Barbell Shrugged - [Nutrition for Brain Health] How to Eat for Brain Performance and Longevity w/ Dr. Tommy Wood, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #722

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

Tommy Wood is a Senior Fellow in the Pediatrics Department at the University of Washington, and Chief Scientific Officer of Nourish Balance Thrive, an online-based company using advanced biochemical testing to optimize performance in athletes. Tommy was born in the US to Icelandic and British parents (which means he has three passports in two different names). He was predominantly raised in the UK, but also spent periods of time at school in Iceland, Germany, and France. Tommy received a bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences and Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge before studying medicine at the University of Oxford. He worked as a junior doctor in central London for two years after medical school, and then moved to Norway to complete a PhD in physiology and neuroscience at the University of Oslo. Tommy is currently President-elect of Physicians for Ancestral Health, he is a director of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine and the Icelandic Health Symposium, and is on the scientific advisory board of Hintsa Performance. Tommy has also coached and competed in multiple sports including rowing, CrossFit, powerlifting, and ultra-endurance racing. Alongside his career in medicine and research, Tommy has published and spoken on multiple topics surrounding functional and ancestral approaches to health, including examining the root causes of multiple sclerosis and insulin resistance.   Connect with Dr. Tommy Wood   Instagram Website Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Tommy Wood is back in the house. You may remember him because he did an awesome show with us last year about Alzheimer's and dementia and brain health and the things that you can be doing today to preserve cognitive function, longevity. And today we're adding in kind of like part two of this. It's like a, it's not, if it was really a series,

we would do it more than once a year, but it's also a series because he is incredibly intelligent with this stuff and very, very knowledgeable with the science and research that he's doing. So we wanted to attack brain health, cognitive function from the nutrition aspect today, which is very, very important as far as maintaining cognitive function and performance, but also just the lifestyle side of things. It's like, what are the decisions that you can be making today that will allow you,

not just your body, but also your brain, to be thriving well into the deeper years of your life, which we all know is extremely important. So very cool having Tommy back on the show and hope you enjoy the episode. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. Once again, you can access that for free over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Tommy Wood. Back on the show, man. Welcome back. Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be digging into nutrition for brain health. And all of you loyal listeners out there, if you want to get into part one on brain health that we did with Dr. Tommy Wood, scroll through your feed to episode 668. We did about an hour and a half talking about the six major activities and new things that you can add to your life from strength

training, music, language. I should stop talking and let you go because this is your specialty. But you know you nail a show, you'll be proud of this um my dad called me the next day and he goes that one was good all right other time he's done that is when we first interviewed dan and he goes that one was good and i'm like fantastic 500 episodes later two of them were good. You know, a stop clock is right twice a day. You get it right eventually.

Yeah. On a similar note, I did, I did also send that episode to my parents. So apparently I thought it was good as well. If I'm entrusting the brain health of both my mom and my dad to Mr. Tommy wood. Well, I appreciate,

I appreciate it. Hopefully it was, it was, it was helpful and, and hopefully, uh, uh, and his dad, uh, is going to like this next one wood well i i appreciate i appreciate it hopefully it was it was it was helpful and hopefully uh and his dad uh is gonna like this next one as well yeah now i'm just gonna be harping on him about all the nutrition he needs to change around in his life now after he learned the activities and he definitely went out and bought a drum set to annoy all of his neighbors two weeks ago, which is phenomenal. So just make sure he wears earplugs. Right.

Yeah. I would love to, let's dig into nutrition for brain health. I think if you were to ask the average person on the street, does the food that goes into your mouth actually help with longevity and brain performance? They probably would not be drawing a connection very easily between those two. It most likely is going to kind of refer to body composition, losing weight, maybe athletic performance, but nobody's really thinking that the food that you put into your mouth is really going to affect how long your brain is

going to be healthy. I'd love to kind of at the very highest level where do we um where is that connection and how do we start to frame the food we eat for brain health yeah the i guess part of the problem is or there are there are several potential problems which is because it often ends up coming down to these ideologies within nutrition. And before you can even start to have a conversation about is this helpful for long-term brain health, is nutrition helpful or important for long-term brain health, which of course it is.

And we have lots of observational studies as well as randomized controlled trials showing that this is the case. People want to start arguing about you know whether it should be plant-based or keto or carnivore or whatever mediterranean diet is yeah in i'm never even sure what a mediterranean diet is but it's been studied a lot um at least the version of it that scientists came up with olives olives olive olive oil um fish no but apparently no salami um depending on depending on who you ask um but of course it's a good example because it's a minimally processed

you know not very many refined carbohydrates not many you know sort of refined fats ultra processed foods that kind of stuff so i think a good place to start is you know your overall diet quality certainly it makes a big impact and they've looked at both um you know sort of whole foods in different contexts and that could be the mediterranean diet or other dietary styles or it can be looking at ultra processed foods and their constituents and why they may have a negative effect on brain health and that can be related to blood sugar and blood sugar control um the propensity to overeat and the negative effects on body composition over time and how they can affect the brain um and then also you know low protein low nutrients all that kind of stuff so so that's where i tend to focus is the quality of foods and the nutrients they contain and if you want to be really uh

objective about it which i think people should be you can just measure some of these things and you can measure markers in the blood that give us a good idea of nutrient status that's important for for brain health i have a question that might might help steer us in the right direction with nutrition here what is the brain made of yes so that's exactly where i was going to go it's the perfect question because everything this thing dude you figured it out because in in its simplest form you would say i'm probably going to need to eat things that my brain is made of or eat things that are going to help my brain think you know make the things that it is made of and both of those things are true so two examples are omega-3 fatty acids both epa and dha the long chain omega-3 fatty acids that you would

associate with fish and seafood they are major constituents of the membranes of the cells in the brain. And so the brain is about 55 to 60% fat. And of that fat, somewhere between 15 and 20%, depending on the region of the brain in some regions, in some stages of life, it's maybe a bit more. But in general, 15 to 30 percent or 15 to 20 percent in most people in most regions is dha um the long the long chain omega-3 so a lot of dha in your brain so that's one thing that it's made up of and you need you need to eat that your body in general can't make enough you know even if you get some of the some of the precursors in most people you can't make enough um to to support the your the needs of your brain um a sort of an opposite example would be cholesterol so a lot of

the other thing that makes up the membranes and the cells in your in your brain is cholesterol and cholesterol your brain makes its own so this can be made uh from like basic building blocks and it's usually going to come either from glucose or ketones are actually particularly in the developing brain when you're trying to grow a brain in the first place the brain uses ketones uh to make cholesterol as like a synthetic precursor to kind of make those basic building blocks so you need to have either the constituents to build the things that you want or you need to actually eat those main constituents and omega-3s are a nice example because they kind of give you this framework to think about how lots of different nutrients interact and affect the brain so there are several studies now that show just supplementing with omega-3s in those in people with who are at

risk of cognitive decline or have cognitive decline already, there is maybe some benefit. There's also some benefit in other mental health conditions like, say, depression or depression anxiety. There are some randomized controlled trials that show omega-3s help. But the magnitude of benefit is kind of less than what people expected because, and this is the case with almost everything when it comes to the brain, it's never like a single variable problem, right? You can't just eat more DHA and it goes where you want and it works as you want it to right so for dha to be in the membrane it's a it's largely in the membrane of the synapses

right that's where the neurons talk to each other as well as in the membranes of mitochondria which generate the energy that your brain needs to run in order to get there and be inserted into a membrane a few things need to happen so it needs to get into the brain in the first place and as your brain ages you get some insulin resistance some metabolic disease there are some pathways by which dha gets into the brain that may become impaired and then once it's there you need to attach it to a phospholipid head group so that it can sit in a membrane. So when fats are in a membrane, they have this kind of the fat chain, which is the DHA. And then you have some kind of head group that it is attached

to so that it sits in the membrane and it stays where you want it to rather than just being like fat floating around. And in order to um do that you need the head like some kind of thing that's going to make the head group itself so choline is a really nice example as is uh serine um and there's been some studies on supplementing with l-serine for cognitive function as well as um cognitive decline um and then in order to attach them you need your methylation system to be working which you know people may have heard of in relation to some genetic polymorphisms mthfr and all these other things um but in reality you need that system to be working and it's just moving it's

a system of moving carbons around and that really requires b vitamins to function properly so there are now at least three randomized controlled trials where they showed that if you had poor B vitamin status, and you supplemented with omega threes, you didn't see benefit of omega threes and vice versa. If you have, if you supplement with B vitamins, but you have poor omega three status, they don't work. But if you have both, then they significantly improve cognitive function and slow the atrophy and cognitive decline of the brain so these things interact so you need adequate omega-3 status you need adequate um b vitamin status um and then you probably need some you know constituents like

choline uh is an important uh dietary constituent and then there are some other nutrients that become important as well that we can measure. Iron status is really important. Vitamin D status is really important. But those are probably the most important ones. And those are things that we can measure, we can track, and then we know how to intervene, what foods to eat. And if you get on top of that, I think that's probably a good chunk of the sort of like the direct nutrients really important for brain health. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.

When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of

deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program.

And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible.

And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. You mentioned kind of at the beginning of this with like the, there has to be like a Mediterranean diet or the keto or carnivore. Like that's how people just like attach themselves to food. One of the things with intermittent fasting is everybody loves like the cognitive, we'll call it boost for lack of a better term.

Kind of like this like mental clarity and ability to focus. But I also would assume that your brain is very important and needs consistent calories so that it's operating at a high level for a very long time. Is there any benefit to fasting? And then is, do we cross a line somewhere where it's like hey now there's just no energy to think um so the last thing doesn't really doesn't really happen um because humans are very well adapted to having brains that function in the absence of food right like that's essentially what made us dominate the planet is the ability to switch to a ketone-based metabolism when we're fasting or fasted because we don't have any access to food for extent for extended periods

so the way your brain functions maybe changes because you become more hyper-focused on the search of food, but there is no sort of like broad shutdown and cognitive functions because, you know, because of extended fasting, because our physiology is designed to adapt to that, such that it allows us to go and get more food so that we can then continue surviving. So there may be changes in which areas of the brain are activated but you don't just say well i ran out of energy for my brain so my brain just stopped working you will that would be a long fast yeah you'll chew through all your muscle tissue all your fat tissue or at least the before the brain like really truly shuts down because that's that's

that's what you're trying to do is keep that brain alive until you can get until you can get your next meal um but sort of maintaining um energy input to the brain is important and and where you get that is is going to differ um depending on the dietary scenario right it could be if you have a primary carbohydrate-based diet the the brain um works just great um in most cases sort of everything else taken into into consideration in terms of overall health and physical activity and all those other kinds of things and but about two-thirds of brain metabolism can probably be taken up by things like ketones or maybe lactate um in the setting of a very low carbohydrate um or ketogenic diet or in periods of prolonged fasting some glucose is still required so that's where you might start to use up some muscle tissue and

extended fast in order to generate glucose so that some parts of the brain that require glucose still get it in terms of cognitive function during fasting there are a few reasons why people may experience that so one is during extended fasting you are going to get an increase in ketones if you have some decrement in cognitive function already related to particularly metabolic health then it does seem that uh ketones can overcome uh some of those issues and then continue to provide or provide energy to the brain in some areas that were struggling to get energy through glucose previously. And there are a couple of randomized control trials that show that. So that could be part of it. Maybe it's helping you overcome some kind of metabolic issue that's already been

sort of building up over time. then um it could be that during extended periods of fasting like i said it can almost increase focus to a certain extent because you're then sort of hyper focused in terms of the drive to get food evolutionarily but if you're able to channel that into a piece of work or you know whatever it is you're working on at least short term i think there's some some potential uh benefits there the you know whatever it is you're working on at least short term i think there's some potential uh benefits there the other side of it is that if you're eating garbage and that garbage makes your brain feel bad then you feel better when you don't eat it so it might not be that fasting is magic it might just be that um when you're eating a lot of refined

carbohydrates you get these big swings in blood sugar that affects uh cortisol when you're eating a lot of refined carbohydrates you get these big swings in blood sugar that affects cortisol when you're stressed it affects you know the autonomic nervous system and there were a few studies that show particularly overeating like hyper hyper or ultra processed foods can negatively affect mood as well as as well as cognitive function even in a relatively short period of time so it might not be that fasting is magic for your brain. It's just not eating the stuff that you're eating previously that was negatively affecting your cognitive function. So I think all of that are taken into account. One, interesting, I know you love random hypotheses.

So I will give you a random hypothesis, which is that your adipose tissue it was sort of like your subcutaneous fat um which i know most people are trying to get rid of but it's good to have some um is your main depot for long chain omega-3 fatty acids like dha so if you're eating fish that dha comes in in triglyceride form and its first stop is usually to be stored in the adipose tissue after the meal and then it's like a depot and then it's a depot for your brain that's why we that's one of the reasons why we have fat we're the only primate and in many respects the only mammal that has really fat babies that's because that fat is a depot to either generate

ketones or to store certain fats that are important for brain development like dha and if you are continuously in the fed state right and most people in modern society just um it's this is a quote from sachin panda which is that when their eyes are open their mouths are open so basically from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to sleep, you're eating. And when you're eating, you have a net and you have sort of like an increase in insulin and all these things that help distribute nutrients after a meal. You have this net influx of fatty acids

into the fat tissue, but you're not accessing the fats that you have in your fat tissue. So imagine a scenario where you have a lot of DHA in your fat tissue because you've eaten a bunch of fish, but you're keeping it locked in there continuously because you're just eating the whole time. So it's possible that longer periods of fasting, and by that I just mean 10, 12, 14 hours a day not eating, which is like a bit of time either side of sleeping. And then that allows you to then access some of that, some of those stored fats in your adipose tissue, because they get released during fasting and then your brain can use them.

That is entirely hypothetical, but possible. So there may be some benefits to, you know, not like everybody needs to do time-restricted eating, but just maybe don't eat all day, all the time. That's interesting. I've never actually thought about the storage ability outside of like the nervous system or cell membranes for long chain essential fatty acids yeah that's why that's why humans are really good at getting fat

is one of the reasons is to be able to store those but then you also want to access them at least the certain certain ones god so that's a pure pure hypothesis uh there's been no studies looking into that whatsoever no even just as simple as like just you know plucking a little bit of fat out of somebody's body and just analyzing for mega threes yeah so the those things have not been done in concert so so um a colleague of mine and i rory he is a he's a doctor in the uk we wrote a paper about why the promise of dha in alzheimer's disease hasn't been sort of fully realized kind of like i was saying earlier like we've done all these trials some of them show there isn't any benefit part of the story certainly seems to be other nutrients like b vitamin status but one thing that we came up with was that your adipose

tissue is this major depot of dha and nobody has looked at dha in the brain versus dha in the adipose tissue and then how that relates with cognitive function and cognitive decline so there's kind of like bits and pieces so we've done studies looking at um by we the scientific community have done studies looking at what fat is in your adipose tissue that's generally fat that you ate so you have some idea of the fats that people are consuming and how that relates to things like cardiovascular health and other things but nobody's then tied it into how much dha is getting into the brain where is it getting there how does that relate to cognitive function but as far as i know that hasn't been done yet that's interesting um yo you mentioned food quality a couple times

now um so epa dha the two primary fatty acids in cold water fish dha makes up you said between 15 20 of your brain you also mentioned choline there's a there's acetylcholine uh in your egg yolks and things like that and not acetylcholine um just phosphatidylcholine. Yeah. Uh, what other common foods are out there that, uh, have the building blocks of your brain that you should be eating on a regular basis? Yeah. Um, so I think coding is, is, is really important. And there are, there are lots of epidemiological and animal studies that suggest that maybe one of the reasons why we have this big increase particularly in fatty liver disease um is an absence a relative absence of choline from the diet which is really important for packaging um and exporting fat from the liver as well as you know making uh neurons in the brain and there are studies in people with cognitive decline and

people after traumatic brain injury where choline supplementation seems to improve recovery and some uh cognitive functions um so sources of choline uh particularly uh particularly eggs uh some organ meats and and in generally animal foods um however um lecithin which you can get from soy or sunflower is is a great source of choline if you choose to eat uh a non-animal based diet or you know a plant-based diet and so you can get those things from other sources if you need to um and you can also do the same with like algal um dha algal long chain omega-3s if if again, you don't eat fatty fish or cold water fish. Other things that are particularly important are going to be then sources of B vitamins. So the four main ones to kind of manage methylation and the marker in your blood that you're interested

in testing is homocysteine to track this. And homocysteine is one of the major risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline. So riboflavin, B12, B6, and folate. So we're thinking in general, organ meats like liver is great, as well as you know, leafy greens and other sources of folate. So those are probably some of the main ones. And then other things that are important, like I mentioned earlier, iron status is important. So making sure you're getting adequate iron intake.

And in general, it's probably more bioavailable from animal sources, but it doesn't have to be. Copper is an important part of managing iron. So a lot of athletes I've worked with, what I've seen is they take zinc for immunity. Zinc then inhibits copper uptake. They become relatively copper deficient and then they can't handle iron properly

and they become iron deficient as a result. So copper again, important source, like oysters are great for copper, liver's great for copper. And then vitamin D and magnesium, probably a couple of other things that are worth thinking about so like in general i've just listed a whole bunch of animal foods that i think have a lot of bioavailable nutrients for the brain that fits with my worldview and i would certainly

recommend that people consume them if they want to but there are always alternative sources if that's something you choose not to do and you just test the necessary markers to make sure that you're staying on top of it yeah is if you are vegetarian or vegan is that purely supplementation um so uh yes and no it will probably depend a little bit uh particularly for things like omega-3s and may depend a little bit on your genetics um as well as you know the the precursors you're eating so are you doing a good job of getting um alpha linoleic acid which is a precursor for the longer chain omega-3s um and then are you doing a good job of converting it and the only real way to know is to test um some studies have looked at long chain omega-3 status in vegans versus omnivores most show that and the same with b12 most show that levels are lower in vegans but not all of them do and it might that

might be due to how good people are at supplementing or testing or maybe there's an interaction with how good their genetics are at dealing with you know the precursors rather than the actual fats themselves i'm not sure what the what the actual lab readings would say on this but like if you look at like a omega-3 or omega-6 like conversion chart which it's all the enzymatic conversions between all the different variations inversions from alkaline linoleic linoleic acid all the way to epa and then eventually to dha like the conversion from linoleic down to epa it's like it's like 90 of it doesn't get converted and then by the time you get to dha it's like only one percent of it has been converted it's yeah it's incredibly low

right so you'd have to eat an incredible amount of plant-based omega-3 to get any significant amount of epa or especially dha right there are some so in general yes. There are some studies, although I've heard from other people that the methods were kind of questioned. But there's at least one study that suggested that how good you are at interconverting these is based on your sort of recent ancestral diet. So imagine you come from Northern Europe like i do from scandinavia um they ate a ton of fish um so you got the dha in its original form and that's what your body was used to to handling however if you live close to the equator you probably your your ancestors in the last few thousand years probably converted to an agricultural based diet um earlier and they were more likely to get some of these precursors

like alpha-linolenic acid and then they became better at converting those um there are a few polymorphisms you can measure but in but it's probably a lot more complicated than even uh than than even that so so the only way that i really know of so some people have a perfectly reasonable omega-3 index despite not eating a bunch of fish and the only way that i really know how to to work through that is to test yeah um we've talked about a lot of things that people can do to improve their brain health we can dig into things they need to stop doing um which is destroying their brain health i would love to dig into what alcohol does to long-term brain health yeah uh it's so funny because

alcohol is like the one thing that people they don't want to know the answer yeah or if they if they find out the answer they find ways to justify their current levels of intake um and i i've had this conversation recently because it's fine if it's just a six pack a night no big deal exactly my brain works just my brain I know lots of people that do more than that. Yeah. All they need is that one person that does way more. And you're like, I'm basically half of that living person. I'm fine. So me and a whole bunch of other people are trying to put together an Alzheimer's prevention day.

There are lots of different dementia awareness weeks and Alzheimer's prevention day. There are lots of different, you know, dementia awareness weeks and Alzheimer's awareness weeks, but we're trying to create like a day where, and you can never, you can never promise to prevent dementia, right? But you can kind of say all these things stack up

to dramatically decrease risk. And so then we're talking about, well, what are the actionable items that people can do? And you can say, I'm doing this one thing or I'm going to commit to doing this one thing

and then that's going to decrease my risk of dementia by by a certain amount and so then alcohol becomes one because some people are convinced that one glass of wine a day is going to be great for their brains whereas you know some other studies would suggest that you know alcohol probably isn't uh the best thing for the brain and then it's just this argument like people just try and justify their own viewpoints um my my viewpoint is that uh in general there's very little evidence to suggest that alcohol is beneficial for the brain in any quantity um however there's probably a point at which there's no net effect one way or the other. And that seems to be up to one single drink, which is a small glass of wine or maybe a can of beer equivalent per day. That's probably the threshold.

And one of the more recent studies looking at that was done with the uk biobank uh where they had like nearly half a million people they got brain scans on all and they looked at the thickness of different areas of the brain and then they looked at how that changed based on alcohol intake adjusting for some some other things and essentially it's sort of stable from zero up to one drink per day. But then once you go above that, you start to see decreases in the size of the brain across lots of different brain structures. And that kind of tallies with other studies that suggest that up to maybe one drink a day, you're not seeing any negative effects. Sometimes people find benefit, but I think that depends on who you're comparing it to because in general in western society people who don't drink there's something else maybe it could be either be a religious thing or a health issue that's

driving them to not drink and so the those who drink in very small moderation versus those who don't drink at all aren't necessarily the same kind of person and that's not always really well accounted for but basically you know i think a drink or two once or twice a week is fine but above that you're probably going to see some negative effects and that's because it affects sleep in particular um as well as maybe having a more direct uh negative effect on the brain if i remember correctly i want to say i heard this on like a huberman it had to have been a huberman like three and a half hour show he did on alcohol which was probably got 12 of the country to stop drinking um one to two drinks a week is like the max before you're considered like a chronic drinker where you start to see like more chronic issues from alcohol i believe um was kind of his metric um you mentioned in that in that answer that it

alcohol changes the brain size is that a shrinking or an expanding from like inflammation what's actually shrinking yeah so kind of the trajectory of brain volume is downwards with an increasing number of drinks. And of course, you know, this is looking at brain size doesn't necessarily tell you the same thing as cognitive function doesn't necessarily tell you the same thing as dementia risk. But across those like looking at the brain in particular, I think, yeah, once, two drinks once or twice a a week that's probably pretty much your upper limit um but if you're thinking about other health effects it's possible that there's even you know even smaller or even less would would be better and when you look at like heart disease and stroke risks and cancer risks they all seem to kind of even out like sometimes alcohol is a little bit beneficial but sometimes a bit detrimental and in general there's a net no real effect until you get to you know up to like you're

kind of saying like a a few drinks a week or more then you start to see overall net net detriment yeah and just the systemic side of it of your sleep's not going to be good yeah that's going to affect things um how how does uh kind of gut health play into brain health um i i know there's a connection there but that's why we have you here to explain that yeah so it's really it's really tricky um they are of course connected and you can look at various metrics of brain health and brain and various metrics of brain health and gut health gut permeability um gut inflammatory markers you know maybe you can look at some aspects of the gut microbiome and they do seem to correlate with risk of neurodegenerative conditions alzheimer's disease overall aging parkinson's disease some mental health conditions the the problem is that we haven't really

disentangled what are common input or common outputs from the same system versus direct links to one another and so i'll give you an example um exercise improves both gut health and brain health and it probably does that largely by improving physical health you know in the muscles you know liver elsewhere lungs like throughout throughout the body and that improves things like insulin sensitivity glucose handling that we know is beneficial for the brain and it's also beneficial for the gut but you didn't do anything to the gut for that to happen so then both the gut and the brain improve and you can say well they're correlated with one another but really it was exercise affecting physical health elsewhere in the body and that seems to be the case for a number of interventions that if you improve

physical health more broadly and exercise is usually the best way to do that that's kind of isolated from what you put into your gut um then you know you see you see the health of the gut improved so anything that you do to improve your health overall improves your gut health as well so they're directly kind of related to one another this is bi-directional relationship what that says to me is that in general there's nothing that I would say is that I'd measure this in the gut and I'd try and fix this thing in the gut and then that's going to improve the brain. It's probably going to be a broader systemic, like pleiotropic, meaning lots of different things happening in lots of different places at the same time. time so i've stepped back a little bit from really over analyzing what's going on in the gut because we don't yet know what the optimal target is in terms of any of those things in the gut which makes it really hard to manipulate uh whereas there are a bunch of other things that i know

um are going to be beneficial um systemically are there things that are potentially important um and i didn't mention this in the supplement list but it's like one of my favorite things i know dan is a fan of this is blueberries and blueberry anthocyanins or berry anthocyanins um and they you know in interventional studies they improve cognitive function but they also affect what's going on in the gut they affect what's going on like they affect vascular health and we know that how well your cardiovascular system works and you deliver energy and oxygen to the brain is important so they're having effects in multiple blueberry anthocyanins polyphenols from tea and coffee and fruits and vegetables are having effects in multiple areas and some of that is happening in the gut but we just don't

know the sort of the relative contribution because all these things are happening at the same time yeah i feel like uh we we know a ton but very little about gut health and then you look at the brain like we know a lot but not all of it yeah and then you put those two together you go what do we do here yeah this is confusing as hell now you waste like a whole month of your life studying and you go just a rabbit hole yeah yeah and it's you could do the same thing with stress right stress affects the gut stress affects gut function brain function is it affecting one or the other or both at the same time are they related probably like can we disconnect them probably not you know yeah um how does hydration similar to this oh go ahead doug you got it bud uh yeah just moving on new categoriesration is definitely one thing I want to talk about.

It probably could be discussed in conjunction with this. I was going to say, to what degree does body weight factor into mental health? If you are the exact same person with the exact same diet, but you're 40% body fat versus 15% body fat, do you have issues with brain fog and et cetera when you're overweight versus fairly lean? Yes. And there are, again, a number of parts to this. And so when you look at sort of, I guess, these observational studies where you look at body composition and then you look at the brain, there are a few things that have kind of come out. So some of the first studies suggested that if you're obese, you know, particularly if you had central adiposity, like a lot of subcutaneous and maybe some visceral adipose tissue, that was associated

with smaller brain volumes, particularly certain areas of the gray matter of the brain, which is, you know, includes like the cortex, which on the outside, as well as the hippocampus inside, which is important for short term memory and various other things. So there seems to be an association between body composition and certainly type of body fat and, and aspects of, of brain structure.

Other studies have looked at muscle mass. So fat free mass, like the fat free mass index or FFMI and, uh, brain volume. So like everybody has a different size skull. So you have a less, a different potential size of brain. But if you normalize the amount of brain that's in your skull relative to the size of your skull, the more muscle you have, the more brain you have inside your skull, uh, which is usually a good

thing um and so it seems that you know there's probably a body fat aspect there's also a muscle mass aspect um we did dig into this a little bit in a recent paper we just published uh andy uh was on that one and we looked at various aspects of body composition but also function so there was an isokinetic leg extension strength like peak force uh that was there was in this data set as well as a measure of cognitive function this is using the digit simple substitution test which is kind of processing speed and some other aspects of executive function and then we also accounted for levels of physical activity and some other uh like markers of of nutrient status so i looked at iron status homocysteine some of the other things that i'd mentioned what we saw was that and this is in sort of standard american adults

who are 60 plus um and i i know that's outside of your age your age group i was listening to your interview with uh dr zordos recently and everybody was complaining that nobody was looking at 40 year olds so this was in 60 year olds i will apologize for that but that was the data set that we had um and what what we found was that muscle mass itself unlike in some other studies wasn't a very good predictor of cognitive function um in fact it was it was about like those who had very high muscle mass actually had worse cognitive function and i was staring at this data i'm like what is going on it doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't fit my alcohol that just doesn't make sense so exactly like the more jacked you are the smarter you are right that has to be the answer don't make meatheads sound dumb

we do a good enough job of that ourselves we don't need science backing this up luckily i i think we figured out at least some of the some of the story so when we looked at um this was accounting for muscle mass this is looking at muscle mass after accounting for muscle strength right so muscle strength was a really a really good predictor of cognitive function so the stronger you were the smarter you were on this on this one test but that was independent of the effect of of muscle mass and then so then we looked at well how strong are you relative to the amount of muscle mass that you have right which is kind of like to make it fair across people um and then that was that was also a really good predictor after accounting for how much physical activity people are doing like the stronger you are

relative to your body size um the the higher your test on this on this cognitive function test and what i think is happening and this is also seen in some other studies recently where uh this and this was again from the uk biobank there was this study that looked at muscle mass um and cardiovascular disease risk and mortality risk. And they found that particularly in men, those who had the highest amounts of muscle mass had higher amounts of cardiovascular disease and were more likely to die earlier. And again, you're just like, I don't understand how this could be happening. But at the same time, in the same study, they showed that grip strength was negatively correlated with

the thing so the stronger you were the longer you lived the less heart disease you had so we know that muscle mass and strength should be positively correlated right in general but that's in active populations who are actually who are building muscle by doing resistance training or some kind of exercise what the general population does is they gain muscle mass because they've just gained more total mass because they're in a caloric surplus. And that is not the same muscle just to carry their body. Exactly. And that is not the same kind of muscle generated in the same way. So the answer I think is that if you're gaining muscle and with that muscle, you're gaining function because you're doing it through some kind of exercise training that is associated with improved health across across the board.

But if you're just gaining muscle by being in a caloric surplus and that's not associated with greater function, that's actually almost detrimental as a signal of detriment. But that's because you're also gaining a lot of body fat and other things that are coming along with that so that's kind of that's kind of where we we landed in terms of what what the data seemed to be telling us i think that answered your body composition question fantastic yeah for sure so yeah so you put on a bunch of body weight in general like if i was to carry around a 50 pound kettlebell with me everywhere i went 24 hours a day and i was an inactive person eventually i'd probably gain some muscle mass if i was to carry around a 50 pound kettlebell with me everywhere, I went 24 hours a day and I was an inactive person. Eventually I'd probably gain some muscle mass if I was in a caloric surplus all the time, just because I'm just, I'm moving around more mass all the time.

Yeah. And so you don't just get fatter. You also build muscle mass. And so because it's the general population and they have more muscle mass because they are just heavier than there's a negative correlation. Yeah, no, exactly. And then this is important because there are some people out there saying don't go to the gym and lift weights and gain muscle because that's

bad for your health and like those people should just be like dragged out around the back and put out their misery because they are just like a hundred as far as i can tell looking at the data they are 100 wrong but they've that's that's the bias that they've you know that's what they've taken from those studies but that's because most people in the population don't gain muscle by going and lifting weights which they should and gotcha uh right on let's kick it back to andrew's original question which i which i i snuck in line and got the obesity question in there what about hydration how does that fit into all this yeah hydration is is obviously very important and for for a number of reasons one you just need to have enough uh fluid inside cells for them to function properly

but also uh maintaining like vascular volume so that you can get stuff in the in the blood supply where where you want to go we know that um as you become more dehydrated, there are acute changes in cognitive function. And maybe there are some other interactions between hydration status and hunger and whether we end up overeating and some other things that those are possible. And then the sort of the micronutrition or the various elements that are important that come with hydration.

So people usually will talk about sodium, but then potassium is really important to maintain adequate hydration. And then also magnesium. I mentioned that earlier. That's another nutrient where if you look at magnesium levels, that seems to associate with cognitive function as well as maybe some other mental health conditions. So getting in enough fluid, but then also making sure that fluid sticks around and that's where you need those elements to do that as well. So two parts,

but certainly an important part of the picture. Yeah. Doug, just follow Galpin's hydration protocol and you'll be fine i'll be all right i've got the galpin equation galpin equation he's got things named after him these days as soon as you go to something named after yourself you know you've made it yeah it's really you can't change it there's no no progression needed it's got a it's got a title um i i would love to uh we're definitely gonna have you back to kind of talk about the into the

lifestyle side. But I do want to, I really want to dig into the sleep thing. And how that affects brain health, nutrition being one of it, but I feel like a lot of times, the way that I'm eating affects the way that I'm sleeping. And that's probably like my number one goal on a daily basis, like for consistency of brain health, no brain fog, having proper energy levels, like how does sleep and we'll just maybe even pan out more to like general stress recovery. But how does all that play into long-term brain health? I think I gave an idea of this model last time i was on the show but it's worth uh revisiting it um because if you're trying to build this idea of what supports long-term brain health i think we need to think about all the things that are important to build and sustain the brain um and

then you could think about well how did certain aspects of my lifestyle fit into that so in general i think of the brain like i would think of a muscle so the most important stimulus we talked about this about last time is just using your brain right actively challenging it yeah so that you try and drive adaptation then uh in order to respond to that adaptation you need a few things you need uh the blood supply to be working right. That's where cardiovascular health becomes important. You need to get energy to be getting there, glucose or ketones, oxygen. So that system needs to be functioning.

And then you need nutrients in order to build the structures in the brain that are going to build those new connections. That's why we talked about things like omega-3s and B vitamins and why that's important. And then you also need some recovery period for those adaptations to be made. That's where sleep is really important. And then you also need to avoid factors that might inhibit the adaptation process. That's where things like alcohol and smoking can inhibit that and chronic stress becomes one of those as well so it's are you creating the environment that allows for adaptation without things that negatively affect it so this is where sleep is critically important and there are some really nice studies where if you say activate a certain part of the body and they they've they've done this by like with

exercise or then restricting movement in a body part and then you look at the activity of the areas of the brain related to that body part at night basically if you move an area of the body that activates a certain area of the brain that area of the brain when it's been activated has a greater sleep requirement and changes its sleep requirement afterwards which basically means that if you use your brain the regions of the brain you use then need more sleep later in order to respond to the the stimulus that you gave it so you need to so you need to create that environment and we know that both uh short sleep and poor sleep are associated with increased risks of cognitive decline and

dementia. And you can measure that based on asking people about how long they're spending in bed, how long they're sleeping, how well they're sleeping. So that's things like, you know, are they requiring certain drugs or medications in order to sleep? That gives you an idea of poor sleep quality. And then that becomes problematic as well, because then it's like, is the problem, the thing you're taking that to help you sleep, the negative effects the brain. And that's part of it. But then it's also the fact that you weren't sleeping well in the first place. That's part of it. But we can dig into any part of that you want. But like sleep is just like critical. If you want to if you want your brain to adapt and stay healthy, it's probably the number one thing after using it in the first place yeah i really

just wanted to ask because i don't want to wait six months to have you back on to talk about the lifestyle side of things um but i do want to if we're going to make a dr tommy wood uh nutrition um protocol same way galpin gets to talk about drinking water um the i would love to know if we could just if we if we were to build is it the mediterranean diet supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids making sure you get a handful of blueberries um how do we how do we start to build out like a practical diet that that people can walk away with and start to implement if you're going to try and get all the nutrients critical to brain function

as easily as possible i think there are there are three probably three foods that i would eat regularly they are sardines um eggs and liver and don't need to be huge quantities but there's one other reason that i really like sardines that I haven't mentioned already, which is their creatine content. So per 100 grams of sardines, there are four to five grams of creatine. All right. That's like a scoop of creatine in one little set of sardines. In that same tin of sardines, you're going to get one to two grams of omega-3 fatty acids um and so then you've got your creatine um a little bit of uh a little bit of choline um and a bunch of omega-3s and then your eggs are

going to give you choline as well as some antioxidants associated with cognitive function like astaxanthin zeaxanthin you can get those from eggs although you can also get them from fruits and vegetables and like things like um salmon or pink seafoods um and then liver is going to give you folate copper b12 all that all that kind of stuff so if you know and and maybe i'll throw some some oysters in there as well if you're feeling adventurous uh for zinc and copper and some other things um but those would be the things that you know eat those things like two or three times a week that that would be my start of the protocol however an easy way is also i would get some basic blood tests we've already talked about homocysteine we didn't talk a bunch about blood sugar regulation but that's critically important

um so you know look at fasting blood sugar hbabA1c, um, look at, uh, nutrient status, homocysteine, uh, look at omega-3 status with like an omega-quant, omega-3 index, uh, maybe measurement magnesium hemoglobin levels. You have some idea of iron, vitamin D, right? And then based on those things, you can either get them from the diet or you can supplement if you need to, or maybe you're great and you don't need to do any of it. Um, you know, I think a little bit of information can be really helpful there. Love that, man.

Always a pleasure, sir. Where can people find you? Hold on a second. Hold on. Before we do that, did you go to Formula One in Vegas? I didn't go to Vegas. I go to Austin every year, but I didn't go to Vegas this year. I did stay up past my bedtime to watch it, though.

Why do they do it at midnight? Because it's, I think, they want it to be a night race. Because you're driving down the strip, and you saw the sphere, and they're driving right around. It was like the overhead shots. I was out there three weeks ago, and Vegas is a disaster. I don't know what it is now, but you go and build a racetrack in the middle of a four or and build a racetrack in in the middle of uh like what four or five mile long racetrack in the middle of vegas insane they

don't have small buildings to navigate around it's like things things three by three square blocks yeah um i mean so so the spec i think it was a spectacle it was an interesting new new track i think they struggled with that a little bit. But I think the main reason they had it at midnight is because then it's morning in Europe where most of the Formula One audience is. Interesting. There you go.

That makes sense. Yeah, I was going off. I was like, I'm not staying up for this. I'm going to have to watch this on Netflix in a year. Because I work in Formula One, I can stay up late and call it work i'm like oh i'm working i love that um where can people find you sir uh instagram is probably the best place at dr tommy wood um like clips from podcasts and things like that go up there uh i do have a

website that i did update recently um dr tommywood.com and like if you happen to want to like read any of my papers or something they got like boring lists of references they got there yeah and uh oh i i have a podcast called better brain fitness uh which i host with my very good friend and colleague neurologist dr josh turknet so you need to find that on my instagram bio or uh search for it wherever you search for podcasts awesome man doug larson dude that's dope i actually did not remember that you had your own show i'm totally gonna go listen to that thanks i'm really bad at mentioning it so i'm glad i remembered this time yeah dude very cool tommy dude i i enjoy talking with you the uh the brain health, mental health,

and how to affect it through nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle becomes more and more interesting to me as I get older and I see other people getting older that I care about. So these are very cool shows. I no doubt will send this to many people that I care about. So thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me.

Anders' dad, hope you enjoyed it. Do you have any questions? Send them along to the podcast. So the podcast is question and answer so if people have questions they can submit them and we we we answer them so hopefully that can yeah help you out we we we say these things with little little joe oh douglas z larson on instagram that guy you can follow there you go ah thank you for including me my friend there it is um we we say these things about my dad in a joking manner, but it's a very real thing in my family over the last year or so.

My dad did have some real brain health things going on and is back to what we would call normal. Maybe not normal for everyone, normal for him. So when we have these shows and he texts me and says, good job on that one. I hope I get it. I hope I get another text on this one. Because this stuff does hit home. I learned a ton from you. And I really appreciate all the work you do. So thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. I appreciate you guys for having me. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're barbell shrug to barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over to rapid health report.com.

That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Goppin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that for free over at rapidehealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.