a lot of immune cells, the Kupffer cells in the liver and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the gut then going into the systemic circulation. So sometimes you'll have, in addition to leaky gut, you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself. And that's, you know, an example of that is the condition hepatic encephalopathy, which is brain fog. That's essentially, we'll talk about that.

What is that for people who don't.

Know what that sounds like a big word. I learned, and I think I mentioned this before, and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is when I worked at the VA hospital, there were a lot of alcoholics, and when you're an alcoholic, you basically turn your liver into a pickled liver. You trash your liver, yeah. You trash your liver, and then you're not able to detoxify. And I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and their liver was not able to detoxify. And then when they would eat Foods, especially high protein type meals, they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma.

So they would literally get delirium, confusion.

Absolutely. Brain fog. Brain fog.

That's when they did brain fog on steroids. And the reason is it was coming from their gut. And what I found so striking when I started learning about functional medicine was that here was a condition in medicine that we knew how to treat by fixing the gut. We gave people antibiotics to sterilize their gut to kill the bacteria that caused all these byproducts that made people have basically delirium or encephalopathy and brain fog. So, it was like wow, the gut is connected to the brain.

Totally connected to the brain, absolutely. And in some cases, they're there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from gut dysfunction.

You mentioned Auto-Brewery Syndrome. I remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence and it turned out she wasn't drinking but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut.

Yeah, it is. It's a very real phenomenon. You have to think about it and the way that you test for that is you can, it's actually quite simple, is you just have somebody do what I call a pancake challenge. You basically some pancakes full of carbs, but throw some maple syrup on it, eat it, and get a blood draw at point zero. You know, eat the meal and then.

Half an hour later check your alcohol level.

That sounds like a fun medical test.

Pancake challenge. So we've talked about the gut, we've talked about gluten, dairy, food sensitivities. There are other reasons too. So, infections.

Infections can do that. Another one that is- Tick infections. Oh, absolutely. Tick infections. Yeah, those are- I would say that that's, in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction too.

Yeah, it's more severe.

It's much more severe. The one thing that I see a lot is allergies. I call it the allergic brain. And you can have food allergies, that can potentially do that or even environmental allergies or mold and the high levels of histamine, because histamine is actually acts as a neurotransmitter. And I've seen this in a number of patients. I've had some patients with another condition which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome. It's sort of a buzz, you know, buzz of a diagnosis now, but it's a very real phenomenon and is related to the mast cells, which are the types of immune cells in the body, in the interstitial, the sort of the spaces between the cells where they reside, and they release lots of histamine. And if anybody has ever had hay fever, you see the typical picture of a person with hay fever, they're like this, half asleep and like they're walking through a fog. Hay fever is an example of brain fog. And antihistamines can actually have a benefit with that. Naturally, things like quercetin and nettles can also be very helpful. And you probably have used it. This is something that I've been using more, is the drug, chromal and sodium. I've had some amazing success with that in more difficult cases. I wouldn't necessarily go to that for my first choice.

What Todd's talking about is this drug that's used for asthma and allergies that is usually inhaled.

Yeah, usually inhaled.

But there's a version and you can take orally that before you eat inhibits your white blood cells from releasing histamine and creating an allergic response. And I often found it extremely effective for some patients. Exactly. So, Todd, talk about this patient that you had that had really bad brain fog. This is a guy who'd come to see you who worked a lot, was a little bit stressed, and that could be easily dismissed as, oh, you're just stressed and tired.

But you went deeper. What did you find? Well, he actually came into me, he had already seen a variety of different doctors. The background is that the gentleman as a child had lots of allergies and asthma. So, he had ear infections, bronchitis, also developed some sinusitis type symptoms. So, he had multiple rounds of antibiotics. And, I always emphasize to patients that when you have an immune dysfunction, look for the gut because 60 to 70% of your immune system is in in the gut. And just like with what's going on with the COVID virus or the COVID-19 syndrome that we're seeing by coronavirus, is it's not the virus or the bacteria itself that causes the problem. It's our immune system's response to it. And in general, we want to have a, I call it a balanced immune system. So we want our immune system to be idling.

Yeah.

Basically just sort of sitting there and okay we're enjoying planet Earth, we're going.

Out for a walk, we're not reacting to this.

Underreacting or overreacting? Exactly, underreacting or overreacting. And when you overreact, we call that an autoimmune disease.

When you underreact, we call that AIDS. So AIDS are cancer?

AIDS are cancer. Or overreaction is allergies or autoimmune. And I think we talk about a weak immune system or a strong immune system, it's really I think an intelligent and a balanced immune system. That's how I like to think about it. And that's related to immunotolerance, which is what the gut does. So, when we have a healthy gut, we have an immune system that is tolerant to lots of things. And you can eat certain things, you can go out in the environment, you're not going to react to dog dander and all these other things. There are some genetic, some people have genetic predispositions towards being more atopic or allergic, but having a a healthy gut, especially early on, the priming of the gut is so critical. Having a vaginal birth, being breastfed, not introducing certain foods like gluten early on in the diet.

Living on a farm.

Living on a farm. Exactly. Being exposed. And, and crawling around in the dirt and literally putting dirt and, you know, I call it, you know, your body's immune system samples planet Earth. Planet North is a very dirty place. There's lots of bugs and all kinds of things and your body learns to be immunotolerant. And one of the things that is really I also focus on is part of this immune system is called the T-reg cells. The T-reg cells are like the conductor in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So, you've got the wind section over here and the horns over here and they keep everything in balance. And the T-reg cells are really, critical. And what we're finding- They regulate. They regulate the whole balance of the immune system. And the T regs that we find out, the two things that are really simple that people can use to upregulate your T regs to keep things in balance are fibers. Fibers in the diet. Fibers are the key things that help with regulation of that. And then also, which I use quite a bit in the patients that I see, is vitamin A. Vitamin A helps to down regulate the immune system and helps to keep the T-reg cells in place.

So, this guy came in with brain fog and he had a lot of stress, but he also had other things. He had mold exposure.

Yeah, he was working in a building and they found out that he was in a water-damaged building unknown to him and he had mold exposure, which you've been experienced yourself.

Been lucky enough to have that.

Yeah, yeah. and we live in, you know, a lot of people are in older buildings. You don't know you might buy the building and there's water damage, you don't even know it's there.

I mean, 50% of buildings have water damage in America. That's a lot.

Really? Yeah. Wow. That's a lot.

Yeah.

So he was actually, he came to me and he had the diagnosis of mold toxins. In fact, he actually learned about this through one of your podcasts. I think it was you talking with David Asprey. Exactly. It was a moldy podcast. So that's how he sort of went down that road and he got treated with a variety of different therapies. He got some IV glutathione, he got some ozone therapies and other interventions, and he got about 50% better. And then within several months, he sort of went back to where he was. He was also again not sleeping much. because he was doing a lot of litigation, it was a lot of stress, he wasn't sleeping well. The big thing that I see with patients with conditions like immune dysregulation is stress and lack of sleep is a stressor, probably the number one stressor. So if people aren't getting a deep restorative sleep, that is a stress to the immune system. And I was trying to emphasize that you can do that for like one one or two days, but you can't do that on an ongoing basis. So really, really important. I always emphasize getting good, deep restorative sleep with patients. So I emphasized that with him. So when he came in, he also had a lot of digestive symptoms. He was actually on a whole bunch of inhalers. He was on like Brio, Spirova, Ventolin, on Zolair injections, Flonase, for his sinuses. He also had Zoloft.

Zoloft is a very expensive, like $20,000 a year, intense immune suppressing medication.

Yeah.

And, he still wasn't better.

He still wasn't better. No, exactly. And, that actually worked by stabilizing mast cells, which you can actually naturally do. Quercetin actually can help high-dose quercetin can be very helpful for mast cell activation. It's also good for COVID. Exactly, yeah, yeah. So, when he came in here, I did a thorough workup on him and I did retest him for mold and he did have some mold, but I compared it to his previous labs and it wasn't that bad. So, I empirically treated him with some binders to sort of help. But, he had already moved out of the moldy building that he was in.

You get out of the moldy environment and then use these binders to help get the mold toxins out of your system.

Right, because the mycotoxins They do tend to recirculate in the body, the enterohepatic recirculation, so they'll get reabsorbed by the body. And what are the kind of binders you use? In him, I actually use very natural things. I used clay, Medi-Clay, and I also used activated charcoal. That was pretty much it.

These are things that don't get absorbed that suck all the bad stuff out.

Oh, yeah, exactly. And, well, you worked in Merck, right? We used to, somebody would overdose, drugs, we would give them charcoal.

That's right.

We make them drink black charcoal.

It was terrible. And every now and then they might vomit up on you. We've been there, done that. Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

So this guy had also other stuff, right? He had gluten issues.

Oh, yeah.

A lot of gut issues.

Yeah. And unfortunately when he went to the previous doctors who did help him out, they didn't go deep enough. They didn't sort of, you know, get all the pieces of the puzzle. So, they did not check him for gluten sensitivity, which he markedly was gluten sensitive, and also did the Cyrex testing on him for gluten and Cyrex for leaky gut. Both of those were markedly positive.

So, there are tests that we use at the Ultra Wellness Center that are a little bit different than traditional food testing that looks at antibodies that aren't true allergy, but there are reactions that our immune system is having against foods and we can tell what you should and shouldn't eat based on this what's.

Causing an immune response. Exactly, exactly. And then I also did stool testing on them. I did the, what I think is sort of the state of the art, the GI Map test, which does quantitative PCR for the DNA of bacteria, yeast, viruses, parasites. And he had probably one of the worst cases of dysbiosis I've ever seen. That's imbalance. Yeah, imbalance, yeah. A lot of imbalances. I tell patients that everybody has hundreds of different kinds of bugs in their gut and they're a little bit like weeds in the garden. No garden does not have weeds. You just don't want too many weeds. And the interesting thing about the digestive tract and bacteria is that there is a phenomenon which is known as quorum sensing. And quorum sensing means that when certain bacteria reach a critical level, they start acting as bad actors. an example of that is like Clostridium difficile. So when patients get antibiotics and they wipe out the good guys, the bacteria, the C. difficile somehow or another sense that there's not enough cops around and they take over the place and they start producing toxins. Same thing happens in this particular case, he had one of the highest levels of pseudomonas bacteria that I've ever seen. And we typically see that in patients with cystic fibrosis. so he had bacterial dysbiosis, that organism plus other organisms.

And he had a lot of gut symptoms, right?

Yes, exactly. A lot of mucus. And in my opinion, that mucus, that sticky mucus, is a biofilm. That's where the bacteria live. They live in that biofilm layer. And antibiotics and such are very difficult to penetrate that.

You're not having a smooth log that just comes out clean, there may be some problems in there.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And, he also had yeast overgrowth, which was not unexpected because of all the antibiotics he had.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. And the acid blocker he was taking.

He was on a proton pump and that's one of my, you know, I hate them. They are good and bad. They can be helpful, but I remember when I was in medical school, we talked about this in the podcast, we were told they just came out and they were like, these are very powerful drugs. You don't want to give to any patient more than six weeks. It shuts down its acid production. It's risky long term. And now everybody's on it. They're over the counter. They're over the counter. Over the counter and for life. And it causes all sorts of destruction in the gut. It causes you to not absorb your nutrients. It causes overgrowth of yeast. It changes the pH. Leaky gut.

Leaky gut.

I mean, it causes the arable bowel.

Osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis, pneumonia. Bile deficiency. Yeah. There we go.

We can keep going. It's not. It's a great. It's a great way to keep the business going.

Yeah, yeah. I I wrote a textbook chapter on reflux and it was like, looking at.

All the data, it was like, holy cow, this is not good. Exactly.

Yeah, and unfortunately they're handed out like Pez candy. Yeah. Hey YouTube, if you like this video.

You'Re gonna love the next one.

Click on it to check it out today. Air pollution can affect cognitive function and put us at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. 20% of Alzheimer's cases might be owed actually to heavily polluted air, and today 52% of Americans live in environments with heavily polluted air. Isn't there like that?