Change Your Brain Every Day - How You Keep Your Mind & Memory Sharp with Leeza Gibbons

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

With 2 million new brain injuries occurring in the U.S. every year, brain health is more important than ever. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and TV personality Leeza Gibbons continue their discussion on how to maintain your brain to keep your mind and memory functioning at full capacity.

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. Welcome back. So we're talking about Alzheimer's disease and how to avoid it, how to do the right things. And we talked about blood flow retirement and aging inflammation genetics head trauma and big lesson i learned early from imaging is mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives and nobody knows about it and like someone has a car wreck someone falls off a bike or you're

talking that even as a child Or they fell off a horse. Yep. Well, you know what killed Superman was a horse. Yeah. They played football, hockey, soccer, and they had header drills, which when you think about it from my perspective, it's just insanity. There are 2 million new brain injuries every year in the United States so if you think about it over the last 40 years

there's probably 80 million people walking around the United States and have had a significant brain injury that's affecting them negatively in life and love at work all kinds of reasons and they don't know they aren't able to trace it back to they don't even think They aren't able to trace it back to. They don't even think about it. They don't think about it. Right, because they end up seeing a psychiatrist who neither never asks or they ask once.

And what I found is I have to ask people 10 times whether or not they've had an injury because they go, no, no, no. And I'm like, well, are you sure? And it's like, oh, when I was seven, I fell out of a second story window. It's like, do you think that counts? Maybe. And your brain is soft. Go ahead. I'm sorry. And your skull is hard and your skull has sharp bony ridges and people don't get it. They think

of the brain as firm, fixed and rubbery because that's how it is in an anatomy lab. But in a human skull, it's soft butter, tofu, custard, somewhere between egg whites and jello. And it houses your soul, your intelligence, every decision you make. And if you damage it, you begin to damage those things. And one study stands out. They looked at the homeless men in Toronto. 58% of them had a significant brain injury before they were homeless. Really? 42% of the homeless women.

Is that right? And it's a major cause of dementia and nobody knows about it because they're not scanning people. And is it, Dr. Amen, not just perhaps the falling out of a window or off of a horse, but repeated little dings from sports? Like maybe you didn't pass out, maybe you didn't have a concussion, but you're a hockey player or a football player or a soccer player and you're continuing to get. So they looked at high school kids.

They put sensors in their helmets and they scanned them before the season and after the season. And what they found, sometimes the hits where there was no loss of consciousness, they had the G forces that were as bad as a head-on collision at 40 miles an hour. And the white matter in the brain and white matter, so gray matter, as everybody's heard about that, it's the brain cell bodies. White matter are the nerve cell tracks. So think of white matter as the streets, as the bridges, as the freeways. And one season in high school disrupted white matter in the brain without a concussion. Because just what you were saying, it's the repetitive hits.

And Joe Louis actually said that, the famous boxer. He said it's not the big hits that give you dementia. It's the thousands of little hits. And one of my favorite all-time scans is Muhammad Ali and his brain. And he won most of his fights, but his brain clearly was troubled. And those repeated hits, part of what led to the Parkinson's? Yes. Yeah.

And, you know, another thing with head trauma we were sharing about our dogs is my dog just doesn't get it that I feed him. He leaves his toys on the stairs. And if I'm not thoughtful, he is going to take me out. And you have to be thoughtful, especially the older you get, because what really kills older people? It's falls. And then it's brain bleeds or broken hips that then lead to blood clots and so on. So the thing to do for head trauma is don't do it. Right? And we were talking about my friend, our friend, Shailene Johnson, and she got her scan, and it didn't look good. And then two years later, it's better.

And every time we talk, we go over the 11 risk factors. And I'm like, so what are you doing differently for head trauma? And she goes, I don't ski anymore. She goes, I used to love to ski without a helmet because I'm a bit of a daredevil. And she's like, I just don't need to do that because I love my brain. I know there are a lot of moms out there, particularly, and dads, who struggle with

the sports question because of all the wonderful benefits of sports and being on teams and all the great things that come as a result of it. And I hope that as a society we begin to incorporate some of this learning into our love of sports and our way of executing sports so that we aren't, you know, unknowingly putting our kids at greater risk, you know, when they're like 10, 12, 14 years old. Well, the American Youth Soccer Organization banned heading for children under 11. And I'm like, they don't like 11 year olds? They don't like 12 year olds? When does the brain actually finish developing? It's like 25 in girls, and it's more like 28 in boys, right? Both of us have boys and girls, and we sort of get that.

The T is so important it's so we're we're talking bright minds the mnemonic for risk factor and we've done b-r-i-g-h and now we have tea which are toxins and they're everywhere they're from the products you put on your body things like parabens and phthalates that steal your hormones, which we'll talk about. There's alcohol. We have this idea for many years, alcohol is a health food. And no, there's a direct correlation between alcohol and cancer. Yeah, he ruined this one for me with the red line.

Ruined. Only because I love you. Ruined. And we just published a study on marijuana and how it accelerates aging, even though it's legal in 31 states and everybody thinks of it as innocuous, it's not. And mold, we had talked about that, that mold, the exposure if you had water damage in your house,

I mean, you have to be careful. And so the simple things to do for toxins is avoid exposure and then support the four organs of detoxification. So water to flush stuff out through your kidneys, fiber to flush it out through your gut, and kill the alcohol so your liver is not bad. And eat brassicas.

So those are detoxifying vegetables. And sweat with exercise and saunas. Interesting about saunas. Now, is there a danger in a sauna of heating up your brain? Or is that okay? So, I hear you may go to Northern Europe. Yes. There's a study from Finland where people who took no saunas, so it was zero to one a week compared to three to five a week compared to five to seven a week, so

compared to none, three times a week was associated with a 30% decrease risk in Alzheimer's disease. What? Five to seven times was associated with a 60% decrease risk of Alzheimer's disease. Because of the sweat? So get in the sauna. It's not just that. Just that. It's also, it produces something called heat shock proteins

that have an anti-inflammatory effect. And there's a study in JAMA psychiatry. One sauna session was found to work as an antidepressant. Oh, that's amazing. Because likely, calming the inflammation. That's really amazing. And talk about hopeful and positive. There's so many simple things you can do. And I recommend this app for people called Think Dirty,

where you can actually scan all of your personal products and it'll tell you on a scale of one to 10 how quickly they're killing you. Whether it's your sunscreen or your deodorant or anything. Right. So quickly on the other ones. M is mental health. So you brought it up that depression increases the risk. You've got to take care of it. The second I is immunity and infections.

There's a new study that just came out. 50% of people with Alzheimer's disease had herpes ters in it so be very careful who you kiss I think infectious disease is going to be a whole subspecialty of psychiatry and stands for neurohormone so with immunity you want to know your vitamin D level and make sure it's optimal right I never liked normal right I don't want to be normal because normal is a 50% risk of Alzheimer's disease at 85. I want to be in the optimal ranges. And for me, for vitamin D, it's 60 to 100.

So either get more sun or take the supplements or both. Correct. And, you know, just get the sun responsibly. Responsibly. Right, because getting burned is not good for you. The N is neurohormone deficiencies. They're just rampant. So for women, it's often hormone replacement after 50.

You know, we don't want your levels like when you were 20, but we also don't want them like when you're 80. We want them to be healthy, and you only know if you measure them. Testosterone, low testosterone is rampant even in teenage boys. It's horrifying because of head trauma. That's counterintuitive. It is because of head trauma and the toxins. Because you know, things like parabens and phthalates, what they're called is endocrine disruptors. They're hormone disruptors.

They steal your hormones. Plus our high-sugar diet. If you want to drop your testosterone, just eat a couple of donuts. It'll drop your testosterone by 25%. And, you know, testosterone is involved in our libido. So I always say if you share the cheesecake at the restaurant, nobody's getting dessert. No dessert when you get home. You'll remember that one. So your hormones get them checked and then optimized. The D is the one I'm the worried about the most. It's diabesity. It's a combination. It's either or. You have high blood sugar, so you're either diabetic or pre-diabetic,

or you're overweight or obese. And given that 50% of us, according to JAMA, are diabetic or pre-diabetic, whoa, and 70% of us are overweight or obese, it's the biggest brain drain in the history of the United States. Well, you say, and I always remember this, that the bigger the body, the smaller the brain. I published two studies that show as your weight goes up, the size of your brain goes down. And it's like, well, why would that be? The fat on your body is not your friend. It stores toxins, so that's a risk factor. It increases inflammatory chemicals. that's a risk factor. It increases inflammatory chemicals.

It's another risk factor. And it takes healthy testosterone and flips it into unhealthy, cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. And so you see all of these pregnant men in our society, you know, with the big, I'm like, dude, deliver the baby. This is not a good thing for you and that's why because I always like why I'm a psychiatrist why do I really care about weight loss and it's because our society is just going the wrong way what is the formula of your waist size to your height so your waist you want it to be half your height or less so I'm 5'6 so at 66 inches my waist needs to be half your height or less. So I'm 5'6", so that's 66 inches. My waist needs to be 33 inches or less.

And that's actually a better predictor of health than your body mass index. That's so interesting to me. It's also really helpful that you've come up with this mnemonic to think about the risk factors with bright minds. That makes it much easier for us to understand and recall what they are so we can get on with the business of changing them and s is sleep and we found sleep apnea triples the risk of alzheimer's triples the risk and that is that we can actually see it it's the same we can see it on scans their scans look like they have early alzheimer's

disease so people that are watching this podcast, they go, all right, how do I know if I have sleep apnea? Obviously, if you're sleeping with someone, they may know. If you're snoring, if you're stopping breathing. But you'll know if you're tired during the day, if you never feel rested, and you should have it checked. It's really important. And you need to make sleep a priority. So have a sleep study when you say have it checked. It's really important. And you need to make sleep a priority. So have a sleep study when you say have it checked?

Yes. Talk to your doctor about having a sleep study. Now, when we come back, we're going to talk about Lisa's care connection and some tips for people who are caring for people who have Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia. 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 Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.