Change Your Brain Every Day - Is Brain Inflammation Causing You to Gain Weight? With Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

When it comes to losing weight, the traditional message has been that calories are king. Control the amount of calories you put into your body, and you control your weight. However, as “Eat Smarter��� author Shawn Stevenson tells us, this is clearly not the whole story. In this episode of the podcast, Shawn and the Amens discuss how inflammation in the brain can reduce your body’s ability to burn calories, causing frustration in many dieters. Luckily, Shawn has practical techniques to break this cycle and reduce inflammation in your brain to help balance your body’s metabolism.   For more info on Shawn's new book "Eat Smarter", visit https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Smarter-Metabolism-Upgrade-Transform-ebook/dp/B07W3M55SP  

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 still here with our friend, Shawn Stevenson, and we are talking about his new book, Eat Smarter. I just love what, I mean, I love that we're talking about concepts that are somewhat well-known, but you dig a lot deeper, Shawn, and I love that. So you're really going into the some of the newer science and, and some of the things, not just about food, but what makes our food work better. And I love what you said at the end of the last episode, food first. So, so let's talk a little bit about your program in this episode.

Absolutely. So in my nutritional science class at my conventional university, you know, big auditorium class, and I was taught the very first day of class that calories are the king. If you can manage calories, you can manage your body composition. If you can manage calories, you can manage your health. And we were all being inundated with this idea, but I've seen this firsthand, family members growing up. And also of course, all the people that I've worked with over the years, something is fundamentally flawed with this concept. And what we know today is that there are seven, what we call epichloric controllers. There are seven factors that are clinically proven to control what calories do in your body. And I have an acronym for them.

It's called in the DM, right? It goes down in the DM, right? Direct messages. It's something the kids say, right? It's something the kids say they're connecting in the DM, but I use that acronym very intentionally because our hormones, which play a major role in what our body composition is, our hormones are like little chemical messengers communicating to all the cells in the body, keeping things on the same page. But when that message, it's kind of like metabolic DMs, like a little metabolic text message or metabolic email. But what happens when one hormone becomes overabundant or overactive, we'll say insulin, as this email, it's going to start going to spam, right? And that's insulin resistance.

And so with this acronym, we're dialing in, looking at the things, what are controlling what hormones do and calories do in the body. And I'll just share a couple of them with you guys really quickly. So one of the, and this is just piggybacking on being here on this particular podcast with these particular superstars, is how much our brain is literally controlling our body's absorption of calories. And researchers at Yale University School of Medicine really detailed how neuroinflammation, right? Neuroinflammation, specifically hypothalamic inflammation is a huge disruptive force in our absorption of calories or literally telling your body to turn down the absorption of calories because of the connection between the gut brain connection. And so what they discovered, and this is a huge issue today, is that neuroinflammation is a major causative factor

in obesity. And as Dr. Amen knows, obesity is a major causative factor in neuroinflammation. Yeah, that's true. And none of these diet programs, some of them can accidentally help with this, but none of them are saying, hey, we need to get your brain healthy so you can lose weight, right? Which is really, again, your hypothalamus is an integration of your endocrine system and your nervous system, literally making your body do all the things that it does. And it's a master regulator of your metabolic rate. It's kind of like your internal thermostat.

And again, it can communicate with your gut to literally tell your gut to increase the absorption of calories from the food you eat or to turn down and suppress the absorption of calories. So this is very, very important. And the question is, okay, if my brain is inflamed, why don't I know? And the brain is incredible in that it can tell you about pain anywhere else in your body except itself. There's no pain receptors in the brain. And so by the time you know your brain is really hurting, it could be too late. Chances are, if you're dealing with insulin resistance, if you're dealing with, you know, kind of, you know, trying to work on your body composition, battling with obesity or being overweight, chances are we do have some brain inflammation. I'm going to throw a quick solution that we know about in the

data. And this is not an advocation for any of these things. It's just the data exists. And so researchers at Auburn university found that oleocanthal rich extra virgin olive oil can reduce neural inflammation and even help to repair the blood brain barrier that gets damaged through neuro inflammation that creates that spiral out of control of more brain inflammation. And what the researchers found was two to three tablespoons a day of extra virgin olive oil. But there's nuance there. We go through all the details and what type of olive oil, where to get it, all that kind of stuff. But I just wanted to throw that little nugget out there that it's really remarkable. And also, if you think about something being on fire, what puts fire out? Water. Water. And we talked on the last episode about how important water is for cognitive

function, but also helping to address neuroinflammation. So that's one of the epichloric controllers in the body. Let's see other ones. You know, I think this is really important when you and I have talked about, um, my book, the end of mental illness, inflammation is a major hallmark. So your brain will talk to you in the sense, if you have brain fog, if you're depressed, if you don't have the focus and energy, that's one of the major things you should be listening to. And I did a study at Amen Clinics on 50 consecutive patients. I looked at their omega-3 index. 49 of them had suboptimal levels. And that comes from our food.

And I love how you are taking complex topics, because I know how complex these are. This is what we do. But you're making them so digestible, pardon the pun, but you're making them so easy to understand. So this is really good. So you're making it easy. And it's often been an area of conflict between Tan and I, because like you, in medical school, they talked about calories really matter. Well, it's not that they don't matter it's just that they do but the quality matters more matters oh this is such a important thing are important but yes you're eating 4 000 calories a day of grass-fed beef right but if you're eating

the right foods you're not going to want the 4,000 calories. And I think that's what he's getting at. All right. We're going to solve this right now. This conflict, this beautiful conflict right now with this, what I'm about to share. So this is the beautiful thing. So what I did, I went through, literally, I took people through the history of the calorie in the book, because this is, I'm just wired up at this point to ask, whenever we have this conflict or this topic, I ask, where did it come from? Where did the calorie come from? We weren't counting calories. Right. Even very, you know, the storied traditions that we look to, the ancient Greeks and Romans,

the very physical culture, they weren't counting calories. They were just eating food, you know? And when calories came along, it was, this was in the domain of physics and engineering. Nobody was looking for a measurement of energy and food, but what it does, it completely negates the complexity of human digestion. And so let me solve this issue right here with this study. And this was published in food and nutrition research. And this just blew my mind because there's a saying, we say it, it's not just the calories, it's the quality of the calories, but truly what impact can it make? And what the researchers decided to do was let's see what happens when test subjects eat a meal of processed foods versus a meal of whole foods. What impact does it have

on their calories and their calorie consumption and expenditure? So they gave them what they deemed to be whole food sandwich, which was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese. All right. And then they gave another group of test subjects, a processed food sandwich, which is white bread and cheese product. And if anybody's asking like, what the hell is cheese product? That's what craft is. All right. They can't call it craft cheese legally because it's not up cheese and cheese. Hold on to the story. But here's the bottom line. They're the same amount of calories. The two sandwiches are exact same amount of calories, same amount of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.

They should be the same on paper and the impact it has on metabolism. But here's what happened. The folks who ate the processed food sandwich had a 50% reduction in calorie burn after eating that sandwich. It effectively created hormonal clogs that made their bodies more stingy in holding on to those calories that they consumed. It created massive disruption. Now here's the thing. Most of us, I know that I did, I ate processed foods every single meal of my life until the age of about 22 because I was just inundated with it. And just say I've got 30 family members. Twenty eight of my family members are obese growing up. They didn't want to be obese.

They're trying the diets. They're doing the points. They're doing slim fast. But it's the pure nature of the food being abnormal. It's not even food. No. Creates this disruption in what our hormones are doing. But again, last little point, these are epicaloric. It's controlling what calories do in our bodies.

Yes. Thank you. Because it drives my family crazy. If I eat popcorn, which is quote unquote calorie smart, I literally will balloon up. But if I eat what for me, the perfect diet is sort of a paleo version of keto, but with a lot of extra greens, like a lot of extra plants, but high fat avocados, olive oil, like lots of fat, I mean, fat based, I will I double the calories and I shred, like I just shred fat and my energy goes up and I feel amazing, but I'll eat way more calories. And so I try to explain to people, if you eat 800 calories of Oreos, yeah, you're initially going to lose weight. And then you're going to start gaining weight like crazy because of the inflammation, but people have a, such a hard time grasping that. Yeah. And I've seen this

in my practice, you know, somebody's coming in, they're already on a thousand calorie a day diet. Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek Yes, and they're gaining weight. Dr. Justin Marchegiani They've already... Yeah. And they're just, they're feeling so defeated because maybe their, quote, weight loss physician they're working with is just telling them they just need to stay in this calorie deficit. There's something wrong with what's controlling what calories are doing in your body. And so the last little piece- Dr. Anneke Vandenbroek Not the last little piece with the other diet,

this is a very, very big part of the conversation because any diet that is making you feel restricted and deprived and depressed, how on earth could that possibly equal health? Like those don't even have the same kind of frequency, But the last little piece of- You're going to be a best friend. All right. Well, we're going to continue this discussion on what to eat to rev up your metabolism. The book is Eat Smarter by Shawn Stevenson. It is doing great. And we want to encourage you to buy it, buy it for your friends, share it.

You know, brain warriors- You're just speaking my language. The first thing brain warriors do is they fix their food because food, your body basically turns itself over. Every couple of months, your skin actually turns itself over, create new skin every 30 days. And it's basically from the food you eat. So Wedge Alert, write it down, post it on any of your social media sites, hashtag Brain Warriors Way podcast, also Eat Smarter. Sean, how can people follow you? I know you have a great podcast that I love being on. How can they follow you?

Yes. Where people are listening to this amazing podcast, they could find the, it's called the model health show. The model health show is crazy. I'm just, I'm from Missouri. I'm from middle America, but it's been the number one health podcast in the United States many, many times. So very grateful for that. So people can check out the podcast and I'm on Instagram at, at Sean model S H A W N model. And I'm pretty active there doing some cool stuff too. That's awesome. Great. Stay with us.

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