Change Your Brain Every Day - Your Lifestyle & Health: What’s the Connection? With Dr. David Perlmutter

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Current scientific research has shown that the quickest, most efficient methods to dramatically change your health are centered around your diet and your lifestyle. But, as Dr. David Perlmutter states, people aren’t generally exposed to this type of information, because no company has a monetary stake in it. In the first episode of a 4-part series with Dr. Perlmutter, he and Dr. Daniel Amen discuss the specific ways certain lifestyle changes can drastically improve your health.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the 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 nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Welcome, everybody. I am so excited to invite and has accepted a return visit to the Brain Warriors Way podcast, Dr. David Perlmutter. David is a neurologist. He is a mega bestselling author of books like Brain Maker and Grain Brain that, goodness, I think spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list. He's a teacher. he's a practitioner, he's been a friend of Tana and mine. And David, it's just so great to have you back again.

I'm delighted to be back and more importantly, delighted to get to spend some time with you. Well, thank you so much. So in the week we have with Dr. Perlmutter, we're going to talk about foods that improve brain health, and we're going to talk about the gut-brain connection, who knew? And we're going to talk about how modern society is brainwashing to increase the incidence of both mental illness and neurological illness. Although I say those as if they are separate, they're clearly not. But David, tell our audience, as a neurologist, why did you get interested in food? When I did my neurological rotation at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, nobody talked about food. In fact, they fed us and they fed our patients actually fairly low quality food, not thinking it had anything to do with health or illness.

Well, I have to say that a recent publication came out indicating that food really does play a critical role in how the brain works, written by, I think his name was Hippocrates. So something that's been there for quite some time, that food is really central thematically in terms of the health and functionality of every part of our bodies. My desire to look for other tools for the toolbox and ultimately landing on food as well as other lifestyle issues really stem from a lack of satisfaction with my course of work, which was mainstream neurology, where basically I was giving out pills, end of story, and dealing with the aftermath of tragic events like stroke and head injury and you name it. But really what got me the most was dealing with the chronic degenerative

neurological conditions, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, et cetera, and recognizing that there was really nothing that we could do to help the situation, A, and B, that there was emerging literature, this was already 25 years ago, that was indicating at least some correlation between lifestyle issues and risk for these diseases. In other words, paving the way for the understanding of the role of preventive strategies as they relate to brain health. And you said earlier, who knew? So I found that to be extremely exciting so that rather than trying to deal with just smoke, I could now focus on the fire. And diet became front and center. And it became very obvious that there is a strong correlation seen between people who were diabetic and risk for degenerative conditions like Alzheimer's.

More recently, Parkinson's. Dramatic increased risk as much as fourfold of developing Parkinson's disease, at least in the younger cohort, when looking at those who have, in fact, the diagnosis of diabetes. And this is a huge study of over a million diabetic patients compared to about six million controls a study done in england so but this uh this relationship became very clear was it causal well what i'm saying is we knew that if you had high blood sugar you had an increased risk of dementia was the high blood sugar causing the changes in the brain? And it took many years for that to unravel itself and for those thoughts to be connected.

They ultimately were. We now understand many mechanisms that relate diet, elevation of blood sugar, to the fundamental mechanism of Alzheimer's being inflammation. So now those thoughts are extremely well connected, and now the whole thing is self-evident. But back in the day when we were advocating for a lower carb diet and telling people that, you know what, having some higher levels of olive oil, for example, more fat in your diet might be a good thing, We didn't have all the answers in terms of the why. But I felt comfortable enough based upon the relationship studies that were correlative, showing there's a correlation between these things, that I could be making those recommendations. And ultimately, when we wrote Grain Brain in 2012, published in 2013,

we had been able then to connect the dots. I found this to be hugely invigorating and exciting and really a platform that allows me to touch a lot of people. BrainBrain is in 35 languages now, so a lot of people around the world are at least getting this information. What people choose to do with it is another story. Well, in the brain warriors way, we argue you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early.

That the weapons of mass destruction are highly processed, pesticide sprayed, high glycemic, low fiber, food-like substances stored in plastic containers. And this just fits perfectly. Did you see the study out of Australia where they had two remote islands? One of them had fast food. The other one did not. And they looked at their omega-3 fatty acid levels and the level of depression. And on the island with fast food, they had significantly higher omega-6 to omega-3 ratio and four times the level of depression. So just thinking about correlation with our diet, just something so simple can be associated with really devastating Well, let me not get too complicated but i'm very fascinated by the what's called the endocannabinoid system uh which is certainly uh taking a lot of spotlight these

days because people are interested in medical marijuana etc but we understand that the uh the type of uh endocannabinoids and activity, the type that are manufactured and their activity is very much related to the balance between omega-3 versus omega-6. Now, we've been comfortable mechanistically over the years saying that omega-3s help to reduce inflammation and therefore may play a role in depression which is an inflammatory disorder that omega-3s like dha help to stimulate bdnf production in other words enhance the growth of new brain cells and that has also been associated with reduction in depressive markers we know that the ssri antidepressant medications also stimulate bdnf we know that the SSRI, antidepressant medications, also stimulate BDNF.

We know that the omega-6s being pro-inflammatory, again getting back to the type of oil, the type of fat that we consume, actually through their production of something called arachidonic acid, enhance the production of the major endocannabinoids. These are things like anandamide and 2-AG, which when they stimulate the endocannabinoid receptors in the brain, increase appetite, increase the production of fat, reduce the release of fat, and ultimately increase inflammation, again, a cornerstone player of depression. So it's really interesting to watch how all these pieces are falling into place these days as we branch out and open the door to more and more ideas. I mean, just opening the door to the gut bacteria a few years ago

was a major change in focus for medical research. Now looking at the endocannabinoid system, looking at, as we talked about earlier, at diet, at sleep, for example, these are non-patentable entities that need to be studied. No one can own them, so we don't see a commercial on television at night watching the evening news saying, hey, if you exercise, you will improve your insulin sensitivity and improve your mood and upregulate BDNF as well. You don't see that because nobody owns it, but yet that's the work. The work is to really let people understand that there's no pharmaceutical fix here that really has any impact. As it relates to Alzheimer's,

in November of 2018, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, was a meta-analysis by a researcher by the name of Dr. Richard Kennedy. He analyzed the patient records of about 2,700 individuals as reported in 10 studies. And these are individuals who had diagnosed Alzheimer's disease and either were taking the Alzheimer's medications, things like the cholinesterase inhibitors or Namenda, Memantine, or they weren't. And what he found in comparing the two was that the group taking the drugs for Alzheimer's had a more rapid cognitive decline, published by the American Medical Association in November of 2018. To me, that's astounding. These are drugs being sold in America close to a billion dollars annually to treat Alzheimer's disease, and they are associated with more rapid decline cognitively on the ADAS-COG scale.

It's breathtaking to me that that wasn't something on the evening news or the front page of the New York Times that it got brushed under the carpet. You know, you think of the faith that families put in their doctors to do the right thing when mom or dad's been diagnosed or husband or wife has been diagnosed and to prescribe a medication that now we know not only doesn't work, which we've known for many years, but is actually making them worse. You know, it's like giving a diabetic a pill that's going to raise their blood sugar or a hypertensive patient a pill that raises blood pressure. And it's still happening.

And these drugs are still being prescribed, and they are associated with worsening, either individually or in combination with each other. I just found it. Holy smokes. I'll send you the PDF after our time together. So I, you know, they say it's better to light the single candle as opposed to cursing the darkness.

A little cursing of the darkness right there. Okay, let's move past it. And let's light the candle. The candle is one that says that you can today dramatically reduce your risk for this disease, did I say has no treatment, by engaging some simple lifestyle changes. And you have talked about these changes extensively. They involve getting some aerobic exercise,

eating a lower simple carbohydrate diet, making sure that you do what you can to get more restorative sleep, meditation, limiting stress in your life, making sure your vitamin D level is adequate, and by all means, taking a good DHA supplement, I believe, or eating plenty of fish. So these are all important factors that are dramatic in terms of being associated with reduced risk for that dreaded condition. And that is, for me, a reason to be, because that's going to have the biggest impact globally. I gave a talk a year ago now to the World Bank, an international monetary fund.

It was simulcasted to 150 locations around the world, simply saying that Alzheimer's is by and large a preventable condition and by the way, is costing us today over a trillion dollars more than the market value of Google or Apple. For a preventable disease. So we've really got to focus on this notion of the ball being back on our side of the court. It's not up to the doctors to figure this one out and the researchers and then make a magic pill for us.

It's much more about what we do today. And that's where the education part comes into play. And wouldn't you say it's not only Alzheimer's disease, that it's also depression. It's also ADHD. It's also many neurological disorders like Parkinson's that by looking for a pill for every problem, we're really thinking about this in the wrong way that we should be attacking all of the risk factors that in fact steal your brain, which then steal your mind. Without a doubt. There is a cartoon I use in my presentations. It has two doctors. One's on the roof with a great big valve pouring water into the house

where the other guy, the other doctor is there with a tiny sponge in a bucket, you know. And we had to turn off the, we had to attack the problem at its source as opposed to, you know, treating the after effects, treating the downstream manifestations

of our lifestyle choices. The World Health Organization has identified chronic degenerative conditions well beyond the brain as being the number one cause of death on our planet now. It isn't war. It isn't infectious diseases. It isn't death and childbirth. It isn't, we said infectious, isn't malaria, other infectious issues. It's chronic degenerative decline in health. Alzheimer's, coronary artery disease, cancer, diabetes. And these are conditions that are basically, dare I blame somebody, these are choices. These are choices that people make in terms of the lifestyle issues

that we have now discussed. And again, that's the mission. If we can help reduce the number one cause of death on the planet, that's really a good thing from not only, you know, the morbidity, mortality aspects of it, but from a financial consideration as well so it's this westernization of diet and other lifestyle issues that we're seeing spread around the globe that is taking its toll predicted whereby the increased prevalence of alzheimer's in eastern europe going from 2015 to 2050 is predicted to increase 26 percent in africa it's predicted to increase over 380%. It's not that there's suddenly been a genetic change, no. It's the lifestyle change, this westernization of diet and lifestyle that is happening around

the globe where people have abandoned their traditional food sources, which has sustained them for centuries, if not longer, to this idea of highly, foods that you mentioned earlier. So as we go, so let's go to the next podcast and talk specifically about foods to choose and foods to lose. And we have to talk more, a little bit more about marijuana. I just published, I don't know, I don't think I sent it to you. I just published a study on 62,454 scans.

I think it's the world's largest study where we looked at how the brain ages from nine months old to 105. And it's not good news. The older you get, the sleepier your brain gets. And the schizophrenia aged the brain the fastest, but the second fastest was marijuana use. It was really interesting. But anyways, we will be back, and we're going to talk a little bit more about foods to choose

and foods to lose with Dr. David Perlmutter, whose five-year anniversary of his groundbreaking book, Grain Brain, has just been released. If you haven't read it, you have to. It will change your life in a great way. Stay with us. Use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain

Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month.