Change Your Brain Every Day - Can Eating Certain Foods Make it Harder to Focus? With Chloe Amen

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

One of the most overlooked factors when determining success at school is nutrition habits. You may be surprised to hear that the type of food you send your child off to school with may play a huge role in how well they’re able to focus in class. In the third episode in a series on the brain at school, Dr. Daniel Amen, Tana, and their daughter Chloe share some insight on how to properly fuel the brain to ace those tests.

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're talking about change your brain, change your grades here with Tana and also Chloe. We're so excited to be with her. This is lesson

three. And you know, one of the big things, and I know you've been tortured by living in our family for a very long time. We used to come at Sunday school and put a donut in my face and say, hey, look what they gave us for Sunday school. I'm great. Great. Go to get your soul fed and those people were trying to kill you. Food is so important to learning. And we wonder why there's a skyrocketing increase in ADHD, but all you have to do is look at school lunches. This is one of my pet peeves. When I would be taking you to school in the mornings and there's across the street, and I understand, I mean,

I get it. People are busy. We've got two parents working now and they're dropping their kids off early to school. And I'd see them coming out of the grocery store across the street. There's a bakery inside the grocery store and they're walking out with donuts and bagels and muffins. And these kids, you know, what frustrates me about it is this. Most people may not have known, but these kids are getting in trouble. And I knew some of these kids and they're getting in trouble. They're getting calls home. They're saying, you know, they're getting labeled as problem children. They're on the list all the time, and they're getting, you know, they're going to the doctor and being told they have ADD and learning problems, which they may. But no one is telling them, change your diet.

Okay? These kids should not be having sugar and simple carbs for breakfast, right? If you've got ADD, especially. So I didn't learn anything about this in medical school. So out of the 80,000 hours it took me to become a psychiatrist and a child psychiatrist, I had 16 hours of nutrition and not one lecture on how food affects your mind. But what taught me, and this was the mother of an autistic child, is when I took him off gluten and dairy, the next week he had 50 words.

Right. And it's just, there's a huge connection between how you perform in school and the nutrition going to your brain. Well, and it frustrates me when people start to have this argument. It's like they'll start with, oh, calories are calories. Really? Well, tell that to a diabetic. Calories are not calories, right?

They're just not. Nobody knows what that means. Okay. So. She's a little bit of a nerd. Diabetics cannot just go eat a bunch of sugar and simple carbohydrates because it's going to jack up their, their, their blood sugar. They can't do that because they don't have the insulin to process it. Right. And then they have to go take insulin.

So calories are not calories. If they, if they eat correctly, then they need to take less medicine. So calories are not calories. And if you have ADD or you've got a learning problem, it's even it's more important that you eat really healthy not more important than a diabetic it's more important it's just more important overall right that you eat really healthy because when you have add your frontal lobes are sleepy okay the last thing you want to do is go eat simple carbs and sugar which are going to drop your frontal lobes more it's going to it's actually going to affect serotonin and drop your frontal lobes you want It's actually going to affect serotonin and drop your frontal lobes. You want something like protein in the mornings

because what you want, protein and healthy fat, which is going to increase dopamine, which helps you focus, it also stays with you longer and balances blood sugar. So in Change Your Brain, Change Your Grains, we talk about brain types. So we've already brought that. And Chloe's a type 3. She doesn't do well on protein.

Her brain is really busy and if she would go on the atkins diet on a really low carbohydrate diet she would become i tried keto just because i wanted to try it because i am one of those people who's like oh just might as well try it right i was not a happy person she over focused on everything that bothered her talk about yeah so i were you dating michael when you tried keto oh no i wouldn't well i still wouldn't be um no i was not nice but i've had to kind of balance it out because just like not everyone learns the same and not everyone studies the same, not everyone's, you know, function is the same as far as organization and that kind of stuff.

Well, not everyone has the same diet which optimizes their productivity. So a high protein diet, low carb does not optimize my productivity. I don't get as much done. Um, I'm cranky and I'm also active. I'm very active. I do like three different sports. Um, but there's healthy carbs and there's unhealthy carbs, right? So just loading yourself with a bunch of sugar, I crashed really fast. That doesn't sustain me throughout the day with school and with all my sports and that kind of stuff. So sugar is not, sugar doesn't work with that. Obviously I've had to experiment at what works best for me. I can't go with no carbs. I'm just not that type, but there's healthy carbs. There's,'s i mean she has

amazing desserts and her books and stuff like that we make muffins and cookies and brownies um that are healthy but that fulfill that need for me i need carbs and i'm i'm happier you're also a little veggie queen so this is vegetables and protein and so this is really important. And that matches your brain. Knowing your brain type. So Chloe's a type three where her brain is busy. If we just put her on a high protein diet, she would concentrate more on the things that upset her as opposed to Alize, who has a sleepy brain and she might do really well right on a higher protein lower carbohydrate diet so in the book we talked to you about how you know your type what are the right things for for your type but the reason i think that um mental health problems and kids is skyrocketing is the ease of fast food restaurants

and processed well everything is sugar and red food die and or food dies there's a study in australia where they looked at two outer islands one of them had fast food restaurants the other one did not and the island that didn't have the fast food restaurants had higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids 97 of the american population is deficient in omega-3s which make up 25 of nerve cell membranes. In your brain, 25% of the fat is omega-3 fatty acids. And on the island that had fast food restaurants, low omega-3s, five times the level of depression. So for teenagers especially, because I'm adding to this because of the book, if you're a high school student or even college, I think a big reason, it's very important, educating yourself and being aware is very important. And I think a lot of, you know,

high schoolers, college students, they're so focused and so aware of their grades and their school that they, food and sleep are an afterthought. And they don't often realize that they correlate strongly. And obviously money, those types of things, you're managing your money. And so between classes going and running for fast food or, you know, even at the lunch table we have like energy drinks and, you know, like sugary everything. Caffeinated drinks. We have vending machines.

And it's like that quick fix. And we're not thinking that, oh, food correlates to how I do on this test that I'm about to take. We just don't think about that because we're young and we have other priorities and other focuses. I'm surely not perfect. I'm a teenager. So it's like every now and then I'm like, okay, I'm with my friends. So it's like the fast food and that kind of stuff. But I try to be just aware of how it affects me the next day when I get brain fog and I'm like, hmm, I wonder what's wrong with me today. It's probably because I had a milkshake yesterday. You know, it's like that kind of, it's noticing that difference and being aware of it. And I think, I think just being conscious of how it affects you is very

important. So if you went out tomorrow and you got fast food and then, you know, you had a test, you tried to study, just pay attention. Um, just do a little experiment and pay attention. Okay. What is the difference? Right. And then you'll figure out what works for you and what doesn't. So if I went on a high protein, that's not going to work for me either. But going out and eating a bunch of sugar, that doesn't work for me either. So I found- So you need a little bit of protein, a little bit of protein and healthy carbs. One of my favorites, actually two studies out of Holland showed that by changing kids' diets, they took a group of ADD kids and by changing their diets, they improved their symptoms 70%. 70% of them actually lost the diagnosis of ADD.

And what they took out was they took out sugar, gluten, dairy, food dyes. And there was sugar, gluten, dairy, food dyes, and corn. And so everyone's like, oh, there's nothing to eat. Well, that's why I wrote cookbooks. There's 10,000 things to eat. Right. You just have to be smart and know how to pick. One of my favorite little trips was Chloe's skin started breaking out.

I think you were 11. And you went, help me with this. And so remember we went to Whole Foods. And I'm like, okay, your job is to pick 10 things you love that love you back. And I taught you how to read food labels. This is what they back. And I taught you how to read food labels. This is what they should be teaching in school, how to read food labels. Unfortunately,

she was, I don't know, in third grade and the school district sent home a letter that basically said, teach your children that all foods are good. When Dana read it, she wrote them a three-page response. I volunteered to go teach. You know, it's a miracle that I was the teacher's pet all the way through school.

I don't know how I did it. I really, you know what? I volunteered all the way through school. And I remember at the end of what, third grade, I think it was, that volunteer appreciation day. And I came walking in one day and there were two teachers walking toward me and one was carrying cupcakes and one was carrying donuts or something. And they're walking toward me and I, I go, hi, they saw me literally their jaws drop at the very same moment. They turned, they spun around, they turned around and walked away. And I'm like, and then it, then it occurred to me why they did it. They were like guilty. And then all of a sudden

they kind of stopped and they realized what they did. And I'm like, really? And I'm like, you guys act like you're in second grade. What is that? When we come back, we're going to talk about more practical tips for you to be a lifelong learner and improve your grades or your salary. We're raffling off after each episode, a free copy of Change Your Brain, Change Your Grade, signed. Go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com and leave us a comment. And in the subject line, write, Change Your Brain, Change Your Grade, raffle. Also leave us questions and comments. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast,

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