Click here for full video: Dr. Bill Wilson what is CARB syndrome?

Welcome to Emory Pharma speaker series. Today we're really excited to welcome Dr. Bill Wilson. Dr. Bill Wilson is an expert on carb syndrome, the links between dietary health and mental health. And we're really excited to have him educate us here today. So with that, I'd like to welcome Dr. Wilson.

Today I'd like to discuss something called the carb syndrome, describing the link between highly processed food and adverse brain function. And first a little bit about my background. My name is William or Bill Wilson. I spent many years in a small town in Northern Minnesota for 30 years and I worked in multiple other settings, hospitalists, et cetera. I currently work part time in telemedicine. I've had long standing interest in neuroscience and also in psychiatric problems and metabolic problems, particularly the connection between the two. Disclosures. I've written a book called Brain Drains sold on Amazon that describes this concept in detail. I'm not paid by any outside group or organization. I have no financial ties to Dr. Barry Sears of Zone Diet who I mentioned in the talk. I do recommend a few food supplements from Life Extension Foundation. I have no association with them financially and I, I talk about various supplements which I you can learn about on my website. As you're probably aware, dietary discussions now are front page material. All sorts of trendy diets. There's books, a lot of exercise programs, supplements, meditation, counseling, even medical, medical professions throwing medications all over the place, commercial weight loss programs. And they're all kind of aimed at getting you healthy, particularly from a metabolic standpoint or a weight standpoint. And my goal is to come up with something that connects all these dots because right now it's a pretty disjointed dysfunctional scene, I believe. And I take the advice of my dear departed father. He used to tell me, keep it simple, stupid, and do the right things and the right things will happen. And I followed this advice. Right now you're probably aware that we have worldwide twin epidemics. Number one, metabolic epidemic dealing with insulin resistance, obesity, type 2 diabetes. The second epidemic is common psychiatric and brain disorders. Both seem to be increased, as the charts show, they're both increasing at about the same rate. And the traditional view of the connection between diet and health, they talk about, you know, metabolism and insulin resistance and so on and so forth and how to treat those problems. The traditional view of psychiatric disorders is due to hereditary factors, too much screen time, destruction of the nuclear family, even COVID 19. And I'm here to present a new concept that I call carb syndrome or carbohydrate Associated reversible brain syndrome. And it's based on the concept that diet can adversely affect brain function. And for years ago I, I came up with this term which you'll understand more when I in my talk called carbohydrate associated reversible brain syndrome or carb syndrome. The definition is it's a disorder that occurs when someone is exposed to ultra processed food over a prolonged period of time. It encompasses everything from a very mild syndrome with no obvious health consequences to advanced carb syndrome with many severe health consequences. And it's probably the most common chronic disease in western civilization at this time. In my opinion. The triggers of carbs syndrome are ultra processed food. And there's a lot of different definitions of that. My definition encompasses four things. Excessive glucose and fructose, mainly from sugar, sucrose or high fructose corn syrup. Excess high glycemic carbs, especially white flour, white white rice. Excess of omega 6 fatty acids mainly from vegetable oils relative to omega 3s. You actually need both. But we get way too many omega 6s in processed food. And then if you read food labels on this food, it's got dozens of different added chemicals, none of which are considered to be healthy. What are the consequences of carb syndrome? Well, a couple things. Number one, you get insulin resistance leading to total body inflammation, especially leading to excessive fat storage, both subcutaneous and visceral, which is the. Visceral is the worst. And number two, you get up to 22 brain dysfunction symptoms which overlap with many traditional psych disorders, creating a huge amount of confusion in the medical profession. I'll quickly go through the 22 symptoms. You can go to my website to learn more about these because I have detailed descriptions of all of them. I would pay particular focus on, number one, strong cravings for sweet and starchy food. If you know, if you have those cravings, you have at least early carb syndrome. Number 21 is something I have to explain. If you're communicating face to face with someone and you say something, there's, there's a lag of less than a second and that person will demonstrate a little head nod, blink or something, telling your brain that they've process what you said. It's, it's really subconscious. People with carb syndrome that communication lag time will go from less than a second to 1, 2, 3 seconds. When you're talking to them. You'll, you'll, you know, it totally disrupts the normal conversation because you, you say something before they process what you said before and all you Experience is kind of a disjointed conversation. But when you treat these people, the communication lag time goes back to normal. I found it to be a very sensitive indicator of brain function. Where did this syndrome come from? Well, back at the beginning of the obesity epidemic, I decided, well, gee, I should be measuring body composition because that's the definition of obesity. I bought equipment and took every patient at every visit. I measured their body composition over decades. And that's where I noticed correlation between certain brain dysfunction symptoms and changes in body fat. And it seemed like the changes in the symptoms always preceded changes in body composition, suggesting to me that when it comes to fat storage, the brain is calling the shots, which certainly makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. And I've been doing this for well over a decade. When in 1999, one of the world's experts on obesity, Willett and et al, published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine telling us dummies in primary care we should be using BMI to diagnose obesity. And I wrote a letter to the editor disagreeing with Mr. Willette. And this is actually the sum of. They published my letter to the editor, and, you know, which was pretty radical at that time. But I think it caught their attention because what I was saying makes perfect sense. And also I worked with some individuals that were developing some urine tests for brain neurotransmitters. And they give me a bunch of these tests to play with. I didn't really know you. What are the, you know, what does that tell you? So I. I gave them to some patients. Well, the one thing I did notice when I gave them to patients who were undergoing a glucose tolerance test where they get a massive dose of glucose, shortly thereafter, their urine would fill up with monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. And normally there's some of those in the urine, but not massive amounts. And to me that it appeared to be a pathological, not a physiological process. And long story short, I figured, well, if that's the case, what could happen if I could reduce these symptoms? And how do you do that? Well, because they overlap with psychiatric conditions, I. I started playing around with brain drugs that psychiatrists use. And one of the interesting combinations was fen phen. I was one of the first doctors in the country to use fen phen in a primary care setting. That's fenfluramine and phentermine. But I never use them for weight loss. I use them to control the symptoms so patients could actually Comply. In other words, when their symptoms were severe, I tell them do these 10 things to be healthy. And they couldn't remember anything he told them. So if I got their brain jump started with the right medications and then I combine these meds with the precursors that they need to make serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, boom, their brain function would dramatically improve. They could actually comply with the other components of my treatment protocol, which is mainly dietary and extra exercise and a few other supplements. And when they took, I never had a patient personally that had heart valve problems from fedfluramine. I think it was actually a very rare occurrence. But even today you can combine drugs like phentermine, wellbutin with Prozac or Celexa and get the same effect. But you have to use them with precursors and you don't want to use precursors with high dose drugs that could cause serotonin syndrome. But I've never had a patient experience that. It's just a precaution. What's the pathology of this proposed disease? Well, I believe ultra processed foods produce glucose spikes and excess fructose produces insulin resistance. That combination disrupts the reuptake system of the brain so the neurotransmitters don't get reabsorbed like they're supposed to be. And you had the, the excess neurotransmitters in the synaptic space get taken up by the bloodstream and cleared by the kidneys and end up in the urine. And that's a pathological process when there's excess of urinary neurotransmitters. And insulin resistance plays a key role in this. So basically, ultra processed food causes a diffuse brain dysfunction because of the depletion of these neurotransmitters interfering with all brain functions, not just the symptoms I described, but, you know, fat storage and controlling metabolism, etc. And this graph shows the brain evolved to recognize when glucose drops below normal, it's time to eat. Okay. And so when you get that below normal, the brain shoots out hunger signals. And not just hunger, but it also wants you to eat something that's going to, you know, feed glucose rapidly, like fruits or tubers or whatever doesn't want you going out hunting buffalo. The brain did not evolve to read glucose spikes because there once was none throughout our evolutionary history. And so that's all it's recording is the drops below. It's reading that, as you know, when it sees repeated drops below normal, it says, oh, this guy is running out of food. He's gonna heading into starvation. We better flip this guy into or woman into a famine protective metabolic mode where everything gets stored as fat. In terms of is there research supporting my crazy idea? Well, I think there is. In 2003, I, I stumbled across Hudson and Pope's article on something they called affective spectrum disorder. These are very well known psychiatrists and they propose that 14, 14 common psychiatric disorders are actually part of the same disease process. And I've listed them here and if you read through them, they all have symptoms that overlap with my 22 symptoms of garb syndrome. And then zoom ahead a couple decades to 2018, all the top neuroscientists in the world got together and published something called the Brainstorm Consortium where they proposed that 10 common psychiatrical problems are part of the same disease process. It took over 500 neuroscientists to come up with this and little old me had come up with it a decade earlier. And as you see, these are some of the same disorders found by Hudson and Pope. So they're basically seeing the same pathology. I think I've just taken a few steps further. Even in their papers they define affective spectrum disorder, a group of psychiatric medical conditions based on shared heritability. Brainstorm Consortium interconnected psychiatric disorders and they say we need to refine the psychiatric diagnostics. And I would certainly agree with them. How do you diagnose carb syndrome? Well, number one, 22 brain dysfunction symptoms. If you have some or many of those symptoms, I'm almost certain that you have carb syndrome. Read through the, you know, some of them overlap with traditional psychiatric disorders. So. But traditional psychiatric disorders don't, don't include cravings for sweet and starchy foods. So that's the number one symptom to look at. And a lot of patients have, may have both a traditional psychiatric disorder such as major depression and carb syndrome. They have two problems. But you can sort through that by, you know, by following going through the 22 symptoms. And actually at the bottom you go to carbsyndrome.com I have a carb syndrome test I've developed you can give to people yourself or others, and it gives you a relative ranking of how likely you are to have CARB syndrome. The second component is people with carb syndrome always have excessive body fat. The only way you're going to see that in some people is to measure body composition. You can use like bioelectrical impedance, near infrared light. Those are the two technologies I used. And plus I use some DEXA scans, waist Hip ratio actually is pretty good, but you want to look at both subcutaneous and visceral fat. Although visceral fat fat has the most metabolic consequences. How do you treat carb syndrome? Well, as I mentioned, you first need to suppress someone that has significant carb syndrome. You may have to use targeted medications, but only use them for a short period of time. And that really has to be done under the supervision of a physician. And right now we don't have a lot of physicians that understand how to do this. But anybody can go out and take a precursor supplement. It's available as you can go to my website, but I recommend Apicurb, which is a you can get from Amazon that contains 5 HTP L Tyrosine, D L phenylalanine with some L glutamine and some vitamin B cofactors. They rebuild your level, your brain's level of neurotransmitters. So they're helpful for traditional psychiatric disorders and for carb syndrome. I think anybody that has symptoms reflecting dysfunction in these neurotransmitters would benefit from taking a precursor supplement. Additional recommendations? Well, number one, follow a healthy whole foods diet and avoid all ultra processed food. Being married to a wonderful Greek lady, I'm a big fan of the Mediterranean diet. But I've just followed you need to drastically reduce your sugar and high fructose corn syrup intake. And some people do well on a ketogenic diet. Should only be done under the supervision of a knowledgeable physician. I think reducing caloric intake to a reasonable degree is a good idea. Regular exercise, both aerobic and strength training is a must actually. Also, I believe you need to suppress excess inflammation. And as my friend Barry Sears has taught me, you need to often supplement with enough omega 3 fatty acids to get your arachnoid acid EPA ratio between 1 and 3. Now you can go. There's a company called Omegaquant. I have no relationship financially to them and they sell these tests like $70. They're finger poke tests. Dr. Sears on Zone website also tells them again, I don't have any financial ties with him. And there's some overall brain supplements I found helpful. There's something called magnesium L threonate. It's a form of magnesium that gets into the brain and helps your dendrites form properly. A lot of these come from Life Extension. They sell a product called Cognitex. It's a combined product that has some stuff your brain needs to function well. Same with vinoprotein, vinopocetine and hyperxine. A. Those are very safe and simple things to take. And I think everybody should take a high quality multivitamin. There's good almost studies showing multivitamins lower the risk of dementia and improve brain function. And to close here, my dear departed mother at my age had advanced Alzheimer's disease. And so did her mother, actually. And so I follow every single protocol that I've discussed today. I have a wonderful nine year old daughter who's listening to my lecture, Rafaela. So I cannot afford to go there. So far, so good. I'd like to thank some people, Robert Lustig, who a good friend and someone that we share a lot of information to, Richard Johnson, my medical school classmate and fructose expert. Very serious the inflammations are. And of course, Ron, who you know quite well. Thank you so much.