Change Your Brain Every Day - Dr. Amen’s Ultimate Guide to Gut Health

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Class is in session! In this special series of the Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, you are invited to a special private Amen Clinics company presentation on nutrition. This first episode tells you everything you need to know about the health of your gut, and why it’s crucial to your overall health.

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. Hi, this is Dr. Daniel Amen. This week's series is a special presentation on nutrition

from our company event we held here at Amen Clinics. We felt that despite the slight change in sound quality, the information we captured could be super helpful to our audience. So we decided to share it with you. The following episode is all about your gut and the role it plays in your overall health. Enjoy. All right. Hello, everybody. So we are continuing on our Bright Minds initiative.

Today, we're going to talk about food. So the N is for nutrition. What goes in your body becomes your body. You want to do the pop quiz? Sure. Some of you will already know this, but where are three quarters of the neurotransmitters in your body made? Your gut. What organ contains two thirds of your immune tissue? Your gut. You actually have to answer.

We're not moving on until you do. and do you know about autoimmune disorders so where your body attacks itself right Hashimoto's thyroiditis is one MS multiple sclerosis um rheumatoid arthritis there's a list of about a hundred of those. And often it's because you have gut problems and no one's ever told you. So if your gut is responsible for immune tissue and your gut's not healthy, that's really the start of a lot of auto, so where your body begins to attack itself. What organ contains 10 times more cells than the total in your body? What organ hosts a foreign legion that protects you? Your gut.

And what do 70% of people suffer from? Leaky gut. Yes, or gut problems, for sure. So the gut is the second brain. It's your microbiome. So it's, you like to call it? Friends with benefits. So this is Biff and Lacey. When my daughter was about seven, maybe, we were talking about

gut bugs and how important they are and probiotics and why it's so important to heal the gut because of your neurotransmitters, because of autoimmune disorders. And if your gut's not right, your brain's not right. So many things happen that we're going to talk about. So we were talking about this and my daughter overhears that you have bugs in your gut and she freaks out. She literally is like screaming. You can imagine a seven-year-old little girl here and she's got bugs in her gut and she just like loses it like loses it so i'm like no no no it's not quite like that yes you've got lots of bugs in your gut but think of the bugs in your gut sort of like your pets so we named them biff and lacy so they're like your pets you have to take

care of them because at the time we had this psychotic german shepherd protection dogs i was a little over the top but i said it's kind of like hank we take care of hank we feed hank we we take care of him so that he protects us right so we don't want your gut bugs going psycho and like you know like hank did but we want him we want them protecting you so we named them Biff and Lacey. And she was like, oh, okay, she got that. So Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, two of the most important gut bugs you have. And we got the stuffed animals because then it was like, it sort of personalized it

and made it a little less freaky. So, yeah. So your gut is called the second brain, right? I mean, we here at Amen Clinics, we're really interested in the big brain. But what feeds the big brain often comes from the second brain, which is your gut. And your gut is loaded with nervous tissue, actually has a direct connection to your brain. And it's why we feel emotional states in our gut. So you get butterflies when you're excited. Or I remember once I went through a period of grief, my stomach was just upset all the time. You know, if I could say something here, it's so interesting because as a nurse, I remember

being in medicine at a time when the gut-brain connection was not something we talked about, which just wasn't something we thought about or talked about. Maybe there were studies being done, but it wasn't sort of this normal thing that we thought of. And as someone who went through so much trouble with my own health, and as a way to suppress my thyroid cancer that kept coming back, they put me on this really high dose thyroid, which then put me on a bunch of other medications and I was a mess. So I was wired, tired, didn't feel good, started to get depressed. My whole system was just wacky, including a lot of these problems. And when I went to the doctor, it's like what frustrated me was the doctors all would see these organs as very separate.

They were not communicating. Oh, it's like, go talk to the cardiologist. Go talk to the GI doctor. Go talk. It was all connected, and it was so frustrating to me that they weren't seeing it because I was certainly feeling it. So that's why we want you to really grasp this because what was affecting me with those medications, one organ was completely affecting how I felt, my brain, my moods. So it's really important.

This is a very important concept, lining your gut. So if we're just thinking from your mouth all the way to the other end, it's about 30 feet of a long tube. And yes, your stomach pooches out a bit, but it's basically a long tube. And lining that tube is the lining of your gut. And the interesting thing, it's only one single cell layer thick. Now, why God did that? No idea, right? It should be like 10. Maybe it's a sign that he doesn't want us to do things that hurt us. Ah, but it protects you from the outside. So we have a granddaughter, Haven, and she's nine months old now. She's so cute. She puts everything in her mouth. And so obviously a lot of things going in her mouth are not good for her. And protecting her is this one single cell layer that is the defense against

invaders in the outside. And when that breaks down, you end up with what we call leaky gut. So here's an electron micrograph. So it means it's just really blown up of the gut lining. And you can see these holes in it. And those holes are what doctors refer to as leaky gut. So leaky gut's associated with autoimmune disease. We just talked about that. Digestive symptoms like gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, et cetera.

Probably no one in here has ever experienced any of those. IBS, so Crohn's disease, celiac disease. It's really interesting. I'll talk about it at the end of this, why that happens when you get leaky gut. Seasonal allergies and asthma, that's shocking to people when they clean up their diet. That's one of the first things that we noticed. Your skin gets better, it's less red, rosacea, things like that, because those are all signs of inflammation, just like allergies. Hormonal imbalances, chronic fatigue syndrome, you definitely get more energy.

Fibromyalgia, mood anxiety. So they may not know what that is. So it's where you just have pain all over your body. When it's unexplained, they don't, they're not really sure why. It's like, you've got this unexplained pain. And doctors used to think it was a myth. Like, it's like, oh, it's like this catch all phrase. It's sort of a way people, it's like, oh, it's like this catch-all phrase. It's sort of a way people, it's like, oh, it's like this way to say, we don't know. It's kind of in your head, but it's not. Like your body starts to overreact. It's inflammation. When that inflammation comes down, the pain gets better. It's one of the first things that we notice within two weeks of people eating really well. Mood, anxiety, depression, ADHD. So that's what we do. So why are we, you know, basically we're, you know,

eight soon to be nine psychiatric clinics interested in your gut because that may be one of the causes. When we get your gut right, your mood's better. Your focus is better. Skin issues like we just talked about. Candida overgrowth. So I'll get a little more into that as we go along what like it's a yeast issue but we'll talk about why that happens um food

allergies and intolerances and headaches headaches are another big one migraines so when i was teaching my nutrition classes the 12-week nutrition classes the big things people noticed immediately before they got even the long-term benefits, before the weight loss, before all that, was sort of the side effect, was skin, headaches, pain. It was just because those are immediate things that happen when your inflammation comes down. So some of the causes of it, the standard American diet, which, you know, if you just look at the initials of that sad but it's basically the American diet

with sugar gluten corn processed foods pesticides low stomach acid but when people get an upset stomach what do they give you they give you anti acids to take down the acid in your stomach. Why do you have acid in your stomach? To digest food. Because it breaks down food. So if you're neutralizing the acid, you actually don't digest food as well. Which is why you start to get, that's what I was going to say earlier, is why you start to get this overgrowth. So you get this overgrowth of the wrong bacteria, the wrong stuff in your gut that leads to the candida, right? It also means you're not getting the nutrients you need. You're not forming vitamin K.

You're not breaking down and getting nutrients like magnesium and other stuff. You're building blocks. So alcohol. Why does Tana's a nurse, why do nurses put alcohol on your skin before they give you a shot? Kills the bugs. You have a hundred trillion in your gut. So do you really want to be drinking much alcohol? Because what it's doing is damaging your gut. So I have an interesting story about

that. So this is not, you're not going to like but it's it's to prove that point um so i have friends that went on this expedition this hiking expedition and they were in the third world country and everyone on the trip got violently ill because somehow they got water in the i don't know what they got but they got either the food or the something contained the water that they weren't supposed to drink but a couple of the guys had gone on a drinking binge the night before. They were like doing shots of tequila. They were the only ones that didn't get it. So we don't want you doing that. This is not a third world country. But that proves the point that what happened was they were able to kill enough of the bacteria that they didn't get that. So, but that means it's killing the good bacteria too. So it's not very common that you get that kind of bad bacteria.

But whenever you do that, you're killing the good bacteria. And you've got, it should be 80-20 or actually 85-15. So that means you're wiping out all that good stuff that's protecting you. 85-15 of good bugs to bad bugs. We'll talk about that in a minute. Also infections, mold, which is why we test for mold, chronic stress, who among why we test for mold, chronic stress, who among us haven't experienced that, or microbiome, that's all the bugs put together.

There's an imbalance of good ones and bad ones. Microbiome, 100 trillion bacteria are what you have. 10,000 unique species, 10 times the cells in the human body. We already said that. And the goal is 85-15, which is what we just said, good bugs to bad bugs. And you have to work at keeping them that way. Otherwise, the bad ones take over. So you have about three pounds

of the brain in your head and five to six pounds of bugs in your gut. And whenever you have a bowel movement about 60% of that is dead bugs. You can say the word. I want you to say the word. What? Why do doctors have such a problem with the word, yes, nurses are very comfortable with the word poop. Every time we talk he avoids the word poop. It's just so funny. And you have to say it over and over again. Why would you say it?

I think that's Tourette's. So these bugs are so important. These bugs in your gut are your friends. So here are the friends with benefits. They protect the single cell lining. They help you digest your food. They help you absorb nutrients. They make vitamins and neurotransmitters. 95% of the serotonin in your body is made by your gut.

So if your gut's not right, your brain will not be right. And I know you have heard weird terms that you don't quite get, like small bowel overgrowth or just odd term. That's what they mean. So you're not making vitamin K because you damage the gut and you're not digesting food properly, and acids will cause that. When you're not digesting your food, you get this overgrowth, and that prevents you from the small bowel overgrowth prevents this

from happening the synthesis of some of those nutrients so just pause for a second your gut bugs are supporting your overall health they're not right you are not right so when they're deficient, you're anxious, you're stressed, you're depressed, you have ADHD, autism, even heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and diabetes. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.