Change Your Brain Every Day - Heal Yourself from the Inside Out, with Dr. Martin Katz

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

When it comes to the healthcare system in this country, Dr. Martin Katz recalls an interesting analogy, “When people are sick, it’s like an overflowing sink, and people keep looking for ways to mop the water up, rather than finding a way to unplug the sink.” In this final episode of a 4-part series with Katz, he and the Amens discuss the importance of a paradigm shift when it comes to chronic health care.

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. Martin Katz. We're having a great discussion about functional medicine, but specifically helping you learn about the power of sulforaphanes, which has great research and helps with

detoxification and decreasing inflammation. And we're going to talk in this podcast about when should you consider adding it to your supplement regimen? Yeah, this is so much fun for me because you're speaking my language now and I get super excited about all the nutrients and nutraceuticals. So please, if you have learned anything or you found anything really helpful, write to us at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com and you can take a screenshot, you can post it on social media, tag us. You can tag us at Brain Warriors Way Podcast. You can tag us individually. But we want to hear from you because that's like our joy

that when we get these comments from you and we know what you're learning, we would love for you to leave us reviews. And we love your questions and comments because when you send them to us and we answer them, it enters you into a drawing for either my cookbook or your book, The End of Mental Illness. Great. All right, Martin, let's make this really simple and practical for people. When should they think of adding this to their regimen? And we always talk about how supplements don't treat diseases. What they do is they support the processes in your health.

So we have supplements that support mood, that support focus, that support memory. One way that I think about this for when people ask me about it, it's like it minds the gap. But one thing I like to think about is when I was in the ICU, we're always doing things to quickly put bandages over bullet holes, right? Because we have to. It's like, we're putting a bandage over, right. But it's a great analogy. We're putting bandages over bullet holes. Whereas when you have the time to educate people and make sure they stay out of those situations, you're preventing it, you're keeping them healthy. And so I think of supplements and lifestyle and food and all these things, these nutraceuticals as how we prevent the bullet hole to begin with, or how we heal

it from the inside out so that we can take that bandage off, which isn't going to hold. So we remove the bandage that's not going to hold very long by healing it from the inside out. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I like that. What I would say is that, you know, a couple of things I'd like to just add that, you know, you show up to a lot of these conferences, sometimes you show up to these conferences and you're speaking to the choir already, or you're singing to the choir already. And so what I would say is if, yeah, exactly, Tana, if what you're hearing is not news to you, please forward it to others who you love, your loved ones, if you feel like they can get something out of it. Because the more people hear about this, the more people understand that they need to be taking care of their health, the bigger and better the chance that we can have a paradigm shift in chronic health care. If I could have one thing before you go on, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you asked me a really important question

before we started the podcast. And you said, how is it that you decided this was so important and you got started? It's so hard to get patients to understand sometimes what made you take your health so seriously that you just like went on this journey. And it's, that's the thing if we could get people to understand. And for me, when you ask that question, my answer to you, and what I'm hoping that people listening will understand if they're not feeling well, whether it's depression from the pandemic or inflammation and you're tired or whatever it is, the thing that got me going was being on nine medications. I would rather take 30 supplements that don't have side effects than nine medications that made me feel awful. So that's what made me go on the

journey was take feeling terrible enough and wanting to be off of those medications that had side effects. So for to answer, like to join in with what you're saying for people who are listening, when, like, if you know this, that's great. But if you don't, and you're listening, why would you do this? Because you're, you don't feel good. And there's another way. So it doesn't mean you're going to get off of all your medications. I didn't, I'll be on medications for the rest of my life. And I'm grateful for them. But there's, I don't need to be on nine of them. So with all these side effects, right? Yeah, so what I would say, there's a couple things I'd like to say um if you're doing if you

feel like you're doing everything right you're eating really well and not just broccoli but the from the isothiocyanate family or what's called the cruciferous family so that's bok choy and kohlrabi and wasabi and cabbage and broccoli and broccoli sprouts, and Brussels sprouts, and you name it, and you're eating a variety of foods. And again, I'm diet agnostic, I don't prescribe to anyone Medicaid, any one type of diet. I'm a big fan of understanding what's good for you. And what's good for you is going to be different, what's good for your neighbor. So don't just listen to be intentional about yourself, so that you're bringing best health to yourself. So if you're eating really well, you're exercising, you're sleeping well, you have limited stress

or you're managing your stress well, you've got great community and you're feeling great, do you need to be taking self-healthing? I don't know. But if you're not doing those things or you're struggling or you're not feeling well, it brings about Dean Ornish's idea of the kitchen sink. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with that, but I absolutely love this analogy and I've taken it because I just love it so much. And so Dean Ornish said that, he was talking about cardiovascular disease, and he said that in this country, the taps are on, the plug is in, the sink is filling up, and it's

overflowing. What we do in this country is we're looking for the best mops, the best towels, the best sponges, and we're trying to mop up that mess. It's not the answer, people. Switch off the faucet. Stop allowing all these toxins and all this stress into your system and pull up the plug, allow it to go out. And the way I take it further is, yeah, we still got the forsyth on, but the problem, what we don't realize is we haven't intentionally stopped up the sink. We

haven't intentionally plugged it up. It's happened over time because of this oxidative stress, because of inflammation, because our immune system is not working as well. Because our cells are losing identity. And David Sinclair's work with the whole sirtuins. So our cells are losing identity. We've done really cool studies on something called glyphosate and gap junctions. And glyphosates happen to disrupt gap junctions. And these gap junctions are really cool little proteins that are intercellular. They go between cells and they're communicating. And there's six different proteins and they're different depending on what organ you're looking at.

So it's likely that these cells are developing their identification through these gap junctions. So I always wonder if I cut myself, how does my skin know to grow back? How does that identify skin? And it's possibly through sirtuins, it's possibly through gap junctions, we don't absolutely know. But again, glyphosate disrupts that and has an effect on the cell in many different ways. It also breaks the gut, and we don't have to get into glyphosate, but it's certainly a toxin. But all these toxins are plugging up the sink. And, again, not intentionally. We go to the grocery store.

We get what we need. We're living in these hygiene hypothesis areas, so our microbiome is not as good. There's so many, and we go into hotels and there's all these flame retardants. I mean, it's just, you go on and on. Plus we're stressed out about, you know, do we have enough money? You know, now how are we going to deal with our kids who are at home? Because I, you know, I'm, you know, they're not at school anymore. I need to work, blah, blah, blah. So there's all these ongoing stresses that unfortunately create an oxidative load, this glucocorticoid load. Another book that I've enjoyed reading is Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which sort of talks about this ongoing stress.

And so here we are adding everything to the sink and the kitchen sink and the plugs and the taps are on. And so when I start talking to my patients and the kitchen sink and the plugs and the taps are on. And so when I start talking to my patients and I just, some of them, you know, Daniel, you know this and Tana, you know this. You look at them, you're like, oh, I don't know. You look like you're a metabolic syndrome risk or, you know, or you look at smokers and their skin's just not as healthy. And, you know, they're starting to have clubbing of their fingers. You can just look at these people.

They don't look as healthy and you know they're starting to have clubbing of their fingers you can just look at these people they don't look as healthy or you know you get some lab work and you see that their ldl oxidized is a little bit higher they see reactive proteins a little high and you just realize that their system is not as good or they come in and they're 42 and they look like they're 52 so there's this idea about chronological age versus biological age. We only have a minute. Oh, sorry. So let's summarize. So if you're struggling with feeling fatigued, if you're in a toxic environment or now in a pandemic, I think our baseline stress for all of us has gone up about 30%.

That can be helpful. How else? If you just had to give me a list of like five things that would help me know that this would be helpful. And then for people that are interested, they can go to broccoli.com forward slash amen, A-M-E-N, and learn more about it. But can you just give me that quick summary

in just like five words? Five words. Well, so, you know, again, if you're, if you have inflammation dealing with inflammation, sulforaphane is going to be excellent, because it's like pain would be pain would be a symptom, right? And would be but again, that's the thing is we got to get away from this idea of treating acute symptoms, because now it's too late, right? You don't want to wait for pain, we got to realize we got to look under the hood, and realize that there's other things that are happening, we're slowly clogging up, clogging up the strain. We don't want to wait till it's end to be clogged because it's going to overflow then.

We want to get to it and slowly decrease it so our cells can work optimally. So we can balance the oxidative stress, which sulforaphane does so beautifully. It is the most powerful turn on of NRF2, which is just so instrumental in helping us increase glutathione all these oxidative stress it helps to decrease inflammation through nfkappa b so again brain health uh joint health you name it we see it and and one of the things we hear a lot is people just

say i'm i'm thinking more clearly because it's allowing the system to clean up. You're burning more cleanly and so your cells are now more healthy. So I would say it's hard for me to not want everybody on sulforaphane, quite honestly, because we do live in a very toxic world. And quite honestly, I'm not sure why more people don't know about sulforaphane. And part of the reason we're trying to get out there and educate people just because it's such a powerful molecule with so many resounding studies behind it. And for that matter, there's thousands of studies on NRF2, which again, broccolite is the most powerful natural supplement to turn on. Great. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Martin Katz.

I could just go on and on and talk about this. I get so excited. That's, I think, why I fell in love with you. I know. I'm kind of a nerd. Pretty redhead that knows about sulforaphane. I'm so excited. I don't go to concerts. I go to seminars.

What did you learn during this podcast? Write it down. Post it. Write it down. Take a picture. Post it on any of your social media sites. Leave us comments, questions, or reviews at brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. We'll enter you into a raffle.

And if we answer one of your questions on the podcast, you will win. So we just hope all of you stay safe during this weird, challenging time. And Martin, thank you so much for being with us on the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Yeah, it was really great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Just wonderful. Thanks for what you guys do as well.

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