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

the brain responds to everything we do what we think what we feel exercise sleep our diet environmental toxins stresses all these things influence our microbiome everything influences the brain let's start off with delivering some immediate value to people three things that people can eat or potentially not eat that's directly tied into having a better brain very important because one of the best ways to access brain health is through our diet both what we eat and what we don't eat let's start with the don'ts the most dangerous thing for your brain is sugar and starch those

cause inflammation of the brain they cause dementia they cause depression they cause behavior issues they're really nasty for the brain so it doesn't mean you can't ever eat them but think about those things as recreational drugs as i've said so starch and sugar the third thing you really want to get rid of is bad fats so trans fats are very dangerous they're still in our food supply even though they've been regulated as not safe to eat they're still out there and a lot of refined processed oils so those would be the things that i would

avoid number one and of course processed food that just kind of goes without saying and what are some examples of those refined and processed oils so my favorite is what they call vegetable oil you go to the grocery store and it says vegetable oil what is it broccoli oil no it comes from seeds it comes from sometimes even cottonseed oil which is highly toxic it's canola oil it's soybean oil 10 of our calories come from soybean oil it's increased a thousand percent in our diet didn't even exist as a real food in our diet until

probably 1900 early 1900s so we really entered an era where we are eating a diet that is so different than we have for almost all of our human evolution and those fats tend to drive inflammation they're easily oxidized they go rancid they're made with extraction processes that have hexane and they're they're often causing significant inflammation and damage in the body and just so people are aware it's not that they're necessarily going out there and buying these oils cooking with everything they're in everything and everything so you have to be a student of ingredient labels and

pay attention to all the processed foods that are out there because a lot of them are big are going to be fighting against your brain yeah the easiest trick is just don't eat anything processed unless you know what's in it like i mean if you have to have a list of ingredients probably i mean yes there's some packaged food that's fine but if you have to know what it's in it so if it says some big chemical words you know can't recognize it or you've got 14 000 things on the label probably not what you

should be eating anyway great so those are three things to avoid okay so you were going to go into the topic of three things that we can pay attention to so most people don't know this but your brain is mostly fat you know we really are all fat heads and about 60 of our brain is made of fat and most of that is what we call dha or docosahexaenoic acid sounds like a big chemical name but essentially it's fish oil comes from algae too you can get it from algae so if you're plant-based you can

get it from algae but it is the main ingredient for a healthy brain and so we need to be eating fatty fish that's low in mercury we need to be eating algae we need to be doing things that actually help boost our dha levels the second thing is good fats in general because our brain actually responds really well to fat mct oil for example is the derivative of coconut oil that's really great for the brain's energy system and can help improve cognitive function it also performs athletic improves athletic performance the third category of foods we

should be focused on are phytochemicals there's 25 000 compounds in plants maybe more the rockefeller foundation is now doing the periodic table of phytochemicals they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to map out the medicinal properties in these foods but it's really easy when you think about it just eat the rainbow if it's colorful and it's not skittles it's okay to eat so all the dark colored vegetables greens blues purples reds yellows those foods that contain these pigments are full of these phytochemicals and they're really extraordinarily helpful in regulating brain function in so many different

ways as a bonus one how about hydration it seems like that's one area that's often overlooked you know one of the things that uh often people forget about is the bottom of the matrix in functional medicine which is the sort of the map we use to figure out what's out of balance for people and hydration is really really important because most of us walk around dehydrated most of us don't drink enough water we have other fluids like sodas and juices and coffees and teas but we don't really have enough water and often when we do

we're not getting intracellular hydration which is so critical so not only in your bloodstream but inside your cells which is what makes you feel good so it gives you energy and performance so my favorite athletic performer is tom brady and he never drinks water without electrolytes maybe that's explained to seven super bowl rings i don't know but i agree i i've using electrolytes in your water is so important and not the kind with tons of sugar and all kinds of weird stuff uh my favorite one i have no affiliation with this brand it's called light

show lytee show but it's simply liquid drops you can put in a glass of water and i every time i drink i try to add those in and there's a portable container you can take your little drops with you so intracellular hydration is really really important and it's important for your cognitive function it's important for energy it's important for everything one caveat on water naturally as the world and especially here in the united states unfortunately too has more and more infrastructure challenges more of the water that's out there is corrupted so just another reason that

people should really invest in a high quality filter i heard somebody say one time either you get a filter or you become the filter that's a good one yeah i think it's right i mean i i mean i i remember reading a paper recently that showed that in the average tap water there's 38 wastewater contaminants pesticides glyphosate medications i mean where do you think all the women taking birth control pill or hormones or prozac or statins those get metabolized and they get excreted in the urine where does that go it goes into our water supply

that gets filtered cleaned and reused and we ended up having all these wastewater contaminants and people don't have a clue about what they're drinking forget about the chlorine and the fluoride and all the other stuff that's added to the water but there's a lot of inadvertent things in the water because of the level of toxicity in our society so i think filtering water is is so key um obviously if you're drinking water bottled water is a problem because one um it's usually plastic which is not something we need more of in the world glass bottles

are okay but getting a filter is really important so let's zoom out really quickly how big of a problem is poor brain health and inflammation of the brain really that is a very important question because a lot of the diseases that we see that are causing disability lastic productivity loss of quality of life are brain disorders whether it's anxiety depression the opioid epidemic neurodegenerative diseases like alzheimer's parkinson's and all the cognitive disorders like adhd autism these are all diseases of inflammation of the brain and they're rampant if you look for example just a depression our

modern tools really suck at treating it i mean if you have severe depression sometimes medications can help but for most people you look at the data maybe 30 effective not much more than a placebo and the question is what's driving that problem it's it's all our inflammatory lifestyle which we've talked about a lot on the podcast and it's it's it's one of the most important things one in four people have a severe episode of depression in their life in the world it's uh accounts for the majority of the costs in our health care and all

the collateral symptoms that we have from from the externalities of depression like loss of productivity so there's a macro economic analysis looking at over the next 30 years what's it gonna cost for chronic disease it's 95 trillion dollars with a t okay that's a lot of dough that's you know way more than the gdp of the top nations in the world combined probably twice that of all the top six nations combined that amount of money the majority of that is for depression because of the loss of productivity the effect on society and so forth so

these are rampant conditions one in 10 kids have add alzheimer's you know we probably have alzheimer's or pre-alzheimer's and 40-50 million americans depression affects you know more than 60 million people but throughout people's lifetime it's super common we're seeing we're seeing a rampant increases in autism in neurodegenerative diseases so we we have to grapple with this problem and brain health and in a more focused way because it is the thing that we need to operate in our lives to be happy to have healthy relationships to do the work we want to do in the world

to be a functioning member society to be engaged and not just be in a spiral of a veggie near vegetative state sitting on the couch watching tv because you feel like crap so there is there is enormous opportunity to sort of pull the veil back and and rethink our whole approach to brain health now one of your first books was ultra mind solution and one of the core ideas in that book was what you do to the body you do to the brain yeah can you expand on that what did you mean by that well

the title of the book was the ultramine solution how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first because unlike what we learned in medical school which is that our head is and brains are sort of this disembodied thing on the top of our shoulders and doesn't connect with anything that's going on below there we've learned that that's completely untrue that we're learning that the brain responds to everything we do what we think what we feel exercise sleep our diet environmental toxins stresses all these things influence our microbiome everything influences the brain so we

we really have to sort of think about how do we re sort of equilibrate to a different way of thinking about brain health based on all the things that we can do to fix the imbalances in the body that affect the brain whether it's thyroid whether it's your microbiome whether it's toxins whether it's low nutritional levels of certain vitamins and minerals like fish oil or omega omega-3s or vitamin d or the b vitamins so we know a lot about the things that make the brain healthy we call these trophic factors these are things that help

the brain grow and improve and increase neuroplasticity and neural connectivity there's so much that's exciting that we know about how to do that and yet most of us are poisoning our brains and we think oh i know i for my heart i have to exercise i have to cut out saturated fat i have to you know do all that and i can prevent heart disease but most of us have no clue how to take care of our brain or live a brain healthy lifestyle you know we just don't learn it what are a couple examples

of things that people are doing today suffer from like the topic of foods right that are some of the biggest contributors to poor brain function in their life overall well the low-hanging fruit is lack of exercise eight percent of americans get adequate exercise that leaves you know 92 percent who needs some help and the exercise is really extraordinary because when you do cardiovascular exercise and your strength training you to hit training and specific kinds of exercise it it increases these incredible molecules in your brain called bdnf bdnf stands for brain derived neurotrophic factor think of

it like miracle growth for your brain so when you exercise you're literally increasing the number of brain cells you're increasing the connections between the brain cells you're increasing your cognitive power exercise is super critical so that alone can make a huge difference for so many people the second thing is sleep if we don't sleep our brains don't work and i remember the study i read recently that looked at sharp shooters in the in the military the snipers essentially who are super accurate like 99 accurate when they have eight hours sleep when they get seven hours

drops off a little maybe 90 less six hours starts to go to like forty sixty fifty percent at under six hours it's like basically hit or miss it's fifty percent and so we really don't understand how important sleep is to cleaning our brain to repairing our brain to getting rid of the garbage the garbage man comes at night when we're sleeping to clean out all the metabolic waste that our brain makes during the day and if you don't have adequate sleep you're not going to be able to do that the third thing in addition to

exercise and sleep is stress we know that chronic stress now we all have acute stresses but the chronic unmitigated stress of our modern life and whether it's coming from the world we live in all the chaos whether it's coming from inflammation and stress that our diet causes because our diet literally causes us to build more adrenaline and cortisol in our body like high structured sugar diets whether it's our senior lifestyle all these things drive our our brains to to not function properly and so the stress response is something we know how to deal with we

know how to actually reset the body by activating the part of your nervous system that is the relaxation response we call that the parasympathetic system as opposed to the fight or flight or freeze response it's you know playing possum you know basically and and it's not just sitting on the couch watching tv drinking a beer uh it's actually a very active thing so it could be meditation it could be yoga it could be my favorite or more passive ones like massage hot and cold plunges there's a lot of ways to access the nervous system to

help reset it to create a deep sense of profound relaxation that's physiologic and that helps you repair your brain because if you have chronic stress it literally shrinks your brain it shrinks the hippocampus in your brain which is the memory center so we know that chronic stress causes dementia so just just that alone can have a huge impact those three things and then there's a huge long list that goes on and on but dale bredesen who one of my favorite people he's a credible neurologist who's studied alzheimer's and has used functional medicine to reverse not

just to stop or slow but to reverse patient after patient and he talks about this idea called the cognoscopy which is how do we we get a colonoscopy but how do we measure our brain function well there are some really specific simple online tests neurocognitive tests you can do there are ways of looking at brain imaging there's certain lab tests and things you look at to see what are the threats to the brain how do you how do you assess the threats and it's important because when you start to understand how the brain works you

can really play with it and see conditions reverse you just never would see i mean i i'm i mean i only wrote ultra mind solution because i was treating people's physical problems and as a side effect their brains would get better and i'm like what happened like someone for example would be having panic attacks and anxiety and depression and i would get their insulin under control and their microbiome under control and they go well i don't have that anymore i'm not depressed i'm not anxious or they'd have bipolar disease and i did this this and

got better or they'd have adhd or autism or alzheimer's and they start to really improve or completely recover i'm like what's going on here this is not what i learned in medical school and so i began to really through the inquiry of my own patients and their data and their experiences and applying functional medicine was able to sort of map out how all this connects and all the things that affect the brain and it's not just um it's not it's not it's not just the obvious things but there's a lot of things that we can

we can dive into around infections and the microbiome and toxins and other things that affect brain health so the fundamental things are easily accessible to everybody and we all should think about not only how do we take care of our body and our weight and our heart risk but also our brain health and and there's some very specific things you can do to do that now this topic is near and dear to you because you write in your book that not only were you focused on helping on your patients but you were trying to help

yourself your own brain broke so i'd love for you to take us down your story and also while you go through it help us look at the whole topic of brain related disorders and how conventional medicine might see it and how functional medicine might see it first i'll start with my story because it helped teach me so much about how the brain breaks and what to do to fix it when i was in college you know a student got into medical school school was easy for me i barely studied and my brain was just like

a still trap and i remembered everything could focus pay attention uh he was happy i mean just my brain was good i exercised i ate healthy i did all the right things i did yoga and then i went to china and got mercury poisoning which i didn't know at the time came back and got some other insult that trick uh tripped my system into really being sick and and all of a sudden i went from completely functional to completely dysfunctional uh i couldn't sleep i even though i was exhausted and had chronic fatigue syndrome i

couldn't focus like i had adhd i couldn't remember anything i was got depressed uh so it was like i had depression atd and dementia all at once and i would literally be reading my kids a story at bedtime and i couldn't understand the sentence if i read it out loud i literally would not be able to understand what i was saying my brain didn't work or when i was talking to somebody i would start a sentence and i didn't know where i didn't really know where i was going i didn't finish the sentence i was

really damaged and so through understanding my own biology and reverse engineering my way to health i began to understand you know all the factors that affect brain health and that's really why i wrote the ultra mind solution because it's what i learned on myself but it's also what i began to see on nearly thousands of patients talk to us about some of those root factors that were going on for you that might be beneficial for other people to hear what was going on in your life that contributed you to being in that place in the

first place well i had a bunch of stuff i mean i i i was in a um crazy work schedule i was working as a er doctor after i came back from china not sleeping you know i literally would was doing 15 shifts a month it doesn't sound like a lot but it's a lot i was staying up all night many many nights i would i was taking care of my two kids my ex-wife was an alcoholic and it was really a tough moment a lot of stress and a lot of work and a lot

of sleep deprivation and then i would you know go to the emergency room i would have eleven o'clock to seven a.m shift at night and i would drink a quadruple espresso a giant chocolate chip cookie and a half a pint of ice cream and i get in the car and i drive to work and i last probably till five in the morning hopefully it was quite enough i could take a nap and i did that for years uh and so between that stress between the difficult stress in my life in terms of my marriage and

also this mercury underlying mercury toxicity that then got tripped into full expression when i had a severe intestinal infection that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back and ended up just cascading into years and years of me trying to figure this out and i got terrible diarrhea for your sibo bacterial overgrowth my muscles were getting damaged my immune system was dysregulated i started getting sores on my tongue rational on my body autoimmune antibodies my liver function went up i mean my whole lab test looked terrible and i was a mess uh and

doctor after doctor was like well you're depressed take prozac or you're anxious take xanax or you can't sleep take ambien or you know it's like it was that and i remember and i started getting weird fasciculations and all kinds of weird symptoms and my my muscles were twitching and my muscle enzymes were really high which means my muscles were being damaged and i remember going to colombia and seeing these top neurologists who is an expert in this type of thing and they ordered a test called the emg which is no fun essentially they stick giant

needles in your muscles and they then send electrical currents down them to see what's going on and this guy was this old british doctor there who was joining the test and he said oh you have been benign fasciculations which means your muscles twitch but it's not serious it's not als which because it could it could have been als and uh and the uh and he goes off the record this isn't normal like there's no such thing as benign fasciculations you don't have ls but it's something else you know so that and that was even before

i figured out the mercury thing i just i just didn't know what's going on i was searching and searching searching so it took a couple of years for me to actually figure out the mercury thing before i was able to get better what was part of that turnaround process which also was the introduction for you into the world of functional medicine like how did you begin to look at things differently and then start to treat yourself well it was always a little weird i mean i always you know i studied nutrition in college and it

was a yoga teacher before i was a doctor i was interested in integrative health i didn't recall that then um and i was always exploring the edges studied ancient healing systems chinese medicine so i always had a different framework that i was coming from when i went to medical school and then when i um got a job at canyon ranch it's right when i got sick uh and i met a woman named kathy swift who's a nutritionist there and she was like you got to come to this lecture from jeffrey bland and i'm like okay

and so i went to hear this guy speak and i listened to him and i thought this guy's a genius or he's a lunatic and if what he's saying is true it it it means that everything i learned needs to be re-examined questioned and reimagined and i need to prove that to myself and my patients so i said i'm going to try it on because if he's right it's a game changer if he's wrong he's just a nut who's promoting a lot of stuff that's kind of goofy and it turned out he was right and

the rest is history and that's when we really started diving into functional medicine at canyon ranch we had a great incubator where we could spend hours with patients i could dig in all these things they could learn everything they were willing to do stuff and so it was really a great incubator and then i just kept going down that rabbit hole and healed myself and started healing thousands and thousands of patients so what was one of the first things and we're going to touch on your story but these are also things that people can walk

away with when it comes to their own story too so what was one of the first things that you did when it came to your diet you're eating chocolate chip cookie double espresso you know you had all this sugar in your diet what was one of the first things you did when it came to your diet uh well i i literally had to do an elimination night because the mercury not only affected my brain it affected my gut which by the way they're totally connected right there's called your second brain there's more neurotransmitters in your

gut than your brain there's more nerve endings in your in your gut than your brain it's really quite fascinating and my gut was a mess and so i developed leaky gut i developed sibo which wasn't even a thing at the time small intestinal bacterial overgrowth fungal overgrowth i would eat anything and my stomach would just blow up like a balloon like i had gas it it just wouldn't come out and i felt like i was had you know like a a giant sort of tire inflator that just blew up my intestines uh and it was

painful and difficult and i had diarrhea and undigested food my stool it was kind of a mess so i literally had to dramatically change my diet to just be able to tolerate any food so i used turkey broccoli and brown rice for like a year just to kind of calm my system down it didn't really help get rid of all my symptoms but it just helped them not be so bad and i until i got rid of the mercury my gut couldn't heal and it's not that you're necessarily recommending the turkey brown rice diet to

other folks you're just talking about what you do i'm just saying like my stuff my system was so dysregulated i couldn't eat anything without causing a rash or my eyes like turning like a raccoon black or a swollen tongue or my whole system was just messed up and in order for me to just reduce my diet to them the most um simple foods that were not going to be triggering reactions i had to really simplify my diet so that's what you did then if you were your patient today what would you do for that person

in that same situation when it came to the topic of diet if i had me as a doctor when i first started this i would have been better a lot faster i wish i but like i literally had to crawl my way through knowing and by that was really tough drew because not only was i sick but it was very hard for my brain to work so i literally had to despite having my brain barely functional still try to learn and focus enough to try things and it was really tough it was really really just

like kind of like trying to like um you know get out of a very deep hole and a black hole and and it was tough because i didn't i didn't have the full capacity of my mind so i started to learn things and i started to incorporate things it was very slow and it took me a number of years before i even figured out that i had mercury poisoning and i ended up sort of being in a functional medicine conference and i met a guy on a plane who was a naturopath and he was he

was like well come to my office because maybe i can help you i told them what's going on he's so he did this machine this electrodermal screening which sounds like total quackery but it's looking at the bioenergetics of different meridians and different electrodemal uh electromagnetic frequencies in your skin which are there and he said well it seems like you have metal toxicity i'm like really okay and then i went to my friend mark david and i said i was just staying at his house i'm like can you do my hair analysis and see what's up

and he took a little hair we sent it off and it was really high and then i did a challenge test and i kind of had a level that's you know i've done i've probably done 20 000 of these tests over the last three years and it was probably in the top top 10 20 tests i've ever seen of the worst levels and then i then that was when i started to detoxify but it was really tough because i didn't have a road map i was just sort of figuring things out we didn't even understand

what sibo was back then we didn't understand a lot of things that we didn't know now we didn't have a lot of the tools we have now so i would probably be a lot better a lot faster so you mentioned mercury you know mercury is part of these environmental toxins that are out there and it can come from a lot of different sources we'll touch on that in a second but mercury is is part of uh you know a ton of chemicals that are in the environment like these uh pufas forever chemicals that are there

we have mold that can be environmental toxins with all the flooding and the buildings that we have um do you think that people are paying more attention to this topic than you've ever seen before about how environmental toxins can play a role in things like brain inflammation yeah i think there's more more literature about the role of environmental toxins in neurodegenerative diseases and autism and add in depression so there's there's more and more science around this so i'm very hopeful uh but i i do think it's still pretty much ignored i think people aren't really

trained in medical school to understand toxins other than acute toxicity uh so chronic low-level toxicity that eventually overwhelms your system is just not something that's even in the field of view of traditional doctors so for example i had this patient recently who had an autoimmune disease but she had very high levels of lead in her blood and the highest level of lead i've ever seen in any patient in 30 years and it's causing all kinds of cognitive and also inflammatory symptoms and you know the traditional doctors don't know how to look for that and test

for that they can take a blood test but they rarely do that but even if the blood test is normal you can still have a lot of stored toxins if you don't have current exposure so if you don't for example if you don't fish for three or six months your blood levels will be good but you could have tons of stored levels in your body i remember reading a new york times article about a group of soldiers that made their way to the cleveland clinic and uh can you tell that story yeah well you know

um special forces guys are really not wimps you know these guys are navy seals who stand in ice water for three hours and you know one run a hundred mile i mean these guys are just super human and there was a whole group of these guys who were really sick and they were being kind of dismissed by the defense department and the va and one of them came to cleveland clinic and i said well let's look at your story what's going on you're cognitively impaired you can't focus you're depressed you're overweight your metabolism is messed

up you have all these other symptoms uh let's just see what's going on so i said what do you do he says well i'm a blast expert i blow stuff up and i teach other people how to blow stuff up and we do it in enclosed buildings and when you blow stuff up and you make bombs and guns you release lead mercury into the air and they're in there in a closed space with poor filtration they're breathing it in to do this long enough you start to become poisoned and they came in and they were

poisoned and i was able to help these people get better it was really pretty miraculous and one of the story in the new york times was was about this one soldier who went to i think was mount sinai where they have the lead expert who uses a very specific technique it's only kind of in research which looks at the bone lead levels which is kind of the best kind of measure of total body lead and and this scientist doctor at and it was at mount sinai said look we we see this we can measure it

but we never see it go down but when these patients came back to me after being treated not only were they clinically better but their their levels of lead in the bone went down i've never seen this before and of course you've never seen it before because most of us were never trained on how to detoxify patients from heavy metals but when you know what to do you can remove the metals and these people get better so now we have a whole group of people working uh with us or from the department of defense and

special task force dagger to incorporate these ideas into into the va and the department of defense healthcare system so before we get back into neuroinflammation overall and brain health overall let's just put a button in the topic of mercury and lead for most people it may not necessarily be the first thing to look at unless if they're working with like a functional medicine doctor yeah most people who are listening are wondering like wow do i have you know mercury do i have lead it's an important topic to pay attention to it's probably something that you

need to be guided down the path of working with a trained practitioner who knows about that area and i think it's important to say look with brain disorders whether it's the mood disorders anxiety depression whether it's the uh you know attention cognitive disorders like add and autism or the spectrum whether it's the neurodegenerative disorders like alzheimer's parkinson's there are many factors that drive those problems and and you have to look at all of them mercury is just one led is just one those are final common pathways from multiple insults so if you take 10 people

with depression there may be 10 different causes for some it might be metals but another might be a low vitamin d level or the fact that they've taken antibiotics and screwed up their microbiome or maybe it's because they're taking an acid blocker and have low b12 or maybe they have gluten intolerance and have doped antibodies against their thyroid which causes depression so there's a lot of ways to get to the same end disease so i always say just because you know the name of the disease it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you just

because you have a label it doesn't mean you know the cause and the problem with modern medicine is what we call the name it blame entertainment game we name the disease oh you have low mood you're crying all the time you're not interested in eating you don't want to have sex you can't sleep you want to kill yourself oh i know what's wrong with you you have depression but that is not the cause of your symptoms depression isn't the cause of your symptoms it's the name of your symptoms and then we blame the name for

the problem oh the reason you have these symptoms because you're depressed and the treatment is an antidepressant so we name it blame entertainment as opposed to what i call thinking and linking which is where we start to begin to think about the cause not just wait uh you know wait for people to sort of get on medication see what happens it's really a very important thing to understand for people that that the same diseases can have many many causes and the same causes can create many diseases so mercury could cause autoimmune disease can cause gut

issues can cause depression can cause alzheimer's can cause autism you know but not all cases of autism or depression or alzheimer's are caused by mercury so you have to kind of think about this kind of framework of one just because you know the name of disease doesn't mean what's wrong with you two one cause can create many diseases and one disease can have many causes so it's a really different framework for understanding human biology let's go back to one of the first things you talked about which was sugar help us really understand how sugar is

so deeply tied into this whole field of neural inflammation and poor brain health what is it that sugar's actually doing in the body okay you got a couple hours i spent my life studying this and it's i'm going to try to synthesize it but sugar is not necessarily bad if you have a cookie or if you have a little bit of this for that once in a while it's not gonna kill you it's the dose that we have we used to have historically 22 teaspoons a year as hunter gathers that means if we got lucky

we find a honey uh like a honey hive and we can get the honey or you know we we might find some berries in the summer and we'd get some sugar but historically we really didn't have sugar as part of our diet in 1800 we had 10 pounds of sugar per person which was still a lot and now in 2020 we have about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year so sugar when you have it at that pharmacologic dose is a poison and it does a number of things one it screws up your microbiome

so it it fertilizes all the bad bugs that create inflammation then that creates a leaky gut and that creates neural inflammation it also drives a process in the body called insulin resistance which means your body is resistant to the effects of insulin it's like the boy who cried wolf you eat a lot of sugar and starch and your insulins go higher and higher and higher and the cells become resistant to the insulin so you need more and more insulin but the consequence of that increased insulin is that you get more fat storage in the abdominal

fat and the belly fat and those fat cells are not just there holding up your pants they're very special kind of fat cells they're not like the fat in your butt or in your thighs or whatever they're highly active organs they produce hormones they produce cytokines you've heard of the cytokine storm from covets they produce all kinds of inflammatory molecules like il-6 uh il1 and tumor necrosis factor alpha these are very powerful inflammatory molecules that are coming from your fat cells so that drives systemic inflammation throughout the body and you get neuroinflammation third we now

know that in alzheimer's disease that there's a huge problem with glucose metabolism and its insulin resistance of the brain for many patients not all alzheimer's is in summaries of the brain but they're calling alzheimer's type 3 diabetes now because of this impact of insulin resistance in the brain so there's a lot of ways and pathways through which this causes a problem and and uh i'm not saying never have sugar of course i have sugar it's just what is the overall balance of your diet is this a staple is this a daily commodity that you're drinking

for breakfast lunch and dinner i mean in america we have sugar for breakfast lunch dinner it's in our cereal it's in our salad dressings it's in tomato sauce i mean there's more there's more sugar per serving of tomato sauce than there is in two arrow cookies two oreo cookies so we gotta get kind of real and get all the hidden sugar out of our diet i'd love to give you were so kind to share your own testimony earlier and some of the things that worked for you let's talk about a couple other case studies from

your practice of people you've worked with let's start first with a topic of depression any case study that comes to mind well you know i i remember this one patient who was severely depressed she was in her early thirties uh an executive coach and uh sort of really struggling uh and and she had crippling depression she also had sinus problems that were intractable she was overweight she was very inflamed she had a lot of gut issues she had tons of yeast overgrowth and it was kind of miserable and she came to see me and i

took a look under the hood and found that she had a lot of inflammation in her body that was secondary to high levels of mercury this patient had really high levels of mercury like 300 which is mine was 187 this was not off the chart and the the mercury was causing the weight gain because it's a metabolic toxin it was causing the gut dysfunction because it poisons the gut it caused the yeast overgrowth which is because the mercury causes yeast overgrowth and it causes her depression and so we systematically treated her by cleaning up her

gut in the yeast by clearing up mercury her sinuses got better the weight came off her depression went away and it took a number of years to get that much mercury out of her body but i just saw her after 10 plus years and it's amazing she's still doing great so the the beauty is that is that you can take people with really intractable problems if you know how to navigate to the cause which is what functional medicine does you really can make a huge difference for these patients how about a kid or children with

uh you know a brain disorder somebody that have a case study that you've worked with before well i have an autism case it's a that's a long story but i've seen kids with autism get completely better using this approach because when you look at brains of autistic kids or people with add they're inflamed there's a whole immune system in the brain called the microglia and they can create an inflammatory process in the brain and on mri scans you literally see large brain swollen brains on these kids when they do autopsy studies of kids with autism

for a diet in a car accident or something they'll see their brains are filled with these inflammatory cells and they're they're inflamed so the question is what's causing that inflammation and kids with autism are like the canaries in the coal mine this one kid i saw was 22 months old when he started getting symptoms we had regressive autism and he had you know a lot of antibiotics early on you hear the same story c-sections lack of breastfeeding early antibiotics and then you know maybe getting vaccinated when they're sick i'm not saying vaccines cause autism i'm

just saying that it can be part of the mix that triggers a dysregulated gut and immune system to go haywire and the whole field of vaccinomics which is fascinating which is looking at how individuals respond differently to vaccines so this kid had had terrible gut symptoms sticky smelly poops he you know was non-verbal at two and a half he couldn't look at you in the eye he he was just a mess all the classic symptoms of autism i was told by the by the doctors just you know give them some behavioral therapy good luck and

you know eventually end up in an institution because he had really severe autism so all i did was what i normally do is i i did my analysis of what are the factors that cause disease what are the factors that are needed to help thriving and health what is he missing what does he need to get rid of basic functional medicine approach we found he had terrible gut disposal three species of yeast he had leaky gut he had bacterial overgrowth he had massive nutritional deficiencies in vitamin d and zinc and magnesium and the b vitamins

b6 b12 and he had a significant mercury in his system as well so we began to treat these things we got rid of the metals in a system we fixed his gut we cleared out the bad bugs with antibiotics and any fungals and we reset everything we gave him all the nutrients he needed and b12 shots and this kid literally became normal and i was like whoa this is crazy because i learned that autism is not reversible now that's not to say that every kid will respond this way because there are many factors and i've

seen kids with autism that have more you know fixed problems that for example genetic and i looked at all their lab tests they're normal i'm like i don't know what to do because they're normal so there is there is a way to navigate the brain health field by looking at all these factors and i've had kids with add that completely normalized by simply getting them the things that they need for their bodies and their brains to thrive let's do another one and that's on the topic of you shared about uh alzheimer's earlier and sort of

alzheimer's dementia all the neurodegenerative diseases that increasingly more and more people are suffering from you had a patient that uh came to you um and was a referral over who was a gentleman that was running a company and was thinking about retiring early because his brain was so messed up talk to us about that yeah he was seven years old and uh you know he was in the book ultramine solution was one of those cases that i had to sort of like rethink everything about my wife brought him in and said look my my husband

is uh basically non-functional he's a ceo of our company or a family health business he now sits in a room alone depressed and demented and uh the kids don't we're gonna be being around him the grandkids are scared about me just not the human he was can you do anything i'm like i don't know let's try so from the functional medicine perspective the beautiful thing about is that it doesn't matter what disease you have you treat the system you normalize function hence the word functional medicine and you see what happens and usually the diseases get

better so it turned out that this guy had a lifelong history of gut issues he had irritable bowel terrible bacterial overgrowth he was on a drug called stellazine for 30 years because his gut was such a mess and it's an anti-psychotic tranquilizer drug that was calming his gut down which is kind of amazing he also had the apoe44 gene so he had some genetic setup for this which is the alzheimer's gene he had also genes that affect his b vitamins called methylation and he had a very high homocysteine which is an important nutrient marker of

folate or b6 or b12 deficiency and when he when you look at the data if your level is over 14 you have a 50 increase of alzheimer's he also had significant heavy metals and i don't mean to be harping on heavy metals but they're they are a big thing in a lot of brain damage and they're one of those things that their doctors don't know how to look at they don't have tests they don't diagnose they know how to treat so it's really a problem you need to see a functional medicine doctor and he lived

in pittsburgh and all my patients from pittsburgh are mercury poisoned why because u.s steel is there all the steel plants use coal to actually make the steel the coal ash is often used in pittsburgh to cover the roads from ice in the winter to put on fields it's in the air pollution and his level was just off the chart plus he had a mouthful of mercury so we we did an aggressive medical treatment on him that fixed um his heavy metals that fixed his gut that optimizes nutrient status and you also have pre-diabetes so he's

a skinny fat guy he looked thin but he actually had this little belly and he was pre-diabetic and we got him on a low start sugar diet cured his in some reason so he had b vitamin issues he had gut issues he had metal issues he had in insulin resistance pre-diabetes and we fixed all that and he went from being completely non-functional to back running his business engaged with his family and friends and reversed the cognitive symptoms that he had it was really a miracle and the neurologist that i sent him to at at harvard

to do all the imaging and the brain scans and stuff that we couldn't do was so impressed by the results that he then started a center for brain health at harvard so it's you know it's so amazing what you see happen with these patients so as you mentioned sometimes a person might need to work with a functional medicine doctor but a lot of times people can take steps and head in the right direction just even through a little bit of self-guided and in some cases at-home testing so i want to talk about testing and are

there any tests that are out there you mentioned genetics for example you also mentioned uh you know omega-3s and getting more of those in your diet there's like a simple at-home test that people can do we have no affiliation with them that they can see they're omega-3s so give a few of these at-home tests and your thoughts in general about them and if they can be part of the uh puzzle pieces for people to figure out how to get to the root causes that are going on with them well it's interesting i see a lot

of companies popping up that are focused on home health testing that are focused on giving access to their data for people that are creating companies that are allowing people to start to do the diagnostics themselves and be part of a a sort of a self-care process that often you know we surrender to our doctors and so there's a lot we can do ourselves uh i believe that people should empower their health information they should be empowered with their diagnostic tests they should be just told your tests are okay and they'll see you later and come

back next year and they they can actually start to look at some of these things um the current landscape of self-testing is limited now but there's things you can do around food sensitivities there's things you can do around hormones there's things you can do around around um you know gut testing so there's there's stuff that's starting to come out i i don't think we're quite there yet for everybody there's genetic tests like 23andme so people can get a sense of what to do um but what would be more exciting for me is some of the

companies that are coming out creating 360 solutions where they're doing diagnostic questions they're kind of guiding you and what you should do and how to fix these things i think we're not quite there yet but we'll get there and what do you think about continuous glucose monitors and their ability to be a pro part of the process of people figuring out what diet is right for them right so before and measure your blood sugar you had to go get a blood test with a regular needle or you have a finger stick test which is annoying

and painful and you have to machine they've developed these new technologies called continuous glucose monitors which are little patches you put on your skin with a tiny tiny little needle that goes into the skin there's even more advanced ones coming out that are just going to be like going through your skin you don't even have to put a needle in and then measure your sugar continuously and so you can see what's affect your blood sugar what's making it spike up and down and you can know oh gee i'm eating this if i eat this if

i eat a plum my sugar goes crazy but if i had a blueberry it doesn't or if i had this you know meal in this way or that way it affects whenever i have a glass of wine before my meal it's way worse than i have it with my meals you begin to learn about your own biology and what's really interesting is that it's not uniform so for example there's something called the glycemic index or glycemic load but it really depends on the person right if you look at a study for example down out of

israel they looked at the same foods on different people and depending on their microbiome their blood sugar levels were quite different that's just one variable the microbiome but there's many other variables genetic variables nutritional status variables um and so forth that are going to affect your metabolism so learning how your body works getting the continuous glucose monitoring as a super helpful and personalized way to identify what works for you and what doesn't so i'm a big fan let's talk about supplementation there are a lot of companies that are out there that are advertising that this

supplement is the best thing ever uh for brain health what are actual supplements that have a strong evidence base for supporting brain health on top of all the basic lifestyle stuff and what are ones that are maybe we should be a little bit skeptical or maybe watch out for when it comes to a category so uh they're called supplements not replacements and so if you're eating a crappy diet not exercising under tons of stress not sleeping exposed to toxins and your micro bombs and mass you know you're gonna not really see huge impact and you

you you know you have to really look at addressing the factors that are causing the imbalance that we talked about and then when you start to put these ingredients in the body can really respond right so the most important one is dha for the brain which is docosaccinoic acid it's an omega-3 fat comes from fatty fish you get it from algae that would be my number one there are really important cascades around b vitamins and detoxification that are important these are genes that affect your metabolism of folate b6 and b12 and also glutathione so taking

b6 b12 and folate super important for the brain magnesium also really important for the brain it helps deal with anxiety it helps to stimulate a receptor called the nmda in the brain which calms down the sort of overexcitation that happens in the brain that leads to inflammation oxidative stress so b vitamin fish oil vitamin d magnesium these are staples for the brain do you want to know my secrets for living a long and happy and healthy life well all i have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite

tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below so let's go into some questions from our community and starting with the first one what are the top foods for brain health so you already mentioned a few but maybe you can expand on this a little bit further and add in some additional ones that you didn't get a chance to talk about sure so so the categories are you know omega-3 fats other good fats and polyphenols um and there's a whole category of other things that can be helpful so in

terms of the omega-3 fats the fatty fish is really important we talked about things like olive oil avocados nuts and seeds great for the brain walnuts look like a brain kind of a brain food they have good omega-3 fat levels also eggs are really amazing so eggs have gotten a bad wrap you want to make sure you have pasture raised eggs because those yolks have far more nutrients and polyphenols and and the reason they're dark yellow as opposed to this pale yellow that we see in most modern eggs is because of all these plant compounds

that give it its power it also has choline which is super important for the brain because it's one of the neurotransmitters is acetylcholine and you need choline to actually help your brain work properly so it's really great in terms of of the brain so i think eggs are a great brain food we also have all the berries they're great because they have this class of compounds called proanthocyanidins which are powerful antioxidants anti-inflammatories uh dark green leafy vegetables also really important because of things like vitamin d sorry vitamin k and folate lutein many other compounds that

are great for the brain and of course turmeric which is a spice that we've used a lot in the indian cooking but it's it's a wonderful powerful anti-inflammatory that has really been effective for the brain so those are some of the top ones i think about uh there's some although other ones that maybe we're thinking about like like green tea which has a lot of catechins fanning which is calming for the brain so there's a lot of benefits from those next question from the community what is the role of coq10 in the brain well this

is a big rabbit hole so one of the things that people need to understand is that your brain is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the brain we've heard the stats that it's you know five percent of your brain body weight or something or maybe less three pounds so that's like a fraction of a percent i guess but it consumes 25 of the energy in the body because it's very busy and in each brain cell there are tens of thousands of mitochondria which are the energy factories in your cells that you need to

actually run your brain and if you have low energy in your brain you have alzheimer's you have autism you have parkinson's you have all these things that are really an energy deficit so the question is how do you build energy in the brain it's all the things we talked about so far but there are certain nutrients that are so critical for reviving and helping the mitochondria function better coq10 is one of them but there's many more carnitine coq10 ribose nscl cysteine nad there's a whole cocktail of mitochondrial supplements lipoic acid b vitamins niacin riboflavin that

are so critical to making energy so think of your energy cells as having a a production line where they take food and oxygen and they convert it to energy that your body uses that production line has a lot of steps and each step requires nutrients and if you're deficient in any of those nutrients you become dysfunctional in terms of making energy which has all these downstream consequences in terms of not just brain health but every aspect of your health and aging so taking a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements is really important there's a woman named suzanne

go who presented grand rounds at cleveland clinic who's a pediatric neurologist trained at harvard oxford brilliant woman published in new england journal jam all the top journals and she's done fascinating functional mri studies looking at imaging of mitochondria in autistic kids and she found there's a subset of kids who have really poor energy metabolism in their brains no wonder they can't connect focus pay attention to anything so she gives them a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements and these kids get better that's not to say that all kids with autism get better with mitochondrial supplements it's those

kids who have that particular pathway and deficit right remember i said just because you know the name of what you got doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you if you have autism it just means you have no social skills you may not be talking you have repetitive behaviors there's certain descriptions we give to the behavior but we're not talking about the cause so you know when you see these studies that are these are not even quote functional medicine studies this is mainstream medical journals but it's using the principles of functional medicine of how do

you create energy right so so the the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine often is conventional medicine is about stopping suppressing inhibiting pathways right the anti-drugs antibiotics anti-inflammatories the blockers the beta blockers the calcium channel blockers right or we have the inhibitors the ace inhibitors so we inhibit block and angie everything as opposed to optimize and enhance function so functional medicine uses compounds that help the body do what it's supposed to do naturally which is how do you make energy naturally well you have all these different compounds in your diet and the supplements that

you can take that help these pathways so when you enhance function there's really no side effects it's actually using the natural pathways of the body to optimize your health what about the role of caffeine in the brain and the body good bad thoughts okay okay so caffeine well yes caffeine gives alertness focus attention but often you get a crash so it creates a temporary boost in focus and energy but then it depletes adenosine in the cells which depletes energy and often you'll get a crash after so depending on your genetics your ability to metabolize caffeine

how fast you are how slow you are it's going to affect you differently there are in in coffee and tea other compounds so i often say that coffee is sadly the number one source of antioxidants in the american diet because americans have such a crappy diet that there's no other antioxidants because 70 60 is processed food that doesn't mean that you should be drinking a lot of coffee for the antioxidants but it is a source of antioxidants and polyphenols and they may have brain benefits so same with tea catechins and other polyphenols in green tea

and other teas actually may have beneficial effects on inflammation oxidative stress detoxification so they can be very helpful but i think i think over caffeinating ourselves is probably not a good idea so let's recap here when it comes to improving our brain health and things that we can do today starting today like step one two and three what do you wanna share with our audience here as we start to wind down today's master class well i think the first thing people understand is that they need to learn how their brain works what makes it thrive

and what damages their brain and they need to systematically go through their life and reduce or eliminate the things that damage their brain and add in the things that help their brain so one of the things what are the worst things that damage your brain sugar and starch processed food stress lack of exercise lack of sleep those things are fixable by anybody without seeing a doctor right and then there are things that the brain needs to function you need a lot of good fats a lot of omega-3s you need a diet that's high in polyphenols

these colorful plant compounds you need a diet that's rich in certain nutrients like magnesium and vitamin d and the b vitamins so leafy greens and colorful fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds uh you need to make sure you exercise because that's one of the best things you can do for your brain meditate do yoga make sure you get eight hours sleep these are just simple things you can do and there's a much more much more depth about how you can even go down the rabbit hole of you know balancing your circadian rhythms and light

therapy and various kinds of we call hormetic therapies which are therapies that give your body a stress but then it responds by creating a healing response so it could be hot and cold plunges it could be you know certain types of exercise there's ways of actually stimulating the body to repair and heal then there's even you know more therapies that people can think about for their brain whether it's regenerative therapies like ozone exosomes hyperbaric oxygen therapy these are all things that are coming down the pipe that can be really helpful in repairing and recovering brains

but for most people the basics work so well and are really things that you don't need a doctor for well you have an entire two-part series on brain health i do broken brain one you do and broken brain too and people can sign up for it and watch it it's on your website at drhymon.com and if you sign up for dr hyman plus you get access to that and your longevity docu series and a ton of other really great stuff including premium episodes of your podcast so that's a great recommendation for where people can go

next uh mark this was a fantastic master class and a fantastic breakdown of a topic that so many people care about i'll pass it back to you to conclude us for today's episode i think you know we we just have to have hope because we're seeing such an epidemic of brain disorders um i mean the anxiety and depression is just rampant our society and a lot of it's driven by our diet we see a dramatic increase in neurodegenerative diseases we see skyrocketing levels of adhd and autism and and often people think these are fixed and

i just want people to go home thinking that these are solvable problems that if we understand how our bodies function we take out the best of putting the good stuff that people can recover from even the most challenging conditions there are now survivors of alzheimer's survivors of autism i mean never heard of that before so i i want people to leave with hope and to understand that they need to focus not only on their general health and well-being but to understand how to create a brain healthy lifestyle which by the way also fixes everything else

if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here well the problem with looking at autoimmune disease is that it's so siloed so the neurologist takes care of multiple sclerosis the gastroenterologist takes care of inflammatory bowel disease the endocrinologist takes care of hashimoto's and the rheumatologist takes care