Change Your Brain Every Day - Can a Bad Diet Encourage Violent Behavior? With Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

The science is pretty clear: bad food creates a bad brain, which causes bad thinking, and leads to a bad life. But is it possible that a poor diet can actually promote violent or anti-social behavior? The answer is shocking. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen are again joined by Dr. Mark Hyman for a discussion on how poor nutrition can affect the brain and behavior.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your 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 nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with our friend, Dr. Mark Hyman. His new book is Food Fix, but it's way bigger than a book. It's how do we fix the food crisis that is damaging the brain, body, health of the world, not just America,

but also damaging our minds. Your brain is the most energy hungry organ in the body. It's only 2% of your body's weight, but it uses 20 to 30% of the calories you consume. And if you consume an inflammatory diet filled with toxins, you're not going to be thinking in a way that really helps you. And Mark, in the last podcast, you were beginning to talk about how our food is damaging our brain, which then damages our decision making, which then spills over to our relationships, our ability to manage our money, even to the divisive political climate that we find ourselves. And when world-class athletes go to the White House and are fed fast food, I don't know, I have a problem with that. It's just bad modeling to have the pizza boxes for our world-class athletes. Because you know, they're not world-class athletes today because they're eating crappy food that, you know, often they have nutritionists

that are really helping them. We just have to be better models for the country at large. It's so true. And I think I'm just so struck in a whole section of my book called Food Society about how behavior and mental health how academic performance is all linked to food and then the data you know you and i were doing this decades ago and everybody kind of laughed at us but you know there's a whole uh new field of nutritional psychiatry and how our overall diet quality with high sugar loads and nutritional deficiencies things like omega-3 zinc magnesium vitamin magnesium, vitamin D, B vitamins, all drive mental illness.

And these are what people are deficient in. And I think that we see these studies, and the studies that most strike me in terms of the effect on behavior and the brain are these prison studies. Because it's easy to sort of do a study if you have a controlled environment. And in food, it's almost impossible because people eat what they want you can't control the diet you give them food you know lock them up you actually can see what happens and just simple interventions like giving in prison a randomized controlled trial prisoners omega-3 fats and a

multivitamin reduce violent crime by 37 percent so makes sense and the author of the study said this was amazing he said having a bad diet is now a better predictor of future violence than past violent behavior and likewise a diagnosis of psychopathy generally perceived as being a better predictor of a criminal past right is miles behind what you can predict just from looking at what a person eats. I actually read one study. Tell me if you've heard of this study where they found that by doing a very similar thing, splitting up the population, feeding one a really healthy diet, that was actually fairly not an over-the-top crazy, you know, like we can get a little like extreme with some of the things we like. We think, like other people think of them as extreme. We think of them as normal. But they just did sort of a normal cleanup vegetables and right

so they did sort of a cleanup on the diet and the other half they let them continue with their diet and not only did they see the the violence um decrease with the group that ate the healthy diet but like you were just sort of alluding to they saw 21 percent decrease in recidivism so i just thought that was amazing but yet they give them 88 cents a day to feed the prison population which isn't and it's like okay so how do you do this on a budget yeah well i think it's possible i i think it's very possible because you know i i think the myth uh that it's expensive to because I think the myth that it's expensive to eat well is a myth. Yes, if you're going to eat

heirloom, variety of everything, grass fed, regenerative everything, it can get expensive. But if you're eating just real food, getting out the junk as the first step, that's powerful. This one experiment of 3,000 youth that were

incarcerated, they were placed to snack food and junk food and refined food and sugar over 12 months. There was a 21% reduction in antisocial behavior, a 25% reduction in assaults, and a 75% reduction in use of restraints, and a hundred percent reduction in suicides and that is striking because suicide is the third losing cause of of death in teenagers and it's increased 33 percent in the last decade or so so that is just a striking thing to me well and think about it suicide's gone up 33 percent since 1999 while cancer cancer has declined 27%. Why? It's because we're working on the wrong paradigm. You know, a pill for every ill, I got that from you, making diagnoses based on symptom clusters and then medicating these people and never once talking to them about their diet. That's insane that we need to just do this in a completely different way

because every other field of medicine, their outcomes have improved since the 1950s but psychiatry because we just have the wrong paradigm. And there's this great study from Australia where they looked at two outer islands. One of them had fast food restaurants. The other one didn't. And then they measured their omega-3 fatty acid index and the level of depression.

And the fast food group had significantly lower levels of omega-3 fatty acids and five times the level of depression it's the food yeah it's crazy i mean i there's one study i quote in the book which was shocking to me because it was sort of an objective brain mapping study where they looked at eeg function before and after just 13 weeks of supplementation with a multivitamin. And the violent attacks reduced by 91% compared to the control group. Oh, wow. And kids who were measured were deficient in iron, magnesium, B12, and folate, all needed for great brain function.

When they looked at the EEG, their brain waves, they found major decrease in abnormal brain function after just 13 weeks of supplementation, which is amazing. It's amazing. But yeah, you're in an academic institution. And still, a lot of physicians, when you talk about supplementation, go, there's no science, there's no research behind that,

it's nothing more than expensive urine they ask what they do they take i'll take them actually we did a survey when i got here we got it we did a survey when i got here shocked the heck out of me which we wanted to see you know what was the utilization in the clinic of supplements what percent of our and this is a major academic you know sophisticated organization what percent recommended supplements to their patients. Guess the number. 10? 20? 70% of the Cleveland Clinic doctors recommend supplements to their patients.

Oh. You know, whether prenatals or vitamin D or fish oil or B vitamin, whatever. It was like orthopedic surgeons. It's like, I mean, it's not just here. So it's shifted. We know this orthopedic surgeons. It's like, I mean, it's not just here. So it's shifting. We know this data from other surveys that, you know, 70%, 80% of doctors are recommending supplements,

but they are sending people to CVS or reference. They're not getting the kind of quality that you guys make or it's available to other professional brands. Right. Interesting. So that's interesting. So what do you think most people should take? Oh, well, I think, you know, clearly the major deficiencies are omega-3s, magnesium, zinc, often iron, the B vitamins like folate, B12, B6.

So those are, you can get those if you take a multivitamin, a mineral, a fish oil, a vitamin D, maybe a little extra magnesium. You know, I think that's a bare minimum for most people. What about a probiotic? Yeah, I would add that in there. I mean, I think the probiotics research, we need more and more research on that. But I think it's pretty exciting to see, you know, the advances in the microbiome that we're learning. And I think we're just sort of at the infancy.

So, you know, I think we'll learn more and more. Yeah. Those are my five go-tos too. I like, everyone sort of needs those basics. All right. When we come back, we're going to talk about specific things you can do to fix your food and help Dr. Hyman fix the food of America and beyond. Stay with us. helps others find the podcast. If you're considering coming to Amen Clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from BrainMD, you can use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements

at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.