Change Your Brain Every Day - Is a Bad Diet to Blame? With Dr. David Perlmutter

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

In this week’s series of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, we are honored to have friend of the show Dr. David Perlmutter return for a discussion centered around his new book “Brain Wash.” Dr. Perlmutter and the Amens explain the fascinating reason why the poor decision-making and ‘us vs. them’ mentality in our society could be attributed to the changing function in certain areas of the brain as a result of our highly inflammatory diet.

We are going to start your new year, your new decade off with a bang. Tan and I are going to do a six-week live class. So starting January 21st, every Tuesday, we're going to be with you for an hour. And at the end, we're going to give away over $20,000 in prizes. We look forward to helping you kick off this new year by becoming brain health revolutionaries. 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 amonclinics.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 everyone to a very special week of the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have returning for the third or fourth time because we love him, and he just will

help you so much. We have neurologist Dr. David Perlmutter, who's a number one New York Times bestselling author. He wrote Grain Brain and Brain Maker. I love both of those books. If you want to know about the gut-brain connection, Brain Maker is just brilliant. David's won lots of awards. He is a masterful teacher. His books have been published in 34 languages. He's been interviewed on Larry King Live, CNN, Fox News, Fox and Friends, Today Show, Oprah, Dr. Oz. And, you know, I just think of him like a brother.

I think of him like a mentor. I've been before, long before I knew you, I I was following you Dr. Perlmutter and taking your courses so it's such an honor and a treat for me because I've started following you what 11 years ago at IFM 10 years ago maybe I'm just going to say it's such

an honor and a treat for me to be able to spend time with you guys as well I think back to the time in Los Angeles that Dan, you and I had breakfast together and got some one-on-one time and it was really very, very special for me. And I really love what you guys do, the information that you're putting out, and I really honor it. So thank you as well. Thank you. So brainwash. Great title, by the way. There's so many ways to go with Brainwash, from what's happening in our society to getting proper sleep.

To cleaning your brain. To wash itself. Why is this book next for you? This is a level book. As you know, it was written with Austin Perlmutter, our son, internal medicine MD. And it is the manifestation of a conversation that he and I had in this very room, as a matter of fact, a couple of years ago, when we were lamenting over the fact that patients didn't do as they were told to do, meaning we were doing the best we can to learn as much information as we possibly could,

spending our lives becoming as informed as we could, then doing the best we could to give that information out to as many people as would listen, including the one-on-one interaction with patients. Yet, most of the time, that information didn't translate into action. So we wanted to figure out what is keeping patients from understanding what good choices are but not making those choices. And we began to explore the whole notion of how a person makes a decision and whether that decision is short-sighted and impulsive or that decision is based on consideration, for example, of the long-term consequences,

good or bad, of what we decide to do today. In healthcare, that's things like, well, in our world anyway, the lifestyle changes, diet, exercise, sleep, you name it. In most medicine, it's taking the medication that your doctor prescribed. Either way, what we know is that most patients don't follow through. So we began exploring the neuroanatomical correlates of decision-making and realized that good, thoughtful decision-making that looks at the future is really a prefrontal cortex type of activity, an activity that comes from the front part of the brain, if you will, as opposed to more impulsive activity

that comes from more primitive parts of the brain, areas of the brain, for example, that include the amygdala. We began to realize that so much of our modern lifestyle locks us into making decisions that don't involve the prefrontal cortex, that don't bring the adult into the room, and that it was wrong of us over the years to be thinking in an accusatory way about our patients and their lack of follow through, their lack of ability to make good changes. And that the deck is stacked against each and every one of us by the food that is so common today being pro-inflammatory, our lack of exercise, what we call sedentarity, our lack of exposure to nature, our non-restorative sleep, our disconnection from nature, all of these things disconnect us from the good decision part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and we term that disconnection syndrome because of all of the multiple manifestations that we see from disconnecting to the prefrontal cortex or as you dan have called it hypofrontality as it relates to what you're able to see on your spec scans

the fact that the prefrontal cortex that gift that we have as humans other animals of course have a prefrontal cortex but you know a third of our cortex is the prefrontal cortex it's a it's a generous gift that we've been given. When we disconnect from that, we disconnect not only from making good choices, good decisions, but we disconnect from the part of the brain that allows empathy and allows compassion and tends to tamp down the us versus them mentality that is so pervasive today. So we really embraced how the world today really fosters our disconnection from this prefrontal cortex. Wow. Which is why you should never let a child hit a soccer ball with their head. And especially a little girl, because

what I've read is 90% of their IQ is housed in their prefrontal cortex, where for males, it's more widely distributed. And we just don't think about it. It is what I'm now going to term the oblivious bad habit dragon that people go through their lives without thinking, without using their prefrontal cortex. You know, can I throw something in there as a patient? Because a couple of times now I've had 10 medical surgeries, but two of those surgeries after surgery, I just didn't feel like myself. So I wonder if sometimes some of the things we have to go through as people to actually maintain our health can affect us so negatively. Just a couple of years ago, I had a surgery and I just didn't come out feeling as motivated or as I felt like I was walking through mud, harder to follow through with my own lifestyle.

And so many people don't understand that when they, you know, there's so many things that affect us, anesthesia, hormones. I mean, all those things are adding to that, are they not? They are. And, you know, one of the biggest players here is something that you guys have talked about for quite some time, and it's inflammation. And, you know, people are embracing the notion that inflammation is a cornerstone of our chronic degenerative conditions, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, you name it, and Alzheimer's and Parkinson's for that matter, and depression for that matter. The recognition that inflammation is helping us disconnect from the prefrontal cortex is really profound information.

Why? Because then when we can contextualize all of our lifestyle choices through the lens of inflammation we realize that what's happening globally for example with respect to diet and the enhancement of inflammation that that is causing is changing the mindset of the world's population such that uh it's it's fostering more impulsivity, more fear, more us versus them, and taking the global population away from thoughtful decisions and empathy and compassion. Not just empathy for the other person, but empathy for our future selves, and even empathy for the planet itself. So it becomes a bit of an existential discussion that we're having

right now, which we've jumped to fairly quickly. But we're just centering, for example, on the westernization of the global diet, meaning the more inflammation being produced by the diet that's spreading around the planet. Yes, it has implications for chronic degenerative conditions. We know that, but it has implications for how each of us sees our neighbor, sees other countries, and sees the health and our role to play in the health of the planet. Well, and the prefrontal cortex is also the mirror neuron system. So your ability to empathize or sort of know the mind of other people. And if we damage that, we really become self-centered as individuals, which then damages our marriages, damages our ability to parent effectively, and so on. Can I comment on that real quickly? and so on. Inflammation is just...

Can I comment on that real quickly? It brings up an interesting thought because it's fundamentally important that we take a deep breath and try to embrace the views of another person. And that is to say, to see things through somebody else's eyes, from their perspective.

I understand and embrace what another person's life might be and how they might see the world. You can call that walking the mile in another man's moccasins or however, but we don't do that very much anymore. We dig into our frame of reference, end of story, and that is more and more deeply entrenched by where people spend their time, for example, on social media that only caters to their way of thinking. We need to embrace other people's views. We need diversity of opinion. Diversity begets resilience, and we absolutely need that if we're going to make it through, you know, some of the big challenges of our day. That's so interesting. Um, just since with knowing our work, um, and, and connecting it with what you're saying that the few people I know that are hyper frontal, that like have really busy, you know, they're the opposite of ADD rather than having sleepy

frontal lobes are super hyper frontal. Um, like you being one of them, my daughter being another one, very much empathize with other people. Like always the first words out of her mouth will be, but wait, what about the other side? What about, you know, and I'm like, how does she do that? It's so young. And I wonder if part of it is that frontal lobe action. Well, they're so important. Now, when they work too hard, it's been associated with OCD. And I think of the prefrontal cortex as the brain's break. And it stops you from saying the first stupid thing you think. Jerry Seinfeld once said the brain is a sneaky organ. We all have weird, crazy, stupid, sexual, violent thoughts that nobody should ever hear. That's exactly right. That's one of the major functions of the prefrontal cortex is to really allow us to be emotionally appropriate in terms of our responses. Again, it is this over, we call this top-down control, where it exercises control over what would otherwise be impulsive outbursts, impulsive activity.

And we see glaring examples these days in which individuals simply respond immediately without thinking, and there is no adult in the room. So we've got to recognize that we need to think through what we do, what we say, how we act. And it gets back to we need to think through our decision making. So interestingly, then, making bad decisions by eating, for example, the wrong foods, by not exercising, not getting a restorative sleep, fans the flames of inflammation that further disconnects us from that very area and it's a feed forward cycle. What we bring to bear in the new book Brainwash are the ways to break those cycles. How do we jump back in and regain control?

Otherwise it's your teenagers at home when mom and dad are going to go away for the weekend and the teenagers are there and I might add with 30 of their closest friends. That's not going to work out really well. Boy, that happened at home. You just re-traumatized me when my daughter, Caitlin, the house was under construction. I had to go away for business. She was supposed to stay with her sister. And my mom went over and found 30 children in the house under construction. One other thought before we have to go to the next podcast is when the prefrontal cortex works too hard, people end up with OCD. So if you just think of this break is it needs to be healthy, but I guess if you think of anorexia, it's their break is working too hard and they can't stop. So it's this balance. If the break's always on, you can't get down the road, but if you don't have a break, you're going to die. And so keeping the prefrontal cortex healthy,

not inflamed, is a critical part to being human. When we come back, we are going to talk about how to take control and strengthen the prefrontal cortex by new strategies in Dr. David Perlmutter's brand new book, Brainwash, on sale January 14th. So by the time this podcast comes out, it'll already be on sale. And like his other recent books, we'll be a bestseller. And we'll do everything we can to help it be that way. Stay with us. Appreciate that.

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