Change Your Brain Every Day - What the Heart/Brain Connection Means to Your Health, with Dr. Steven Masley

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Dr. Daniel Amen has often said that what is good for your heart is good for your brain. Why is this connection so important? In the second episode of a series with “30 Days to a Younger Heart” creator Dr. Steven Masley, the discussion is on the crucial link between the heart and the brain, including the steps you can take to improve the health of both of these vital organs today.

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 back. We are here with Dr. Stephen Masley,

the author of The Mediterranean Method and a number of other books. Stephen is a physician, but also a trained chef. What a great combination. And Stephen, I have this idea that if you want to keep your brain healthy, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And I came up with a mnemonic called Bright Minds that helps us remember them. And the B in Bright Minds is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. It's also associated with depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and a host of other problems. And so why is that important as we're going to talk about the heart? It's you have any form of heart problems, vascular problems, it damages your brain. And so I love

the podcast we're going to do now, where we're going to talk about the brain heart connection. And the first time I knew anything about this was 1982. I just graduated from medical school. My grandfather had his second heart attack. And this is one of the happiest people I'd ever known in my life who began with a major depression and ended up on antidepressant medication. He cried easily. He was negative. He was irritable. This was not my grandfather. And came to learn that 60% of people who have a heart attack will develop serious depression within the next 18 months. So there's this huge connection between your blood vessels, your heart, and your brain. So can you talk to us about that? Well, I really noticed that in the research in my clinic too, because when we looked at,

we tried to, I tried to answer a question, what would be the number one predictor of your brain, you know, brain processing speed using something like CNS vital signs. And we looked at weight and activity and strength and lab tests and blood pressure. But if you're growing plaque, that was the number one predictor by far. So plaque growth is intimately associated with your brain processing speed and your memory. And I think it's twofold. One, obviously, we need perfusion. We need circulation for any of our tissues in our body to work well. Our heart, our muscles, our genitals, our brain, any of them. But I think there's also something that we have physiologic needs that support the whole body.

And whatever is supporting your brain is intimately connected to the same things that support your heart and help prevent heart disease. So what increases plaque? My bias is that the number one thing that's associated with arterial plaque growth is sugar and insulin resistance and uncontrolled blood sugar. That's the number one cause. It's not cholesterol. I'm not saying don't worry about your cholesterol, but I don't think cholesterol is the number one thing. I think it gets so much attention because we can test it in a lab and prescribe a drug for it pretty easily. But blood sugar is really essential but you know there's several factors that we looked at what things predict it your fitness predicts it your nutrient and vitamin intake predicted whether

you eat enough fiber or not has an impact so nutrients fitness food yeah I didn't have an adequate way of measuring stress I'm sure stress has an impact on it. I was not able to measure that, but I believe it's really true. So how do people know about the level of plaque in their blood vessels? Well, probably nationally, the more common thing is they go out and get one of these CT heart scans and it looks at old calcified plaque. I much prefer to see new plaque with ultrasound. There's no radiation. You can do it serially over time and see if your plaque's growing, shrinking, or staying the same. So intimal medial thickness

is the measuring the lining of your artery, whether there's plaque in it or not, and the thickness. And the carotid artery right here on your neck is like the easiest place in your body to measure that. If you're growing it here, compared to when people had a heart study, there's a 95% correlation that if you're growing plaque in your carotid, you're growing it in your heart and vice versa. So what study do they ask their doctor for? Carotid intimal medial thickness, carotid IMT. Very different than like a duplex flow.

That's looking for blockage. That's something a surgeon's looking for to see if you're blocked enough to document and justify surgery. My goal is you'd never need surgery on the arteries in your neck. We prevent that by intervening sooner and preventing that. So in the hospital, we tend to measure our medical clinics, we measure blood flow. And we look for, I think, you know, cynically, I would say we're looking for someone who's at least 70% blocked so you can justify surgery. My goal is to find people way sooner than that and try to avoid ever needing that. Yeah.

So you're focused on prevention. So you talked about blood sugar. What is your thought on saturated fat or animal fat? And I'd love to give people a tip before we wrap this up. I've changed on this over time. You know, for a long time, I was telling people to follow a low saturated fat diet. And, but I think the evidence linking that to heart disease has become controversial, whether it really is a big factor or not. So I think an excess of saturated fat might be unwise. I think if you're having it in moderation, I don't really have a,

I think it's more important that when you're eating animal protein, that it's clean, it you know, free range, grass fed, wild, it wasn't you come from a feedlot, I think that's more important than the saturated fat content. So I usually advise people to keep their saturated fat intake modest. But my emphasis on eating good fats, healthy fat, nuts, olive oil, avocado. I don't want someone on a low-fat diet. I want them on a healthy fat diet. And saturated fat in moderation, I'm okay with. What about butter versus margarine?

Because that's a big question we get. Margarine, I think is, you know, hydrogenated fat is like embalming fluid. So I would definitely go with butter rather than i would go with margarine okay but i would prefer they use olive oil than butter interesting well and most butter is from cows that were given antibiotics hormone and that were grain fed well you can get grass-fed you can but it's it's harder and i don't know that there's actually a benefit to it. It's just so interesting. I want to go back to cholesterol because my understanding,

and I know you've written about longevity, is that what people don't talk about is low cholesterol. Under 160 has been associated with homicide suicide depression autism adhd and death from all causes but aren't we like cholesterol makes a significant amount of the fat in your brain is made up of cholesterol cholesterol also is the mother hormone in a sense that hormones are made from cholesterol. But when we prescribe statins, aren't we like creating this whole school of people? Well, so many cardiologists, they want your cholesterol to be as low as possible.

And I have a brother-in-law who's got like monster high calcium scores in his vessels. And whenever his cholesterol, because the cardiologist pounds the statins, he gets depressed. I mean, actually gets like sad and tearful. And I'm like, no, you cannot go below a total cholesterol of 160. Do you have more to say about that? Well, I think if people actually followed like the lifestyle you and I recommend, if they were to follow more of a Mediterranean diet, most people wouldn't qualify and need statin meds. Let's face it. If they really did this, they wouldn't need a cholesterol-lowering medication. And when you do on them, no, I'm not into ultra-aggressive therapy.

I mean, muscle aches, and it lowers your testosterone too. You said cholesterol. You're right. It is the mother hormone. Without cholesterol, you can't make testosterone, and you end up with testosterone deficiency, which impacts men and women. So it's not, you know, I think there's so many side effects with statins. And it's not that I never have written for them.

I have. But my goal, again, is how do you not need them? And if you are on them, how do you be on the minimal dose so you can still shrink your plaque and document you have serial plaque shrinkage? That's regressing heart disease at the same time. And I think following a Mediterranean lifestyle is probably the most effective way to accomplish that. And would you agree or disagree with people when they say LDL is bad cholesterol? Well, I'll be honest. Back in 1996, I called H for healthy and L for lousy for cholesterol.

But it's a lot more complicated than that, as we have learned over time. And really, the particle size is far more important than the total number of total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol. So if you've got big, fluffy LDL, it doesn't really grow plaque. If you have little, tiny inflammatory, and that has a lot more to do with your activity and your stress and your blood sugar control than anything else. So I think, really, if we're going to follow cholesterol, we need to be looking at advanced markers and particle size. Well, isn't it true that part of why they said that in the past was because we didn't have the testing methods we have now it's

changed right so you're not that it was right or wrong it's that we've advanced so so there's an evolution to our knowledge right i love this this is so important two quick tips before we have to stop on how to have a better brain and a better heart. Food. I mean, eat real food, vegetable fruit, beans and nuts, spices and herbs, cook with olive oil. If you use, when you use animal protein, make sure it's clean. It didn't come from a feedlot that it's wild grass bed, natural food without preservatives and chemicals and sweeteners. That's number one. And number two is how do we eat? It's about being joyful and leisurely and not being stressed out and not eating in front of a computer or phone or television. It's eating with people and interacting with people. So there's not just about

what we eat. It's how we eat, I think, is equally important. Great. Excellent. Stay with us. We're here with Dr. Steven Masley, the author of the new book, The Mediterranean Method, out December 31st. Stay with us. healthy supplements from BrainMD. You can use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or a 10% discount on all supplements at brainmdhealth.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.