Change Your Brain Every Day - Why You Shouldn't Let Your Kids Play Contact Sport - Q&A Part 2

Episode Date: February 3, 2017

In this second part of our Q&A, you'll learn why contact sports should be shunned by your kids and what alternative sports you should choose. We've also answered the question on what is the role of inflammation in Alzheimers.   

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Hi, I'm Jan. You emphasize brain injury. I wonder if you think we should allow our children to play contact sports? You know, that's just a very important question. 16,000 children in our country box. So do you think boxing is a good brain sport or a bad brain sport? Not so good. And then, you know, when you take tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of children who are playing football, hockey, and hitting soccer balls with their head, it's absolutely psychotic when you think of it from a brain science perspective. So on the show, I talked about how your brain is soft. Well, really soft. It's about the consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard, somewhere between egg whites and jello. And it's housed in a really hard skull that has many sharp bony ridges. So brain cells are made up of a body and sort of a tail, and the tail is called

an axon. Most people think the axon, you can move it around, that it's really flexible, but it's not. In fact, if you just move it 7% one way or another, it breaks it. So imagine putting your head in a helmet and beginning to slam it up against other aggressive people, your axons are moving more than 7%. It's causing breakages. And we let developing brains do this, which is really crazy because your brain is actually not finished developing until you're about 25 years old. So here we have kids in the height of brain development, and we're allowing them to do things that hurt their brains. It's really stupid. Golf is good. Tennis, terrific. Table tennis is the world's best sport. Thank you, Jan.

Hi, Dr. Amen. I'm Sylvia Grasky. I really have enjoyed this today. And I'd like to know the connection between ADD and aging. You know, that is a really interesting question. So for a long time, so I'm a general psychiatrist, but I'm also a child psychiatrist. So I've been seeing ADD kids for 30 years. And one of the things I learned early about ADD children is they have ADD parents because it runs in families. You get it from your mom or you get it from your dad. It's a highly heritable disorder. As I've been thinking about getting physically healthy and aging, having ADD

just makes all of it worse because ADD is associated short attention span, distractibility, disorganization, restlessness, and impulse control problems. And if you have impulse control problems, you might end up being one of those people that, you know, that don't worry, be happy people who die early from accidents or preventable illnesses such as hypertension, obesity, or diabetes. And it's just a very bad thing. So at the Amen Clinics, we screen people for ADD. And if you have it, it's critical to get it treated, because once it's treated, people do so much better.

And what I see, the quality of their decisions go up and the level of stress in their lives go down. Remember one of the things that we talked about, as stress goes up, the cells in your hippocampus, so that big major memory center in your brain goes down. And people with ADD are chronically stressed all the time because they're late, they don't do things till the last minute, and so on. So getting it treated is very important. Yeah. Thank you. Hi, my name is Amanda. I'm wondering, can you tell us what is the connection between inflammation and Alzheimer's? It's a very important question. Inflammation is where your body becomes on fire. So most people know about inflammation.

So if you cut yourself, you see that that area becomes red, hard, and painful. Well, that red, hard, painful can also happen inside your body, in your blood vessels, in your joints. And now we know even in your brain. And when people have increased inflammation, everything in their body ages from their skin to their blood vessels and to their brain. I read a brand new study that people who have depression or people who have bipolar disorder have high levels of inflammatory markers. So of course, then my brain went, oh, so how do you lower it? Well, you get on an anti-inflammatory diet, just like we talked

about. Get rid of the sugar, get rid of the wheat, get rid of the dairy, eat mostly high quality vegetables, some fruit, nuts and seeds, lean protein, and the fire in your body will go down. Isn't that interesting? And also take fish oil. Fish oil decreases inflammation. Now, of course, the drug companies are going to go, what drug? You know, let's do a study. Aspirin or ibuprofen, because those things are anti-inflammatory. And it might not be a bad idea to, in fact, take them. In a fascinating series of studies, people who have pain syndrome, who took Tylenol or acetaminophen, actually, they got Alzheimer's disease two and a half years earlier than the general population because acetaminophen is not an anti-inflammatory and can disrupt the production of glutathione in your

liver. But people who took ibuprofen as their pain medication, in fact, got Alzheimer's disease two and a half years later than the general population, we think because of its anti-inflammatory effects. Now, I like to say a decision is either an over 100 IQ decision or it's an under 100 IQ decision. Waiting for a pill to fix your lousy lifestyle is a below 100 IQ decision. You with me? An above 100 IQ decision, in my opinion, is let's get our diet right. Let's do any of the bad things we're doing that promote inflammation in our body, smoking, alcohol, caffeine. Get them out of there, and you'll just live long. Thanks, Amanda.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.