Change Your Brain Every Day - A Cure to Many Gut/Brain-Related Illnesses with Dr. David Perlmutter

Episode Date: January 31, 2019

In the fourth and final episode in a series with Brain Maker author Dr. David Perlmutter, Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Perlmutter discuss an incredibly effective treatment for those who suffer from gut/brain related illnesses. But beware, this procedure is not for the squeamish!

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Well, welcome back. I'm here with Dr. David Perlmutter, bestselling author, neurologist, teacher, friend. I'm so pleased to spend time with you always because I learn so much. And you're like the perfect guest on the Brain Warriors way because we believe that you're in a war and you need to be arm prepared and aware to really win the fight of your life. And it's not a small war.

I read a book called Hooked, written by a Silicon Valley person on how they create addictive gadgets. And I'm like, oh my goodness, you're in a war. So let's spend just a little bit of time and talk about BrainMaker. It's one of your books I dearly love on the gut-brain connection. But also, let's spend a couple of minutes on the war and the new book you're working on, BrainWash. Let me first start by saying that Brain Maker was a book that really focused a lot on the gut and how it manifests as either brain degeneration or brain health. And I have to say, when that book came out, it was extremely disruptive. I mean, we talked about, sure, about food, about probiotics

and prebiotic fiber, about the threats to the gut bacteria with respect to medications, for example, antibiotics, non-steroid, anti-inflammatory drugs, acid-blocking drugs. But we even went further and discussed this emerging technology called fecal microbial transplant. Oh, I remember that. Where fecal material from healthy individuals was transplanted into individuals' colons who had a, whatever the issue may be, but it was an issue that we understood and understand is an issue related to abnormalities of the gut bacteria. For example, we know that there's an overgrowth of a type of bacterium called Clostridium difficile or C. diff that claims the life of 30,000 to 40,000 Americans a year today.

And the treatment for C. diff over the years has been antibiotics, about 28% effective. Fecal transplant is more than 95% effective in treating C. diff. So it worked for that. Now 500 hospitals in America are doing fecal transplants for C. diff. But just yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association was a review article, an editorial written about an article appearing in the same journal, using fecal microbial transplant, transplanting fecal material into people with Crohn's disease with really dramatic results, Crohn's being an autoimmune condition. So we begin to think about

the idea of using this radical change of the gut bacteria for immune related things and inflammatory related issues. Several years ago, as I wrote about in Brain Maker, I had a child come to see me with autism. And in addition, mother states, oh, and his digestion is terrible. He doesn't have a bowel mood for weeks at a time. And when he does, it smells so bad. We noticed that from the moment after he was born. And as you and I know, that's not unusual. That's what you would expect to hear. And for years, everyone has known that there's been this incredible relationship between abnormalities of gut function and autism. But it was sort of like, well, they have this and they have that. The gastroenterologist will deal

with the gut and I will deal with the autism as best I can. Well, no, there's a powerful signal there. Now that we understand the powerful role of the gut bacteria in brain health and function, maybe there's a clue. And I said this to this child's mother and I said, you know, why don't we think about doing a fecal transplant on your child?

And she, of course, asked, well, what in the heck is that? And I explained it. And she said, Dr. Perlmutter, if you think that might help and it's not going to hurt, I'm all in. We found a 12-year-old healthy girl who was delighted to help out. I said, you know, it's really strange. We're going to have to get your poop and we're going to put it into this child's colon. And she said, whatever I can do to help. So we did this and I was getting ready to go on stage in Germany when a few minutes before I got an urgent call from this kid's mother who sent me a video of him doing a book report on Benjamin Franklin in front of his class.

And I will never forget that moment. I mean, this is a kid who wouldn't speak, wouldn't make eye contact in regular school, telling me some things about Benjamin Franklin that I didn't even know. And it was really quite remarkable. And when I published that in BrainMaker, oh, my gosh, did people criticize. And, you know, I fully follow the doctrine of primum non nocea, above all, do no harm, and looked at the risk-benefit ideology as well. And nice to know that two, three years ago, University of Arizona did a larger study, 20 children, open label, and did fecal transplants and demonstrated across the board

not only improvements in their GI function, but in their cognitive parameters as well. Published and worked on Dr. Alessio Fasano at Harvard as part of that research. So that's the kind of stuff we were exploring. And I think that we are still powerfully involved in laying the groundwork and understanding the role that our gut bacteria are playing in our overall health. After all, those 100 trillion organisms depend on you and me being healthy, otherwise they perish. And I've often said that, you know, women who are pregnant, now we say you have to be careful you're eating for two. Well, everyone on the planet is eating for a hundred trillion.

They're going to eat what you eat. When we threaten them with artificial sweeteners, we increase our risk for metabolic issues. When we threaten them with acid blocking drugs, the journal Stroke indicates that we increase our risk for developing Alzheimer's disease and stroke. So we've got to nurture those guys. And we do so by eating a diet that emulates the diet of our ancestors, a diet that's very rich in prebiotic fiber, and that doesn't threaten them with high levels of processed carbohydrates, sugars, artificial sweeteners and flavors and colors and you name it. Do you think fecal transplantation is going to become a treatment for autism? I think that what we anticipate seeing is a production of an understanding of why fecal transplant has been helpful. And I hate to say,

but kind of extracting out the active ingredient. What we now understand is that you can get some benefit from fecal transplantation in other realms, not with autism, only a minimal amount of research from actually transplanting just the the coverings over the bacteria that have the antigens the proteins on them so you don't necessarily have to have viable bacteria so think where we're going is to a place where we finally understand what is it what is contained are they viable bacteria which bacteria do what and ultimately refining that to an extent that it wouldn't even need to be transplanted through into the colon, because we now know that you can cure C. diff, not with just fecal transplant, but using oral capsules of fecal material as well. So I think ultimately,

what we're getting at is, you know, the coming together of the notion of probiotics with the data that fecal transplantation is developing to ultimately cure a disease or have a dramatic impact on a disease related to inflammation and altered neurochemistry, things like autism and depression and anxiety, ADHD, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease. That's the future. Wow. So many good things.

Before we stop, talk about. I can't believe we're getting ready to stop. Too much. We just started. I know. It's just so much fun. Brainwash. my goodness. So much. I have two nieces that I adopted that I love like they're mine. And one of them goes to middle school where a day a week McDonald's delivers lunch. And another day a week, Pizza Hut delivers lunch. And it just highlights the war, that if I was an evil ruler and I wanted to create mental illness in our society,

that's clearly one of the things I would do, is give them this low- quality food that really upsets their microbiome. When you're thinking about brainwash, what is it that you're hoping to deliver in the book and that people will take away from it when it's out next year? I think the biggest thing that we could do and why we've written the book is to call things out so people can recognize where they are being hijacked. That food is addictive and is manipulated, as we've seen, with respect to sugar content, salt content, fat content, to make it more, not just palatable, but more addictive. And that our brains are being hijacked in terms of what we see in media, what we see on social media, what we see when we're online, making us think that we are going to achieve certain goals if we carry out a certain action.

And that it is a war, that these are not things that just happen. These are volitional techniques of marketing to make us behave in a certain way and to lock us into that behavior. primitive brain function level from functioning from the amygdala where we are impulsive fearful uh self-centered and keeping us away from the notion of connectivity so what we describe in brainwash is disconnection syndrome that we are disconnecting and i've become disconnected at multiple levels we've become disconnected from the signaling from our DNA, from the life supportive signaling and metabolic products that our gut bacteria want to provide us. We've become disconnected from the prefrontal cortex, allowing us to be those highly developed humans that we could be caring for each other, caring for the planet. We're disconnected from our neighbors, from our communities, certainly from other nations, and ultimately disconnected from nature, from the planet itself. And the end game for Brainwash is reconnection, as you would imagine. And we aim to provide those tools to recognize what's leading to disconnection and to hopefully, I split the infinitive, I'm sorry, to hopefully allow people the tools to reconnect.

I love that. It's going to be a huge hit. So I am so grateful to you, grateful to your friendship. I know Tana would echo the same thing to your teaching. I'll continue to follow you. How can our listeners connect with you? How can they learn more about, I mean, yes, you have your books, Grain Brain, Brain Maker. Best way, it would be drperlmutter.com. I send out a newspaper email every week with a newsletter. And just as you've seen our site, we have thousands, tens of thousands of full PDF research articles. That's a data bank that we've used in the books we've written that is fully searchable by topic. So if you're interested in autism or Parkinson's, you dial it in and all the studies come up. So you can learn where the information that we talk about comes from. Great. Well, thank you, my friend. Such a joy to be with you again.

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