Change Your Brain Every Day - The Amens’ Simple Guidelines for Optimal Nutrition Pt. I

Episode Date: May 15, 2019

Back to school! In this episode, you are invited once again to a private, Amen Clinics company presentation on nutrition. In this lesson, the Amens reveal their simple guidelines to follow for optimal health, revealing the facts behind protein, water, fats, carbs, and more!

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. Hi, this is Tana Amen.

In this episode, we're once again taking you behind the scenes to our company event on nutrition that was held here at Amen Clinics. So you may notice a change in the audio quality. The following episode is part one of our guidelines for everyday nutrition. Enjoy. Okay. Five meals you love, and then we're going to ask you at the end, do they love you back? This is one of the most important statements Tan and I have developed over the last 10 years. Do you love things that love you back? Doing the right thing is never about you should do it.

It's does it serve you? Are you living to eat or do you eat to live? It's an interesting question. Food is medicine or it's poison. This is Angie. She's one of the people that I coached. On Facebook, right? Yeah, I coached her because she lives in Virginia.

And so I had to do most of it just over email and then I would talk to her on the phone. Anyways, Angie became, she was a prisoner of war, no doubt. So when she was eight years old, she started with weight problems early on and lots of other issues. Her mother put her into genicride when she was eight. And so this started a huge issue with just body shaming for her. She just felt ridiculed and just massive problems. She started hiding in the closet and binge eating when she was a child. So she had this lack of focus, lack of follow through, lots of physical issues.

She had migraines, she had depression and anxiety that literally ruled her life. But mostly she had this shame and this feeling that she was being ridiculed everywhere she went. So she became sort of reclusive. She didn't want to go out anywhere. She had ovarian cysts, she was trying to get pregnant. Doctor was like, not only is it not healthy for you to get pregnant at your weight, but you're going to have a hard time being pregnant because you've got so many problems going on with your female organs and so she had brain fog all sorts of problems and a friend of hers handed her my book when it first came out the omni diet and she's like oh great just another diet like that's how she felt she's like why am i doing just another diet her friend

said just read the the opening couple chapters if you don't like it don't do it so she did and angie got hooked and she went i realized it was not me it's what food was doing to me no one had ever sort of taught her that it's not just about willpower the food industry does not have your best interest at heart. That's why we say it's a war. There are chemicals in the food that are literally making you and keeping you addicted and depressed. They're hijacking your hormones.

When she really got that and she went, oh, okay, I'm going to be more gentle with myself. I'm just going to change what I eat. She wasn't going to focus on so much the weight. She just wanted to focus on wellness. And that's when she really got well. And the weight loss was the side effect. She lost 103 pounds in 14 months, three years later, when I was still talking to her, she had kept it off. Every time she started to slip and that when the scale would jump by five pounds, she's like, okay,

I know something's I'm not doing something right. That was her cue. So she would do it all over again. She'd start from the very beginning. She lost her all of her digestive issues, her migraines. She lost her ovarian cysts, her, her, um, the, I don't know if she lost her ovarian cysts. She lost all the side effects of her female issues. Let me put it that way. Um, she had the highest confidence she's ever had she loved going out in public people were now you know like what did you do how are you doing this and she gained control over her moods it's not that she never had mood swings but now she never thought that they were going to just overcome her but the biggest thing that happened for angie was she was able to forgive her mother and that just changed all of her relationships. Her relationship with food allowed her to forgive herself, which then allowed her to forgive her mother.

And she realized, look, if I had this problem, this relationship with food, my mother couldn't do any better. And it was able to change her life. So let's talk about what we think, based on decades now of research, are foods that are good for your brain and ones that are bad for your brain. So if you think of a plate, about 70% of it should be plants. Why? Because plants have medicine in them.

So you can go to the pharmacy, P-H-A-R, pharmacy, or you can go to the pharmacy that begins with an F, right? The foods that are made on a, grown on a plant rather than made in a plant. And we're fans of protein. And you can get protein from vegetable sources. You certainly can. Or if they're from animal sources, you just want to make sure they're clean as we talked about. And when people say, oh, but it's so much more expensive. It is more expensive.

We want you eating less of it. Higher quality, less of it, right? And small amounts throughout the day. And some of the ways you can supplement that is protein shakes. It can be plant-based protein as long as you're getting all of your amino acids. There are a lot of vegans that – I have no dog in that fight. I don't care if you want to be a vegan as long as you're healthy. So we just want to check your numbers and be following that.

So supplement, you still need to focus on getting the right amounts of protein even if you're vegan and if you're vegan you can have potato chips and french fries yeah it doesn't make way to help and a number of the doctors that first came to work here were vegan and vegetarian and they're some of the most unhealthy people I had seen right so don't equate being a vegan necessarily with being healthy. You can be, but it takes a lot of work. You need to be thoughtful about what you eat. So over the years, Tana and I together

have created some very simple food rules. So calories matter, but the quality of them actually matters more. I like to explain this to people by saying, okay, you can go on an Oreo or a Twinkie diet and drop your calories down to 800 a day. You will lose weight initially, but what will happen over time, if you keep doing that and you keep eating

lousy food, your inflammation is going to increase. As your inflammation increases, your joints are going to hurt, your pain is going to increase. All this stuff starts to happen, the autoimmune reactions that we talked about. And as your gut becomes less and less healthy, the weight loss normally stops, but your metabolism becomes affected, and you begin to actually gain weight with less calories when you do that. When you eat really healthy, when you eat the right foods, you get to eat a whole lot more and get all the benefits of decreasing inflammation, of getting healthy, of being leaner, fitter, more energetic, having a higher mood. And you can eat a lot more calories doing that. It doesn't mean you can go crazy and eat 4,000 calories. I don't care what you're eating, you're going to right stuff. Water.

80% of your brain is water. So anything that dehydrates you, like alcohol, decreases your cognitive function and your physical strength. And this is two of my favorite studies when people are like, but I don't like water. So you just need to know this. I mean, there's so like but i don't like water so just you just need to

know this i mean there's so many people who don't like drinking water um so you can put stuff in your water if it you know like the brain boost on the go is fantastic for doing that but one of the things that really helps me get this through to people two studies one showed that your physical power goes up by 19 when you're fully hydrated in the gym. They did the study on people working out. So cardiac output, how much they could lift, went up by 19% when they were fully hydrated. Okay, well, that's obvious to me. It's like, okay, I'm weaker than when I'm not hydrated. I don't like being weak.

That's one thing. The other one, the other study was done on a group of pilots, and they showed that when pilots were dehydrated their cognitive reasoning their cognitive functioning and their spatial reasoning went down significantly that's not a plan i want to be on okay so that's really indicative of what happens to your brain when you are not hydrated but we actually can prove that and show you so if i have a bottle of water when i lecture i will drink actually very little of it the reason i created brain boost on the go is it's sweet it's loaded with b6 b12 folate and theanine and i love the taste of it and so I'll take this and I'll drink the whole thing.

And so it's good for me. I actually use it in the afternoon. So if I've not slept well or I'm tired, you know, around two o'clock, I'll have a bottle and I'm good till seven. I mean, it really is sort of my five-hour energy, but it has no brand violations in it like caffeine and sugar. It's sweetened with stevia.

I often say one of the fastest ways to increase your energy focus mood is to water your brain. That's so smart. So we got to scan Bill Phillips. He's's a very famous bodybuilder he wrote the book body for life and he came in and we were doing a research project on eating good food and then comparing it to bad food but we did a baseline study and his brain looked like he was a cocaine addict. I'm like, Bill, what's the deal? Cocaine?

No, no, I promise. He prides himself on being well. What we found later, he had purposefully dehydrated himself for a photo shoot because that's what bodybuilders do right before they go get a shoot. You see them with the ripped muscles no one looks like that normally not even them so they have to dehydrate it so he took 40 milligrams of lasix and as he was showing these ripped muscles his brain was clearly not good and when he hydrated himself his brain was much better.

High-quality proteins. We talked about that. Make it clean. Hormone-free, antibiotic-free. You want to do free-range as much as you can, for sure. And why grass-fed as opposed to grain-fed? Because you want to be eating – if you're going to consume protein, you want that animal to have been eating

what is natural to the animal right so just like you if you're eating stuff that's not natural to you it makes you sick if the animal's eating stuff that's not natural to them it makes them sick so when they force animals that are not supposed to be eating grains to be eating grains or soy it makes the animal full of inflammation it makes them sick which hence the antibiotics okay so that's why that happens and we were actually at mount vernon um a couple of years ago in virginia you know george washington's estate and they knew back then so at the end of the 1800s they knew that and there was actually a sign there, in order to make the animals fat, they would gather them and feed them corn and potatoes. And keep them still. And keep them still. So why are we fat in this country? 70% of us are overweight, 40% of us are obese, and it just keeps climbing up.

It's because we're using pro-inflammatory potatoes and corn and soy. We're feeding ourselves what they knew hundreds of years ago make people fat. And so I'm not a fan of much corn. I don't really eat potatoes at all. Because I have obesity in my family, my genes say I should be fat. And I'm not. Why? Because I don't give in to the behaviors making it likely to be so. So one thing I want to touch on really quickly, it's rare, but I do coach people who sometimes have the opposite problem. They're hyper metabolic, because they're police officers, because they are, you know, high performance athletes. So there's a guy at my karate studio who he's, he's very thin and can't keep weight on. And that does happen. So when that happens, those are the only people that I will tell, look, as long as it's gluten

free, don't worry so much about some rice, or you about some rice or just don't make it your staple. But some of those things, they need them a little bit because they have to, to put some weight on. They're too hypermetabolic. But that will explain to you then why people who are not hypermetabolic probably should avoid those foods. They're burning that sugar. They're burning that glucose faster than they can take it in. And protein you can get from vegetables, especially broccoli and spinach, which are almost half protein. Healthy fats.

So it used to be fat was the enemy. And culturally, I think that's beginning to go away. We want you to eat healthy fats. So bad fats,, so bad fats. Eliminate all bad fats. Frying foods and unhealthy oils. Pretty much anything that's packaged, even though we now have this new law, no trans fats, it's a lie.

Okay, you just need to know that. It's a lie. So as long as it's under a certain amount, which is one-half gram per serving. But if you look at the servings in a normal package that you would normally eat, it's sometimes three or four servings that you will eat, right? So they make the serving size really small, and that's how they get away with the trans fats.

Pretty much any processed food usually contains trans fats. And anything that's hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated, you should avoid. So there's a fascinating study from the Mayo Clinic looking at Alzheimer's disease and diet. And people who had primarily a fat-based diet, so fish, nuts, seeds, healthy oils, avocado, had a 42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease, almost half. People who had a protein-based diet, so think of the Atkins diet, had 21% less risk. But people who had a carbohydrate-based diet, so this is a standard American diet, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, juice, sugar, had a 400% increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease. It's sugar and foods that turn to sugar. It's not fat.

One of the things that should tick you off to this is that they're referring to Alzheimer's disease now as type 3 diabetes. So it's just disastrous for the brain. It makes your vessels brittle. It's just terrible. Any of you who have high blood sugar in the testing or high hemoglobin A1C, you need to think of that as an emergency. And I know this isn't a lecture on exercise, but one of the reasons it's so important for people who have high blood sugar or high hemoglobin A1c to exercise and put muscle on your body is because not only does exercising bring down, in general, bring down your blood sugar, but the more muscle mass you have on your body, the more insulin sensitive you are. So the less muscle you have on your body, the more insulin resistant you are. Which means you're more likely to get diabetes. So at work, you know, I'd love

for ideas on how can we increase our level of exercise at work? You know, because when you're a therapist, you spend a lot of time sitting. But when I'm also a child psychiatrist, I used to take the kids I'd see and go for walks. And the reason is, you know, if you just put a kid in a chair and say, talk to me about the problems in your life, they won't talk. But if you go for a walk, they'll talk.

And it's a double benefit to exercise and therapy. Smart carbs. So I think of smoothies, which I love our protein powder. I was actually instrumental in helping to create that, along with some of our team. But it is so important to get that protein. Well, I love smoothies, which is why I put so many recipes in my books,

because you get the protein, you get healthy fat, you get hydration, and you get smart carbs. So carbs are not the enemy. It's those simple carbs. We want carbs that have what we talked about earlier, those prebiotics, right? You want fiber. So these are dumb carbs. They make you stupid. There's actually a study they did at UCLA where they took rats and gave them a head injury. So they whack them in the head. And then, now these are rats that already knew how to run a maze. And they divided them into two groups.

One of them they gave their normal healthy diet. The other one they added fructose or fruit sugar, so think of the orange juice, to their diet. After three weeks, the rats on the healthy diet could run the maze despite the head injury. The other group with the fructose were still confused and depressed. But what do we have on the sidelines of football games? Gatorade, which is basically sugar and artificial colors, right? Do bad things for you. And yet we expect

them to be able to heal from concussions. It's just not going to happen. And there's a way to create an actual real drink that will help them, but you have to- to well brain boost on the go would be awesome but dumb carbs versus smart carbs low glycemic what does that mean doesn't raise your blood sugar all of you whatever you go to eat go glycemic index or glycemic load you can google it and it'll immediately tell you blueberries are good pineapplesles bad. Dates are terrible, apples are pretty good. So I just want you to choose low glycemic foods that are high in fiber. And that's why the apple is so much better than the apple juice. But in almost all of our books, there's not only a glycemic index. It will explain to you

what the glycemic load is and give you attention about choosing foods. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode.

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