Change Your Brain Every Day - Your Microbiome: The Role of Probiotics and Prebiotics, with Shawn Stevenson

Episode Date: February 3, 2021

Everyone has a different metabolic footprint, and it changes constantly, so we need be aware of our diet and make changes when necessary. One of the most important factors to keep an eye on is the role probiotics and prebiotics play in our microbiome. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel and Tana Amen are again joined by “Eat Smarter” author Shawn Stevenson for a discussion on how the components of our microbiome work, and how we can make small changes to our diet that will make a big difference in the health of our gut, brain, and body.  For more info on Shawn's new book "Eat Smarter", visit https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Smarter-Metabolism-Upgrade-Transform-ebook/dp/B07W3M55SP  

Welcome back. We are still here with our friend, Sean Stevenson. We are having such a great conversation about his new book, Eat Smarter. And Sean, you are just, I love this because you are just speaking my language um you are validating um my points this is my chin it's what i love thank you um i do i love being right but anyways um i was but the reason i'm so passionate about this is because you in the very first, like before we even came on, you were talking about how, and we're going to do a live chat on this, about how much food affects society and anger and moods. And I was one of those kids. I grew up poor. I grew up with a lot of trauma. I grew up eating processed foods. This matters. This matters for getting people well, not just

for losing weight. I mean, the first three letters in the word diet or die, but for getting people healthy. So you were in the middle of making a point. I want you to make that point, but then take us through like more of your program and why this matters so much to you. Absolutely. So this point, and also part of the program, it's highlighting something. This might be the most important thing when it, in the universe of diet and food is that we each have a very unique metabolic fingerprint. There's never been a person who has the same metabolism, metabolism like you in the history of humanity. And nobody ever in the future will have a metabolism just like you. And here's the most important point. Even yourself next week doesn't have the same metabolism as you have right now. It is constantly changing

and fluid and in flux. And this isn't accounted for. This is why a diet can work great for a year. Then all of a sudden the weight starts coming back or, you know, maybe I start to have some kind of a symptom of, you know, maybe I'm having joint pain. Something happens and we have to have the wherewithal and internal intelligence to adjust our diet framework to fit us. Because there are many wonderful diet frameworks and I know the guys, but each water is a unifier. You can take this diet framework, but do not allow it to imprison you. And so one of those other points in what is controlling what calories do in our bodies, for example, in our kind of digestive and metabolic uniqueness is

our digestive efficiency itself. Two people can be the same height and same weight and one person can have a foot longer digestive tract, you know, which in and of itself is going to give more time and availability for them to absorb more calories, right? That's not taken into consideration. Also, your bile production, your enzyme production, stomach acid production, all of these things that kind of help to modulate and determine how many calories you're actually absorbing from your food can be radically different in two people that are on the same diet, same exercise program and wonder why. And so what we know in the data is that we can have these two folks do the

same thing for an entire year. And one of them can burn upwards of a hundred thousand more calories in a year doing the exact same thing. And it's just not, it seems again, it seems like it's just not fair. We've got to address the things that control what our metabolism is doing. So part of my program is adjusting and looking at the things that are controlling what calories do in the body. One of the big ones and what a lot of folks are talking about today is the health of the microbiome and your microbiome makeup. Your microbes are the front line determining whether or not your body's going to absorb calories, what it's going to do with the calories, and also the elimination of waste, of course. And so really quick snapshot study, and then I'll talk about how this relates with how we connect with other people.

The journal Cell discovered, and researchers published this in the journal Cell, but there's two parts. There's a specific bacteria they found in mice that literally blocked their intestines from absorbing as many calories from the food that they ate. Through the lens of allopathic medicine, we'll be like, well, we just need to bottle up that bacteria and sell it. So it stops people from absorbing as many calories from their food. But there's always residual side effects. Our bodies don't operate in a vacuum. That might affect our bacteria's ability to make B12 for us or to produce short chain fatty acids to protect our gastrointestinal tract and reduce rates of autoimmunity. The list goes on and on. What we really need to look at is how are bacteria controlling whether or not we're absorbing calories? And research at the Wiseman

Institute, and I would see this in my practice, I could have somebody send out for a stool sample. Basically they poop into like a nacho basket. It's really weird. Send it out. And if I've never even seen the person before and I could get their report back and look at their bacteria cascade, I can know with a high degree of certainty, whether or not they're obese without ever seeing them. No, there's a specific makeup of our microbes associated with obesity, insulin resistance, and being overweight. And so these researchers took folks that had a cascade associated with obesity and implanted that into lean mice. And they took folks who had a lean microbiome makeup and implanted that into lean mice mice. Those mice, the mice who received the implant of fecal matter from the folks with the bacteria associated with obesity, these mice

became insulin resistant. They gained weight and gained body fat, not changing anything with the diet, just changing the microbes. So a big part of the program, it's unbelievable. A big part of the program is what are practical, simple things we can do to support and optimize our microbiome. And as Dr. Amen mentioned on an earlier episode, a big part of it is avoiding the things that's destroying our microbiome, especially pesticides, rodenticides, herbicides. Those things are designed to kill very small things, small organisms. We are made, our microbes are those things. And most of them are neurogenic or estrogenic. So damaging the nervous system and our bacteria there in school, I was taught, you know, these are single-celled organisms. They don't have a nervous system.

They can feel pain. They communicate with each other. Sounds very similar to a nervous system, they can feel pain. They communicate with each other. Sounds very similar to a nervous system to me. And we know that artificial sweeteners can damage our microbiome. Plastics can come in, but there's so many things are hormone disruptors, the toxins you put on your skin and your cosmetic, right? But people are trying to lose weight. It's their hormone disruptors that can also disrupt your microbiome. But think about how unfair it is, all these weight loss products

that use artificial sweeteners, that kills your microbiome. Yeah. That's not fair. So all these health foods. So some of the do's and don'ts I have in my notes, don't stock up on water and plastic bottles because of BPAs,

the toxin that can impact your body. Do boil tap water if you're concerned about the chemicals. Don't buy white rice, pasta, cereal, bread, and flour tortillas because they're high glycemic. Don't fill up your shopping cart with cookies, cupcakes, and candies. My grandfather was a candy maker and my dad owned, before he died, a chain of grocery stores that's in my family. I grew up eating crap. My grandmother was diabetic. Yeah, no, I love the do's and don'ts. But what do you do to keep your microbiome healthy?

Besides just taking a probiotic. I mean, we, you know. Oh, no. Even that, that idea, again, in my practice, I was getting pretty much everybody on a probiotic, but I was really missing the point because probiotics, even if we have the very best probiotic in the world, it cannot colonize and really proliferate and take hold and do all the

positive things in your gut. If the probiotics don't have prebiotics, if they don't have the food source for them to colonize and do their job, this is not talked about enough. So these are prebiotics for the probiotics who then make postbiotics for you. All right. So all the beneficial things that these microbes can do. And so prebiotics, people can go to Google and look at a list of prebiotic foods, but it's very short sighted. We know Jerusalem artichoke, asparagus, onions, garlic.

OK, that's great. But here's the truth. Every single food, every real food functions as a prebiotic for some type of beneficial flora. And it's going to be unique to you. You know, for example, your ancestors might've been eating a certain food for centuries. Maybe it was a certain type of bean. And all of a sudden a diet doesn't allow for that food. And you strip that away and the microbes associated that eat that food. Now they don't have any food to eat. So they leave. It's kind of like an extinction or like an endangered species.

And in order for you, and it might've been protecting you against weight gain, against autoimmunity, but not to, this is not an advocation to eat that food. Think of immigration now. Yeah. Yeah. Think of if your ancestors like ours grew up in the Middle East, and now they moved, and now they have processed American food that puts them at higher risk for illness. So if people were to come to you, do you, I'm assuming by what you're saying, you somehow do a personal profile on them? Yes, this is what I did. This is what I did in my practice.

And so do you have something in the book that helps people identify to some degree? Continuously, continuously, I'm encouraging and creating these, this ability for folks to see like, oh, that thing, that sounds like me, or this thing sounds like I need to avoid just to have more self inquiry, you know, and to ask these questions, because again, we all have a unique metabolic fingerprint. The last point is this with the prebiotic side, every single food has prebiotic capacity, but here's a really powerful insight and walk away for today, a takeaway for today. When you eat a food, you're eating that food's microbiome.

So when you're eating a berry, you're eating that berry's microbiome and you're taking it on. When you eat an avocado, you're eating that avocado's microbiome, right? So it's just like, when we talk about you are what you eat, literally these foods are becoming a part of us, but also are a part of our microbes, which gene for gene, we're 99%, 99% of our genes are from our microbes, right? Gene for gene. So this is very, very important and powerful. So number one, increasing,

here's the big takeaway in the data. The number one thing that's been found to increase the diversity of your microbes. By the way, we found that as your diversity of microbes go down, your rate of obesity goes up. Your diversity of microbes goes down, your rate of obesity goes up. Your diversity of microbes goes down, your rate of heart disease goes up. Your rate of insulin resistance goes up.

The list goes on and on. We know that they're directly connected. The number one way to increase your diversity of microbes is to increase the diversity of foods that you eat. Real foods, all foods. Yes, and even if we're eating healthy, we could all get caught in a rut of eating the same foods over and over again.

So this is a big advocation for us to just start to add in some different foods each week and experiment and have different things to feed our various microbes. And you have a 30-day program in here to help people eat smarter, use the power of food to reboot your metabolism. Upgrade your brain. I love that part. And transform your life. Stay with us.

We're here with Shawn Stevenson. You can get Eat Smarter anywhere. Great books are sold. 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. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.