Change Your Brain Every Day - How To Turn Your Food into Fuel Right Now, with Darin Olien

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

SuperLife author Darin Olien has travelled the globe researching the science behind how different types of food are processed in the body. One of his biggest takeaways from this journey is that there���s no reason to buy into the everchanging cycle of fads and diets out there. In the third episode in a series with Darin, he and the Amens discuss some simple fixes you can integrate into your food strategy to help optimize the way your body processes nutrients, and help it to fight off toxins.  For more info on Darin's new book "SuperLife: 5 Simple Fixes That Will Make Your Healthy, Fit, and Eternally Awesome", visit https://www.amazon.com/SuperLife-Simple-Healthy-Eternally-Awesome/dp/0062297198 For more on Darin's new Netflix series "Down to Earth with Zac Efron", visit https://www.netflix.com/title/80230601

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 to day three with Darren Olin. We're having such a good time talking about food. You know, that gets us excited. We love this idea. I've often said everything you put on the end of your fork matters because food is either medicine or it's poison,

literally. And you, Darren, have spent your life, I don't know about your whole life, but you spent a significant portion of your life now studying the effects of food. And I love what you said about alchemy, combining how do certain combinations of foods really affect us and how they heal our bodies. And today we're gonna talk about five simple fixes

that will just make you healthy and fit. So welcome back, Darren. Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of ironic that we say it's simple. It is in terms of that because I think we've gotten out of our instinctual way of living too. And so I try to break it down into a foundation that people can understand. One is this nutritional understanding that we don't have to buy into fads. We don't have to buy into that this is bad and that is bad all the time. And this carb phobia

and this fat phobia and everything else. And so I just kind of make it very simple in the sense that eat a diversity of plants. And I'm like, I've been plant based for 17 years. I'm not also on that advocate saying everyone needs to do that, because we're all individuals. However, I do believe that we need to eat more of plant the plant kingdom. And we've really comes down to the diversification of those foods. It's so easy for us to just kind of eat the same kind of 10, 15, 20 foods every day. And we really have to break that kind of bad habit and get back to some of our ancestors were eating 300 different types of foods throughout the week. So they were naturally foraging and finding.

And what that's doing is that's filling in the gaps of some of the nutrients that we need from the minerals to the vitamins, to the enzymes, the antioxidants, the polyphenols that are helping us protect from free radicals. So I just really make a case in the book for a whole healthy plant-based focused way of eating with a diversity of foods and colors are your best friend. So those are diversity of colors. It's kind of that easy cheat where those, those colors are representing different polyphenols and different antioxidants. So you definitely like, you can look at those bell peppers and you can see all the different kinds. Well, actually, the red ones and the green ones have a huge amount, sometimes five, six, seven times more vitamin C, for example,

than the one next to it. So you really have to create diversity of eating. The other thing is, I really start to talk about oxygenation from the standpoint of when you have an acid. Well, there's a couple of things and they all relate. There's alkalinization where that is really the balance of acids and alkalis in our body. And that's really a way of saying health is really through voltage. So pH is a study of or an indicator of conductivity when it relates to what you're putting in your mouth. So it's really voltage. So we really need to understand that our body's healthy when it's able to to the batteries and our cells and everything.

And we have enough water that we can conduct electricity. And that electricity is really at the core of the body's ability to heal or at the dampening of its inability to heal. So alkalinity, if you're eating meat all day and processed foods all the time, then that's a huge amount of acidity that you're building up and your body will have to spend time and energy and resources to try to balance that. And then I, then I go into oxygenation. The more your body's balanced from an acid alkaline perspective, uh, the more your body's able and, and has the ability to receive more oxygen. So I also get into why that's important. High oxygen environment creates this terrain where it doesn't invite anaerobic bacteria and pathogens in it. It really is your micro environments will push out bad bacteria or viruses and tell them that this is not a healthy place for you to survive as a bacteria. So the more we take care of ourselves, the more the oxygen is raised in our body, the more we have balance in our, in so many other systems. And then naturally through all of those

principles, there's a, there's a natural detoxification that happens. There's autophagy and, and senescence that naturally happens. You can definitely amp that up through fasting or intermittent fasting. But, but naturally when you have these other balances in place, your body starts to kind of gobble up the garbage as senescence in your body. And then there's an incredible other pillar I talk about, and that's hydration. We talked about that in the episode. It's one of the most favorite episodes. We talked about the importance of water. And this is astonishing to me that nearly 10% of all Americans don't even drink an ounce of water a day. And when you realize that 90% plus of your central nervous system and your brain is water, well over that of your blood, and the overall body is 70% water, that when you're under

this kind of duress from the lack of water, that you're suboptimal in your thinking process, your thought process, your ability to detox. Think of water as your greatest detox. It's going in and out of the cell. It's able to pull the garbage out and get it out of your body through your kidney and colon and things like that. to be aware of as they're kind of in this modern day world. And when these systems are in balance, you're in balance. And then again, you know, when we're aware of all of that stuff, then you can really start bringing in some of the power foods and the superfoods as well to kind of amp up. And especially now, like the adaptogens to help stress. We're all dealing with a level of stress right now because of our society problems and adaptogens are a great way to help improve the stress levels. One thing you said that I love really helpful for me when I was first starting my journey into

health. So many people think, well, as long as I'm putting food in my body, it's fuel. But I love what you said about making sure the environment is not friendly to microbes and germs and things that make you sick. And that was something that I learned. And my way of thinking about that to me was when we were in Paris one time, there was a strike and there was trash on the street. They weren't picking up the trash, right? So all of a sudden you see critters coming out to get the trash. When there's no trash, there's no critter. So I started thinking, oh, wow, that's so interesting. If I don't take care of my internal body, I'm literally not taking out the trash. So the rats and the germs and everything else can come and invade. But if I, and I'm very vulnerable and very susceptible. So I've got to keep that environment ultra clean.

I got to keep that trash picked up and that detox system working really well. And you can only do that if you're doing the right things to support it. And that's so funny that you say that because I use that exact example in my book. So the trash example, like exactly what you just said. And that's if we are lacking the ability to take out that trash, then what has to show up as a part of this natural ecosystem? It's exactly... You've got to go somewhere.

Well, that's one of the reasons why sleep is so important. People don't understand that when you sleep, your brain cleans or washes itself. It has a whole other glymphatic system that opens up during sleep. And it was only discovered recently that getting less than seven hours of sleep at night, the trash begins to build up. And at our clinics, we have eight, soon to be nine clinics around the country. We do brain imaging studies and we just see people have sleep apnea or chronic insomnia, have significantly lower function to really important areas of their brain. And so just the pillars that we totally agree on, eating right, exercise. You just mentioned in passing sunlight, but the dermatologists won. They made us afraid of the sun.

And now 80% of the population is low in vitamin D. And if you're low in vitamin D, you're more susceptible to die from COVID-19. And vitamin D is sort of low vitamin D. It's a universal risk factor for so many different things, including cancer. So getting these foundational strategies, and none of it is hard. Being sick is hard. Being sick is hard. Having cancer is hard. Having cancer is hard. Well, when we come back, we're going to spend our final session with Darren actually answering your questions.

Oh, I love this. We have a group of questions that we'll have Darren help us with. His book is Super Life. Down to Earth is his new Netflix show. We are grateful to Darren so that we could introduce him to our brain warrior audience. So what did you learn? Write it down,

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