These FOODS & HABITS Boost Brain Health & REDUCE INFLAMMATION | Mark Hyman

The brain responds to everything we do, what we think, what we feel, exercise, sleep, our diet, environmental toxins, stresses, all these things influence our microbiome, everything influences the brain.

Let's start off with delivering some immediate value to people. Three things that people can eat or potentially not eat that's directly tied into having a better brain.

Very important because one of the best ways to access brain health is through our diet. Both what we eat and what we don't eat. Let's start with the don'ts. The most dangerous thing for your brain is sugar and starch. Those cause inflammation in the brain. They cause dementia, they cause depression, they cause behavior issues. They're really nasty for the brain. So it doesn't mean you can't ever eat them. but think about those things as recreational drugs, as I've said. So starch and sugar. The third thing you really want to get rid of is bad fats. So trans fats are very dangerous. They're still in our food supply, even though they've been regulated as not safe to eat, they're still out there and a lot of refined processed oils. So those would be the things that I would avoid, number one. And of course, processed food that just kind of goes without saying.

And what are some examples of those refined and processed oils that you're missing?

So My favorite is what they call vegetable oil. You go to the grocery store and it says vegetable oil. What is it? Broccoli oil? No, it comes from seeds. It comes from sometimes even cotton seed oil, which is highly toxic. It's canola oil, it's soybean oil. 10% of our calories come from soybean oil. It's increased 1,000% in our diet. Didn't even exist as a real food in our diet until probably 1900, early 1900s. So we really entered an era where we are eating a diet that is so different than we have for almost all of our human evolution. And those fats tend to drive inflammation. They're easily oxidized, they go rancid, they're made with extraction processes that have hexane and they're often causing significant inflammation and damage in the body.

And just so people are aware, it's not that they're necessarily going out there and buying these oils.

No, cooking with everything.

They're in everything. So you have to be a student of ingredient labels and pay attention to all the processed foods out there because a lot of them are gonna be fighting against your brain health.

Yeah, the easiest trick is just don't eat anything processed. Unless you know what's in it. Like, I mean, if you have to have a list of ingredients, probably, I mean, yes, there's some packaged food that's fine, but if you have to know what it's in it. So if it says some big chemical.

Words, you don't can't recognize it, or you've got 14,000 things on the label, probably not what you should be eating anyway.

Great. So those are three things to avoid. So you were gonna go into the topic of three things that we can pay attention to. most people don't know this, but your brain is mostly fat. You know, we really are all fat heads, and about 60 of our brain is made of fat. And most of that is what we call DHA or docosa hexanoic acid. Sounds like a big chemical name, but essentially it's fish oil and comes from algae, too. You can get it from algae. So if you're plant-based you can get it from algae, but it is the main ingredient for healthy brain. And so we need to be eating fatty fish that's glowing mercury, we need to be eating algae, we need to be doing things that actually help boost our DHA levels. The second thing is good fats in general, because our brain actually responds really well to fat. MCT oil, for example, is the derivative of coconut oil that's really great for the brain's energy system and can help improve cognitive function. It also improves athletic performance. The third category of foods we should be focused on are phytochemicals. There's 25,000 compounds in plants, maybe more. The Rockefeller Foundation is now doing the periodic table of phytochemicals. There's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to map out the medicinal properties in these foods, but it's really easy when you think about it. Just eat the rainbow. If it's colorful and it's not Skittles, it's okay to eat. So all the dark colored vegetables, greens, blues, purples, reds, yellows, those foods that contain these pigments are full of these phytochemicals, and they're really extraordinarily helpful in.

Regulating brain function in so many different ways. as a bonus one, how about hydration? It seems like that's one area that's often overlooked.

You know, one of the things that often people forget about is the bottom of the matrix in functional medicine, which is the sort of the map we use to figure out what's out of balance for people. And hydration is really, really important because most of us walk around dehydrated. Most of us don't drink enough water. We have other fluids like sodas and juices and coffees and teas. but we don't really have enough water. And often when we do, we're not getting intracellular hydration, which is so critical. So not only in your bloodstream, but inside your cells, which is what makes you feel good. So it gives you energy and performance. So my favorite athletic performer is Tom Brady, and he never drinks water without electrolytes. Maybe that explains his seven Super Bowl rings. I don't know, but I agree. I I've. Using electrolytes in your water is so important and not the kind with tons of sugar and all kinds of weird stuff. My favorite one, I have no affiliation with this brand, it's called Light Show, L-Y-T-E Show, but it's simply liquid drops. You can put in a glass of water and every time I drink, I try to add those in and there's a portable container you can take your little drops with you.

So intracellular hydration is really, really important and it's important for your cognitive function, it's important for energy, it's important for everything. One caveat on water. naturally as the world, and especially here in the United States, unfortunately too, has more and more infrastructure challenges, more of the water that's out there is corrupted. So just another reason that people should really invest in a high quality filter. I heard somebody say one time, either you get a filter or you become the filter.

That's a good one. Yeah, I think it's right. I mean, I remember reading a paper recently that showed that in the average tap water there's 38 wastewater contaminants. pesticides, glyphosate, medications. I mean, where do you think all the women taking birth control pill or hormones or Prozac or statins, those get metabolized and they get excreted in the urine. Where does that go? It goes into our water supply that gets filtered, cleaned and reused. And we ended up having all these wastewater contaminants and people don't have a clue about what they're drinking. Forget about the chlorine and the fluoride and all the other stuff that's added to the water. But there's a lot of inadvertent things in the water because of the level of toxicity in our society. So I think filtering water is is so key. Obviously, if you're drinking water, bottled water is a problem because one, it's usually plastic, which is not something we need more of in the world. Glass bottles are okay, but getting a filter is really important.

So let's zoom out really quickly. How big of a problem is poor brain health and inflammation of the brain really?

That is a very important question because a lot of the diseases that we see that are causing disability, loss of productivity, loss of quality of life, are brain disorders, whether it's anxiety, depression, the opioid epidemic, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and all the cognitive disorders like ADHD, autism, these are all diseases of inflammation of the brain and they're rampant. If you look, for example, just at depression, our modern tools really suck at treating it. I mean, if you have severe depression, sometimes medications can help. But for most people, you look at the data, it may be 30% effective, not much more than a placebo. And the question is, what's driving that problem? It's all our inflammatory lifestyle, which we've talked about a lot on the podcast. And it's one of the most important things. One in four people have a severe episode of depression in their life in the world. It accounts for the majority of the cost in our healthcare and all the collateral symptoms that we have from the externalities of depression, like loss of productivity. So, there's a macroeconomic analysis looking at over the next 30 years, what's it going to cost for chronic disease? It's $95 trillion with a T. Okay? That's a lot of dough. That's way more than the GDP of the top nations in the world combined, probably twice that of all the top six nations combined. That amount of money, the majority of that is for depression because of the loss of productivity, the effect on society and so forth. So these are rampant conditions. One in 10 kids have ADD, Alzheimer's, you know, we probably have Alzheimer's or pre-Alzheimer's in 40, 50 million Americans. Depression affects, you know, more than 60 million people, but throughout people's lifetime, it's super common. We're seeing rampant increases in autism, in neurodegenerative diseases. So we have to grapple with this problem of brain health in a more focused way because It is the thing that we need to operate in our lives, to be happy, to have healthy relationships, to do the work we want to do in the world, to be a functioning member of society, to be engaged and not just be in a spiral of a near vegetative state sitting on the couch watching TV because you feel like crap. So there is enormous opportunity to sort of pull the veil back and rethink our whole approach to brain health.

Now, one of your first books was UltraMind Solution. One of the core ideas in that book was what you do to the body, you do to the brain. Can you expand on that?

What did you mean by that? Well, the title of the book was the Alter Mind Solution, how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. Because unlike what we learned in medical school, which is that our head and brains are sort of this disembodied thing on the top of our shoulders, and it doesn't connect with anything that's going on below there, we've learned that that's completely untrue. that we're learning that the brain responds to everything we do, what we think, what we feel, exercise, sleep, our diet, environmental toxins, stresses, all these things influence our microbiome, everything influences the brain. So we really have to sort of think about how do we re sort of equilibrate to a different way of thinking about brain health based on all the things that we can do to fix the imbalances in the body that affect the brain. whether it's thyroid, whether it's your microbiome, whether it's toxins, whether it's low nutritional levels of certain vitamins and minerals like fish oil or Omega-3s or vitamin D or the B vitamins. So we know a lot about the things that make the brain healthy. We call these trophic factors. These are things that help the brain grow and improve and increase neuroplasticity and neuroconnectivity. There's so much that's exciting that we know about how to do that. And yet most of us are poisoning our brains and we think, oh, I know for my heart, I have to exercise, I have to cut out saturated fat, I have to do all that and I can prevent heart disease. But most of us have no clue how to take care of our brain or live a brain healthy lifestyle. We just don't learn it.

What are a couple examples of things that people are doing today, separate from the topic of foods, that are some of the biggest contributors to poor brain function in their life overall?

Well, the low hanging fruit is lack of exercise. Eight percent of Americans get adequate exercise. that leaves 92% who need some help. And the exercise is really extraordinary because when you do cardiovascular exercise, when you do strength training, you do HIIT training and specific kinds of exercise, it increases these incredible molecules in your brain called BDNF. BDNF stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Think of it like miracle grow for your brain. So when you exercise, you're literally increasing the number of brain cells, you're increasing the connections between the brain cells, you're increasing your cognitive power. Exercise is super critical. So that alone can make a huge difference for so many people. The second thing is sleep. If we don't sleep, our brains don't work. And I remember the study I read recently that looked at sharpshooters in the military, snipers essentially, who were super accurate, like 99% accurate, when they have eight hours sleep. When they get seven hours, drops off a little, maybe 90%. Less than six hours starts to go to like 40, 60, 50%. Under six hours, it's like basically hit or miss. It's 50/50. And so we really don't understand how important sleep is to cleaning our brain, to repairing our brain, to getting rid of the garbage. The garbage man comes at night when we're sleeping to clean out all the metabolic waste that our brain makes during the day. and if you don't have adequate sleep, you're not gonna be able to do that. The third thing in addition to exercise and sleep is stress. We know that chronic stress, now we all have acute stresses, but the chronic unmitigated stress of our modern life and whether it's coming from the world we live in and all the chaos, whether it's coming from inflammation and stress that our diet causes because our diet literally causes us to build more adrenaline and cortisol in our body like high starch and sugar diets, whether it's our sedentary lifestyle, all these things drive our brains to not function properly. And so the stress response is something we know how to deal with. We know how to actually reset the body by activating the part of your nervous system that is the relaxation response. We call that the parasympathetic system as opposed to the fight or flight or freeze response. It's playing possum, basically. And it's not just sitting on the couch watching TV, drinking a beer. It's actually a very active thing. So it could be meditation, it could be yoga, it could be my favorite are more passive ones like massage, hot and cold plunges. There are a lot of ways to access the nervous system to help reset it to create a deep sense of profound relaxation that's physiologic and that helps you repair your brain. Because if you have chronic stress, it literally shrinks your brain. It shrinks the hippocampus in your brain, which is the memory center. so we know that chronic stress causes dementia. So just that alone can have a huge impact, those three things. And then there's a huge long list that goes on and on. But Dale Bredesen, who one of my favorite people, he's a credible neurologist who studied Alzheimer's and has used functional medicine to reverse, not just to stop or slow, but to reverse Alzheimer's in patient after patient. And he talks about this idea called a cognoscopy. which is how do we get a colonoscopy, but how do we measure our brain function? Well, there are some really specific, simple online tests, neurocognitive tests you can do. There are ways of looking at brain imaging. There are certain lab tests and things you look at to see what are the threats to the brain? How do you assess the threats? And it's important because when you start to understand how the brain works, you can really play with it and see conditions reversed that you just never would see. I mean, I only wrote Alter Mind Solution because I was treating people's physical problems and as a side effect, their brains would get better. And I'm like, what happened? Like, someone, for example, would it be having panic attacks and anxiety and depression and I would get their insulin under control and their microbiome under control and they go, well, I don't have that anymore. I'm not depressed. I'm not anxious. Or they have bipolar disease and I did this and this and this and got better. they'd have ADHD or autism or Alzheimer's and they start to really improve or completely recover. I'm like, what's going on here? This is not what I learned in medical school. And so I began to really, through the inquiry of my own patients and their data and their experiences and applying functional medicine, was able to sort of map out how all this connects and all the things that affect the brain. And it's not just, it's not, it's not, it's not just the, the obvious things, but there's a lot of things that we can dive into around infections and the microbiome and toxins and other things that affect brain health. So the fundamental things are easily accessible to everybody and we all should think about not only how do we take care of our body and our weight and our heart risk, but also our brain health and there's some very specific things you can do to do that.

Now this topic is near and dear to you because you write in your book that not only were you focused on helping on your patients, but you were trying to help yourself. Your own brain broke. So I'd love for you to take us down. your story. And also, while you go through it, help us look at the whole topic of brain-related disorders and how conventional medicine might see it and how functional medicine might see it.

First, I'll start with my story because it helped teach me so much about how the brain breaks and what to do to fix it. When I was in college, you know, a student, got into medical school, school was easy for me. I barely studied and My brain was just like a steel trap and I remembered everything, could focus, pay attention, was happy. I mean, just my brain was good. I exercised, I ate healthy, I did all the right things. I did yoga and then I went to China and got mercury poisoning, which I didn't know at the time, came back and got some other insult that tricked my system into really being sick. And all of a sudden I went from, completely functional to completely dysfunctional. I couldn't sleep. I even though I was exhausted and had chronic fatigue syndrome, I couldn't focus. It's like I had ADHD. I couldn't remember anything. I was got depressed. So it was like I had depression, ADD and dementia all at once. And I would literally be reading my kids a story at bedtime and I couldn't understand the sentence. If I read it out loud, I literally would not be able to understand what I was saying. My brain didn't work. Or when I was talking to somebody, I would start a sentence and I didn't know where I, I didn't really know where I was going. I couldn't finish the sentence. I was really damaged. And so through understanding my own biology and reverse engineering my way to health, I began to understand, you know, all the factors that affect brain health. And that's really why I wrote the Ultramind Solution, because it's what I learned on myself, but it's also what I began to see on nearly thousands of patients.

Talk to us about some of those root factors that were going on for you that might be beneficial for other people to hear. What was going on in your life that contributed you to being in that place in the first place?

Well, I had a bunch of stuff. I mean, I was in a crazy work schedule. I was working as a ER doctor after I came back from China, not sleeping. I literally was doing 15 shifts a month, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot. I was sitting up all night, many, many, I was taking care of my two kids. My ex-wife was an alcoholic and it was really a tough moment, a lot of stress and a lot of work and a lot of sleep deprivation. And then I would go to the emergency room and I would have an 11 o'clock to 7:00 a.m. shift at night and I would drink a quadruple espresso, a giant chocolate chip cookie and a half a pint of ice cream and I'd get in the car and I'd drive to work and I'd last drive till five in the morning. Hopefully it was quiet enough I could take a nap. And I did that for years. And so between that stress, between the difficult stress in my life in terms of my marriage and also this mercury underlying mercury toxicity that then got tripped into full expression when I had a severe intestinal infection. That was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back and ended up just cascading into years and years of me trying to figure this out. And I got terrible diarrhea for years. SIBO, bacterial overgrowth. My muscles were getting damaged. My immune system was dysregulated. I started getting sores on my tongue, rash all over my body, autoimmune antibodies. My liver function went up. my whole lab test looked terrible and I was a mess. And doctor after doctor was like, well, you're depressed, take Prozac or you're anxious, take Xanax or you can't sleep, take Ambien or, you know, it's like I was, it was that. And I remember, and I started getting weird fasciculations and all kinds of weird symptoms and my, my muscles were twitching and my muscle enzymes are really high, which means my muscles are being damaged. And I remember going to Columbia and seeing these top neurologist who's an expert in this type of thing. And they ordered a test called the EMG, which is no fun. Essentially, they stick giant needles in your muscles and they then send electrical currents down them to see what's going on. And this guy was this old British doctor there who was running the test, and he said, oh, you have been benign fasciculations, which means your muscles twitch, but it's not serious. It's not ALS, which could have been ALS and. and he goes, Off the record, this isn't normal. There's no such thing as benign fasciculations. You don't have LS, but it's something else. And I thought, ah, you know, and that was even before I figured out the mercury thing. I just didn't know what was going on. I was searching and searching and searching. So it took a couple of years for me to actually figure out the.

Mercury thing before I was able to get better. What was part of that turnaround process, which also was the introduction for you into the world of functional medicine? How did you begin to look at.

Things differently and then start to treat yourself? well, I was always a little weird. I mean, I always, you know, I studied nutrition in college, and it was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I was interested in Integrative Health. They didn't even call it that then. And I was always exploring the edges, studied ancient healing systems, Chinese medicine. So I always had a different framework that I was coming from when I went to medical school. And then when I got a job at Canyon Ranch, it's right when I got sick. And I met a woman named Kathy Swift, who's a nutritionist there, and she's like, you got to come to this lecture from Jeffrey Bland. And I'm like, okay. And so I went to hear this guy speak and I listened to him and I thought, this guy's a genius or he's a lunatic. And if what he's saying is true, it means that everything I learned needs to be reexamined, questioned and reimagined. And I need to prove that to myself and my patients. So I said, I'm gonna try it on. 'Cause if he's right, it's a game changer. If he's wrong, he's just a nut who's promoting a lot of stuff that's kind of goofy. and it turned out he was right. And the rest is history. And that's when we really started diving into functional medicine at, at Canyon Ranch. We had a great incubator where we could spend hours with patients, I could dig into all these things, I could learn everything. They were willing to do stuff. And so it was really a great incubator. And then, I just kept going down that rabbit hole and healed myself and started healing thousands and thousands of patients.

So what was one of the first things, and we're going to touch on your story, but these are also things that people can walk away with when it comes to their own story too. So what was one of the first things that you did when when it came to your diet. You were eating chocolate chip cookie, double espresso, you had all this sugar in your diet. What was one of the first things.

You did when it came to your diet? Well, I literally had to do an elimination diet because the mercury not only affected my brain, it affected my gut, which by the way, they're totally connected, right? There's called your second brain. There's more neurotransmitters in your gut than in your brain. There's more nerve endings in your gut than your brain. It's really quite fascinating. And my gut was a mess. So I developed leaky gut. I developed SIBO, which wasn't even a thing at the time, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth. I would eat anything and my stomach would just blow up like a balloon. I had gas, it just wouldn't come out and I felt like I was, had a, you know, like a giant sort of tire inflator that just blew up my intestines. And it was painful and difficult. And I had diarrhea and I just had food my stool. I was just kind of a mess. So I literally had to dramatically changed my diet to just be able to tolerate any food. So, I used turkey, broccoli, and brown rice for a year just to kind of calm my system down. It didn't really help get rid of all my symptoms, but it just helped them not be so bad. Until I got rid of the mercury.

My gut couldn't heal. And, it's not that you're necessarily recommending.

The turkey, brown rice diet to other folks. You're just talking about what you did. I'm just saying, my system was so dysregulated, I couldn't eat anything without causing a rash or my eyes turning like a raccoon black or swollen tongue or my whole system was just messed up. And in order for me to just reduce my diet to the most simple foods that were not going to be triggering reactions, I had to really simplify my diet.

So that's what you did then. If you were your patient today, what would you do for that person in that same situation when it came to the topic of diet?

If I had me as a doctor when I first started this, I would have been better a lot faster. I wish I, but like I literally had to crawl my way through knowing and and by that, it was really tough, Drew, because not only was I sick, but it was very hard for my brain to work. So I literally had to, despite having my brain barely functional, still try to learn and focus enough to try things. And it was really tough. It was really, really tough. It was like, kind of like trying to, like, you know, get out of a very deep hole and a black hole. And it was tough because I didn't. I didn't have the full capacity of my mind. So I started to learn things, and I started to incorporate things. It was very slow, and it It took me a number of years before I even figured out that I had mercury poisoning. And, I ended up sort of being in a functional medicine conference and I met a guy on a plane who was a naturopath and he was like, well, come into my office because maybe I can help you. I told him what's going on. So, he did this machine, this electrodermal screening which sounds like total quackery but it's looking at the bioenergetics of different meridians and different electrodermal electromagnetic frequencies in your skin which are there. And, he said, well, it seems like you have metal toxicity. Really? Okay. And then I went to my friend Mark David and I said, I was just sitting at his house. I'm like, can you do my hair analysis and see what's up? And he took a little hair, we sent it off and it was really high. And then I did a challenge test and I found I had a level that's, you know, I've done, I've probably done 20,000 of these tests over the last three years and it was probably in the top, top 10, 20 tests I've ever seen of the worst levels. And then I, then that was when I started to Detoxify. But it was really tough because I didn't have a roadmap. I was just sort of, figuring things out. We didn't even understand what SIBO was back then. We didn't understand a lot of things that we didn't know now. We didn't have a lot of the tools we have now. So that would probably be a lot better, a lot faster.

So you mentioned mercury. Mercury is part of these environmental toxins that are out there, and it can come from a lot of different sources. We'll touch on that in a second. But mercury is part of a ton of chemicals that are in the environment, like these pufas, forever chemicals that are there. We have mold that can be environmental toxins with all the flooding and the buildings that we have. Do you think that people are paying more attention to this topic than you've ever seen before about how environmental toxins can play a role in things like brain inflammation?

Yeah, I think there's more and more literature about the role of environmental toxins in neurodegenerative diseases and autism and ADD in depression. So there's more and more science around this. So I'm very hopeful. uh, but I, I do think it's still pretty much ignored. I think people aren't really trained in medical school to understand toxins other than acute toxicity. Uh, so chronic low level toxicity that eventually overwhelms your system is just not something that's even in the field of view of traditional doctors. So, for example, I had this patient recently who had an autoimmune disease, but she had very high levels of lead in her blood and the highest level of lead I'd ever seen in any patient in 30 years. And it was causing all kinds of cognitive and also inflammatory symptoms. And, you know, the traditional doctors don't know how to look for that and test for that. They can check a blood test, but they rarely do that. But even if the blood test is normal, you can still have a lot of stored toxins if you don't have current exposure. So if you don't, for example, if you don't eat fish for three or.

Six months, your blood levels will be good.

But you could have tons of stored levels in your body.

I remember reading a New York Times article about a group of soldiers that made their way to the Cleveland Clinic.

Yeah.

And can you tell that story?

Yeah, well, you know, the Special Forces guys are really not wimps. You know, these guys are Navy SEALs who stand in ice water for three hours and, you know, one, run 100 miles. I mean, these guys are just super human. And it was a whole group of these guys who were really sick and they were being kind of dismissed by the defense department and the VA. And one of them came to Cleveland Clinic and I said, well, let's look at your story. What's going on? You're cognitively impaired, you can't focus, you're depressed, you're overweight, your metabolism is messed up, you have all these other symptoms. Let's just see what's going on. So I said, what do you do? He says, well, I'm a blast expert. I blow stuff up and I teach other people how to blow stuff up. and we do it in enclosed buildings. And when you blow stuff up and you leave bombs and guns, you release lead mercury into the air and they're in there in a closed space with poor filtration, they're breathing it in. So you do this for long enough, you start to become poisoned and they came in and they were poisoned and I was able to help these people get better. It was really pretty miraculous. And one of the story in the New York Times was about this one soldier who went to, I think it was Mount Sinai where they have the lead expert. who uses a very specific technique. It's only kind of in research, which looks at the bone lead levels, which is kind of the best kind of measure of total body lead. And this scientist, doctor, I think it was at Mount Sinai, said, look, we see this, we can measure it, but we never see it go down. But when these patients came back to me after being treated, not only were they clinically better, but their levels of lead in the bone went down. I've never seen this before. And of course you've never seen it before because most of us were never trained on how to detoxify patients from heavy metals. But when you know what to do, you can remove the metals and these people get better. So now we have a whole group of people working with us from the Department of Defense and Special Task Force Dagger to incorporate these ideas into the VA and the Department of Defense Healthcare System.

So before we get back into neuroinflammation overall and brain health overall, let's just put a button in the topic of mercury and lead. For most people, it may not necessarily be the first thing to look at unless if they're working with a functional medicine doctor. So most people who are listening who are wondering, like, wow, do I have mercury? Do I have lead? It's an important topic to pay attention to. It's probably something that you need to.

Be guided down the path of working with a trained practitioner who knows about that area. And, I think it's important to say, look, with brain disorders, whether it's the mood disorders, anxiety, depression, whether it's the tension of cognitive disorders like ADD and autism or the spectrum, whether it's the neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. There are many factors that drive those problems and you have to look at all of them. Mercury is just one, lead is just one. Those are final common pathways from multiple insults. So if you take 10 people with depression, there may be 10 different causes. For some it might be metals, for another it might be a low vitamin D level or the fact that they've taken antibiotics and screwed up their microbiome or maybe it's because they're taking acid blocker and have low B12 or maybe they have gluten intolerance and have dealt with antibodies against their thyroid which causes depression. So, there's a lot of ways to get to the same end disease. So, I always say just because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. Just because you have a label, It doesn't mean you know the cause. And the problem with modern medicine is what we call the name it, blame it, and tame it game. We name the disease, oh, you have low mood, you're crying all the time, you're not interested in eating, you don't want to have sex, you can't sleep, you want to kill yourself. Oh, I know what's wrong with you, you have depression. But that is not the cause of your symptoms. Depression isn't the cause of your symptoms, it's the name of your symptoms. And then we blame the name for the problem. Oh, the reason you have these symptoms, 'cause you're depressed. And the treatment is, an antidepressant. So we name it, blame it, and tame it, as opposed to what I call thinking and linking, which is where we start to begin to think about the cause, not just wait for people to sort of get on medication, see what happens. It's really a very important thing to understand for people that the same diseases can have many, many causes, and the same causes can create many diseases. So Mercury could cause autoimmune disease, could cause gut issues, could cause depression, could cause Alzheimer's, could cause autism, but not all cases of autism or depression or Alzheimer's are caused by mercury. So you have to kind of think about this kind of framework of one, just because you know the name of the disease doesn't mean what's wrong with you. Two, one cause can create many diseases and one disease can have many causes.

So it's a really different framework for understanding human biology. Let's go back to one of the first things you talked about, which was sugar. Help us really understand how sugar is so deeply tied into this whole field of neuroinflammation and poor brain health. what is it that sugar's actually doing in the body?

Okay, you got a couple hours? I spent my life studying this, and I'm gonna try to synthesize it, but sugar is not necessarily bad. If you have a cookie or if you have a little bit of this or that once in a while, it's not gonna kill you. It's the dose that we have. We used to have historically 22 teaspoons a year as hunter gathers. That means if we got lucky, we find a honey like a honey hive and we can get the honey or we might find some berries in the summer and we get some sugar. But historically we really didn't have sugar as part of our diet. In 1800 we had 10 pounds of sugar per person, which was still a lot. And now in 2020 we have about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year. So sugar, when you have it at that pharmacologic dose, is a poison. and it does a number of things. One, it screws up your microbiome, so it fertilizes all the bad bugs that create inflammation. Then that creates a leaky gut and that creates neuroinflammation. It also drives a process in the body called insulin resistance, which means your body is resistant to the effects of insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. You eat a lot of sugar and starch and your insulins go higher and higher and higher and the cells become resistant to the insulin, so you need more and more insulin. but the consequence of that increased insulin is that you get more fat storage in the abdominal fat and the belly fat. And those fat cells are not just there holding up your pants. They're very special kind of fat cells. They're not like the fat in your butt or in your thighs or whatever. They're highly active organs. They produce hormones. They produce cytokines. You've heard of the cytokine storm from COVID They produce all kinds of inflammatory molecules like IL-6, IL-1 and tumor necrosis factor-alpha. These are very powerful inflammatory molecules that are coming from your fat cells. So that drives systemic inflammation throughout the body and you get neuroinflammation. Third, we now know that in Alzheimer's disease that there's a huge problem with glucose metabolism and it's insulin resistance of the brain for many patients. Not all Alzheimer's is insulin resistance of the brain, but they're calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes now because of this impact of insulin resistance in the brain. so there's a lot of ways and pathways through which this causes a problem. And I'm not saying never have sugar, of course I have sugar, it's just what is the overall balance of your diet? Is this a staple? Is this a daily commodity that you're drinking for breakfast, lunch and dinner? I mean, America, we have sugar for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's in our cereal, it's in our salad dressings, it's in tomato sauce, I mean there's more sugar per serving of tomato sauce than there is in two Oreo cookies. So we got to get kind of real and get all the hidden sugar out of our diet. I'd love to give, you were so.

Kind to share your own testimony earlier and some of the things that worked for you. Let's talk about a couple other case studies from your practice of people you've worked with. Let's start first with the topic of.

Depression, any case study that comes to mind. Well, you know, I remember this one patient who was severely depressed. She was in her early 30s. an executive coach and sort of really struggling. And, and she had crippling depression. She also had sinus problems that were intractable. She was overweight, she was very inflamed. She had a lot of gut issues. She had tons of yeast overgrowth, and it was kind of miserable. And she came to see me, and I took a look under the hood and found that she had a lot of inflammation in her body that was secondary to high levels of mercury. This patient had really high levels of mercury, like 300, which is mine was 187. This was on an off the chart. And the mercury was causing the weight gain because it's a metabolic toxin. It was causing the gut dysfunction because it poisons the gut. It caused the yeast overgrowth, which is because the mercury causes yeast overgrowth. and it caused her depression. And so we systematically treated her by cleaning up her gut in the yeast, by clearing up mercury, her sinuses got better, the weight came off, her depression went away, and it took a number of years to get that much mercury out of her body, but I just saw her after 10 plus years and it's amazing she's still doing great. So the beauty is that you can take people with really intractable problems if you know how to navigate to the cause, which is what functional medicine does, you really can make make a huge difference for these patients.

How about a kid or children with a brain disorder, somebody that you have a case study that you worked with before?

Well, I have an autism case. That's a long story, but I've seen kids with autism get completely better using this approach because when you look at brains of autistic kids or people with ADD, they're inflamed. There's a whole immune system in the brain called the microglia and they can create an inflammatory process in the brain. And on MRI scans, you literally see large brains, in brains on these kids. When they do autopsy studies of kids with autism for diet in a car accident or something, they'll see their brains are filled with these inflammatory cells and they're, they're inflamed. So the question is, what's causing that inflammation? And kids with autism are like the canaries in the coal mine. This one kid I saw was 22 months old when he started getting symptoms. We had regressive autism, and he had, you know, a lot of antibiotics early on. You hear the same story. C-sections lack of breastfeeding, early antibiotics, and then, you know, maybe getting vaccinated when they're sick. I'm not saying vaccines cause autism. I'm just saying that it can be part of the mix that triggers a dysregulated gut and immune system to go haywire. And the whole field of vaccinomics, which is fascinating, which is looking at how individuals respond differently to vaccines. So this kid had terrible gut symptoms, sticky, smelly poops. He was non-verbal at two and a half. He couldn't look at you in the eye. He was just a mess. All the classic symptoms of autism. I was told by the by the doctors, just, you know, give him some behavioral therapy, good luck, and, you know, eventually end up in an institution. Because he had really severe autism. So all I did was what I normally do is I did my analysis of what are the factors that cause disease, what are the factors that are needed to help thriving in health? What is he missing? What does he need to get rid of? Basic functional medicine approach. We found he had terrible gut to spousal, three species of yeast. He had leaky gut. He had bacterial overgrowth. he had massive nutritional deficiencies in vitamin D and zinc and magnesium and the B vitamins, B6, B12. And he had a significant mercury in his system as well. So we began to treat these things. We got rid of the metals in his system. We fixed his gut. We cleared out the bad bugs with antibiotics and antifungals, and we reset everything. We gave him all the nutrients he needed and B12 shots. And this kid literally became normal. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy, because I learned that autism is not reversible. Now, that's not to say that every kid will respond this way because there are many factors. And I've seen kids with autism that have more, you know, fixed problems. For example, genetic. And I look at all their lab tests, they're normal. I'm like, I don't know what to do because they're normal. So there is, there is a way to navigate the brain health field by looking at all these factors. And I've had kids with ADD that completely normalized by simply getting them the things that they need for their bodies and their brains to thrive.

Let's do another one and that's on the topic of you shared about Alzheimer's earlier and sort of Alzheimer's, dementia, all the neurodegenerative diseases that increasingly more and more people are suffering from. You had a patient that came to you and was a referral over who was a gentleman that was running a company and was thinking about retiring early because his brain was So messed up. Talk to us about that.

Yeah, he was seven years old and he was in the book Alter My Mind Solution was one of those cases that I had to rethink everything about. My wife brought him in and said, look, my husband is basically non-functional. He's the CEO of our company or a family held business. He now sits in a room alone, depressed and demented. And the kids don't want to be around him. The grandkids are scared about me. not the human he was. Can you do anything? I'm like, I don't know. Let's try. So from the functional medicine perspective, the beautiful thing about it is that it doesn't matter what disease you have. You treat the system, you normalize function, hence the word functional medicine, and you see what happens. And usually the diseases get better. So turned out that this guy had a lifelong history of gut issues. He had irritable bowel, terrible bacterial overgrowth. He was on a drug called Stelazine for 30 years because his gut was such a mess. And it's an antipsychotic tranquilizer drug. that was calming his gut down, which is kind of amazing. He also had the ApoE4-4 gene. So he had some genetic setup for this, which is the Alzheimer's gene. He had also genes that affect his B vitamins called methylation. And he had a very high homocysteine, which is an important nutrient marker of folate or B6 or B12 deficiency. And when he, when you look at the data, if your levels over 14, you have a 50 increase of Alzheimer's. He also had Significant heavy metals. And I don't mean to be harping on heavy metals, but they are a big thing in a lot of brain damage. And they're one of those things that their doctors don't know how to look at, they don't know how to test, they don't know how to diagnose, they don't know how to treat. So it's really a problem. You need to see a functional medicine doctor. And he lived in Pittsburgh. And all my patients from Pittsburgh are mercury poisoned. Why? Because U.S. Steel is there. All the steel plants use coal to actually make the steel. coal ash is often used in Pittsburgh to cover the roads from ice in the winter to put on fields. It's in the air pollution. And his level is just off the chart. Plus, he had a mouthful of mercury. So we did an aggressive medical treatment on him that fixed his heavy metals, that fixed his gut, that optimized his nutrient status. And he also had pre-diabetes so he's a skinny fat guy. He looked thin, but he actually had this little belly and he was pre-diabetic and we got him on a low starch sugar diet cured us in some reason. So we had B vitamin issues, he had gut issues, he had metal issues, he had insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, and we fixed all that. And he went from being completely non-functional to back running his business, engaged with his family and friends, and reversed the cognitive symptoms that he had. It was really a miracle. And the neurologist that I sent him to at Harvard to do all the imaging and the brain scans and stuff that we couldn't do, was so impressed by the results that he then started a center for brain health at Harvard. So it's amazing what you see happen with these patients.

So as you mentioned, sometimes a person might need to work with a functional medicine doctor, but a lot of times people can take steps and head in the right direction just even through a little bit of self-guided and in some cases at home testing. So I want to talk about testing and are there any tests that are out there? You mentioned genetics, for example. You also mentioned Omega-3s and getting more of those in your diet. There's a simple at-home test that people can do. We have no affiliation with them that they can see they're Omega-3s. So, give a few of these at-home tests and your thoughts in general about them and if they can be part of the puzzle pieces for people to figure out how to get to the root causes that are going on with them.

Well, it's interesting. I see a lot of companies popping up that are focused on home health testing, that are focused on giving access to their data for people that are creating companies that are allowing people to start to do the diagnostics themselves and be part of a sort of a self-care process that often we surrender to our doctors. And so there's a lot we can do ourselves. I believe that people should be empowered with their health information. They should be empowered with their diagnostic tests. They should be just told your tests are okay and we'll see you later and come back next year. And they can actually start to look at some of these things. the current landscape of self-testing is limited now, but there's things you can do around food sensitivities, there's things you can do around hormones, there's things you can do around, you know, gut testing. So there's stuff that's starting to come out. I don't think we're quite there yet for everybody. There's genetic tests like 23andMe, so people can get a sense of what to do. But what would be more exciting for me is some of the companies that are coming out creating 360 Solutions where they're doing diagnostic questions, they're kind guiding you on what you should do and how to fix these things. I think we're not quite there yet, but we'll get there.

And, what do you think about continuous glucose monitors and their ability to be a part of the process of people figuring out what diet is right for them? Right.

So, before measure your blood sugar, you had to go get a blood test with a regular needle or you'd have a finger stick test which is annoying and painful and you have to machine. They've developed these new technologies called continuous glucose monitors which are little patches you put on your skin with a tiny, tiny little needle that goes into the skin. There's even more advanced ones coming out that are just going to be, like, going through your skin. You don't even have to put a needle in. And they measure your sugar continuously. And so you can see what's affecting your blood sugar, what's making it Spike up and down. And you can know, oh, gee, I'm eating this. If I eat this, if I eat a plum, my sugar goes crazy. But if I had a blueberry, it doesn't. Or if I had this, you know, meal. in this way or that way, it affects whatever. If I have a glass of wine before my meal, it's way worse than I have it with my meal. So you begin to learn about your own biology. And what's really interesting is that it's not uniform. So, for example, there's something called the glycemic index or glycemic load. But it really depends on the person, right? If you look at a study, for example, done out of Israel, they looked at the same foods on different people, and depending on their microbiome, their blood sugar levels were quite different. That's just one variable. the microbiome. But there's many other variables, genetic variables, nutritional status variables, and so forth that are gonna affect your metabolism. So learning how your body works, getting the continuous glucose monitoring is a super helpful and personalized way to identify what works for you and what doesn't. So I'm a big fan.

Let's talk about supplementation. There are a lot of companies that are out there that are advertising that this supplement is the best thing ever. for brain health? What are actual supplements that have a strong evidence base for supporting brain health on top of all the basic lifestyle stuff? And what are ones that are maybe we should be a little bit skeptical or maybe watch out for when it comes to a category?

So they're called supplements, not replacements. And so if you're eating a crappy diet, not exercising under tons of stress, not sleeping, exposed to toxins, and your microbiome's a mess, you know, you're going to not really see huge impact. And you, you, you, you know, you have to really look at addressing the factors that are causing the imbalance that we talked about. And then when you start to put these ingredients in, the body can really respond. Right. So the most important one is DHA for the brain, which is docosahexaenoic acid. It's an omega-3 fat comes from fatty fish. You can get it from algae. That would be my number one. There are really important cascades around B vitamins and detoxification that are important. These are genes that affect your metabolism of folate, B6 and B12, and also glutathione. So taking B6, B12 and folate, super important for the brain. Magnesium, also really important for the brain. It helps deal with anxiety. It helps to stimulate a receptor called NMDA in the brain, which calms down the sort of overexcitation that happens in the brain that leads to inflammation, oxidative stress. So B vitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, these are staples for the brain. You want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and link below.

So let's go into some questions from our community and starting with the first one, what are the top foods for brain health? So you already mentioned a few, but maybe you can expand on this a little bit further and add in some additional ones that you didn't get a.

Chance to talk about. Sure. So the categories are, you know, omega-3 fats, other good fats, and polyphenols. And then there's a whole category of other things that can be helpful. So in terms of the omega-3 fats, the fatty fish is really important we talked about. things like olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, great for the brain. Walnuts look like a brain, kind of a brain food. They have good omega-3 fat levels. Also, eggs are really amazing. So eggs have gotten a bad rap. You want to make sure you have pasture raised eggs because those yolks have far more nutrients and polyphenols. And the reason they're dark yellow as opposed to this pale yellow that we see in most modern eggs is because of all these plant compounds that give it its power. It also has choline, which is super important for the brain because it's one of the neurotransmitters is acetylcholine, and you need choline to actually help your brain work properly. So it's really great in terms of, of the brain. So I think eggs are a great brain food. We also have all the berries. They're great because they have this class of compounds called proanthocyanidins, which are powerful antioxidants, anti-inflammatories dark green leafy vegetables also really important because of things like vitamin D, sorry, vitamin K and folate, lutein, many other that are great for the brain. And of course turmeric, which is a spice that we've used a lot in the Indian cooking, but it's a wonderful, powerful anti-inflammatory that has really been effective for the brain. So those are some of the top ones I think about. There's some other ones that maybe we're thinking about, like green tea, which has a lot of catechins, theanine, which is calming for the brain. So there's a lot of benefits from those.

Next question from the community. what is the role of CoQ10 in the brain? Well, this is a big rabbit hole.

So one of the things that people need to understand is that your brain is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the brain. We've heard the stats that it's, you know, five percent of your brain about body weight or something, or maybe less three pounds. So that's like a fraction of a percent, I guess. But it consumes 25 of the energy in the body because it's very busy. And in each brain cell, there are tens of thousands of mitochondria, which are the energy factories in your cells that you need to actually run your brain. And if you have low energy in your brain, you have Alzheimer's, you have autism, you have Parkinson's, you have all these things that are really an energy deficit. So the question is, how do you build energy in the brain? It's all things we've talked about so far, but there are certain nutrients that are so critical for reviving and helping the mitochondria function better. CoQ10 is one of them. but there's many more carnitine, CoQ10, ribose, N-Acetyl Cysteine, NAD. There's a whole cocktail of mitochondrial supplements, lipoic acid, B vitamins, niacin, riboflavin that are so critical to making energy. So think of your energy cells as having a production line where they take food and oxygen and they convert it to energy that your body uses. That production line has a lot of steps. and each step requires nutrients. And if you're deficient in any of those nutrients, you become dysfunctional in terms of making energy, which has all these downstream consequences in terms of not just brain health, but every aspect of your health and aging. So taking a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements is really important. There's a woman named Suzanne Goh who presented grand rounds at Cleveland Clinic, who's a pediatric neurologist trained at Harvard, Oxford, brilliant woman, published in New England Journal, JAMA, all the top journals. and she's done fascinating functional MRI studies looking at imaging of mitochondria in autistic kids. And she found there's a subset of kids who have really poor energy metabolism in their brains. No wonder they can't connect, focus, pay attention to anything. So she gives them a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements and these kids get better. That's not to say that all kids with autism get better with mitochondrial supplements. It's those kids who have that particular pathway and deficit, right? Remember I said just because you know the name of what you got doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. If you have autism, it just means you have no social skills, you may not be talking, you have repetitive behaviors. There's certain descriptions we give to the behavior, but we're not talking about the cause. So, you know, when you see these studies that are, these are not even quote functional medicine studies, mainstream medical journals, but it's using the principles of functional medicine of how do you create energy? Right? So, the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine often is conventional medicine is about stopping suppressing inhibiting pathways, right? The anti-drugs, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, the blockers, the beta blockers, the calcium channel blockers, right? Or we have the inhibitors, the ACE inhibitors. So, we inhibit, block and anti everything as opposed to optimize and enhance function. So, functional medicine uses compounds that help the body do what it's supposed to do naturally. which is how do you make energy naturally? Well, you have all these different compounds in your diet and the supplements that you can take that help these pathways. So when you enhance function, there's really no side effects. It's actually using the natural pathways of the body to optimize your health.

What about the role of caffeine in the brain and the body? Good, bad, thoughts?

Okay, okay. So caffeine. Well, yes, caffeine gives alertness, focus, attention, but often you get a crash. So it creates a temporary, boost in focus and energy, but then it depletes adenosine in the cells, which depletes energy, and often you'll get a crash after. So depending on your genetics, your ability to metabolize caffeine, how fast you are, how slow you are, it's going to affect you differently. There are in coffee and tea other compounds. So I often say that coffee is sadly the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet because Americans have such a crappy diet that there's no other antioxidants because 70% or 60% is processed food. that doesn't mean that you should be drinking a lot of coffee for the antioxidants, but it is a source of antioxidants and polyphenols and they may have brain benefits. So same with tea, catechins and other polyphenols in green tea and other teas actually may have beneficial effects on inflammation, oxidative stress, detoxification, so they can be very helpful.

But I think over caffeinating ourselves is probably not a good idea. So let's recap here. When it comes to improving our brain health and things that we can do today, starting today, like step one, two and three. What do you want to share with our audience here as we start to wind down today's masterclass?

Well, I think the first thing people understand is that they need to learn how their brain works, what makes it thrive and what damages their brain. And they need to systematically go through their life and reduce or eliminate the things that damage their brain and add in the things that help their brain. so what are the things, what are the worst things that damage your brain? Sugar and starch, processed food, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. Those things are fixable by anybody without seeing a doctor, right? And then there are things that the brain needs to function. You need a lot of good fats, a lot of omega-3s. You need a diet that's high in polyphenols, these colorful plant compounds. you need a diet that's rich in certain nutrients like magnesium and vitamin D and the B vitamins, so leafy greens and colorful fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds. You need to make sure you exercise because that's one of the best things you can do for your brain. Meditate, do yoga, make sure you get eight hours sleep. These are just simple things you can do. And there's a much more depth about how you can even go down the rabbit hole of balancing your circadian rhythms and light therapy and various kinds of, we call hermetic therapies, which are therapies that give your body a stress, but then it responds by creating a healing response. So it could be hot and cold plunges. It could be, you know, certain types of exercise. There's ways of actually stimulating the body to repair and heal. Then there's even, you know, more therapies that people can think about for their brain, whether it's regenerative therapies like ozone, exosomes, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. These are all things that are coming down the pike that can be really helpful in repairing and recovering brains.

But for most people, the basics work so well and are really things that you don't need a doctor for. Well, you have an entire two-part series on brain health. I do. Broken Brain 1 and Broken Brain 2. You do. And Broken Brain 2. And people can sign up for it and watch it. It's on your website at drhyman.com and if you sign up for Dr. Hyman Plus, you get access to that and your longevity docu-series and a ton of other really great stuff including premium episodes of your podcast. So that's a great recommendation for where people can go next. Mark, this was a fantastic masterclass and a fantastic breakdown of a topic that so many people care about. I'll pass it back to you to conclude us for today's episode.

I think, you know, we just have to have hope because we're seeing such an epidemic of brain disorders. I mean, the anxiety and depression is just rampant in our society. And a lot of it's driven by our diet. We see a dramatic increase in neurodegenerative diseases. We see skyrocketing levels of ADHD and autism. And often people think these are fixed, and I just want people to go home thinking that these are solvable problems. That if we understand how our bodies function, if we take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, that people can recover from even the most challenging conditions. There are now survivors of Alzheimer's, survivors of autism. I mean, never heard of that before. So I want people to leave with hope and to understand that they need to focus not only on their general health and well-being, but to understand how to create a brain healthy lifestyle, which by the way, also fixes everything else. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. Well, the problem with looking at autoimmune disease is that it's so siloed. So the neurologist takes care of multiple sclerosis. The gastroenterologist takes care of inflammatory bowel disease. The endocrinologist takes care of Hashimoto's, and the rheumatologist takes.