The 6 Ways To BOOST BRAIN HEALTH & End Inflammation! | Lewis Howes

To be mentally well, you need to develop practices that you do.

Like, what are the five foods that we should have to help our brain the most?

Salmon, wild salmon, blueberries, walnuts. Olive or avocado oil. Yeah. Healthy protein, Chocolate. I make this great brain, healthy hot chocolate. And every night for my family, I just look at the six of them that live at home. I'm like, okay, who's up for it tonight? So Costco, of all places. Organic vanilla, unsweetened almond milk. Raw cacao. It's a superfood. So organic raw cacao and a little bit of sweet. Leaf is a company that makes flavored stevia. They make chocolate flavored stevia and put it in the blender, heat it up. It's phenomenal. Good for me. I love it. And it loves me back.

It loves you back. Salmon, blueberries, walnuts, avocado or avocado oil. Raw chocolate are some of the top favorite foods for the brain.

For the brain.

Why are these foods? Is it high in antioxidants? Is it proteins that they have? Is it.

So blueberry. It's the phytonutrients. They've actually done studies showing cognitive enhancement with blueberry juice. Salmon, it's the omega 3 fatty acids and the complete protein. Avocados, it's the healthy fat, especially omega 3 fatty acids. Same with walnuts. Your brain is fat. Low fat diets are bad, really, for your brain. People who go on low fat diets actually have an increased incidence of depression.

Really?

Yeah.

So now you don't want bad fats, fried fats particularly, you want healthy fats. Avocados, nuts and seeds, green leafy vegetables.

Olive oil. Is that olive oil?

Avocado oil, Damian. Nut oil, yeah.

So how much food should the brain have? Is it. You know, your buddy, our buddy Dave Asprey talks about fasting a lot. A lot of people are in this fasting craze. If we're not giving the brain food or nutrients for a day, three days, five days, does that help the brain? Does it reset the brain? Does it hurt the brain?

So intermittent fasting, where you go 12 to 16 hours from dinner to breakfast or lunch, is good. They've actually found your. There's a term called autophagy, where your brain begins to clean up some of the trash.

So it works in the brain, too. Not just in the.

It works on the brain as well. Now, I grew up Roman Catholic, and long suffering was one of the gifts, and I never got that one. I'm not a fan of long suffering. I'm not doing a marathon, it's like way too much stress for my brain. And I'm not fasting for three days, but I can go 12 hours. I mean, like, that's not a big deal. And it helps people lose weight, it helps them be healthy. And I come from a family of fat people. My dad used to hate when I would say that. But I have a brother, 150 pounds overweight, despite me loving him, nudging him.

And.

You just have to be thoughtful. Know your vulnerability and bright minds. The G is genetics. So know what you're genetically vulnerable to. And you know I have to work on it.

Right?

Right.

How you mentioned you don't do marathons if you're not traumatizing the brain through contact sports, but you're an endurance junkie. You love to run marathons. You run them every year. You do triathlons, you do ultra marathons, you're doing mountain climbing. Are these activities good for the brain to put some extreme stress on it, even if it's not physical contact to the brain or does it long term hurt the brain?

The scans I have of extreme athletes are not good.

Really?

Yeah, I think it's too much stress for the brain. I love hiit training, high intensity training that's been shown to increase mitochondria and cells. I'm not a fan of putting your body under a lot of stress. It's just not good for it. Some stress is good. We call it eustress a little bit so your fibers grow. That's why weight training is important. The stronger you are as you age, less likely you are to have Alzheimer's disease.

Really?

But you want to love your brain. You want to make sure you're sleeping for your brain. That's the s in bright mind.

So if someone's like, you know what, okay, I hear what you're saying, but I really love to do a marathon or two a year. And a few times in my life I want to do, you know, on a climb Everest or something like that, I want to do something to challenge myself and I go, awesome. Is that going to hurt the brain.

If you're doing everything else right? So One of my NFL players just signed an $80 million deal. So he's going to play, he's going to play. But if you're going to do something that is potentially damaging to the brain, make sure you're doing everything else right. So for example, being a firefighter is a brain damaging profession. We need to own that. Just like we need to own playing football is A brain damaging profession, it's like own it, everybody knows it. Now when I started my work in 2007, very few people know it. Now everybody knows it. But they don't know that being a firefighter, because they're our heroes. Those are the people we need when we need them, and we need them healthy. But because of the toxins they breathe, because of the emotional trauma they see day in and day out, because of the head traumas they experience, they have a higher incidence of depression, a higher incidence of suicide, and a higher incidence of early death. We should not be okay with this, but it doesn't mean we're not going to have firefighters. What it means is we should put their brain in a rehabilitative environment all the time. We should be teaching them about brain health like with NFL players currently. We should be teaching them, look, if you're gonna do this, own it. It's a brain damaging sport. So let's just do everything else, right?

What are the other things, right that you talk about? Are. There are a few main keys. Is it nutrition, is it sleep?

Well, we think about bright minds. It's just such a good model. So blood flow, B is blood flow. So A, exercise and foods like beets that increase blood flow or supplements like ginkgo that increase blood flow. The R is retirement and aging. New learning is absolutely critical. You know, your work and studying greatness, you're always learning something new which is.

Great for the brain. Retirement plus aging, Is that what you say?

Retirement and aging.

So continuing to learn in those states.

And always putting yourself in an anti aging environment. So the food you eat, the exercise, new learning, being passionate, never retiring, right? I mean, maybe you go and do something else you like better because you have enough money, but never retirement. Because when you start, when you, when you start not doing things, your brain actually starts to disconnect itself.

So when we say paper, someone retires at 60, 60, 70, 75, and they say, you know, I'm just gonna sit on the beach for the next however long, enjoy my family time, enjoy the money I've had and relax. What happens to those people if they don't have a purposeful mission in their life beyond relaxation, what happens?

Their brain disconnects itself.

Really?

They have a higher incidence of dementia. And my dad worked until he died when he was almost 91 and he's like, when my friends retire, they die.

Really?

Now if you retire because you really didn't love what you were doing anyways, and you go off and do something you love, maybe not golf because you're around all those toxins on the grain. Maybe not golf, but if you're doing things you love and you're always learning, well, that's awesome. That's a really good thing.

So you can retire from your job. Don't retire from your life.

Don't retire from your life.

Stay connected in some meaningful pursuit suit.

Absolutely critical to keeping young. And then the eye is inflammation. This is the big bad actor, because inflammation in your body, which comes from eating processed foods. One of the surprising things comes from gum disease. If you're not a flosser, really, you need to floss. I'm a flossing fool.

Me too.

I did twice a day.

I wasn't that way until I started reading the studies that people who have gum disease have a higher incidence of heart heart disease, but also a higher incidence of brain disease. They actually found gum bacteria higher in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. And so omega 3 fatty acids decrease inflammation. Fruits and vegetables decrease inflammation. Flossing and probiotics. Getting your gut, gut healthy. There's this huge connection between the brain and the gut because inflammation often comes from having an unhealthy gut, either from infections or the lousy food that you're eating. And the G is genetics. You need to know your vulnerability. But genes aren't a death sentence. What they should be is a wake up call to know what you're vulnerable to. My I have heart disease and obesity in my family. I don't have heart disease and I'm not obese. Why? Because I'm always on a prevention program. You just want to be serious as soon as you know what your risks are.

Okay.

H is head trauma, which we talked about. Brain is soft, skull is hard. There are 3 million new head injuries every year in the United States. This is a big deal.

3 million new head injuries every year. Is that from car accidents or sports falls? Everything.

Everything.

Wow.

You know, being hit, domestic violence, whatever.

It might be anything. Gunshot, whatever, whatever.

3 million. Which means most people live over the last 30 years, that's 90 million people in the United States struggle with the effects of traumatic brain injury. Very high in prison populations, very high in people who struggle with psychiatric diseases. And then t is toxins. And so you go, what can I do to support my brain? Well, one, avoid them. Alcohol is not a health food. My biggest blog last year was titled I told you so. And when I dated my wife, Tana, I think you met my wife. She's awesome. And when we were dating, she said, carewife. My current.

Not the 20 year.

Not the 20 year. She said, I'll never tell you I told you. So she lied. She just flat out lied to me. It's like her favorite thing to say. But I've been telling people ever since I started imaging alcohol is not a health food. And our first clinic was right next to the Napa Valley, so it was not a popular thing to say. But it's just what I saw. And then there's a study from Johns Hopkins that say people who drink every day have smaller brains. Last year, the American Cancer Society came out and said, any alcohol is associated with an increased risk in cancer. Seven different cancers.

Oh, any alcohol?

Any alcohol? And so my every wine drinker is.

Saying, no, you're wrong. No, I'm not listening to this right now. What about a glass once or twice a week? What about the nutrients from the brain?

If you're gonna do something that's bad for your brain, you should be doing other things that are good for your brain. Right. It doesn't mean you can never have a drink. But just know it's not a healthy, healthful thing to do. So you want to do the other things. Yeah.

Like when I eat a bowl of ice cream and pizza, I know it's not helping my brain.

Right.

And if you do it once a month, it's like not the biggest deal in the world. But then because here we're talking about tea for toxins. You want to support the four organs of detoxification. So your kidneys drink more water, your gut eat more fiber. In my shake every morning, I put fiber in it for your liver, kill the alcohol and eat detoxifying vegetables. They're called brassicas, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, kale. And take infrared saunas. People who take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of Alzheimer's disease because it detoxifies you. And it's also. There's actually a study in the Journal of the American Medical association, people with major depression took one infrared sauna. Their mood was better.

Well, how cool is that?

I mean, that's like simple. There's no side effects, mostly to taking a 25 minute sauna.

So is it infrared or any type of sauna?

Well, it's probably any type of sauna, but the study was on infrared.

But anything that's releasing the toxins, any heat exposure and not too much sweating.

With exercise or saunas is detoxifying for you. And this isn't hard, right? Like, not one thing I've said so far is Hard. The M in Bright minds is mental health. This is where you learn to kill the ants and tame the dragons. So ant stands for automatic negative thoughts. The thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day. And the exercise is super simple. Whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, write down what you're thinking and then just ask yourself if it's true. You don't have to believe every stupid thing.

I was working with the therapist recently that said, just because someone tells you something about yourself doesn't mean and they're trying to give you this thing doesn't mean you need to receive that gift. It's not a gift you need to receive. They're offering you a gift. That's a bad gift. Doesn't mean you need to take it. You can just say, okay, I don't need that gift right now. I don't need to let that thought sink in and believe this. And I think I'll speak for myself. Growing up, anytime I heard someone say, you suck. You're dumb, you're an idiot, you're not enough. You'll never amount to whatever. I learned to believe those things, and I think a lot of us probably learn to believe whatever we hear from anyone, whether it was a side comment or a direct comment. And how have you learned over the years to really defend against those ants? Like, besides, someone might say, okay, I tried writing it down that this is not true and analyzing this, but what's a what? How can we really show up for ourselves so our thoughts don't consume us in a negative way?

So you know that if you're overweight on Monday and you have a salad, you are not going to be trim on Friday.

Right.

You need to develop practices.

Right.

That getting well physically is a discipline that occurs over and over time. Right. To be mentally well, you need to develop practices that you do, like eating well over and over and over. So, for example, I start every day with, today is going to be a great day, soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning. And today was easier because I spent last night in Santa Monica and walked around the beach this morning. And I get to hang out with you. Today is going to be a great day. That way my unconscious mind finds why it's going to be a great day. And then your brain is always listening. I talk about taming the hopeless and helpless dragon, the dragon from the past that feeds depression. And it's something I do called positivity bias training. I want to get my brain looking for what's Right. Because it automatically goes for what's wrong. And so I start every day with today is going to be a great day. And then if I have a hard time, if I feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control, I write down what I'm thinking and then I just go, is it true? And there's a whole bigger method in the book. And often I'll go to what's the opposite of that thought? No one loves me or no one respects me or you're a failure. And so quickly, my brain, if I go, my wife never listens to me. I've had that thought. I'll go, well, I never listen to my wife. And I'll be like, oh, that can be true. Or she does listen to me. And then I find the times, it's just, I don't believe what goes on in my head. And then when I go to bed at night, and this is so powerful, I say a prayer and then I go, what went well today? And I put myself to sleep by reviewing the positive things that happen.

The brain, foods that would actually help increase our mood, the function of our mood to feeling better, not in an addictive, I need this all the time. McDonald's hit. But overall calming, happy, healthy mood.

Well, I think that, you know, omega 3 sources, huge. You know, we know those are really necessary for brain health. So you know, oily fish are the best sources. I think there are some of the mushrooms. The one most studied is lion's mane, which is a very good edible mushroom. But that really looks as if it improves cognitive function and protects the brain. I think anti inflammatory agents like turmeric, ginger are great.

Olive oil?

Olive oil, of course.

Do you take supplements yourself?

I do, I take a, you know, a multi nutrient supplement. I take CoQ10, I take magnesium, I take a number of mushroom formulas. Really?

And you make them yourself?

I don't make them, but a friend of mine does and I'm a great believer in mushrooms and their medicinal benefits.

How long have you been studying mushrooms?

Geez, probably since the 1970s. Also I first became interested in. Well, I grew up, my mother was very fearful of mushrooms, as many people were. She said, don't even touch them, you'll get poisoned.

Really?

Yeah. And so I first got interested in food, mushrooms and then started when I began reading about Chinese medicine to see how much they were valued in Chinese medicine and in Western medicine. We never paid any attention to them. So that interested me and I began looking at what are the effects of these things and why are they so Much loved in Asia. And they're really interesting. A lot of these affect immunity, resistance to cancer viruses. You know, they're just. They're great. So I began, you know, I really became knowledgeable about mushrooms.

Really?

Yeah.

So you take them daily or weekly?

Yeah, I take. Yeah. And I eat mushrooms whenever I get the chance.

Mushrooms are powerful, huh?

They're real powerful.

Was there a documentary called, like, the Magic Power of Mushrooms or something on Netflix, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's. How many species of mushroom?

Countless, I don't think we know.

Thousands, right?

Yeah, thousands and thousands. And the percentage of them that can kill you is very tiny. So when you go out, when you learn to pick wild mushrooms, the first thing you want to do is learn the ones that can kill you. And those are fairly easy to learn. And then once you learn those and avoid them, you can experiment. And the worst thing you're going to get is a stomach ache of one sort or another for a few hours, and you'll be fine.

Tell me, talk to me about teas, because I'm interested in teas and the power of teas. And what is the purpose of tea and why do people drink it so much in general?

Okay, first of all, tea all comes from one plant. It's Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. A lot of things people call teas are herbal infusions that aren't made from the tea plant. So chamomile tea is not tea.

It's not tea.

Rooibos tea is not tea.

What is it? It's just herbal infusion.

It's an herbal infusion. But if you're talking strictly about tea, it's all. All from this one species of plant.

Where does this species grow? It can grow anywhere?

Well, yeah, it's native to China and India, but it can. I hear people are cultivating tea in Oregon now. I haven't tried any of it yet anyway, so it can grow over a wide. You know, can't take frost, but it can grow in a lot of different areas. But then there are many varieties of tea, depending on how the tea is grown, how it's treated, whether it's steamed, dried, roasted, toasted, how long it's oxidized. And you've got, like, everything from white tea, which is very delicate, green tea, oolong tea, black tea. And, you know, there's all sorts of different preferences. When I was growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank. Right, right. Or iced tea with a lot of sugar. And the only tea that we had available Was tea in bags. And the common stuff is literally the sweepings from the floor of tea estates. So it's been only relatively recently that people in this country have become aware of good tea.

What are the benefits of tea? Why drink tea?

Well, it's agreeable throughout. For centuries, people have found it to be agreeable. It's a stimulant. It's got caffeine.

All tea, or I guess all true tea, has caffeine.

Some has more than others.

Like a mint tea, that's non caffeine, that's not tea.

There is, however, mint flavored tea, so you gotta read the label.

You know, that's with caffeine.

Yes, it has tea.

It has caffeine.

Right. Now, the stimulation, however, of tea is very different from that of coffee. Coffee has more caffeine in it, but they have different other things in them. And tea has a compound called L theanine that you've probably heard of, that's a relaxant. And I think that combination really affects the quality of stimulation of caffeine.

So it's got caffeine, which gives you sharper energy, but also a relaxation. Yes.

People, I think, describe it as a relaxed alertness.

Interesting.

Different from the stimulation of coffee, which I personally think is much more jangling.

A jittery alertness versus a calm alertness, a focused alertness.

Exactly. Now, the other observation I make, I don't want to bash coffee too badly, but I see an awful lot of people who are addicted to coffee, physically addicted. You know, if they try to stop, they have a withdrawal syndrome. You know, it's like lethargy and then a pounding headache. And it can, you know, last for 48 hours and instantly relieved if you have some coffee. You don't see that with tea.

You know, rarely you're not like, I need my tea. I'm on my parade.

And also, when I was actively seeing patients, I used to say that I would produce one miracle cure a week by getting somebody to stop drinking coffee. And it was from everything from hand tremors to irregular heartbeats to bladder problems, GI problems, stomach problems, a whole range of stuff. And they had no idea that the coffee was doing it to them.

You got them off the coffee and they were like two weeks later, they were fine, Fine.

And these were often problems that had gone on for years and breaking people's hearts. And nobody ever told them, though, you're breaking people's hearts. But also, there's a huge variation in how people respond to caffeine in general and coffee in particular. I See people who have no idea that the one cup of coffee they have in the morning is the reason they can't sleep at night. And I see other people who can drink a pot of coffee at bedtime and fine. So you gotta find out where you are on that spectrum.

Yeah, I can have a cappuccino at night after like 10 o' clock and pass out the next day.

So you're relatively caffeine insensitive.

Yeah, not that I need it, I just like little taste or whatever and I wonder and I'll drink it in the mornings and it doesn't like give me more energy. I feel like I have energy.

Right. But when people say they get energy in coffee, it's their energy. You know, coffee just bunches it up and when it wears off, you're left with a depletion of energy.

Really?

What do you mean?

It's their energy bunches it up.

Caffeine isn't giving you a gift of coffee isn't giving you a gift of energy. It's like it's forcing your body to give up chemically stored energy that it would normally not release all at once.

Like stored where? In the fat cells or in the.

No, in all cells. It's in all cells. Energetic compounds in all cells. But when you release that energy, then when the drug wears off, you have a depletion of energy and you feel tired. Yeah, you have a crash.

And why does tea not do that specifically?

Probably because it's first because it's less caffeine, so it's gentler stimulation. And it's also got this other compound that moderates the thing. So I guess you can find, you could find tea addicts. I don't see them very often and I don't see many people who say they get a crash from tea drinking. And also coffee does have. There are health benefits of coffee. But there's been a tremendous amount of research on health benefits of tea, especially green tea.

Like what are the benefits overall?

Lower death rates.

Really?

Yeah. There's a huge population study in Japan.

Is that because of the tea or because of all the other factors of the environment? Friends.

And we don't know, but there's a clear association between the more tea people drink, lower causes, all causes of death, it's got improved cardiovascular health, lower rates of cancer, all sorts of stuff like that. And of the various forms of tea, personally I think green tea has been most studied.

Here's the thing, when I drink green tea in the morning with no food, it makes me feel a little Upset like I've thrown up before.

I've heard this from people.

I get a little nauseous sometimes.

I hear this from people. So you want to have food in your stomach, Right. That's fairly simple. Fix.

Got you. Why is that, do you think?

I don't know.

And it's coffee.

I'm fine.

I mean, interesting. I don't know.

Drink coffee in the morning and not eat all day.

I do not know why.

Maybe there's a compound in the tea stimulating something interesting.

So my preferred form is matcha green tea, which is the powdered tea.

Yeah.

But matcha doesn't make me feel sick.

Okay, good Matcha. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. You got to try our matcha, which is the best.

Which you got. You guys have. I mean, the best domain in the tea world of matcha dot com.

Yeah. What was a good score?

And why.

Why is.

Why did you get in? How did you get into macho?

When I was 17, I was on a student exchange program. This was 1959. No, actually it was an experimental school called the International School of America.

Your whole life just sounds woo woo out there, which I love.

This was great. I got to travel around the world for nine months and live with native families in different cultures. Changed my life.

Anyway, it's a quick story there before you tell it. My dad, we had seven exchange students live with us when I was a kid. So it's like we didn't have the money to travel.

Right. But you brought it to you.

We brought it to me. So we had people from all over the world teaching us the culture and.

The food and all those. Substitute for that. Amazing. No substitute for that. For knowing about other. Other cultures.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I lived with Japanese families outside of Tokyo and Kobe and the Japanese family outside of Tokyo. There were supposed to be a student studying English, but there was no language.

No one spoke English.

No one spoke English. So the second night that I was there, the mother, through gestures made known she wanted to take me next door to her neighbor who was a tea ceremony practitioner. So it was cool. So the three of us sat around and this woman in kimono made matcha. So first of all, the color of the matcha just blew me away. I mean, it's not this brilliant green powder. I'd never seen green like that. And then the whisk that they whisked it in a bowl to a froth is a marvel of Japanese craftsmanship. Carved from a single piece of bamboo. And that whisk just. Oh, I loved I wanted one of those. So I then in the 1970s, I began going to Japan fairly regularly for different things. And whenever I'd go I'd bring matcha back and turn people onto it. Nobody had ever heard of matcha and I'd make it for people. And somewhere in the 80s, maybe 90s, I started importing matcha from a company in Japan that I met and selling it on my website, drweil.com, way ahead of its time. There was no awareness of matcha or.

Starbucks made it pub.

Then watching matcha suddenly become popular here, I was amazed but also disappointed that so much of the matcha here was terrible.

Well, it's just sugar infused, but also.

The matcha itself, because it's such a fine powder, it's got a huge surface area, it oxidizes very quickly. So if it's not stored properly, it loses that ring color, becomes sort of yellowish green or gray green. It gets bitter and a lot of people, that's all the only matcha they've tried is stuff like that. So I really wanted to turn people on to good matchas.

What are the benefits of matcha in general?

Well, it's the only form of tea in which the whole leaf is consumed and it's got a higher content of antioxidants and flavor compounds and that l theanine than other forms of tea. So it's grown in an unusual way. It's like they're special tea plants and starting about three weeks before they harvest it, they cover the plants with shade cloth, that's about a 90% shade cloth, so pretty dark. And in response to that, the leaves.

Get bigger to try to get the.

Sun to get bigger and thinner. They produce more chlorophyll to try to make more energy and they produce more antioxidants and more flavor compounds. And then the leaves are harvested, steamed, dried, aged and then they're ground between stones. Used to be done by hand, now they're sort of mechanically driven, but it's these grooved granite stones to this super fine powder. And so it's, you know, it's a special form of tea that has higher content of all the good stuff.

We'll have to come to Tucson and have you make me something.

I would love to do that.

Whisk it up for me or just go to Japan. I'd love to do that, Find a specialty place.

But meantime, you can get it from our website, matcha.com.

There you go. You guys teach how to make it.

Too and sell the videos and we Sell everything.

Everything.

Everything.

These all there.

That's exciting.

Yeah, that's fun. So it's been fun to turn people onto that.

So why matcha over jasmine or green? What's the.

I think it's personal preference. Whatever you like. I like the first of all, I just like the look of matcha. I like the taste of it. I like the ritual of whisking it. Yeah, well, you can do it any way you want.

And is it, you know, the Starbucks ways? Like you put almond milk in it or something. But how would you. Is this with water?

Is this with. Yeah, just. I like it just with water. No sweetener. That's just the way I like it. I also like iced matcha, sort of. I use an electric whisk and room temperature water and then put ice cubes in it when it's hot weather. I like that a lot.

Wow.

I like to drink green things.

Are you drinking one tea a day? Do you have more?

I'd say one a day for you? Yeah, usually one a day or early in the day. Occasionally I'll have another one, but usually you don't need more than one.

What's your nighttime ritual?

My nighttime ritual? I eat early.

What's that, five, seven?

Four to five?

I would say that's your dinner. Yeah.

I like to cook. So even if I'm by myself, I usually cook for myself. Simple stuff. But I like simple, delicious things. And I like cooking for other people. And then after dinner, I like to often read, watch movies, depending on the weather, of course. I mean, if it's up in BC and it's light till 10 o', clock, I'm outdoors, right?

Right.

You're living the dream. You've done so many different interesting things. What's the thing you're most proud of that you've created?

There is now a center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine named the Andrew Weil center for Integrative Medicine.

That's pretty cool. Yes, that's pretty cool.

And. And we're the world leader in education in this field. As I said, We've graduated over 2,000 physicians from our trainings. We train medical students. We have our curriculum in 80 residency programs. We train other health professionals, we train chiropractors, dentists, nurses in integrative medicine. I've always said one day we'll be able to drop the word integrated. It'll just be good medicine. And that's coming.

And integrative is. Is that the exclusion of medicine, like traditional medicine?

No, it builds on conventional medicine.

So you still can Prescribe traditional medicine.

Yeah, you know, we. If I've always said if I'm in a serious car accident, I don't want to go away to a Christian Science practitioner or a chiropractor or shaman, you know, I want to go to a trauma center and get put back together. But then I'd use other methods I know to speed up healing. So I think the. Frankly, one of the things I can see happening, I think that a lot of smaller and community hospitals aren't going to be there in the future. I think nobody's going to be able to afford that stuff. And that what we call conventional medicine, allopathic medicine, that may become a specialty for dealing with trauma, for critical illness. And there'll be one large facility in cities that has all the hardware, and there'll be new kinds of institutions that will come into being that I think of as healing centers. That's one possible future.

You've seen the obesity go up in America since the last 50 years. It probably wasn't 2/3 back then. It was probably about one third maybe, or not even. I don't know what it was back then.

Well, I remember watching a few years ago, I watched the whole Ken Burns documentary on World War II. It was on PBS. And there are many crowd scenes, both military and civilian. Thousands of people. You don't see a single fat person in those crowds.

Is it because they didn't have the money to buy food? Is it because they're.

No, it's not.

And, you know, the other interesting thing is if you look what people were eating in those days, they didn't know a lot of what we know now.

They weren't processing food as much, too.

So. Yeah, so, I mean, but people ate. You know, they were eating potato meat and potatoes and pies and whatever. But it was real food, food made from scratch. You know, they were not eating manufactured food. They weren't eating fast food.

There was no fast food then.

Right.

What do you think is going to. What do you think in the next 50 years we're going to be as a country in terms of obesity?

You know, I saw this is a couple years ago. I read that the military is really having problems finding people who are qualified for military service because of obesity. So if it's really. So if it's threatening national defense, you'd think, you know, now people are going to take it seriously. We got to do something.

Just because they're not in shape enough to pass the test, the physical test.

Yeah. You know, we're in such a mess in this country with regard to food and nutrition, it's hard to know where to start. Where I would start is if we could get people to stop drinking sweet liquids. Right. That would be. We had to put it so far ahead of the curve.

Soda popping.

And it's not just soda pop, it's also fruit juice, it's energy drinks, it's. That's putting sugar and coffee and tea, all the Starbucks Matcha, that would be one place to start. Just to not drink sweet liquids. That would be a big step.

What about alcohol consumption?

I don't sure. I think the whole key with alcohol is moderation. There's constant arguments about whether it's beneficial or harmful. I think moderation is the key. I don't think that's nearly as big a factor as, as sugar really.

And when you created the anti inflammatory diet, Right. When was that? Long ago.

And you know, I have a history of being ahead of the curve in a lot of areas know that I've been able to foresee trends. I was I think the first people to warn people about trans fats 10 years before people took notice of that. So I became aware of this, beginnings of this hypothesis that cross chronic inflammation was the root cause of a lot of different kinds of serious chronic diseases. And that just fascinated me because when I was in medical school I was taught that cardiovascular disease had nothing in common with cancer and that had nothing in common with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. And now suddenly it looks like all of these things are linked. They have a common root of chronic inflammation. Inflammation. And if that's the case, the good news is then there's a common strategy for dealing with them if you can reduce inappropriate inflammation. So I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about inflammation. Inflammation is the cornerstone of the body's healing response.

So inflammation is good when you're in pain?

Well, it's good. It's the way the body gets more nourishment and more immune activity to an area that's injured or under attack. So we all know it on the surface of the body. You know, it's redness, swelling, you know, pain, heat. But we aren't aware of it necessarily internally and especially if it's low level. Inflammation is so powerful and it's so potentially destructive that it's very important that it ends when it's supposed to end and stay where it's supposed to stay.

So you don't want it throughout your body.

No inflammation persists. If it outlives itself purpose, then it causes disease and it looks now if you can't produce enough inflammation, you're vulnerable to infection. If you produce too much inflammation, you're vulnerable to allergies and autoimmunity. And it looks like if you've got low level chronic inflammation going on for a long time, you greatly increase risks of cardiovascular disease, of neurodegenerative disease and cancer. And so I think one of the best things we can do is learn how to contain it. So what are the factors that influence it? It's partly genetic. It's stress. Exposure to environmental toxins is a big one. Secondhand cigarette smoke is a very powerful pro inflammatory agent. Really? But diet has a huge influence and that's one that's potentially under our control. And I think there's no question that the mainstream North American diet is strongly pro inflammatory. It gives us the wrong kinds of fats, the wrong kinds of carbs, and not enough of the protective elements, which are mostly in fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, tea, things like that.

Yeah. So what would be the anti inflammatory diet?

So a base of high quality produce. And the government always tells us to eat more fruits and vegetables, but the emphasis really should be on vegetables because fruits are sugar sources and you want to, you know.

Veggies. More veggies.

More veggies. You want to avoid pro inflammatory fats, which are things like, you know, hydrogenated fats, margarine, vegetable shortening and the polyunsaturated vegetable oils.

Okay.

So you know, you want to eat olive oil, should be your main, main thing fat.

Or avocado oil.

Or avocado oil, yeah.

Gotcha.

Nut seeds, good? They're good, yeah. Yes. In terms of carbohydrate, it's not that carbohydrates are bad, it's that you want to reduce consumption of quick digesting ones, the ones that turn quickly into blood sugar. So everything made with flour and that's all the snack foods, all the processing, everything. Yeah. And sweeteners in general. I mean, that doesn't mean you live without sugar completely, but you want to really keep that to a minimum.

So is this all flour? Is this just more.

It's all flour. I think one of the almond flour, well, that's a nut, so that's better. But with grains, I think there's such misunderstanding. If I ask people to name a whole grain food, the usual answer I get is whole wheat flour or whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is not a whole grain food. Where's the grain? And the FDA doesn't get that. They let that put labels on it saying this is a whole grain food and good for you. Most whole wheat bread is colored white bread. You know, when you have a grain, the starch is tightly compacted, very dense, and it's surrounded by a more or less by a fibrous bran. And it takes time for digestive enzymes to get in there and convert the starch to sugar. When you mill a grain into flour, whether or not the bran is present, whether or not the germ is present, you convert the starch into a material with an infinite surface area and it's a snap for digestive enzymes to turn that into sugar.

How does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called the Ultra Mind Solution about how the body affects the mind. We often know about the mind body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example at Harvard of nutritional psychiatry. There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast, the Doctors Pharmacy. The doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain and mood. And we see depression, anxiety, irritability, stress. It turns out that when you eat the American diet, diet, otherwise known as a sad diet, the standard American diet, that, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. You know, when you cut yourself and you get infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our Diet, I mean, 95% of us are deficient probably in omega 3 fats. You know, 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood, like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a Role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And the clinical trial trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders, often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone, your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber toothed tiger.

Wow.

And that can create anxiety internally with the insulin internally?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal. But if you eat all that crap, your brain is going to feel it, your body's going to feel it.

So what happens to the brain when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain? And then it starts to, you know, what does that do? Is it inflame it in that moment, does it take time to inflame something?

So there's a whole cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar. That's 60% of our diet. It's ultra processed food. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten. Sugar and starch and whatever bad fats drives it into your fat cells. And it's a one way street into your fat cells called your adipocytes around your belly, those belly fat cells. Those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones, inflammatory markers and messengers, neurotransmitters. It's quite striking when you look at, they're not just like holding up your pants.

It's fat there.

It's like it's actually doing stuff. And when you eat in that way, it drives hunger, it stores fat, it shuts down your metabolism and it Slows, literally slows your metabolism. And even worse, it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one way turnstile, only get in and then on top of that it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules, we call them adipocytokines that go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's a kind of a downstream effect over chronic eating. This way if you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you. Right. But if you're constantly eating this stuff and we're talking about the average American eats a pound, almost a flour and sugar a day.

Wow.

A pound, like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour. You add that up and it's. And I know I'm not that eating that much and you aren't. So a lot of people are making up for the difference.

Right, right. So food affects your mood for sure.

Yeah. And not only that, it's not even just, you know, it was striking. And I don't know if you had David Plumiter on the show, but he wrote a book called Brainwash. And it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this American diet that we're all eating. It disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is a grown up. It's the adult in the room. It's like you think you're gonna punch that guy, but you go, I better not punch that guy.

Right.

It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain that's going to just run or fight or flee. And what happens is literally, physiologically, these parts of the brain are connected. But when you eat crap, they get disconnected. And so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grownup in the room. Which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred. And I mean just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now, I think a large part of that has to do with our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian, reptilian insult that is driving behavior change. And when we look at, and we look at the fact of other data to support it's not just a theory. In prisons, if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in Prisons, which is pretty darn bad. There's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin, it's an 80% reduction.

Come on.

If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials because he's got these people locked up.

So.

So you've got. It's a really great kind of study. Now, these kind of studies are hard to do because mostly we're free. We call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want. They don't follow the study protocol. When you're locked up, you get what you get, Right. And so they took these.

The environment's the same for everyone. Yeah, all that stuff.

That's right.

And they took these kids and they. And they. These were kids who were disruptive, violent, aggressive, oppositional, suicidal. It was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods, there was a 91% reduction in all violent behavior. You know, oppositional behavior, need for restraints. Went down. Suicide went down 100%. I mean, it's the third leading cause of death in that age group. It went down 100. No suicides. And so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry. And you know, wait a minute. Maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems with obesity and the problems of chronic disease and the fact that Covid is landed on a perfect, you know, laboratory for spreading in America because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet. But it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our. And our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing at rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health.

Oh, that's not hard.

So, I mean, you know, in my book, the Pegan diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming youg Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. And, and it's really practical and there's a bunch of steps at the end. But. But I think, you know, the. The real dangers are. One, high fructose corn syrup. Because anything with high fructose corn syrup, almost by definition is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other bad crap. So if you're reading labels, like, if you just can eliminate that, that would be like, number one. Number two would be trans fats, hydrogenated fats, which.

What is that? What's really.

What's that in? What foods is that in? Is that processed packaged food, hydrogenated fats or fried? Is that french fries? Yeah.

So hydrogenated frats have literally been, have been banned by the fda, essentially ruled not safe to eat. But they're still out there. Okay, there's. You can still find them. It's less but it's. And they used to be really. That's makes Crisco shortening. So anything that comes with a baked good or any, any processed food. And the third thing would be, you know, you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard, can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad?

You know, no.

Which is also known as bht. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer. It's banned in Europe. We have it in everything here, you know, so if you wouldn't have, you know, azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries, you probably shouldn't eat it. And yet this is in so much of our foods. In fact, in America it's legal. This is an ingredients used in breads to make them fluffier. Subway used it in their Subway sandwiches.

Take it out then.

So our friend ashamed them into taking out. But it's still legal here. It's not illegal. She just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the subway and got them. But in Singapore, for example, if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15 year jail sentence and a $450,000.

No, you do not.

Yes you do. I swear to God. In Europe a lot of these chemicals are bad. So basically just eat real food. So get rid of the all, all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then, you know, there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the pegan diet food is medicine and quality matters. And then it's not just calories, it's, it's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes, you're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, your mitochondria. Everything is controlled by what we're eating. So the book is really focused on two key Principles. One is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine. Because, you know, I call it the Pegan diet as a joke between paleo and keto, right?

Sure.

I was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardiologist and another one was a paleo doc. And they were just fighting and I was in the middle and I think felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth. And I was sort of, I was like trying to break the, Break the tension a little bit. And I said, hey, if you're a paleo and you're vegan, I must be pagan. And it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed. I was like, oh, wow, that was good. And then I thought about on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein, animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar and even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject. But they're pretty identical. And so the goal of this book is not to create a dogma, but to create a big ten inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems? And I think, you know, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. You know, a lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be Paleo or be vegan or be this or be that, be raw. And the truth is, it depends on you if you are. If I do keto, my body doesn't respond great. I mean, I do higher fat. But another person who's a diabetic, they might do great on it. One person on a vegan diet like Rich Roll may be able to run triathlons. I mean, just incredible Iron man stunts of heroic effort. But he may be a unicorn or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine, see, are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted, or they don't have protein or their body doesn't like it. I just had a patient, for example, this week who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan. She's basically a vegetable and sugar vegan.

And she didn't even like toast sugar as well.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, a lot of People who are vegan eat sugar because the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So it's not uncommon. And so she wasn't overweight at all, but metabolically, she was super unhealthy. She had acne and her gut was a mess. And she had very low protein, like very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. I mean, and, you know, she was extremely unwell, and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we've had. We had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit. I had to get her on some different protein shakes, which she needed. I had to up regular vitamins. I had to sort of get her off the sugar. I mean, but I think, you know, it takes a lot of work. So the key is, how do you personalize the diet and get away from the basically religious nutrition that we.

Which is either all vegan, vegetarian, vegetarian, keto, carnivore. There's all these extreme diets, Right?

Exactly. Yeah. And again, I always encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body.

Yourself.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, how do you feel? Do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How you're clear, you have energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition. Nutrition. And how do you identify your particular needs? By various kinds of testing. Whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing. And how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet?

Everyone's kind of swearing, by their way is the way. But it seems so extreme in my mind, you know, and I'm. Yeah. And I. I empathize with vegans. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want to hurt animals either. And I, you know, but then I've tried it for a while, and I'm also like, gosh, but I miss meats. And it's like, what is the way? And what I'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all. You have to really figure out what works for you. You talk about brain foods, specific foods that we should be stocking our kitchen with. Can you share what some of these brain foods are? You have an acronym for them. I'm not sure if you have them all memorized.

But.

So I'll give you a few to get you started. So I use the Brain Foods acronym to really almost have bee checklist for people. I like people to take a photograph of it or read it or list it in their phone so that when they're at the supermarket, they're picking out those nutrients. So, you know, B is my favorite berries, and my favorite berry is blueberry. Now, they're rich in anthocyanins, they're rich in fiber, they are colorful. And that brings me to the R, one of the R's. As for eat the color of the rainbow. And these are sort of things Louis said. Many people overlook. Their doctors have said it or they've heard it or read it. But what we're uncovering in the science is that the color of the rainbow, the colors of vegetables, the phytonutrients in those interact with the gut microbes. These are powerful antioxidants, powerful anti inflammatory substances which impact things like depression, anxiety, and more. So it's no longer just eat a colorful salad. There's actual good evidence as to why we should be eating it.

And does it matter if it's cooked or uncooked?

The science on that varies, but my feeling about it is the following. When you have raw veggies, they have their microbiome intact, providing those bacteria. They're giving you good nutrients. So I like to play, I like people to do the following. Have some say when they're preparing their vegetables for roasted veggie dish, keep some chopped veggies that you munch on and then roast the rest or baking the rest, whatever. So you're having a little bit of combination of both.

Some raw, some cooked, some cooked.

But things like, say, spinach, steaming the spinach can actually help lower the oxalate levels. So some of it is more specific.

Okay, gotcha. Now, here's a. There's a. I've heard a topic about fruits that some people say have as much as you want. Others say the less fruit the better, or do it in seasonal times or things like that.

Yeah.

Have you seen anything where if people are only eating fruit, that it helps or hurts them psychologically? Or can you never have too much fruit in moderation?

So I think when it comes to psychological health, one of the biggest things is how mental health and metabolic health are now connected. What I mean by that is I talk about berries because they have a low glycemic index. So they have a powerful positive impact eaten in moderation. So I don't mean 4 cups of blueberries a day, but I do mean about a half a cup at least, as one of your servings of fruit in a day. The issue with fruit is that the higher glycemic fruits, say the more tropical fruits, you know, mangoes and pineapples, those are actually less healthy for those with mental health, because many individuals with mental health might have struggle with weight and sometimes with metabolic health.

Interesting. And so if you have a lot of these high glycemic fruits, they store.

More fat, they could increase your weight, they could potentially increase your weight, which.

Can make you psychologically say overweight or.

Not confident yourself that as well as your metabolic health, because it could impact your insulin resistance, your insulin sensitivity, your glucose load. So because in my clinical practice, I often see people who are struggling with their weight, I don't mean low weight, I mean struggling with a little bit of extra weight, or they're taking medications like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Zoloft, Prozac, to name a few. One of the side effects is weight gain. Not everyone develops it, but many people do. Psychotropic medications, others, antipsychotics also have a problem. They impact metabolic health and glycemic control and they impact weight. So as a psychiatrist, you really have to be tuned into that to realize if you're going to save food, qualify better food for that individual to eat. Because a person could eat two bananas a day and that could totally increase their weight. Are bananas on their own unhealthy? No. To an average person of normal weight who's exercising and leading a healthy lifestyle, perfectly fine, eat a banana. But to that individual, it may not be the best solution. So it's that caveat with mental health that's important.

So what's the best fruit to eat if you're trying to lose weight?

So the best answer to that is stick with a couple of servings of different berries. Stick with a lifestyle that is supporting your weight loss, which goes from mindfulness all the way to hydration to outdoor time to good sleep and all of that, because we know it's not just one thing.

Eliminating stresses in your life.

Exactly. Stress is a huge driver of weight gain because of the impact on cortisol. So I would say stick with a couple of different types of berries and smaller servings and have those regularly because the fiber and the phytonutrients from them are still going to help you. So I would never say exclude fruit completely unless your diabetologist has said, look, you need to do this in order to Bring down your hemoglobin A1C, then it's a different conversation.

So when is fruit good for you then? Because if you're trying to lose weight, I'm hearing it's not as good to have a lot of it, not a.

Lot of it in moderation, actually, to be honest, everything in moderation, right? Because every healthy food, you want to eat it in a portion controlled sort of way. Food is actually always good for you. It provides nutrients, macro and micronutrients, which are healthy for your body, healthy for your brain. So whether it's the vitamin C from kiwi or whichever, or if you're having leafy greens, not a fruit, but if you're having folate from leafy greens, that's affecting you in a positive way. So food is always a good option. But that also comes from my food philosophy, which is I am diagnostic and I don't demonize a food group. So if you come into me and say I'm vegan or carnivore, my role as a nutritional psychiatrist is to improve your mental well being. I will advise you how you can tweak your diet in a positive way. You may not agree with me, but I'm going to offer you that guidance. Because what I find is that people fall into these, eat this, not that mentality, then they exclude entire food groups, then they crave that food group, then there's a rebound effect, and then they end up either gaining the weight or they end up being unhappy because they've started to consume a food that they previously gave up. It becomes a vicious cycle.

Like I said, they weren't going to eat something, then they go eat it for a month.

Depression, feeling more anxious, interesting. And then almost unable to get back on that saddle of just eating, eating a healthier diet, which I want people to eat healthier foods as part of their lifestyle. So it's a natural, whether they're traveling, whether they're walking through an airport or whether they're at home, they're just reaching for those healthier options or carrying it with them.

And what about antioxidants? Why are these so powerful for mental health?

So antioxidants have an extremely important impact through the gut microbiome, but also in the brain. In the natural process of life, we encounter different things that for form, these unhealthy substances in our body called radical oxygen species, if left on their own, they can actually lead to cancer, heart disease, lots of bad things, as well as worsening our mental health. So what antioxidants do is they kind of. They interact with these radical oxygen species to almost neutralize them. And that's why they're so powerful. So that's why we should eat our antioxidants.

Okay, what foods are rich in antioxidants?

Starting with berries, but you know, they're also spices. That's something people don't realize. There are spices that are rich in antioxidants, like turmeric with a pinch of black pepper. My nutritional psychiatry, no brainers. Add a pinch of black pepper because that makes the turmeric more bioavailable and bioactive for your body.

So.

Spices, many of them have rich antioxidants. So those are. The spice cabinet is probably one of the ones you're not tapping into to add antioxidants as well as veggies, all these different colors of vegetables, different bell peppers, different lettuces, all of these. Whether the purple carotenoids from carrots have rich antioxidants because of the. There because of the nutrients in them.

What about the research that's been out about lectins and nightshades, certain lectins? Is this something that you would avoid or limit? Or is the science from your research not really saying there's an issue with nightshades and lectins?

So, you know, part of it depends on the person. If they are working with a physician who's asked them to and their condition. If they've been asked to stay away from nightshades because of a certain condition and it's been working for them, I'm not there to say stop doing that and eat everything if it's working for them. Absolutely. But many people come to me a little confused about where, you know, what. What foods include lectins and what they should avoid. But there are also some culinary techniques where you can get around by food preparation. For example, if you like nuts, you know, there's a way, there's a way to get raw, natural nuts. Soak them in water overnight, rinse them out and slow. It's not even roasting because it's such a low temperature, almost dry them out in the oven at a very low temperature, and that circumvents some of the anti nutrients in them. So there are always ways to think about food and make it healthier or look at, at a cooking technique which could improve either the nutrient value or get around things like that. So I'd rather have that conversation than ask people to exclude things not about other people's research, but more about my approach to how I feel I can Help individuals in their mental well being. Because, you know, this is not just for someone with depression or anxiety. A lot of people in the last few years have just been feeling a little off. And I use that term loosely. It's a little bit anxious, not sleeping well, feeling blue, just not just feeling. There's a great article calling it languishing, just not feeling good, just not feeling quite themselves. So eating in a good way can help a lot of that without a prescription.

Right. What would you say is the best cooking technique that you've learned to get the maximum result for optimal nutrition? Is it from the nuts? Is it from soaking something? Is it from some other type of food where you've seen, okay, here's the original raw form. And by applying this technique, it actually enhances it to really help your mental health, your brain that much more. Is there a technique like that?

I don't think there's one technique. You know, I think that I mentioned the, I mentioned things like sports spinach and steaming it or applying gentle temperature. The nuts. That's specific to a better way to enjoy the nuts. Some people don't have a problem with nuts. They eat them and they feel okay. Now the lectin research may refute that, but again, you pay attention to how you're feeling emotionally, how you're feeling physically, what your doctor's telling you. And you either continue or you change direction a little. One thing I will say is that many people hear their doctor say, eat your vegetables, eat your greens. And they sort of, they roll their eyes and they move on. They don't do it often. It's that action step. One of the things I can say is just gently roasting vegetables in the oven with delicious flavors, putting in colorful veggies, adding spices. Even your kids will want to eat it, you know, because it's interesting. It's different. That I think is one of the things where you can really expand and, you know, just little simple tricks. Like you can do your roasted, colorful, roasted vegetables with different spices for the flavor. Plus you can do your protein on. Whether you plant based or you eat tofu, whether you eat chicken, you can do it on the same sheet pan. And that makes it super easy for someone to prepare dinner.

Right. The next thing you say is include lean proteins and plant based proteins. From the science, you said you don't eliminate any diet or any food groups.

I try my best not to.

There are so many people that try to say, like, eat only meat and this is the way to go. And other people say, be vegan. This is the way to go. Is there science proving which foods are better, like lean proteins that are plant based versus animal proteins.

So I will say that in nutrition science, they're usually things I can quote and they're probably in the same day or same week or same year, at least three other articles which will refute that because that tends to be the spirit of nutrition science. Omega 3s I've seen clinically help my patients time in time and time again, whether usually I like them to use food sources first, but some people prefer supplement or they do and I've seen the improvements. Yet there is research to say they're terrible, you shouldn't use them, that kind of stuff. So I say this with an open mind, understanding that. So I feel that the camps, who. And they are sort of camps, right? Because they tend to be very polarized. Either only eat this and the individuals say, who are plant based will say, well, does this study to name a substance that is negative for your health because it is from meat. And then there are people, individuals who eat meat who will say, but you don't get enough from just the plant. So there's always this polarization. And here's what I feel about it. I think that the more we continue to have these camps, the more confused we are going to continue to be as a country and the worse our nutrition is going to get. Because most people, it's not most people. A lot of people know the SAD diet and are consuming that. So anything we can move from that to a healthier version of that food, understanding what healthy whole foods are is better for us. I think it's much more about that for more people than camps. I'll be this and not that. And I have difficulty with those because I feel that science can support both sides of the argument.

I know you could always find evidence for both sides.

Always find evidence for both sides.

And something against the other side, probably.

Right, exactly. And say, well, gee, you're missing this nutrient because you're plant based or you're missing that nutrient because you're eating or consuming more meat. And I think that's where most people in the public get confused. And they come in and say to me, should I exclude this entire food group? Should I give up whole grains? Should I never eat a slice of this or that? And I think that perpetuating that is not good for us as a country. But if we can find a sensible way forward for the most. So not the people in different camps, but those who just want to eat healthier, want to Feel emotionally better and most of us need to right now with all that's going on, I think it's a healthier way forward and more sustainable.

Yeah, I'm curious about nuts. You mentioned nuts for a second. This is actually the next thing on the brain. Foods and nuts. I'm a big fan of nuts, but can you overdo it? I don't drink milk anymore, but I have the milk substitutions like almond milk and things like that. So if you're having the physical nuts, then you're having almond milk and then almond butter. Is there too much of that?

So there's always even a healthy food. We can overdo even a healthy food. So practicing. I'm not so much of a calorie counter as much as I am the source of food and the quality of food and then paying attention to portions. So I mentioned blueberries and I said that doesn't mean 3 cups of blueberries a day because unfortunately then the load of the amount of sugar from that is not good for you, even though berries are healthy and they have lots of nutrients in them. So similarly with nuts, you want smaller servings and you want different types of nuts. My favorites are macadamia and hazelnuts. I eat them in smaller portions. For someone who likes nuts and they're going to consume that portion of nuts in a day, you may want to switch to something like hemp milk, which by the way, you can make in like literally make in too easy steps. And hemp milk has the advantage of having short chain omega 3s in it because it's rich in ala. So there's a good solution for.

So if you're going to have nuts, don't also have almond milk and nut.

Butters and everything in the same day, that same 24 hour period.

Have hemp milk instead. If you're going to use almond milk.

Have almond milk instead. You know, have your nut butter but you know, nut and seed butter because you're getting the, you're getting other seeds and the value of that and just don't have a of ton, you know, so everything in moderation. If you do eat more of it, then maybe have that the next day, you know, and balance it up that way. It's similar to avocados. You'll have, you know, delicious avocados in California. The truth is, you know, a good serving on a day is about a quarter of a medium avocado to get the benefit of the healthy fats.

Really a quarter of a medium of.

An avocado, medium to large avocado so.

Not a whole avocado.

No, it becomes. What happens is it gets calorie dense at that point. And so, you know, it's balancing that up. Now, if you ate that for breakfast, that's okay. My policy around that is, you know, just cross correct at the next meal or the next day because you understand something a little bit better.

There's a component, of course, with genetics. Now, with that said, we know that the leading science right now and what's really beginning to finally explode and become popular, part of the lexicon is epigenetics.

Yes.

And things that are above genetic control. Now, with that said, I think the first thing is having a understanding and an association with what fat actually is. And most folks have no idea. Unfortunately, we're at war with something we don't even understand. And so fat can be broken down into essentially five different categories at minimum. And a couple of these folks might have heard before, but we're going to go even deeper. So the first type is subcutaneous fat. And subcutaneous fat is a type of white adipose tissue. This is a fat that's just below your skin. And so if you're trying to. If you think about like fat on your arms or your thighs, your butt, you can also have some subcutaneous fat on your belly, but that's the stuff you can pinch.

Now, I can pinch a lot right here.

The other type of fat is visceral fat, and that's also. It's also known as omentum fat. And omentum fat is the kind of deeper recesses of your abdominal cavity. Right. So this is the fat that's really kind of around the organs, you know, kind of putting. If you have a lot of visceral fat putting stress on your pancreas and on your kidneys, and just everything in.

Your core is the fat inside your. Not on the outside of your muscles, but inside your body.

Yeah. So it's like your abdominal cavity.

Gotcha. Your visceral fat is. You want less of that?

Yeah.

This is the most dangerous type of fat. This is the fat that's most correlated with heart disease, with Alzheimer's, with type 2 diabetes. You know, it's just putting stress on your core, everything, which there's so much around there.

Digestive tract, your organs, your liver, your stomach, everything.

And this is the stuff. It's a little bit more firm to the touch. It's a little bit harder to get your hands around. And so these are both still two types of white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Okay, so your body's storing energy. And before I go on, let me preface by saying this. Our fat is actually amazing. It's one of the most important things that have made us the humans that we are today is our ability to store energy and to go back and utilize that energy. Our fat is programmed to do what we've taught it to do. It's just doing what it's programmed to do. It's very good at it, though, and it can be a little bit clingy, you know, so you have to give the right messages, and that's part of the issue. So I just want to make that clear. And fat is also. It's not. We tend to think it's like scattered droplets of cells or unhappiness throughout our body, but it's really an organ itself. So that is an organ. It's an organ. It's an organ that has this interconnected communication. And being that it's an organ, it produces its own hormones. All right? So it's like making. Producing more hormones that encourage more fat storage. Storage if it gets out of hand. All right, So I want to preface by saying that.

Wait, is it an organ or is it, like, an organ?

It's an organ.

Fat is an organ.

Just like, for example.

So fat in our body is one organ, and it's all connected from the brain in my. Connected from the fat in my brain to my belly to my toe.

Now, there's different types of fat communities, all right? So this is another conversation. This. I go through all of these. I literally call it the fat community communities and eat smarter and break this stuff down. So there's another type of fat in the white adipose tissue camp that a lot of people don't know about. It's called intramuscular fat. All right, Intramuscular fat.

This is the third type of fat.

Yeah. And so this type of fat really works on site to provide energy to your muscles. Now, when I went to school, my conventional education, I really was indoctrinated with an idea that fat and muscle are kind of. They have this dichotomy, like they're two different things. They're separate, but they actually work together. And intramuscular fat really provides. And just to think about what it looks like, if you think about the marbling of a steak, all right, that's.

That's.

That's your intramuscular fat. Now, that can get out of hand, too. And you can get what we refer to as chubby muscles, all right, with the intramuscular fat. So it's too much white adipose tissue. So storage on that particular fat community. All right, so these three are white adipose tissue. These are storage fats. Now, here's what's really amazing, and a lot of folks might know about this next one. We also have body fat that burns fat. So they're not storage fats. These are fats that contribute to the burning of energy. The first one that's becoming a lot more recognizable is brown adipose tissue.

All right.

Or bat.

Brown adipose tissue. Or brown fat. Now, brown fat. The reason that it's brown is that it's so dense in mitochondria. Right? Mitochondria.

Mitochondria are good, right?

Yeah. Mitochondria are really the energy power plants of our cells, really producing the energy. When we talk about having energy, these are the power plants creating that energy. And mitochondria is where your fat actually gets burned. All right, so folks, don't. We're taught these diet paradigms, like where the. How does it work? Where does the fat go? How does it get burned? Your mitochondria actually are the place where the triglycerides get shipped to to actually burn them and use them as fat. So brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria.

Side note, how. How do I go to bed weighing a certain amount, and then I wake up and I lose two pounds? Where does that go?

Is that just a burn through sweat?

Is that just mitochondria burning and it's disintegrating into the air? What is happening?

This is such a great question. So in each. This is the first time in book form, like, we're walking people through how the process of fat loss actually happens.

Do I breathe it in?

You've got that Thanos keychain. Does it go to another dimension?

You know what I mean?

But what they did, and this was so fascinating, they actually tracked the path of fat getting burned throughout the body and tracked how it actually is eliminated. And so what they discovered was that about 84% of the fat. Because. Okay, we have to preface by saying this for us, psychologically, in our culture, we tend to think of burning fat if there's a visual of it, it's sweating.

Yeah.

Like, we're out there, we're at the gym. We're sweating it out. That's like. That's your fat cells crying, having a good breakup cry. You know, that's how we. That's what we think.

Yeah.

But in actuality, about 84% of the fat that you lose or that you expel from your body is through breathing.

What?

Yeah, it's eliminated via your lungs. Yeah, it's carbon dioxide, so it.

No way. So fat in the body and then it goes, what, into your lungs? It's like transporting through the lung cavity, and then you breathe it out.

It's an eliminatory organ. You know, we don't think about that. We tend to think about, like, our gastrointestinal tract, our bladders, eliminatory organs, your lungs. And so you breathe. About 84% of the fat that you lose comes out via your breath. And about a third of that happens while you're. While you're sleeping at night.

So you breathe fat out. That's how you burn it.

Yeah.

80. How much?

CESAR Millan is the dog whisperer.

Yes, I was just with the dog whisper. Exactly. I burn it in my sleep. So wait a minute. How much fat do we burn through our lungs?

About 84% of it.

So all of our fat. So if I'm 100.

But this is not just your breathing. It's all the metabolic processes that take place to create the metabolic kind of offshoot.

So just through the mouth, through the.

Breathing, you also do eliminate some of body fat through fluids. So about, you know, somewhere around the ballpark of about 15%, 16 to 14%. Sweat, urine. Yeah. Tears, you can hear. All of these things are eliminating products, you know. Yeah.

Is the fat. It looks coagulated when you look at it in, like, in your body.

Right.

So how does it break down and then turn into just nothing that you can see?

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's a very complex and beautiful process.

Body is fascinating, what you can do.

It is. It is. And we go through we. And it can be so overwhelming. But what I did was I made it an analogy in the book of a theater making your body like a cellular movie theater. And there are particular ushers who are there to put fat into the seats. So we tend to think that fat cells, we're trying to, quote, kill fat or burn fat, but that's not really how it works. Actually, your fat cells are storage containers. And what they're getting filled with, the fat cells, basically, when you're. When you're born, you have a certain allotment of fat cells, all right? You can't just indiscriminately kill them. They get filled with more and more energy. It makes the fat cell expand. So we're trying to do is to get the fat cell to let go of its contents. So it can be used as fuel.

Right.

All right. And so there are two enzymes that are really the head ushers that push fats, the fat contents or triglycerides into the fat cell, or they usher them out when it's time to leave. So one of its hormone sensitive lipase is the one that comes and gets folks out of the theater. Right. Lipoprotein lipase takes the triglycerides and ushers them into the theater. All right. And then there's organs that kind of dominate and regulate what those enzymes are doing, you know, namely your. Your. Your pancreas is like the mother of two brothers who have two different roles. One of them is insulin, and the other one, its brother, is glucagon. All right. Insulin is so, man, when you think of insulin, what do you think of, though?

Eating sugar.

Yeah, that's right.

Insulin spikes in the body when you eat sugar.

Right?

Yeah. And most folks think of diabetes, too. It's like, tied into that lexicon. But insulin is so important for our survival. It's just. It's a super amazing.

We need it.

Yes, you absolutely have to have insulin. And if you're born, you know, in a condition where you have type 1 diabetes and the beta cells in your pancreas aren't even making insulin, like, you can die, your cells won't get energy. So now here's the thing. Insulin's job is to store energy and to encourage all those enzymes and to do their work as well. So when it's out of hand, when insulin is too active, it can be a problem.

It's storing too much fat.

Yeah. And it can get to a point where there's so much activity with insulin, it's getting overrun and. And stressed out that it stops doing its job properly. That's where you get insulin resistance. All right? And then you have something called this kind of instant cell fat cell creation that can take place with the liver. It'll just start making its own fat as well. So. But we'll circle back to that a little bit. Yes, but here's the thing. So you got insulin doing its job of fat storage or energy storage. Glucagon does the opposite. It encourages your cells to let go of their contents to be used as energy.

So how do you get insulin to stop doing its job?

That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. But we don't want to stop. We just want to be efficient.

Efficient.

And it's. Now, here's another thing. We do know that as you mentioned sugar is a big driver of insulin.

Carbohydrates in general, pastas. Right.

Yeah, protein. But protein does as well. It incites the activity of insulin at a lesser degree, for sure. And even fat, in a kind of backdoor way, does drive insulin function too, or even contributes to potentially insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance. So it's not just this one thing. But we do know that in our culture, you know, on average, folks eating like 150 pounds of sugar a year, you know, so that abnormal amount of exposure is chronically creating this over overactivity of insulin to the, to the point that we have insulin resistance existence.

Because 100 years ago we weren't eating as much sugar.

I'm assuming it's not even close. It's not even close.

But it's.

But what is with the. The life expectancy increases every year? It seems like if we're eating more and more bad things, but we're able to live longer, whereas before we weren't.

That's the, that's the misnomer, though. We're not necessarily living longer, we're dying longer.

We're getting sick and being able to.

Yes. Very different. And this is the first generation. We are the first generation right now that is going to not outlive our generations before us.

All right.

This is the first time we're seeing this downtick when we're supposed to be seeing folks. Well, basically the life expectancy has gone down for the first time really? In, like, recent history. Yeah, yeah.

So we're saying we're not supposed to outlive our parents or. What do you mean?

So we'll just say the life expectancy of the past generation was 80 years old. Now it's 79.

Really.

You know, so it's just going a. Life expectancy has gone down for the first time.

Previous generation. Got you. It's interesting. I was asking Dr. David Sinclair about this.

I love him.

He was like, the goal is not to live as long as you can and be sick and miserable. He's like, I've seen that in too many people. The goal is to live as long as you can, healthy, flexible, abundant, you know, not with chronic pain, and then die quickly.

Right.

It's to get sick and then die within a week, not get sick and die within 20 years of misery. He's like, that's not a great life.

Yeah. We don't just want lifespan, we want health span. And it all really boils down. And this is the most beautiful part about this and what I'm really hoping to impress upon culture. Because when we tend to think of food, we tend to think of it in relationship. In our culture, we think of diet and relationships relationship to weight. It's just like what's connected when in reality, food is one of the greatest, if not the greatest determinant of what every single cell and organ system in your body is doing at all times. And this is what I really want to get across is of course, I'm going to give you the best information possible on the metabolism connection with food, but also how does food affect your cognitive performance? And it's shocking when you find this data out how deeply food impacts your levels of empathy and your ability to connect with other people. What do you break that down as well?

What are the foods that cultivate more empathy and compassion? And what are the.

Before.

Before we get to that.

Yeah.

The, the fat storage. There was one more.

Were you talking about brown fat?

Yeah, brown fat.

And there's another fat.

Yeah. So there's one other fat. And so brown adipose tissue is very dense in mitochondria. Right. So these energy power plants. That's why it's.

Brown.

Babies have a lot of brown fat. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation advantage to prevent hypothermia, you know, just to basically keep thermogenesis going. As you become an adult, you have a lot less. Brown adipose tissue is mostly located like around your collarbones, your shoulder blades, down your spine. And brown adipose tissue is remarkable in that it's really correlated. If you have enough brown adipose tissue, which you can create more. And the mobilization activity of it is correlated with having a better body composition. So this type of fat is burning fat for you, if you know brown fat. Yeah. All right, so that's a. We got three storage fats, and then we've got two other types of fat.

And that's body fat that burns fat.

Yes.

And so this other one, and this is one a lot of folks might know, might not know it a lot about yet, is beige fat.

This is the fifth type of fat.

Yeah. So this is beige fat.

Beige fat.

And so beige fat is really, really remarkable in that it can actually become brown fat or white fat. All right. Based on your lifestyle inputs and your nutrition can determine whether it's going to be coming, turning into a fat storing type of fat or fat burning type of fat and the browning of this fat. One of the things. And I'll just throw this out there for folks, since you asked about a specific food, when we go through so many different But I'm going to throw one out that might sound a little bit crazy. A little controversial is coffee. Coffee has been found to encourage your beige fat cells to become brown fat cells. And in fact, one of the studies that I cited in Eat Smarter found they actually used FMRI and they looked at what was happening in the body when somebody drank coffee and they saw the brown fat areas of the body actually light up, signaling increased thermogenesis. And one of the studies found that there's about a 3 to 11% increase in metabolic rate from having caffeine. Now there's a U shaped curve of benefits. Right. Some is good. Once we get to a certain place we can mess ourselves up. And also we get in the conversation of what is that coffee coming along with? Right. Is it just, is it coffee? Are you consuming coffee with donuts and crap and like, you know, these coffee creamers with all these synthetic chemicals, that's not good. And even the coffee itself, are you getting a piping hot cup of coffee with pesticides and herbicides and rodenticides and these toxicants that damage these hormones related to fat loss and fat storage and create kind of dysbiosis in the gut? So there's a big conversation there and we dive into all these pieces to see like there's so many wonderful things that we have access to, but in our culture we've been a little bit led astray. And it's not that coffee is inherently good or bad, it's been utilized for by humans for centuries, but it's the quality and how you're going about it.

That can make all the difference and the quantity probably. And.

Yeah, yeah. And so just going back to your original question, when we're targeting that, you know, the belly fat specifically, and this is something that is not talked about enough, it's really about encouraging and optimizing the hormones related to fat storage and fat burning. Right. And this gets into the conversation of calories because we tend to be very calorie focused as far as if we're trying to lose weight or we're trying to lose belly fat. And it's not that calories don't matter. I want to make that clear. I want to preface with this, but when I was in my nutritional science class in college, the very like the king, the monarch, the warden of diet is calories. And I say warden intentionally because it's a little, it gets into this kind of prisoner mentality.

Yeah.

And diets are really revolving around this. And I, I'm always asking this question And I'm so grateful that I've kind of hard wired myself to do this. Where did it come from? And it wasn't discovered and used for nutrition. It was discovered and utilized initially in physics and engineering. And it made. Yeah, and this was in 1800s. And then it made its transition into nutrition thanks to a guy named Wilbur Atwater. But he's just kind of a little side note as well. And I basically, I go back and talk about all the people involved, but this is what changed America. This is what changed the world, really. Was a physician. She's a pioneer, for sure. Her name was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, and she's the one who popularized the term calorie. And she sold. This was back in the early 1900s. She created a nutrition book, a diet book. And they sold 2 million copies back then, which is basically everybody and their mother has.

Right, right.

All right.

Now what's it called?

This was Diet and Health and the Key to Calories. Something like that. The key to calories. But I went back and read these old fangled writings. There's like a lot of pieces of it online. And this began the indoctrination of our culture and starting to look at food in terms of numbers. It's no longer this dynamic, multifaceted entity that affects all of our hormones and neurotransmitters and organ systems. Now it's numbers. And she specifically said, we will no longer call a slice of bread a slice of bread. You won't say one slice of bread. You'll say 100 calories of bread. You will no longer say a slice of pie. You say 350 calories of pie. And so we stopped looking at food as food. We started this evolution and started looking at it as numbers. And she asserted that a woman of her height could eat whatever she wanted as long as she maintained 1200 calorie intake. And now let me also make this clear. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters battle with her weight for her lifetime.

All right?

And it's that term of like, teach what you want to learn kind of thing. Now, this is also crucial. And some people, this might tug at their heartstrings a little bit. This was also the beginning of this indoctrination, associating food with character, associating food with morality. And so she basically asserted that it's a character defect. If you're not able to manage your weight, there's something wrong with you. And started to use terms like sin and punishment in relationship to food. And this was also during the time of, like, World War I. So food rationing was a big thing. And she said, one of her quotes I put in the book, and I'm paraphrasing, that for every pang of hunger you feel you should have a double joy, knowing that you're saving the hunger pangs in a starving child or, you know, with soldiers. And what. So she's basically saying this was also a massive change in our perception that hunger is related to weight loss. If you're hungry, you're doing it right. And this started to really change the psychology of dieting. Right. And so calories began to become the king and the big focus. Now I want to say this. Calories matter for sure. It's a, it's a measurement of energy in food. Just like a meter is a measure of energy in distance. But that meter is consistent. If we measure this room consistently, it's going to be the same meter, same distance. However, calories are different. Completely ignore. When you're talking about a measurement of energy, it ignores the complexity of human digestion and human hormones and neurotransmitters and cellular function. It's going to be different every day. The calories that you consume and what effects it has on your body, what.

Would you shy away from? What would you say? You know what, that's probably the worst thing for your brain to have functionality and to function longer and live longer with your brain health. What are the main foods you would absolutely never touch? You never give your family or your kids because you just feel like it's very harmful.

Processed foods and any processed foods. No, we don't eat. I don't eat processed foods. I really try to stick to whole foods.

So does that include like. That's a cooking pastries.

I was just thinking, oh, my goodness, this is maybe not true. I do eat crackers occasionally, but I'm. I really don't eat a lot of processed foods. And they're mostly minimally processed. My daughter really loves these peanut butter covered banana bites, so I buy those. But I wouldn't call it a processed food. I mean, it's not fresh from the plant, but it's certainly not burgers or hot dogs or popcorn. It just frozen pizza. I don't. Don't eat that. I just.

So what is the. What does processed foods do to brain health?

There is a lot of research showing that the standard American diet or the SAD diet is really, really. Yeah, it's really, really bad news for your brain. And we have seen this many times using brain scans. We publish this time and time again. Then this may sound Biased. But we were using a Mediterranean style pattern as an example of a healthy diet, which is what scientists would tell you. Most scientists really endorse a Mediterranean style diet as a healthy, as a brain, healthy diet. We were comparing the brain scans of people in the Mediterranean diet to those of people of the same exact age, educational level, on a Western diet or in a standard American diet. You could see the difference just by looking at the brains. So if you are, what do the.

Brains look like on the Mediterranean diet.

Versus I wish I could show you.

Sad, the sad American processed diet. What is it just like it light up? It's lit up more, it's more rich looking, it's just fuller. What is the difference?

Yeah, the difference is that the brains of people on the Western diet look older. Just picture that in your mind if you can. And the brain of a 50 year old person on a Mediterranean style diet looks very full. The brain is composed of three different parts, but mostly just two parts. There's brain and then there's fluid inside your hand. You want to have as much brain as you can and as little fluid as you can. I mean, you want to have some fluid because it's protective, but not too much. You have more fluid and less brain. It means your brain is shrinking like you're losing neuron and fluid is taking over the space.

Oh my gosh.

If you compare the brain scans, you can tell that people on Western diets show brain shrinkage already in midlife, and that continues over time. And worse than that, and we have published this, the Western diet is associated with the emergence of, of Alzheimer's plaques already in midlife. So people on Mediterranean diets are basically zero plaques, at least in our hands.

What do you mean by plaques? What does that mean?

Alzheimer's plaques. So Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common form of dementia in the population, is characterized by presence of these plaques inside the brain.

So plaque on your teeth, there'd be plaque in your brain?

Yeah. There are lesions inside the brain that are considered the hallmark or the signature of Alzheimer's diseases. For a really, really long time, scientists, everybody thought that Alzheimer's was a disease of old age. And that's because the symptoms become evident when people are in their 70s, but.

Now people are getting them in their 50s. The plaque buildup.

That's right. So Alzheimer's disease starts with negative changes in the brain decades prior to anyone forgetting kids or forgetting names. That happens in midlife. And the very first signs that we can detect using brain scans are these plaques, these lesions that you can see building up inside your brain. There's a very clear difference in the timeline for people in Western diet who develop the plaques earlier than people who follow healthier diets.

Wow.

So that's a really. That's a big flag.

Is there a way when, if you notice someone's brain scan is shrinking their brain? Yeah, they're building some of these early stage plaques around their brain. They've got more fluid, less brain matter. Is there a way to reverse that so your brain can actually grow and expand and become healthier and reverse Alzheimer's plaque? Is that possible?

So. Well, that's the hope. With the vaccinations that we're working on. Scientists have been working on developing vaccines for Alzheimer's disease for a really, really long time. The idea is that if you remove the plaques, your brain will stop deteriorating. But so far, all the clinical trials failed, which is in removing the plaques? No, they've removed the plaques, but they do not reverse dementia or cognitive impairment or the atrophy. So that's disappointing in so many ways, I can't even begin to tell you. But that's another reason why the entire scientific community is now moving towards prevention. People say we're starting too late. We should start treating this when people are younger.

Right.

Not when they need it. It's like when you're.

It's preventative. You know, we want to. We want people not to get those plaques. I think that would be ideal.

So when you get. When you start to build up these plaques, what I'm hearing you say is you can remove the plaque potentially, but you still cannot reverse dementia or Alzheimer's. Are you able to reverse Alzheimer's in some way? Is that possible?

Depends on what you mean by reversing Alzheimer's. So there's Alzheimer's disease, which is the actual pathology, the lesions and plaques and tangles and a bunch of other things. And then there's dementia, which is the clinical syndrome with the symptoms. We can reverse Alzheimer's by removing the plaques, but the problem is that the symptoms don't go away.

Really. So we're unable to reverse the symptoms of dementia currently, is that right? No one. No one's. No one's had dementia and then reversed it?

Not in clinical trials.

In real life. Has someone done this that you're aware of?

I don't think so. I.

So is there a way to slow it down?

I think I would know about it.

Is there a way to. Is there a way to slow this process down so it doesn't get worse? And it's kind of like a manageable symptoms where it's like, okay, I'm, you know, I'm forgetting or I'm losing memory, but it's not worse and worse and worse every day. Have we seen that?

Yeah. So there are some medicines that we have. There are Alzheimer's drugs that slow down progression, like Donepezil or Aricept, like the most common. Well, we only have four medications approved for Alzheimer's disease. We have acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, which are the most common. We have Memantine for some cases. They do slow down progression by. But they do not fix the problem.

Where is Alzheimer's the most prevalent in the world? Is it in the usa? Is it in Europe? Is it in what countries or regions of the world?

Yeah, the United States are quite on top. And then there are other countries as well in Europe, some places in Asia. I think industrialized countries in general experience higher rates of dementia. And one thing that I would like to point out that is against my work so that Alzheimer's disease affects women more than men or affects more women than men? To say more correctly. Yes.

Why is that?

One thing that people don't realize is that almost two thirds of all Alzheimer's patients are women. So for every man suffering from Alzheimer's, there are two women. And that's one of the reasons that I started looking into Alzheimer's disease, is that I have a family history of Alzheimer's disease that really affects the women in my family. So if you can't believe it, my grandmother was one of four siblings, three sisters and one brother. All three sisters developed Alzheimer's disease and died of it, whereas the brother was spared. So for me, that was terrifying for my mom as well. And I started asking questions. I was like, why does it matter? Is it just my family number one, my screw?

Is it a gene that your parents have that then you're gonna have no matter what? Because I think that's a fear for a lot of people. Like, my grandfather had it. My dad's gonna, you know.

Yes. For a really long time, most people understood Alzheimer's disease as some kind of inevitable consequence of aging or bad genes in your DNA. But we now understand that no more than 2% of all Alzheimer's cases are genetically inherited. 2% at most, have gene.

So you could have five people in your family have it, and you still have a 2% chance of getting it from them, the gene. Is that right?

Well, this is in the whole population. I think if five people in your family Have Alzheimer's disease. You want to get tested for genetic.

Patients now, is it. Is it because of the diets they've been eating, that's the reason why they're getting it? Or is it because they're going to get it no matter what?

Well, so for 2% of the population is genetic, is genetically determined for 98% of the population is multifactorial. So there are a number of factors that really matter, including your genetic background, not in a causative way, but more. There are genes that give you blue eyes and genes that give you brown eyes, and there are some genes that negatively impact brain health and genes that are protective. So it's a combination of things. But then medical history is supremely important. Lifestyle is huge and environment, they really all matter. And what we have found is that hormonal aging, your hormones, are also incredibly important, especially for women. So it's what I was telling you. So for a really long time, people would say to me, women live longer than men, and Alzheimer's disease is a disease of old age. Obviously, more women than men have Alzheimer's disease. But what we have shown is that, yes, women live a little bit longer than men, four and a half years on average.

Four and a half years.

But we tend to develop Alzheimer's disease at a younger age. The men. And this is.

Why is that you think that's menopause?

Well, one of the reasons, at least the reasons that we are looking into all the time at this point is menopause. And it's literally that during menopause we lose the superpowers of estrogen and the brain goes through quite a transition. You can see how brain energy levels literally change. In women's brains. Connectivity changes, the white matter volume changes, blood flow changes, Everything kind of changes. And for some women, it's just. It's just a phase. It's just a transition. The brain adjusts. There's a new baseline, there's a new normal. We move on.

It's a what a.

Some women with.

How long does that transition take? Is it months? Is it years?

Yeah, no, it's years. It's years.

So you might feel this brain fogginess for a couple of years and then it should balance out.

Yes. For some women, however, the symptoms of menopause don't go away. It may turn into something more serious, including a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease. So basically, we start developing these Alzheimer's plaques. Not all women. This is not universal. But some women, women with a predisposition to Alzheimer's disease start developing these red flags for Alzheimer's disease in their 40s and 50s, so much earlier than we have thought before. And then, of course, think about this. So you're going through menopause and your brain is changing and it really needs support. And you're eating poorly, you're not exercising, you're not sleeping, you have a ton of stress. Those factors all really work together against you in a way. So I think it's really important for men and for women. I would say women really need to start thinking about that in midlife, that our brain is like a muscle. There are things that we can do to make it stronger and more resilient. We can exercise it properly, we can feed it properly, we can take care of it properly. And your brain will perform so much better for you at any age. And men and women need to do slightly different things. What are the not so slightly? So, for example, for some women, we have a lot of patients who come to us, they learn so much more about their brains and. And the risk factors. And then some women will start taking hormones, hormonal replacement therapy. In the end, it's really case by case. Some women swear by it, some women swear at it. They really hate it. It does not work. It helps. Doesn't help at all for some women is a godsend. And I think it's really important to have a conversation with a doctor, not just your menopause specialist, but I think also brain doctor. And we're not there yet. We're not there yet. I now work at the intersection between neurology, neuroscience and women's health, which is a very unusual space, a very interesting space, but it's also a very challenging space. And I think my hope for the future is that we'll start looking at women as organisms, as a person. Right. Not like you go to the endocrinologist to look at your thyroid. You know, you go to the ob GYN to look at your ovaries, then you have to go to a brain person to look at your brain. I believe in integrative medicine. I think that we're moving in that direction.

It's all connected.

It's.

Yeah, yeah, might be a problem here, but it's affecting something else. You know, it's all. It's all connected.

Yeah.

Yes. So I think that is really, really important. But however, hormonal replacement therapy really doesn't work for all women. And there is no recommendation to use it for Alzheimer's prevention yet. We're working on it. We're hoping that we'll find a good way to help integrate these therapies in a safe way. But. Sorry, I just made this. Go ahead. I would say that the point of hormonal replacement therapy is that you, you want to give women the estrogens that the body is no longer making. But where are these estrogens coming from? Because plants make estrogens. So estrogen is the most ancient of hormones and that means that they can go across species. So plants make estrogens, animals make estrogens, women make estrogens. And estrogens from a plant phytoestrogens enter a woman's body. And if you consume these plant based foods often enough, that's effectively a very gentle hormonal replacement therapy over time. Which is one of the reasons that people think that a mediterravenian style diet that is more plant centered is beneficial for women's health. Because women on this kind of diet have a much lower risk of a number of things from cardiovascular disease and so stroke to depression to Alzheimer's disease, dementia. And also they have fewer hot flashes that they don't suffer from menopause the way that so many American women do.

Now I've heard from different scientists and nutritionists about meat being a complete protein and having like these nutrients nutrient dense within the meat. Yeah, how. But I'm hearing you say that plant based is, has just as many nutrients and proteins and antioxidants and all these other things. What are the, what are the benefits or the, or the cons against eating quality meat, let's say for brain function and brain health? Are there things we should look out for if we do have a lot of meat or some meat in our diet?

It's a really interesting point. I think so many people right now are eating a lot of meat. There are a lot of diets out there that really support and encourage eating good quality meat, but quite a lot of meat. I would say the research points to plant based diets as being healthier overall and more protective.

For the brain.

Yes, for the brain. But I think also in general, there aren't that many dietary recommendations that include a lot of meat. I think every person is different. But to your point, there's no need to eat meat to obtain complete protein. It's an easy way. It's definitely convenient for you if you're not an animal. It's a good way to obtain complete protein just in one small amount, in a small portion of food. To obtain the same amount of protein from plant based foods, you need to eat more of those. But There are some plant based foods that are actually quite rich in protein which are interesting. Like hemp seed, complete protein, tempeh complete protein, nutritional yeast complete protein and also a good source of vitamin B12. So I think it's a fish is a good source of complete protein that's actually been linked time and time again with a lower risk of dementia by almost 70%.

If you could only eat five foods every single day for the rest of your life.

Oh my gosh.

To optimize brain health, brain functionality, longevity support, memory, all those things.

Yes.

What would those five foods be on a daily basis?

I would say, well, you don't like berries, but I would definitely go for berries because they're rich in fiber, they're low in sugars, and they provide a really an enormous amount of antioxidants for a small serving size. And just evidence that consuming two to three servings of berries per week really slows down cognitive decline in both men and women, and especially in women. So you might want to try something.

I gotta start. Which, which berries? Which two or three are the best?

Blackberries actually have more antioxidants than even blueberries. That's an interesting type of berry. They're not as easy to find as blueberries, but you can get them frozen and they're still quite intense.

Now if it's a modified BlackBerry where it's frozen, it's put in a smoothie and blended, it's in liquid form. Does that all still matter or do you need it?

No, I didn't think raw form.

Or is.

It doesn't matter now cooking. So cooking destroys vitamin C. Vitamin C. All the antioxidants are really easily damaged by heat. So freezing shouldn't reduce the antioxidants capacity by too much. Obviously you don't want them to be frozen for 10 years. I mean, you know, sure.

So we got blackberries, blueberries.

Blackberries are gray goji berries, one of the most concentrated sources of vitamin C. There's a kind of plum that I haven't been able to find. It's a kakadu plum, which seems to be this the most powerful concentrated source of vitamin C on the planet. I know they have been in Australia and Pacific islands. I've never seen it here, but I would like to try it.

Okay, so we got berries number one. What would be the second?

Mulberries are really good mulberries. Berries. Sorry, I'm still.

I'd actually. I actually had mulberry tree in my backyard in Ohio growing up and I would eat some Mulberries every now and then. So maybe I'll get back into mulberries.

That could be nice. You can also find them dry.

Okay. Dried mulberries work too.

Yeah, they're very good. They're very tasty.

You still have the nutrients when they're dried.

Yes, yes.

A little bit less than the fresh ones, but they're sweeter, they're dry.

Okay.

I grow them in the garden. Yeah.

And those are high in antioxidants. Those are high in antioxidants.

Yeah, they're high in antioxidants.

Okay, great. Awesome. Okay, so we got berries is what.

You get the berries. And I would go for dark leafy greens.

Okay.

Because they're really important. They contain a ton of phytonutrients, which are really good. You know, they have antioxidant, anti inflammatory properties and a lot of fiber. And fiber is really important for a number of reasons. The most obvious being that it supports gut health, obviously. And 70% of the immune system is in the gut. So eating fiber also supports immunity, which especially now, is a huge concern for everyone. But also fiber has a really important modulatory function on sex hormone binding globulin, which is what regulates flow of hormones inside the body. And so it really helps support hormonal health as well. So I would say two reasons to eat fiber and go for your leafy greens. And there's a ton of greens. And we don't have to eat kale all the time. There is so many other varieties that.

Are just spinach and arugula.

All those, all the lettuces, all the different microgreens. They're collard greens, if you like them. But also cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower. Now is the season. So cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Romanesco, they're yummy.

I'm sure.

You eat veggies?

I eat those. I eat a lot of veggies. Yeah.

There you go.

Okay, so we got.

Those are the first two. Well, I would throw some polyunsaturated fatty acids there that the Omega 3 trees, whether from fish. Do you eat fish?

Yeah.

Right. So in that case, for those who do eat fish, then this mashed fish. So salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, herring. Smash.

Smash. Fish.

Yes.

All right.

So they're really good sources, very concentrated sources of dh.

And if you didn't. And if you didn't get that from fish, what would be the substitute you would do? Plant based.

Well, for me, plant based. So Omega 3 is from hemp seeds for sure. Flax seeds and flax oil, walnuts, almonds, chia seeds and also seaweed. We are under muscled. And the reality is, as you pointed out, there's been this fixation on fat, adiposity, the diseases related to obesity, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, insulin resistance.

All of these that go along with with obesity, right?

Exactly.