Change Your Brain Every Day - Fact & Fiction: Nutrition in the Kitchen- PT. 2 with Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

If you’re having trouble determining which foods are healthy for you and which are not, you’re not alone. There are tons of conflicting ideas about the “correct” way to eat. In the second part of a series with Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen break down the misconceptions about exactly which foods are good for you.

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. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. We're back with our friend Mark Hyman, and we are now going to talk about what should you eat. We're talking about his new book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?

So Mark, tell us, what should they eat? How do we simplify? What are the principles? How do we simplify it? Well, it's so confusing, right? And everybody's wondering, and everybody's trying different things, and some of it's working, some of it doesn't. And I was sitting on a panel with two friends of mine.

One was a paleo doc, Frank Whitman, and another was a vegan cardiologist, Joel Kahn, with completely diametrically opposed views. You know, one was saying, well, if you eat, like, you know, vegan, you're going to die. And it was like, if you eat paleo, you're going to die. They can't both be right. And I was sort of going back and forth. And I was sitting in the middle, and I'm like, I felt like a ping pong ball. I said, wait a minute, guys.

You know, you can't both be right. I said, if you're paleo and you're vegan, then I must be a pegan. I literally just made it up on the spot. And it like became this meme and I wrote an article about it. And then it was picked up by the Guardian and by, you know, USA Today and all these outlets. And I sort of thought about it. I'm like, oh, wait a minute, this kind of makes sense. Like what are the principles that are foundational that everybody agrees on? And I think they're pretty simple. One is we should all be eating real food.

Right. And we can find that. Two, we should be eating a plant-rich diet. Not plant-based, but lots of vegetables and plants. Three, we should be eating a diet that's high in the good fats, avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds. Even, you know, grass-fed saturated fats, coconut oil can be part of a healthy diet.

And get rid of refined foods, like refined oils. Very low-glycemic diets are important. So that means low starch and sugar. That's one of the biggest drivers of all disease, including dementia, depression, as well as obviously all the things like diabetes and cancer and heart disease are all driven by the starchy sugary diet so that's really important whatever you eat should be low glycemic even if it's real food right you can eat 12 idaho potatoes but you could argue that an idaho potato is not real food a real food would be a traditional peruvian potato which is about this big

highly nutrient dense very low in starch as opposed to these hybridized modern versions of potatoes. So I would say that. And then we want to eat foods that are free of things that we shouldn't be eating that aren't food ingredients, right? 3000 food additives, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, GMO, nobody really disagrees with that. And what about dairy? Well, dairy is controversial. And both paleo and vegan camps say that's bad. And I think there are populations that may tolerate it better and people who may tolerate it better. But for the most part, I think it's a harmful food for most people, especially our modern hybridized cows, which are full of A1 casein, which is super inflammatory, lots of gut issues, acne, inflammation, cancer, doesn't help your bones, doesn't help you lose weight.

I mean, it's not nature's perfect food unless you're a calf. So I think if you're looking at dairy and you want to try, stay a little bit off it, but maybe sheep or goat is different because that has A1 case, A2 casein, which is not as inflammatory. So we've got, and then we've got meat and animal protein. Well, that's a controversial area. So meat and protein and grains and beans are the areas of controversy and conflict. Everything else, paleo and vegan agree on, right? So if you're eating meat, I think everybody would agree that we should eat meat that doesn't harm the animals, doesn't harm the planet, and doesn't harm us, right? Which would be animals raised through regenerative agriculture that are grass-finished, that help restore the environment, sequester carbon in the soil, hold onto water. Because our soil drives climate change.

People don't realize this. But if you eat animals that are grown in traditional ways, it depletes our aquifers. It destroys our soils, which then lead to inability of the soil to hold carbon. And then we get high levels of carbon and climate change, which then pollutes our oceans with acidification that then kills the phytoplankton that then actually produces 50% of our oxygen. So we're basically going to suffocate and we're going to overheat because of how we're doing agriculture. So if you're eating animal foods, they shouldn't be from factory farms. If you're eating fish, you should eat fish that's sustainably raised or harvested. You don't want to overfish the oceans,

and we're doing that at increasing rates. So want low mercury fish low toxin fish so i go through what are those so we eat whatever you're eating same thing with you know poultry and eggs and so forth and then of course there's grains and beans and i think people are super confused about them you know there's a whole camp where they're like lectins are bad you should never eat them they're so bad for you and they're going to cause all kinds of diseases and they're like people are saying grains and beans are God's gift to mankind. And if you want to live in, to be a hundred, you have to eat a lot of beans. So what's the truth about that? Well, the truth is that it depends on you, right? If you have an autoimmune disease, if you

have gut issues, if you're obese or diabetic, grains and beans can be a problem. You know, one, because they're starchy and, you, and to get the amount of protein you'd get from a six ounce piece of chicken or fish, you need to eat three cups of beans with 100 grams of carbs. Now some of that's fiber, so that's okay, but there's that, and there's issues of inflammatory proteins in there

like lectins and phytates. I think they're not as big an issue as many people make them out to be, but I think they can be for some subsets of populations. And grains, well a lot of us are eating grain because our main grain is wheat. And mostly it's the modern wheat, which is hybridized, which means that they've created a strain of wheat that has very high starch content, but it's got a higher glycemic index than sugar. It also, when they breed plants like wheat,

they actually add the genes, so you get more gluten proteins that are more inflammatory, which is probably part of why we've seen a 400% increase in celiac disease in the last 50 years. And then they spray it at harvest with glyphosate, which is basically Roundup to exfoliate the wheat to make it easier to harvest. It's not being used as a GMO product. It's just being used as an herbicide like Agent Orange. And then on top of that, they preserve the wheat flour, which we eat about 133 pounds a year for every person,

with calcium propionate, which you may know, Daniel, is a neurotoxin. And in kids with autism, you see very low levels of butyrate, which is a main short-chain fat produced in our gut, and high levels of propionic acid. In the animal models, you can inject propionic acid into the brains of these rats and actually they induce autistic behavior almost immediately. So what is that happening? Well, we shouldn't be eating modern wheat. If you want to try einkorn wheat, if you're not gluten sensitive, you might be okay. Traditional rye, barley, maybe.

But better to stay away from gluten grains and eat weird grains like quinoa, buckwheat, black rice, amaranth. Those are grains that tend to be more better tolerated and have more nutrient density. And if you're not super overweight or pre-diabetic, you may be able to tolerate them. If you have autoimmune diseases, you may be able to tolerate those. So all these, there's nothing, there's a no food in sugar. You know, sugar's okay. It's just a recreational drug, right? It's not something you have as a regular thing. Like we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, sugar in America, right? It's not something you have as a regular thing. Like we have breakfast,

lunch, and dinner, sugar in America, right? Breakfast cereal. We have like sugar in our salad dressing. I quote you on that all the time. I love it. It's a recreational drug. It's a legalized recreational drug, basically. Yeah, fine. I mean, like I like tequila, but I don't have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don't have like six shots of tequila. I'll have like one or two on a fun night. So everything you're saying makes so much sense to me. It's why I followed you for so long because you're so rational. I remember one time being at a lecture and hearing two of my friends, they're my friends. We've had them both on our show.

They're both cardiologists, both functional medicine doctors. One is a vegan, like a rabid vegan, and the other one is a rabid non-vegan who goes after vegans, okay? He's like a paleo guy. These guys are lecturing in the same block of lectures. Like I'm at a cardiology type of lecture. Sure, sure. And I thought to myself, this would be just completely confusing for anyone attending this thing. Because one is saying you're going to die, just like you said, if you eat any kind of meat.

The other one's saying that is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. All of you vegans are crazy, literally crazy. Like it's making you crazy. And so I'm like, this is terrible. But what I did is I stepped back because you're one of my main mentors. You and Dr. Perlmutter are like my two main mentors. And I stepped back and I went, wait, what's really crazy is I know them both. Both of them have huge followings of people who have incredible results. That's the crazy part.

They're people, all of them get well. So what is it that they're both doing? Well, it's what Mark's talked about is they avoid poison. So everybody agrees on avoiding poison. And a plant-rich diet. And a plant-rich diet. That's what they're doing. Mark, but let's talk about vegans and depression. So there are actually a number of studies showing a correlation between depression and not eating meat what do you think that is about well I think that you know first of all veganism is it's a science

of behind it and then there's the religion behind right and they often get confused and there was a movie recently called What the Health, which so many people saw on Netflix. And I had very educated, smart friends of mine going, this is the truth of the capital T. And I said, wait a minute. We have to look at the science of what they're saying. And there were, I think, five or six vegan bloggers and YouTubers who came out finally against this movie because they said it was bastardizing the science. It said, you know, Neil Barnard at the beginning of the show saying sugar and starch and carbs have nothing to do with obesity or diabetes. And I'm like, well, what is he ignoring, you know, decades of research that shows this is true?

And he said, well, it's just a vehicle for the fat to get in. And that's why. But I'm like, no, that's not what the science is. Or Garth Davis says, carbohydrates cannot be stored. They can only be burned. I'm like, what basic biochemistry class did he miss in first year medical school? So you have all this stuff happening, and then that kind of subverts the whole mission a little bit. But the truth is that we know there's never been a voluntary vegan society in the history of humanity until recently. Veganism was coined in, I think,

the 40s. And that, you know, when you look at populations that are eating a traditional Western diet and you switch them to a whole foods, plant-based diet, guess what? They thrive. They do better. They lose weight. Their symptoms get better. They feel better. But you follow these people out. And this is where, you know, I have a unique perspective because I'm not just reading articles and theorizing about this stuff. I've been seeing patients for 30 years. You got 10 more years on me, Daniel. And I've been seeing what happens to people over time. So you take these people four or five years out and you're questioning about depression and veganism, what's the deal? What happens is these people get nutritionally deficient. And the data is

really clear. They become deficient in omega-3 fats and B12 and iron and many other nutrients that are critical for health. And so while they'll do initially well, over time they do less. And their protein issues are real. They actually, as they age, they lose more muscle. And muscle is the single biggest, most important thing, your organ, that's ignored and neglected as we age. Because muscle determines your metabolism. It determines your hormone. It determines your level of insulin resistance. It determines so much about your health. And when you don't have adequate protein as you get older, you can't synthesize muscle effectively. So this is a challenge. I mean, you need eight cups of beans to get your daily protein requirement, and who's going to eat that much if you're an active elderly person?

Nobody would want to be married to them. Yeah, probably, right? They have to sleep in another bedroom. So I think that my opinion is that it can be okay for transition, but that over time, you have to have a diet where you have to supplement. That makes me worried. I mean, yes, most of us do need supplements for other reasons, but this is a diet that I've seen people over time become very nutritionally efficient. And I test people.

I do their blood work. I look at their levels of vitamin D and omega-3 fats and iron and B12 and zinc, and they're low. I published a study last year on omega-3 fatty acids, and we looked at the omega-3 index, and then we looked at blood flow to the brain. And the lower the omega-3 index, the lower blood flow was to the hippocampus, which is one of the major memory structures in the brain.

So optimizing, and you can't get good sources of EPA and DHA from plants. The conversion is not good from something like flax seeds. And it's... Yeah. I mean, you can get algae, but that's DHA, so you miss the EPA and they're both important. They're coming out with some new products that are higher in EPA, but it's hard and expensive to do that. Yeah. I'm with you. I am really tired of the food fight. I don't see the reason for it.

This should really be about getting individuals healthy. I agree that we should all be conscious of the planet, but getting individuals healthy and we're with you on that. And so that's why we test every person individually. It's individualized. What does your body need? Are you headed in the right direction? We just want you to be healthy. And there's a lot of variation, right? Like there are people who thrive more on a vegan diet and you have always these stories of the outliers. But look at the numbers. The numbers don't lie. So, you know, that's how we know. They're important health numbers. All right. So stay with us. When we come back, we're going to go through Dr. Hyman's diet and we'll talk about, well, what do you eat at breakfast? And what do you eat for snacks? And what do you eat for lunch to try to make it really practical for people. And then stay with us for the last podcast where we're going to talk about the politics of food.

Oh, that's going to be fun. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warrior's Way cookbook we give away every month.