Dhru Purohit Show - These Foods and Habits Boost Brain Health and Reduce Inflammation with Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Pendulum and Cozy Earth. If you haven’t heard, me and Dr. Mark Hyman have been teaming up to do weekly podcast episodes called “Masterclasses.” We sit down and have deep conversations about the most important health topics of our time and give you all the answers you’ve been after.  This week on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, I am featuring two of our favorite Masterclass episodes all about creating optimal brain health and reducing inflammation.  We talk about the top foods to avoid—and to enjoy—to optimize brain health, why sugar is so bad for the brain, and how toxins can lead to neurodegeneration. Then we break down the meaning and function of inflammation and how it manifests as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and more. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fourteen-time New York Times bestselling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor’s Farmacy. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. He is also an advisor and guest cohost on The Dr. Oz Show. For more on Dr. Mark Hyman, follow him on Instagram @drmarkhyman, Facebook @drmarkhyman, Twitter @drmarkhyman, YouTube @drmarkhyman, and through his website, drhyman.com. For more on Dhru Purohit, follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, YouTube @dhrupurohit, and TikTok @dhru.purohit. Text Dhru at 302-200-5643 or click here.  Interested in joining Dhru’s Facebook community? Submit your request to join here. This episode is brought to you by Pendulum and Cozy Earth. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code DHRU20. Cozy Earth are the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, nontoxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The brain responds to everything we do, what we think, what we feel, exercise, sleep, our diet, environmental toxins, stresses, all these things influence our microbiome. Everything influences the brain. Hi, everyone, Drew Prote here. Today, I have Dr. Mark Hyman on the podcast. We're actually sharing an interview that Dr. Mark Hyman and I did on the topic of brain foods, the top foods to eat to support your brain and the things that you can do that are also not food related to have better brain health. You know, the topic of brain health is so important for so many. This podcast actually used to be called the Broken Brain Podcast, off of a documentary that Mark, Dr. Mark Hyman and I made together.

And the whole idea was your brain isn't broken. There's plenty of things that you can do. And I interviewed all the experts all around the world that are the top in that field of teaching us how to have a better brain help. And one of those people that I interviewed for the documentary was Dr. Mark Hyman. And now I have them back on the podcast today to share an interview on this topic. we start off with some immediate value with the first question. What are three things that anyone can do today to have better brain health?

If you don't know about Dr. Mark Hyman, he is the goat, the goat, the greatest of all time. He is a 14-time New York Times bestselling author, functional medicine physician. He helped set up the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Functional Medicine. He was on the board and is an advisor to the Institute of Functional Medicine and so many more accolades that are there. Today we have a two-part interview where we first start off with brain health and then secondarily we go into another interview that Mark and I shared a few weeks ago. I think you're going to enjoy it. Stay tuned. Let's start off with delivering some immediate value to people.

Three things that people can eat or potentially not eat that's directly tied into having a better brain. Very important because one of the best ways to access brain health is through our doctor. it, both what we eat and what we don't eat. Let's start with the don'ts. The most dangerous thing for your brain is sugar and starch. Those cause inflammation in the brain. They cause dementia, they cause depression, they cause behavior issues. They're really nasty for the brain. So it doesn't mean you can't ever eat them, but think about those things as recreational drugs, as I've said. So starch and sugar. The third thing you really want to get rid of is bad fats. So trans fats are very dangerous. They're still in our food supply, even though they've been

regulated as not safe to eat. They're still out there. And a lot of refined processed oils. So those would be the things that I would avoid number one. And of course, processed food. That just kind of goes without saying. And what are some examples of those refined and processed oils that you're mentioned? So my favorite is what they call vegetable oil. You go to the grocery store and and it says vegetable oil. What is it? Broccoli oil? No, it comes from seeds. It comes from sometimes even cotton seed oil, which is highly toxic. It's canola oil. It's soybean oil. 10% of our calories come from soybean oil. It's increased 1,000% in our diet. Didn't even exist as a real food in our diet until probably 1900, early 1900. So we really entered an era where we are eating

a diet that is so different than we have for almost all of our human evolution. And those fats tend to drive inflammation. They're easily oxidized. They go rancid. They're made. with extraction processes that have hexane, and they're often causing significant inflammation and damage in the body. And just so people are aware, it's not that they're necessarily going out there and buying these oils and cooking with everything. They're in everything. So you have to be a student of ingredient labels and pay attention to all the processed foods

that are out there because a lot of them are going to be fighting against your brain. Yeah, the easiest trick is just don't need anything in process. Unless you know what's in it, like, I mean, if you have to have a list of ingredients, I mean, yes, there's some packaged food is fine, but if you have to know what it's in it. So if it says some big chemical words, you can't recognize it or you've got 14,000 things on the label, probably not what you should be eating anyway. Great. So those are three things to avoid.

And so you were going to go into the topic of three things that we can pay attention to. So most people don't know this, but your brain is mostly fat. You know, we really are all fatheads. And about 60% of our brain is made of fat. And most of that is what we call DHA or Decosahexinoic. acid. Sounds like a big chemical name, but essentially it's fish oil. It comes from algae, too. You can get it from algae. So if you're plant-based, you can get it from algae. But it is the main ingredient for a healthy brain. And so we need to be eating fatty fish that's glow

in mercury. We need to be eating algae. We need to be doing things that actually help boost our DHA levels. The second thing is good fats in general because our brain actually responds really well to fat. MC2, for example, is the derivative of coconut oil that's really great for the brain's energy system and can help improve cognitive function. It also performs. It also performs. of whom's athletic performance. The third category of foods we should be focused on are phytochemicals. There's 25,000 compounds in plants, maybe more. The Rockefeller Foundation is now doing the periodic table of phytochemicals.

There's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to map out the medicinal properties in these foods. But it's really easy when you think about it. Just eat the rainbow. If it's colorful and it's not Skittles, it's okay to eat. So all the dark colored vegetables, greens, blues, purples, reds, yellow, those foods that contain these pigments are full of these phytochemicals. And they're really extraordinarily helpful in regulating brain function in so many different ways.

As a bonus one, how about hydration? It seems like that's one area that's often overlooked. You know, one of the things that often people forget about is the bottom of the matrix in functional medicine, which is the sort of the map we use to figure out what's out of balance for people. And hydration is really, really important because most of us walk around dehydrated. most of us don't drink enough water. We have other fluids like sodas and juices and coffees, but we don't really have enough water.

And often when we do, we're not getting intracellular hydration, which is so critical. So not only in your bloodstream, but inside your cells, which is what makes you feel good. So it gives you energy and performance. So my favorite athletic performer is Tom Brady, and he never drinks water without electrolytes. Maybe that explains his seven Super Bowl, right? I don't know. But I agree. I've using electrolytes in your water is so important and not the kind with tons of sugar

and all kinds of weird stuff. My favorite one, I have no affiliation with this brand. It's called Light Show, L-Y-T-E-Show. But it's simply liquid drops. You can put in a glass of water. And every time I drink, I try to add those in and there's a portable container you can take your little drops with you. So intra-sular hydration is really, really important.

And it's important for your cognitive function. It's important for energy. It's important for everything. One caveat on water. naturally as the world, and especially here in the United States, unfortunately, too, has more and more infrastructure challenges, more of the water that's out there is corrupted. So just another reason that people should really invest in a high-quality filter. I heard somebody say one time, either you get a filter or you become the filter. That's a good one. Yeah, I think it's right.

I mean, I remember reading a paper recently that showed that in the average tap water, there's 38 wastewater contaminants, pesticides, glyphosate, Medications. I mean, where do you think all the women taking birth control pill or hormones or Prozac or statins? Those get metabolized and they get excrete in the urine. Where does that go? It goes into our water supply that gets filtered, cleaned, and reused. And we ended up having all these wastewater contaminants and people don't have a clue about what they're drinking. Forget about the chlorine and the fluoride and all the other stuff that's added to the water. But there's a lot of inadvertent things in the water because of the level of toxicity in our society. So I think filtering water is so key. Obviously,

see if you're drinking water. Bottle water is a problem because, one, it's usually plastic, which is nothing we need more of in the world. Glass bottles are okay. But getting a filter is really important. That is a very important question because a lot of the diseases that we see that are causing disability, less of productivity, loss of quality of life, are brain disorders, whether it's anxiety, depression, the opioid epidemic.

neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and all the cognitive disorders, like ADHD, autism, these are all diseases of inflammation of the brain, and they're rampant. If you look, for example, just a depression, our modern tools really suck at treating it. I mean, if you have severe depression, sometimes medications can help. But for most people, you look at the data, it may be 30% effective, not much more than a placebo. And the question is, what's driving that problem? It's all our inflammatory lifestyle, which we've talked about a lot on the podcast. And it's one of the most important things.

One in four people have a severe episode of depression in their life in the world. It accounts for the majority of the cost in our healthcare and all the collateral symptoms that we have from the externalities of depression, like loss of productivity. So there's a macroeconomic analysis looking at over the next 30 years, what's it going to cost? for chronic disease, it's $95 trillion with a T. Okay, that's a lot of dough. That's, you know, way more than the GDP of the top nations in the world combined, probably twice that of all the top six nations combined. That amount of money, the majority of that is for depression because of the loss of productivity, the effect on society and so forth. So these are rampant conditions. One in 10 kids

have ADD. Alzheimer's, you know, we probably have Alzheimer's or pre-Alzheimer's and 40, 50 million Americans. Depression affects more than 16 million people, but throughout people's lifetime, it's super common. We're seeing rampant increases in autism, in neurodegenerative diseases. So we have to grapple with this problem in brain health in a more focused way because it is the thing that we need to operate in our lives, to be happy, to have healthy relationships, to do the work we want to do in the world, to be a functioning member society, to be engaged and not just be in a spiral of a near vegetative state sitting on the couch watching TV because you feel like crap. So there is enormous opportunity to sort of pull the veil back and rethink our whole approach

to brain health. Now, one of your first books was Ultramine Solution. And one of the core ideas in that book was what you do to the body you do to the brain. Can you expand on that? What did you mean by that? Well, the title of the book was the Ultramine Solution, How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First. Because unlike what we learned in medical school,

which is that our head is, and brains are sort of this disembodied thing on the top of our shoulders and it doesn't connect with anything that's going on below there, we've learned that that's completely untrue, that we're learning that the brain responds to everything we do, what we think, what we feel, exercise, sleep, our diet, environmental toxins, stresses, all these things influence our microbiome. Everything influences the brain. So we really have to sort of think about how do we re sort of equilibrate to a different way of thinking about brain health based on all the things that we can do to fix the imbalances

in the body that affect the brain, whether it's thyroid, whether it's your microbiome, whether it's toxins, whether it's low nutritional levels of certain vitamins and minerals like fish oil or omega-3s or vitamin D or the B vitamins. So we know a lot about the things that make the brain healthy. We call these trophic factors. These are things that help the brain grow and improve and increase neuroplasticity and neuroconnectivity. There's so much that's exciting. that we know about how to do that. And yet most of us are poisoning our brains. And we think, oh, I know for my heart, I have to exercise.

I have to cut out saturated fat. I have to do all that. And I can prevent heart disease. But most of us have no clue how to take care of our brain or live a brain healthy lifestyle. You know, we just don't learn it. What are a couple examples of things that people are doing today? Separate from like the topic of foods, right,

that are some of the biggest contributors to poor brain function in their life overall. Well, the low-hanging fruit is lack of exercise. Eight percent of Americans get adequate exercise. That leaves 92 percent who needs them out. And the exercise is really extraordinary because when you do cardiovascular exercise, you do strength training, you do hit training and specific kinds of exercise, it increases these incredible molecules in your brain called BDNF. BDNF stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor.

Think of it like miracle growth for your brain. brain. So when you exercise, you're literally increasing the number of brain cells. You're increasing the connections between the brain cells. You're increasing your cognitive power. Exercise is super critical. So that alone can make a huge difference for so many people. The second thing is sleep. If we don't sleep, our brains don't work. And I remember the study I read recently that looked at sharpshooters in the military, the snipers essentially, who were super accurate, like 99% accurate when they have eight hours sleep. When they get seven hours, drops off a little, maybe 90%. Less six hours starts to go to like 40, like 60, 50%, 50%.

Under six hours, it's like basically hit or miss. It's 50. And so we really don't understand how important sleep is to cleaning our brain, to repairing our brain, to getting rid of the garbage. The garbage man comes at night when we're sleeping to clean out all the metabolic waste that our brain makes during the day. And if you don't have adequate sleep, you're not going to be able to do that. The third thing, in addition to exercise and sleep, is stress. We know that chronic stress. Now, we all have acute stresses, but the chronic, unmitigated stress of our modern life. And whether it's coming from the world we live in and all the chaos, whether it's coming from inflammation and stress, our diet causes, because our diet

literally causes us to build more adrenaline and cortisol on our body, like high starch and sugar diets, whether it's our sedenture lifestyle, all these things drive our brains to not function properly. And so the stress response is something we know how to deal with. We know how to actually reset the body by activating the part of your nervous system that is the relaxation response. We call that the parasympathetic system as opposed to the fight or flight or freeze response. It's, you know, playing possum, you know, basically. And it's not just sitting on the couch watching TV, drinking a beer. It's actually a very active thing. So it could be meditation. It could be yoga could be my favorite or more passive ones like massage, hot and cold plunges.

There are a lot of ways to access the nervous system to help reset it to create a deep sense of profound relaxation that's physiologic. And that helps you repair your brain. Because if you have chronic stress, it literally shrinks your brain. It shrinks the hippocampus in your brain, which is the memory center. So we know that chronic stress causes dementia. So just that alone can have a huge impact, those three things. And then there's a huge long list that goes on and on.

But Dale Bredesen, who, one of my favorite people, he's a credible neurologist who studied Alzheimer's and has used functional medicine to reverse, not just to stop or slow, but to reverse Alzheimer's in patient after patient. And he talks about this idea called a cognoscopy, which is how do we, we get a colonoscopy, but how do we measure our brain function? Well, there are some really specific, simple online tests, neurocognitive tests you can do. There are ways of looking at brain imaging. There are certain lab tests and things you look at to see what are the threats to the brain?

How do you assess the threats? And it's important because when you start to understand how the brain works, you can really play with it and see conditions reverse that you just never would see. I mean, I only wrote ultra-mind solution because I was treating people's physical problems. And as a side effect, their brains would get better. And I'm like, what happened? Like someone, for example, would be having panic attacks and anxiety and depression, and I would get their insulin control and their microbiome control, and they'd go, well, I don't have that anymore.

I'm not depressed. I'm not anxious. Or they'd have bipolar disease and I did this and this and this and got better. Or they'd have ADHD or autism or Alzheimer's and they start to really improve or completely recover. I'm like, what's going on here? This is not what I learned in medical school. And so I began to really through the inquiry of my own patients and their data and their

experiences and applying functional medicine, was able to sort of map out how all this connects and all the things that affect the brain. And it's not just, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not just the obvious things, but there's a lot of things that we can, we can dive into around infections and the microbiome and toxins and other things that affect brain health. So the fundamental things are easily accessible to everybody. And we all should think about not only how we take care of our body and our weight and our heart risk, but also our brain health. And there's some very specific things you can do to do that. Now, those topics is near and dear to you because you write in your book that not only

were you focused on helping on your patients, but you were trying to help yourself. Your own brain broke. So I'd love for you to take us down your story. And also, while you go through it, help us look at the whole topic of brain-related disorders and how conventional medicine might see it and how, functional medicine might see it. First, I'll start with my story because it helped teach me so much about how the brain breaks and what to do to fix it. When I was in college, you know, a student, got in a medical stool, school was easy for me. I barely studied and my brain was just like a

steel trap. And I remembered everything, could focus, pay attention, was happy. I mean, just my brain was good. I exercised. I ate healthy. I did all the right things. I did yoga. And then I went to China and got mercury poisoning, which I didn't know at the time, came back and got some other insult that tricked my system into really being sick. And all of a sudden I went from completely functional to completely dysfunctional. I couldn't sleep. I, even though I was exhausted and had chronic fatigue syndrome, I couldn't focus. It was like I had ADHD. I couldn't remember anything.

I got depressed. So it was like I had depression, ADD, and dementia all at once. And I would literally be reading my kids a story at bedtime and I couldn't understand the sentence. If I read it out loud, I literally would not be able to understand what I was saying.

My brain didn't work. Or when I was talking to somebody, I would start a sentence. And I didn't know where I didn't really know where I was going. I couldn't finish the sentence. I was really damaged. And so through understanding my own biology

in reverse engineering my way to health, I began to understand all the factors that affect brain health. And that's really why I wrote the Ultramine solution because it's what I learned on myself, but it's also what I began to see on nearly thousands of patients. Talk to us about some of those root factors that were going on for you that might be beneficial

for other people to hear. What was going on in your life that contributed you to being in that place in the first place? Well, I had a bunch of stuff. I mean, I was in a crazy work schedule I was working as a ER doctor after I came back from China, not sleeping. You know, I literally was doing 15 shifts a month. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot.

And I was seeing up all night, many, many nights. I was taking care of my two kids. My ex-wife was an alcoholic, and it was really a tough moment, a lot of stress and a lot of work and a lot of sleep deprivation. And then I would, you know, go to the emergency room. And I would have an 11 o'clock to 7 a.m. shift at night. And I would drink a quadruple espresso, a giant chocolate chip cookie, and a half a fine ice cream.

and I'd get in the car and I'd drive to work, and I last until 5 in the morning, hopefully it was quite enough, I could take a nap. And I did that for years. And so between that stress, between the difficult stress in my life in terms of my marriage,

and also this mercury underlying mercury toxicity that men got tripped into full expression when I had a severe intestinal infection, that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back and ended up just cascading into years and years of me trying to figure this out and I got terrible diarrhea for your sebo, bacterial overgrowth. My muscles were getting damaged. My immune system was dysregulated. I started getting sores on my tongue, ratchel of my body,

autoimmune any bodies. My liver function went up. I mean, my whole lab test looked terrible. And I was a mess. And doctor after doctor was like, well, you're depressed, take Prozac, or you're anxious, take Xanax, or you can't sleep, take Ambien. Or, you know, it was like it was that. And I remember, and I started getting weird fasciculations and all kinds of weird symptoms. And my My muscles were twitching and my muscle enzymes were really high, which means my muscles were being damaged. And I remember going to Columbia and seeing these top neurologists who was an expert in this type of thing. And they ordered a test called the EMG, which is no fun.

Essentially, they stick giant needles in your muscles and they then send electrical currents down them to see what's going on. And this guy was this old British doctor there who was running the test. And he said, oh, you have benign fasciculations, which means your muscles twitch, but it's not serious. It's not ALS, which is, it could have been ALS. And, uh, and the, uh, and he goes, off the record,

this isn't normal. Like there's no such thing as benign facetulations. You don't have LLS, but it's something else. And I thought, ah, you know, so that, and that was even before I figured out the mercury thing. I just, I just didn't know what was going on. I was searching, searching and searching. So it took a couple of years for me to actually figure out the mercury thing before I was

able to get better. What was part of that turnaround process? which also was the introduction for you into the world of functional medicine. Like how did you begin to look at things differently and then start to treat yourself? Well, I was always, you know, I studied nutrition in college and it was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, was interested in integrative health. They didn't even call it that then. And I was always exploring the edges, studied ancient healing systems, Chinese medicine.

So I always had a different framework that I was coming from when I went to medical school. And then when I got a job at Canyon Ranch, it's right when I got sick. And I met a woman named Kathy Swift, who was a nutritionist there, and she's like, you got to come to this lecture from Jeffrey Bland. And I'm like, okay. And so I went to hear this guy speak. And I listened to him and I thought, this guy's a genius or he's a lunatic. And if what he's saying is true, it means that everything I learned needs to be reexamined, questioned, and reimagined. And I need to prove that to myself and my patience. So I said, I'm going to try it on. Because if he's right, it's a game changer. If he's wrong, he's just a nut. promoting a lot of stuff that's kind of goofy. And it turned out he was right. And the rest is history. And that's when we really started diving into functional medicine at Kenya Ranch. We had a great incubator where we could spend hours with patients. I could dig in all these things. They could learn everything. They were willing to do stuff. And so it was really a great incubator.

And then I just kept going down that rabbit hole and healed myself and started healing thousands and thousands of patients. So what was one of the first things? And we're going to touch on your story, but these are also things that people can walk away with when it comes to their own story too. So what was one of the first things that you did when it came to your diet? You're eating chocolate chip cookie, double espresso, you know, you had all this sugar in your diet. What was one of the first things you did when it came to your diet? Well, I literally had to do an elimination diet because the mercury not only affected my brain

and affected my gut, which by the way, they're totally connected, right? There's called your second brain. There's more neurotransmitters in your gut than in your brain. There's more nerve endings in your gut than your brain. It's really quite fascinating. And my gut was a mess. And so I developed leaky gut. I developed SIBO, which wasn't even a thing at the time, small intestinal

bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth. I would eat anything and my stomach would just blow up like a balloon. Like I had gas. It just wouldn't come out. And I felt like I had, you know, like a giant sort of tire inflator that just blew up my intestines. And it was painful and difficult. And I had diarrhea and digested food my stool.

It was just kind of a mess. So I literally had to dramatically change my diet to just be able to tolerate any food. So I used turkey, broccoli, and brown rice for like a year just to kind of calm my system down. It didn't really help get rid of all my symptoms, but it just helped them not be so bad. And until I got rid of the mercury, my gut couldn't heal. And it's not that you're necessarily recommending the turkey, brown rice diets of the folks. You're just talking about what you did. I was saying my system was so dysregulated.

I couldn't eat anything without causing a rash or my eyes like turning. like a raccoon black or swollen tongue or my whole system was just messed up. And in order for me to just reduce my diet to the most simple foods that were not going to be triggering reactions, I had to really simplify my diet. So that's what you did then. If you were your patient today, what would you do for that person in that same situation when it came to the topic of diet? If I had me as a doctor when I first started this, I would have been better a lot faster. I wish I, but like I literally had to crawl my way through knowing. And by that it was really tough, Drew, because not only was I sick, but it was very hard for my brain to work.

So I literally had to, despite having my brain barely functional, still try to learn and focus enough to try things. And it was really tough. It was really, really, really tough. It was like kind of like trying to, like, you know, get out of a very deep hole and a black hole. and it was tough because I didn't have the full capacity of my mind. So I started to learn things and I started to incorporate things. It was very slow. And it took me a number of years before I even figured out that I had mercury poisoning.

And I ended up sort of being in a functional medicine conference. And I met a guy on a plane who was a naturopath. And he was like, well, come into my office because maybe I can help you. I told him what's going on. So he did this machine, this electrodermal screening, which sounds like total quackery. but it's looking at the biogenetics of different meridians and different electrodermal electromagnetic frequencies in your skin, which are there. And he said, well, it seems like you have metal toxicity.

I'm like, really? Okay. And then I went to my friend Mark David. I said, I was just staying at his house. I'm like, can you do my hair analysis and see what's up? And he took a little hair. We sent it off and it was really high. And then I did a challenge test.

And I found I had a level that's, you know, I've probably done 20,000 of these tests over the last three years. And it was probably in the top, top 10, 20 tests I've ever seen. of the worst levels. And then that was when I started to detoxify, but it was really tough because I didn't have a roadmap. I was just sort of figuring things out. We didn't even understand what CBO was back then. We didn't understand a lot of things that we knew now. And we didn't have a lot of the tools we have now. So that would probably be a lot better, a lot faster. So you mentioned mercury. You know, Mercury is part of these environmental toxins that are out there and it can come from a lot of

different sources. We'll touch on that in a second. But mercury is part of, you know, a ton of chemicals that are in the environment, like these poofas, forever chemicals that are there. We have mold that can be environmental toxins with all the flooding and the buildings that we have. Do you think that people are paying more attention to this topic than you've ever seen before about how environmental toxins can play a role in things like brain inflammation? Yeah, I think there's more and more literature about the role of environmental toxins in neurodegenerative diseases and autism and ADD in depression. So there's more and more science around this.

So I'm very helpful, but I do think it's still pretty much ignored. I think people aren't really trained in medical school to understand toxins other than acute toxicity. So chronic low-level toxicity that eventually overwhelms your system is just not something that's even in the field of view of traditional doctors. So, for example, I had this patient recently who had non-immune disease, but But she had very high levels of lead in her blood and the highest level of lead I'd ever seen in any patient in 30 years. And it was causing all kinds of cognitive and also inflammatory symptoms. And, you know, the traditional doctors don't know how to look for that and test for that.

They can check a blood test, but they rarely do that. But even if the blood test is normal, you can still have a lot of stored toxins if you don't have current exposure. So if you don't, for example, if you don't have fish for three or six months, your blood levels will be good. But you could have tons of stored levels in your body. I remember reading a New York Times article about a group of soldiers that made their way to the Cleveland Clinic. Yeah.

And can you tell that story? Yeah, well, you know, the Special Forces guys are really not whims. You know, these guys are Navy SEALs who stand in ice water for three hours and, you know, run 100 miles. I mean, these guys are just superhuman. And it was a whole group of these guys who were really sick. And they were being kind of dismissed by the Defense Department and the VA. And one of them came to Cleveland Clinic and I said, well, let's look at your story. What's going on?

You're cognitively impaired. You can't focus. You're depressed. You're overweight. Your metabolism is messed up. You have all these other symptoms. Let's just see what's going on. So I said, what do you do?

He says, well, I'm a blast expert. I blow stuff up. And I teach other people how to blow stuff up. And we do it in enclosed buildings. And when you blow stuff up and you leave bombs and guns, you release lead mercury into the air. And they're in there in a closed space. with poor filtration, they're breathing it in. So you do this long enough, you start to become poisoned.

And they came in and they were poisoned, and I was able to help these people get better. It was really pretty miraculous. And one of the story in the York Times was about this one soldier who went to, I think it was Mount Sinai where they have the lead expert who uses a very specific technique. It's only kind of in research, which looks at the bone lead levels, which is kind of the best kind of measure of total body lead. And this scientist, doctor, I think it was at Mount Sinai, I said, look, we see this, we can measure it, but we never see it go down. But when these patients came back to me after being treated, not only were they clinically better, but their levels of lead in the bone went down.

I've never seen this before. And of course you've never seen it before because most of us were never trained on how to detoxify patients from heavy metals. But when you know what to do, you can remove the metals and these people get better. So now we have a whole group of people working with us from the Department of Defense and Special Task Force Dagger to incorporate these ideas into the VA and the Department of Defense health care system. So before we get back into neuroinflammation overall and brain health overall, let's just put a button in the topic of mercury and lead. For most people, it may not necessarily be the first thing to look at unless if they're working with like a functional medicine doctor. So most people who are listening who are wondering like, wow, do I have? You know, Mercury, do I have lead?

It's an important topic to pay attention to. It's probably something that you need to be guided down the path of working with a trained practitioner who knows about that area. And I think it's important to say, look, with brain disorders, whether it's the mood disorders, anxiety, depression, whether it's the attention of cognitive disorders like ADD and autism or the spectrum, whether it's the neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, there are many factors that drive those problems. And you have to look at all of them.

Mercury is just one, lead is just one. Those are final common pathways from multiple insults. So if you take 10 people with depression, there may be 10 different causes. For some, it might be metals. For another, it might be a low vitamin D level, or the fact that they've taken antibiotics and screwed up their microbiome, or maybe it's because they're taking an acid blocker and have low B12, or maybe they have gluten intolerance and have dealt with antibodies against their thyroid,

which causes depression. So there's a lot of ways to get to the same end disease. So I always say just because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you. Just because you have a label, it doesn't mean you know the cause. And the problem with modern medicine is what we call the name it, blame it, and tame it game. We name the disease. Oh, you have low mood. You're crying all the time.

You're not interested in eating. You don't want to have sex. You can't sleep. You want to kill yourself. Oh, I know what's wrong with you. You have depression. But that is not the cause of your symptoms. Depression isn't the cause of your symptoms.

It's the name of your symptoms. And then we blame the name for the problem. the reason you have these symptoms because you're depressed. And the treatment is an antidepressant. So we name it, blame it, and tame it. As opposed to what I call thinking and linking, which is where we start to begin to think about the cause, not just wait, you know, wait for people

that sort of get on medication and see what happens. It's really a very important thing to understand for people that the same diseases can have many, many causes. And the same causes can create many diseases. So mercury could cause autoimmune disease, can cause gut issues, can cause depression, can cause Alzheimer's, can cause autism, you know, but not all cases of autism or depression or Alzheimer's or cause by mercury. So you have to kind of think about this kind of framework of,

one, just because you know the name of disease doesn't mean what's wrong with you. Two, one cause can create many diseases and one disease can have many causes. So it's a really different framework for understanding human biology. Let's go back to one of the first things you talked about, which was sugar. Help us really understand how sugar is so deeply tied into this whole, whole field of neuroinflammation and poor brain health. What is it that sugar is actually doing in the body? Okay, you got a couple hours? I spent my life studying this and I'm going to try to synthesize it. But sugar is not necessarily bad. If you have a cookie or if you have a little bit of this for that once in a while, it's not going to kill you. It's the dose that we have. We used to have

historically 22 teaspoons a year as hunter gathers. That means if we got lucky, we find a honey, like a honey hive and we can get the honey or, you know, we might find some berries in the summer and we'd get some sugar. But historically, we'd really have sugar as part of our diet. In 1800, we had 10 pounds of sugar per person, which was still a lot. And now in 2020, we have about 150 pounds of sugar per person per year. So sugar, when you have it at that pharmacologic dose, is a poison. And it does a number of things. One, it screws up your microbiome. So it fertilizes all the bad bugs that create inflammation.

Then that creates a leaky gut, and that creates neuroinflammation. It also drives a process in the body called insulin resistance, which means your body is resistant to the effects of insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf. You eat a lot of sugar and starch, and your insulin's go higher and higher and higher, and the cells become resistant to the insulin. So you need more and more insulin. But the consequence of that increased insulin is that you get more fat storage

in the abdominal fat and the belly fat. And those fat cells are not just they're holding up your pants. They're very special kind of fat cells. They're not like the fat in your butt or in your thighs or whatever. They're highly active organs. They produce hormones. They produce cytokines. You've heard of the cytokine storm from COVID.

They produce all kinds of inflammatory molecules like IL-6, IL-1, and two-ineercosts factor alpha. These are very powerful inflammatory molecules that are coming from your fat cells. So that drives systemic inflammation throughout the body, and you get neuroinflammation. Third, we now know that in Alzheimer's disease, that there's a huge problem with glucose metabolism and it's insulin resistance of the brain for many patients. Not all Alzheimer's is insulin resistance of the brain, but they're calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes now because of this impact of insulin resistance in the brain. So there's a lot of ways and pathways through which this caused a problem.

And I'm not saying never I have sugar. Of course I have sugar. It's just what is the overall balance of your diet? Is this a staple? Is this a daily commodity that you're drinking for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I mean, in America, we have sugar for breakfast, lunch, dinner. It's in our cereal. It's in our salad dressings.

It's in tomato sauce. I mean, there's more sugar per serving of tomato sauce than there is in two Oreo cookies. So we've got to get kind of real and get all the hidden sugar out of our diet. I'd love to give, you were so kind of share your own testimony earlier and some of the things that worked for you. Let's talk about a couple other case studies from your practice of people you've worked with. Let's start first with the topic of depression. Any case study that comes to mind. Well, you know, I remember this one patient who was severely depressed.

She was in an early 30s, an executive coach and sort of really struggling. And she had crippling depression. She also had sinus problems that were intractable. She was overweight. She was very inflamed. She had a lot of gut issues. She had tons of yeast overgrowth. And it was kind of miserable.

And she came to see me and I took a look under the hood and found that she had a lot of inflammation in her body that was secondary to high levels of mercury. This patient had really high levels of mercury, like 300, which is, mine was 187. This was a lot of off the chart. And the mercury was causing the weight gain. because it's a metabolic toxin. It was causing the gut dysfunction because it poisons the gut. It caused the yeast overgrowth, which is because the mercury causes yeast overgrowth, and it caused her depression.

And so we systematically treated her by cleaning up her gut in the yeast, by clearing up mercury. Her sinuses got better. The weight came off. Her depression went away. And it took a number of years to get that much mercury out of her body. But I just saw her after 10 plus years. and it's amazing. She's still doing great.

So the beauty is that you can take people with really intractable problems if you know how to navigate to the cause, which is what functional medicine does, you really can make a huge difference for these patients. How about a kid or children with a brain disorder? Somebody that you have a case study that you worked with before. Well, I have an autism case. That's a long story. But I've seen kids with autism get completely better using this approach.

Because when you look at brains of autistic kids, or people with ADD, they're inflamed. There's a whole immune system in the brain called the microglia, and they can create an inflammatory process in their brain. And on MRI scans, you literally see large brains, swollen brains on these kids. When they do autopsy studies of kids with autism

for a diet and a car accident or something, they'll see their brains are filled with these inflammatory cells, and they're inflamed. So the question is, what's causing that inflammation? And kids with autism are like the canaries in the coal mine. And this one kid I saw was 22, months old when he started getting symptoms. So he had regressive autism. And he had, you know, a lot of antibiotics early on. You hear the same story, C-sections, lack of breastfeeding, early

antibiotics, and then, you know, maybe getting vaccinated when they're sick. I'm not saying vaccines cause autism. I'm just saying that it can be part of the mix that triggers a dysregulated gut and immune system to go haywire. And there's the whole field of vaccinomics, which is fascinating, which is looking at how individuals respond differently to vaccines. So this kid had had terrible gut symptoms, sticky, smelly poops. He, you know, was nonverbal at two and a half. He couldn't look at you in the eye. He was just a mess.

All the classic symptoms of autism. I was told by the doctors just, you know, give him some behavioral therapy, good luck, and, you know, eventually ended up in an institution because he had really severe autism. So all I did was what I normally do is I did my analysis of what are the factors that caused disease, what are the factors that are needed to help thriving and have. health. What is he missing? What does he need to get rid of? Basic functional medicine approach. We found he had terrible gut disposed at three suites of yeast. He had leaky gut. He had bacterial overgrowth. He had massive nutritional deficiencies in

vitamin D and zinc and magnesium and the B vitamins, B6, B12. And he had a significant mercury in his system as well. So he began to treat these things. We got rid of the metals in a system. We fixed his gut. We cleared out the bad bugs with antibiotics and any fungles. And we reset everything. gave him all the nutrients he needed and B12 shots. And this kid literally became normal. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy because I learned that autism is not reversible. Now, that's not to say that every kid will respond this way because there are many factors. And I've seen kids with autism that have more, you know, fixed problems that, for example, genetic.

And I look at all their lab tests and they're normal. I'm like, I don't know what to do because they're normal. So there is a way to navigate the brain health field by looking at all these factors. And I've had kids with ADD that completely normalized by simply getting them the things that they need for their bodies and their brains to thrive. Let's do another one. And that's on the topic of you shared about Alzheimer's earlier and sort of Alzheimer's, dementia, all the neurodegenerative diseases that increasingly more and more people are suffering from. You had a patient that came to you and was a referral over who was a gentleman that was running a company and was thinking about retirement. because his brain was so messed up. Talk to us about that. Yeah, he was seven years old and he was in the book, Ultramid Solution was one of those

cases that I had to sort of like rethink everything about. And my wife brought him in to look, my husband is basically non-functional. He's a CEO of our company or a family held business. He now sits in a room alone, depressed and demented. And the kids don't want me to be around him, the grandkids are scared of him. He's just not the human he was. Can you do anything? I'm like, I don't know. Let's try. So from the functional medicine perspective, the beautiful thing about it is that it doesn't matter what disease you have. You treat the system. You normalize function, hence the word functional medicine, and you see what happens. And usually the diseases get better. So it turned out that this guy had a lifelong history of gut issues. He had

irritable bowel, terrible bacterial overgrowth. He was on a drug called Stellazine for 30 years because his gut was such a mess. And it's an antipsychotic tranquilizer drug that was calming his gut down, which is kind of amazing. He also had the APOE-4-4 genes. So he had some genetic setup for this, which is the Alzheimer's gene. He had also genes that affect his B vitamins called methylation. And he had a very high homoosecine, which is an important nutrient marker of folate or B6 or B-12 deficiency. And when you look at the data, if you're levels over 14, you have a 50% increase of Alzheimer's. he also had significant heavy metals. And I don't mean to be harping on heavy metals, but they are a big thing in a lot of brain damage.

And they're one of those things that their doctors don't know how to look at. They don't have a test. They don't have diagnosed. They don't how to treat. So it's really a problem. You need to see a functional medicine doctor. And he lived in Pittsburgh. And all my patients from Pittsburgh are mercury poison.

Why? Because U.S. steel is there. All the steel plants use coal to actually make the steel. Coal ash is often used in Pittsburgh to, cover the roads from ice in the winter to put on fields. It's in the air pollution. And his level was just off the chart. Plus, he had a mouthful of mercury. So we did an aggressive medical treatment on him that fixed his heavy metals, that fixed his gut, that optimizes nutrient status. And he also had pre-diabetes. So he's a skinny fat guy. He looked thin, but he actually had this

little belly and he was pre-diabetic. And we got him on a low-star sugar diet, cured his insulin reason. So he had B-vitamin issues, he had gut issues, he had metal issues, he had insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, and we fixed all that. And he went from being completely non-functional to backgrounding his business, engaged with his family and friends, and reversed the cognitive symptoms that he had. It was really a miracle. And the neurologist that I sent him to at Harvard to do all the imaging and the brain scans and stuff that we couldn't do was so impressed by the results that he then started a center for brain health at Harvard. So it's amazing what you see how happen with these patients.

So as you mentioned, sometimes a person might need to work with a functional medicine doctor, but a lot of times people can take steps and head in the right direction just even through a little bit of self-guided and in some cases at-home testing. So I want to talk about testing and are there any tests that are out there. You mentioned genetics, for example. You also mentioned omega-3s and getting more of those in your diet. There's like a simple at-home test that people can do. We have no affiliation with them that they can see they're omega-3.

So give a few of these at home tests and your thoughts in general about them and if they can be part of the puzzle pieces for people to figure out how to get to the root causes that are going on with them. Well, it's interesting. I see a lot of companies popping up that are focused on home health testing, that are focused on giving access to their data for people that are creating companies that are allowing people to start to do the diagnostics themselves and be part of a sort of a self-care process that often, you know, we see. surrender to our doctors. And so there's a lot we can do ourselves. I believe that people should be empowered with their health information. They should be empowered with their diagnostic test. They shouldn't be just sold your tests for okay and I'll see you later and come back next year. And they can actually start to look at some of these things. The current landscape of self-testing is limited now, but there's things you can do around food sensitivities. There's things you can do

around hormones. There's things you can do around, you know, gut testing. So there's stuff that's starting to come out. I don't think we're quite there yet for everybody. There's genetic tests like 23 and me. So people can get a sense of what to do. But what would be more exciting for me is some of the companies that are coming out, creating 360 solutions, whether doing diagnostic questions, they're kind of guiding them and what you should do and how to fix these things. I think we're not quite there yet, but we're going to get there.

And what do you think about continuous glucose monitors and their ability to be a part of the process of people figuring out what diet is right for them? Right. So before, measure your blood sugar, you had to go get a blood test with a regular needle or you have a finger stick test, which is annoying and painful, and you have their machine. They've developed these new technologies called continuous glucose monitors, which are little patches you put on your skin with a tiny, tiny little needle. It goes into the skin.

There's even more advanced ones coming out there are just going to be like going through your skin. You don't even have to put a needle in. And they measure your sugar continuously. And so you can see what's affecting your blood sugar, what's making it spike up and down. And you can know, oh, gee, I'm eating this. If I eat this, if I eat a plum, I sure. sugar goes crazy, but if I've had a blueberry, it doesn't. Or if I have this, you know, meal in this way or that way, it affects whatever. If I have a glass of wine before my meal,

it's way worse than I have it with my meal. So you begin to learn about your own biology. And what's really interesting is that it's not uniform. So, for example, there's something called the glycemic index or glycemic load. But it really depends on the person, right? If you look at a study, for example, then out of Israel, they looked at the same foods on different people. And depending on their microbiome, their blood sugar levels were quite different. That's just one variable. the microbiome, but there's many other variables, genetic variables, nutritional status variables, and so forth that are going to affect your metabolism. So learning how your body works, getting the continuous glucose monitoring as a super helpful and personalized way to identify

what works for you and what does it. So I'm a big fan. Let's talk about supplementation. There are a lot of companies that are out there that are advertising that this supplement is the best thing ever for brain health. What are actual supplements that have a strong evidence base for supporting brain health on top of all the basic lifestyle stuff? And what are ones that are maybe we should be a little bit skeptical or maybe watch out for when it comes to a category? So they're called supplements, not replacements. And so if you're eating a crappy diet, not exercising under tons of stress, not sleeping, exposed to toxins and your microbiome is a mess, you know, you're going to did not really see huge impact. And you, you know, you have to really look at addressing the factors

that are causing the imbalance that we talked about. And then when you start to put these ingredients in, the body can really respond, right? So the most important one is DHA for the brain, which is docosa hexinoic acid. It's omega-3 fat. Comes from fatty fish, you get it from algae. That would be my number one. There are really important cascades around B vitamins and detoxification that are important. These are genes that affect your metabolism of folate, B6, B-12, and B-12, and also glutathione. So taking B-6, B-12, and folate, super important for the brain. Magnesium, also really important for the brain. It helps to deal with anxiety. It helps to stimulate a receptor called the NMDA in the brain, which calms down the sort of overexitation that happens in the brain

that leads to inflammation, oxidative stress. So B vitamin, fish oil. vitamin D, magnesium, these are staples for the brain. So let's go into some questions from our community and starting with the first one. What are the top foods for brain health? So you already mentioned a few, but maybe you can expand on this a little bit further and add in some additional ones that you didn't get a chance to talk about. Sure. So the categories are, you know, omega-3 fats, other good fats and polyphenols.

And there's the whole category of other things that can be helpful. So in terms of the omega-3 fats, the fatty fission. was really important we talked about, things like olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, great for the brain. Walnuts look like a brain. Kind of a brain food. They have good omega-3 fat levels. Also, eggs are really amazing.

So eggs have gotten a bad wrap. You want to make sure you have pasture raised eggs because those yolks have far more nutrients and polyphenols. And the reason they're dark yellow as opposed to this pale yellow that we see in most modern eggs is because of all these plant compounds that give it its power. It also has coline, which is super important for the brain because it's one of the neurotransmitters is acetylcholine, and you need coline to actually help your brain work properly. So it's really great in terms of the brain. So I think eggs are a great brain food. We also have all the berries. They're great because they have these class of compounds called proanthosyanins, which are powerful antioxidants,

anti-inflammatories. Dark green leafy vegetables also really important because of things like vitamin D, sorry, vitamin K and folate, lutein, many other compounds that are great for the brain. And of course, turmeric, which is a spice that we've used a lot in Indian cooking, but it's a wonderful, powerful anti-inflammatory that has really been effective for the brain. So those are some of the top ones I think about. There's some other ones that maybe we're thinking about, like green tea, which has a lot of catacons, phyonying, which is calming for the brain. So there's a lot of benefits from those. Next question from the community.

What is the role of CO-Q-10 in the brain? Well, this is a big rabbit hole. So one of the things that people need to understand is that your brain is one of the biggest consumers of energy in the brain. We've heard the stats that it's, you know, 5% of your brain, body weight or something or maybe less three pounds. So that's like a fraction of a percent, I guess, but it consumes 25% of the energy in the body because it's very busy.

And in each brain cell, there are tens of thousands of mitochondrial. which are the energy factories in your cells that you need to actually run your brain. And if you have low energy in your brain, you have Alzheimer's, you have autism, you have Parkinson's, you have all these things that are really an energy deficit. So the question is, how do you build energy in the brain? It's all things we've talked about so far, but there are certain nutrients that are so critical for reviving and helping the mitochondria function better. Kukuten is one of them, but there's many more carnitine, Kukuten.

ribose, naceal cysteine, NAD. There's a whole cocktail of mitochondrial supplements, lipoic acid, B vitamins, niacin, riboflavin. They're so critical to making energy. So think of your energy cells as having a production line where they take food and oxygen and they convert it to energy that your body uses. That production line has a lot of steps.

And each step requires nutrients. And if you're deficient in any of those nutrients, you become dysfunctional in terms of they're making energy, which has all these downstream consequences in terms of not just brain health, but every aspect of your health and aging. So taking a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements is really important. There's a woman named Suzanne Goh, who presented Grand Rounds at Cleveland Clinic, who's a pediatric neurologist trained at Harvard, Oxford, brilliant woman, published in New England

Journal, JAMA, all the top journals. And she's done fascinating functional MRI studies looking at imaging of mitochondria and autistic kids. And she found there's a subset of kids who have really poor and, you know, and she's a subset of kids who have really poor energy, metabolism in their brains. No wonder they can't connect, focus, pay attention, do anything. So she gives them a cocktail of mitochondrial supplements and these kids get better. That's not to say that all kids with autism get better with mitochondrial supplements. It's those kids who have that particular pathway and deficit. Remember I said, just because you know the name of what you've got,

it doesn't mean what's wrong with you. If you have autism, it just means you have no social skills, you may not be talking, you have repetitive behaviors. There's certain descriptions that we give to the behavior, but we're not talking about the cause. So, you know, when you see these studies that are, these are not even, quote, functional medicine studies. This is mainstream medical journals, but it's using the principles of functional medicine of how do you create energy. Right. So the difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine often is conventional medicine is about stopping, suppressing, inhibiting pathways, right? The anti-drugs, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, the blockers, the beta blockers, the calcium channel

blockers, right? Or we had the inhibitors, the ACE inhibitors. So we inhibitors, we're block and anti, everything, as opposed to optimize and enhance function. So functional medicine uses compounds and help the body do what it's supposed to do naturally, which is how do you make energy naturally? Well, you have all these different compounds in your diet and the supplements that you can take that help these pathways. So when you enhance function, there's really no side effects. It's actually using the natural pathways of the body to optimize your health.

What about the role of caffeine in the brain and the body? Good, bad thoughts. Okay, okay, so caffeine. Well, yes, caffeine gives alertness, focus, attention, but often you get a crash. So it creates a temporary boost in focus and energy, but then it depletes adenosine in the cells, which depletes energy, and often you'll get a crash after. So depending on your genetics, your ability to metabolize caffeine, how fast you are, how slow you are, it's going to affect you differently.

There are in coffee and tea other compounds. So I often say that coffee is sadly the number one's, sadly, the number one's one. source of antioxidants in the American diet because Americans have such a crappy diet that there's no other antioxidants because 70% or 60% is processed food. That doesn't mean that you should be drinking a lot of coffee for the antioxidants, but it is a source of antioxidants and polyphenols and they may have brain benefits. So same with tea. Catecans and other polyphenols in green tea and other teas actually may have beneficial effects on inflammation, oxidative stress, detoxification, so they can be very helpful. But I think overcaffeinating ourselves is probably not

a good idea. So let's recap here. When it comes to improving our brain health and things that we can do today, starting today, like step one, two, and three, what do you want to share with our audience here as we start to wind down today's masterclass? Well, I think the first thing people understand is that they need to learn how their brain works what makes it thrive and what damages their brain. And they need to systematically go through their life and reduce or eliminate the things that

damage their brain and add in the things that help their brain. So what are the things, one of the worst things that damage your brain? Sugar and starch, processed food, stress, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. Those things are fixable by anybody without seeing a doctor, right? And then there are things that the brain needs to function. You need a lot of good fats, a lot of omega-3s. You need a diet that's high in polyphenols, these colorful plant compounds, You need a diet that's rich in certain nutrients like magnesium and vitamin D and the B vitamins. So leafy greens and colorful fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds. You need to make sure you exercise because that's one of the best things you can do for your brain.

Meditate, do yoga. Make sure you get eight hours sleep. These are just simple things you can do. And there's a much more depth about how you can even go down the rabbit hole of, you know, balancing your circadian rhythms and light therapy and various kinds of we call hermetic therapies, which are therapies that give your body a stress, but then it responds by creating a healing response. So it could be hot and cold plunges.

It could be, you know, certain types of exercise. There's ways of actually stimulating the body to repair and heal. Then there's even, you know, more therapies that people can think about for their brain, whether it's regenerative therapies like ozone, exosomes, hyperbaric oxygen therapy. These are all things that are coming down the pike that can be really helpful in repairing and recovering brains. But for most people, the basics work so well and are really things that you don't need a doctor for. Well, you have an entire two-part series on brain health. I do. Broken Brain 1 and Broken Brain 2. And people can

sign up for it and watch it. It's on your website at Dr.heimen.com. And if you sign up for Dr. Hyman Plus, you get access to that and your longevity dockey series and a ton of other really great stuff, including premium episodes of your podcast. So that's a great recommendation for where people can go next. Mark, this was a fantastic masterclass and a fantastic breakdown of a topic that so many people care about. I'll pass it back to you to conclude us for today's episode. I think, you know, we just have to have hope because we're seeing such an epidemic of brain disorders. I mean, the anxiety and depression is just rampant our society. And a lot of it's driven by our diet. We see a dramatic increase in neurodegenerative diseases. We see skyrocketing levels of ADHD and autism.

And often people think these are fixed. And I just want people to go home thinking that these are solvable problems, that if we understand how our bodies function, if we take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, that people can recover from even the most challenging conditions. They're now survivors of Alzheimer's, survivors of autism. I mean, never heard of that before. So I want people to leave with hope and to understand that they need to focus not only on their general health and well-being, but to understand how to create a brain-healthy lifestyle, which, by the way, also fixes everything else.

What are the top three things that people are doing? factors that are contributing to the chronic inflammation epidemic that we're facing today? I'm going to get to those things. But first, I don't know if people actually know what inflammation is. Let's go into it. So people know that if you have a sore throat, it's red, painful, swollen, and that's inflammation. And it hurts, right? The ancient description of inflammation was rhubor, cholera, dolore, and tumor. So, tumor is swelling, rubar is redness, dolor is pain, and cholera's heat, right? So we have to understand that those are the cardinal features of inflammation. But then you go, well, I don't really feel inflamed. My throat doesn't

hurt. My joints aren't swollen. I don't have a rash. What do you mean by inflammation? It's what we call hidden or silent inflammation. And that is the problem. It's the inflammation that we see that we can't feel that's causing all the chronic diseases that we see today. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, depression, not to mention obviously autoimmune disease, allergies, and so forth. Those, we know there's inflammation in those.

But, I mean, do people think of being overweight as an inflammatory state? Do people think of diabetes is an inflammatory state? Do people think of depression is an inflammatory state? No, but inflammation is causing all of those chronic diseases. So back to your question, what are the biggest drivers of inflammation? Well, it's something that has been only recently a phenomena in traditional medicine and has been ignored pretty much forever except by functional medicine, which is your gut, your microbiome.

Turns out that 60 to 70% of your immune system is in your gut. Why is it there? Well, it's the place where you're exposed to all the foreign materials every day more than anywhere else. The purpose of your immune system is to identify friend from foe and to get rid of the bad stuff. So when you're eating pounds of a foreign material, namely food, and you have three pounds of form material in the or not namely bacteria, that's a lot to handle. So the ability of the gut to sense what it should take in, to keep out the things that shouldn't be in there is so important. And so having a healthy microbiome allows us to properly regulate our immune systems and to let in the nutrients that we need, proteins, the amino acids, the fatty acids, the sugars and carbohydrates that we need, the nutrients we need. But it keeps out all the bad stuff.

It's the first line of defense. First line of defense. So when that barrier gets broken in the gut, all of a sudden, your immune system is exposed to a sea or actually more accurately exposed to a sewer. And so that starts to piss off your immune system and you start to create systemic inflammation. So the microbiome is really important. And we're just beginning to understand how to identify what's out of balance in there and how to correct the system. Traditional medicine is still very much behind the eight ball in this. Functional medicine is way ahead by 30, 40 years on understanding, one, how to identify dysfunction in the gut,

how to repair a leaky gut, how to reduce inflammation, how to restore normal microbiome. Now, before we go to the other two, just to jump in, the ancients knew a little bit about this. Yeah. Talk about that. There's a famous Arieu-Veta quote that really says, if your gut's not healthy, you're not healthy. And if you want to fix disease, focus on the gut. So this has been known for a long time.

Actually, this idea wasn't new. Eli Metznikov at the turn of the 1900s was a scientist who first came up with the notion of the gut as a source of chronic illness. They had some wacky ideas about how I deal with it, which was take out your colon, which I would recommend. But they were on the right track, which is problems in the microbiome in the gut cause systemic disease. And the solution is not cutting out your colon.

It's fixing the gut. But it's not something that new. And Hippocrity says, you know, health is in, health and disease starts in the gut. Absolutely. That was the first one that you want. wanted to go into, what are two other ones that you want to mention, and there's a lot of them that are out there, but we're talking about the top three. What are two other ones you want to imagine? The other big source of inflammation is our diet and not any random thing from our diet,

but the amount of starch and sugar in our diet that drives a dysfunction in our metabolism called insulin resistance. It's essentially like where we come resistant to the effects of insulin, and our bodies need to make more and more insulin. to regulate our blood sugar. And that is because we're flooding our system with pharmacologic doses of starch and sugar about a pound a day per person, which is just historically unprecedented.

And that insulin resistance causes the development of specific kinds of fat cells. They're called adipocytes. There are specific kind of fat cells in the gut around your belly, your belly fat, that produce a class of compounds called adipocytokines. Cytokines you might have heard about with COVID. or the cytokine storm, these are the messenger molecules of your immune system.

And when you have a lot of these belly fat cells made from eating starch and sugar caused by too much insulin and insulin resistance, it creates systemic inflammation. So it literally puts your body on fire. So if you're overweight, if you have diabetes, if you have high blood pressure, if you have heart disease, if you have dementia, these are all related to this phenomenon of too much starch and sugar and its systemic inflammation. We now know that, for example, if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation, there are very little risk for heart disease.

But if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation, those are the people who are at risk for heart disease. So when you start to look at inflammation in the body, it's not what we can feel, but there are ways of measuring through laboratory testing, the amount of inflammation in our body. And we're going to become more and more sophisticated about this. David Furman at Stanford, who was assigned to a science. scientists and a doctor developed through technology. It's only recently available, big data analytics, giant throughput analyses where you can

look at thousands and thousands of blood markers. I mean, we go to the doctor, we get 10, 20 lab tests, right? 30, 40, maybe 50. There's thousands of molecules floating around your blood. And most of them we completely ignore. So he was like, I don't care what we're actually measuring. Let's look at what actually matters. And so he put thousands of these chemicals through an analytic machines correlate with

people's clinical history and was able to find four biomarkers of inflammation and immune dysregulation that are highly predictive of aging, highly predictive of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, all those diseases. So we are going to become more and more sophisticated at our ability to look at inflammation. People want to know more about it. They can go to Edifice. I think it's Edifice Health is the company, which is actually commercializing this test. But there's other tests we do like C-reactive protein that help to look at inflammation. But insulin resistance is a big driver of inflammation because it makes your belly on fire, literally. And these fat cells are just pumping out tons of inflammation throughout your body.

The third thing that is really important to understand is that stress is inflammatory. Chronic stress causes inflammation in the body through a number of different mechanisms. One stress makes you insulin resistance, so it'll contribute to just making you overweight and belly fat. I mean, I had a patient once where this was so clear. She had a daughter who was in Israel. It was during the time of sort of the infata, the uprising, maybe a few decades ago. And she was terrified every day that her daughter was going to get killed in some kind of bomb or some kind of attack during this Palestinian uprising.

And so she couldn't sleep. She wasn't even overeating, but she just gained all this weight. And as soon as her daughter came back from Israel, she lost. 40 pounds, just like that, without changing anything. So sometimes stress can be a very big factor in its resistance. It also affects your inflammatory response and creates an increased inflammatory response. So if, and this is interesting. If you look at the data on what we call sociogenomics, which is the ways in which are social interactions cause changes in gene expression, you can be having a conversation with someone. And if they're in conflict with you, if you're oppositional,

if you're having an emotionally charged negative interaction, it will turn on genes of inflammation. If you have a loving, connected conversation with someone, it will turn on genes that shut off inflammation. So your mind, your brain is the most potent pharmacy ever, and it will drive either inflammation or it will stop inflammation simply by your thoughts. So you have to kind of look at that.

And that's something we're going to, We haven't talked about a lot, but is how do we master our minds? Most of us are victims of our minds activity and we train our muscles, we train our body, we increase our metabolism. Nobody knows how to train their brain to actually function better from the perspective of being in control of your thoughts. And that's not an easy one. It's a whole other topic for a podcast.

How big of a challenge is the topic of inflammation? Like really, like put it in a sense of a scale in terms of all the things the world is dealing with when it comes to problems with health, how directly tied in is inflammation with those problems? It's probably the number one driver of all the misery we see in the world. There's a beautiful new book that was written by Raj Patel and Rupa Maria, who I've had on the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast called Inflamed. And it's about the biological, the social, economic, and political consequences of

an environment and a diet that's driven systemic inflammation throughout society. And it's staggering when you start to look at it. Oppression is inflammatory. And there's so many people oppressed and struggling in this society. The diet's inflammatory. The social structures we have are inflammatory. And so inflammation, when you look at all the problems that are facing humans in terms of health, And even in terms of some of the socioeconomic issues, that inflammation is such a big driver.

And understanding how we calm that down is so important. One of the things that it does, which I think is something people don't understand. When we look at our society, we see so much conflict, so much divisiveness, so much hatred, so much intolerance. I don't remember it like this growing up. I mean, I just don't. I mean, the diet wars are terrible. The Republicans, Democrats are no longer working together in any meaningful way. You know, we've got religious conflict, political conflict.

We've got the divisiveness in this country where we had sort of a takeover of the capital by a whole bunch of people who were, you know, hopefully making the world a better place. But really, that was not a very helpful act. So why is that happening? Well, it turns out that your brain, when it's inflamed, doesn't work. And all the things that we see as behavioral disorders, as violence, as depression, anxiety, mood disorders, the opioid crisis, turns out that a lot of these things are driven by inflammation in the brain. And what's happening often is that the inflammatory process diet that we have, the changes in our microbiome, because of our microbiome, because of the brain, of our diet because of C-sections, antibiotics, and toxins and all the things that damage are

about microbiome because of glyphosate, all that leads to inflammation. And when you have inflammation like that in the body, it disconnects the ancient limbic brain, the reptile brain, the fight or flight response from the frontal lobe, which is basically the adult in the room, your executive function, your higher self. So when your higher self and your lower self are not talking to each other, when your survival brain and your sort of mature grown-up brain that make sure you don't do or say or act in ways that are damaging or harmful to other people, that connection gets weakened or it breaks. And so when you look at, for example, diet studies in prisons or in juvenile detention centers,

it's so impressive because simply swapping out healthy food, an anti-inflammatory diet for an inflammatory diet in prisons because of violent crime. by 56%. They had a multivitamin by 80%. In juvenile detention centers, these kids are violent. 91% reduction in violent behavior. 75% reduction in mistrates. 100% reduction in suicide rates in this group,

which is the third leading cause of death in adolescent males, and you reduce it by 100% simply by changing the diet. Why does it work? It works because it cools off the inflammation in the brain. is causing a disconnect between people's ability to have executive function, to have the grown up in the room, to have the higher self show up and say, gee, maybe I shouldn't punch this person, or maybe I shouldn't cut them, or maybe I shouldn't shoot them, or, you know, maybe I shouldn't be in this violent oppositional life. And I think, I don't know how much it's contributed to the

divisiveness in our society from the food, but I think it's way more than we think. And we've had David Promutter and his son, Austin, on the podcast, talking about their book, which describes this phenomena and the science and the neurology behind the way our diet affects our brain and disconnects our limbic brain from our frontal lobe driving violent and disruptive and divisive behavior. Well, one of the unique things that's happening in today's world that is built on top of all the different things that you're talking about is that there are a lot of people getting rich off of creating this inflammation. We have the food companies that are getting rich by

marketing and selling high sugary foods to the public. We have the news media that's literally making incredible millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars by driving inflammatory style news, which drives inflammation in people, creates more stress. And the advertising is all about inflammatory products, right? All about inflammatory products. Food. food and many other factors that are out there too. So a unique thing that's going on in the world today that's important to highlight that has really never been there at this level is that through really the hijacking of media and the use of media to grow these large companies, we now are able to spread inflammation so rampant

and there's a very few and small group of individuals that are getting dramatically wealthy off the process. Yes. You know, I think, you know, a lot of stuff started off with good intentions that had bad consequences, right? In the post-World War II era, we needed to scale up agriculture

to feed a hungry world, a growing population, to produce a lot of cheap carbohydrate, starchy calories. And we did a great job. We did a great job. The average American has 500 more calories than they did in 1970, available for them to eat, and they're eating it, which is why we're also unhealthy. That was a good idea, but the unintended consequences have been devastating, not only to human health in terms of diabetes and obesity. I mean, when I was born, there was a 5% obesity

rate. Now it's 40. It's an eightfold increase in obesity in my lifetime. But we've also created unintended consequences for the environment and climate and the changes of in our biodiversity and loss of species and the damage to the soil and our water systems because of how we're growing food. So we've created all these unintended consequences. In the same way, you know, these food companies, we're not actually designing foods to drive all these problems, but we're locked in a system where the status quo is trying to be preserved so they can maintain their market share and their profitability and they're trying

to navigate and figure out how to shift because culture is shifting, demand is shifting. but, you know, we have a tremendous amount of money that goes into preserving the status quo, how we grow food, what we grow, the processed food industry, the marketing of the food. I mean, we spend billions of dollars from the food industry, gets spent billions of dollars marketing and advertising bad foods. And the worst of food, the more money they spend advertising. And what's worse is it's hidden advertising now that's really a problem. And so these algorithms on these social media derive.

you into more and more of the same. So if you click on a conspiracy, one conspiracy theory, you're going to get fed 10 other conspiracy theories. So I met these people that believe in all these weird seemingly disconnected conspiracy theories because that's the universe they live in. So we live in these self-reinforcing information bubbles that are driven by algorithms. And the algorithms were there designed to give people stuff they like, to show them if they want a nice pair of shorts or a bathing suit that they might like. Again, well-intention. Well-intention. But the consequences now, we sort of let the genie out and it's out of control. And so even the people who develop these systems, I mean, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is evil or had an evil intent

to create more divisiveness and conflict and disruption in the world and violence. No, I don't think so. But I also think that the incentives now are to keep doing it and not to stop. So we have to start to look at what we're doing and create different forms of communication. and media and social media that are not driven off of these algorithms that tend to cause more disruption, more divisiveness, and are incentivizing the wrong thing. I mean, one of the things that just shocking to me is forget all the ads on TV that kids see and there's about $10 billion spent all that. There's 500 billion ads, 500 billion ads in one year directed at children for junk food on Facebook. That's terrifying to me because the parents don't even know it. It's like you can say, oh, don't watch your TV kids or don't watch those commercials about, you know, fruit loops.

But it's all the hidden stuff. It's all, it's all, and it's all stealth. It's embedded in games. There's free games for these kids on social media, and they play these games. But in the games, they highlight McDonald's or they highlight Coca-Cola, they highlight these different kind of food companies that are paying for it. And it's really co-opping these kids' brains. It's copying their their, their, their, their,

their own free will in a way. And I think that's what scares me more than anything is the usurping of free will by this digital persuasion economy that's using algorithms to target us in ways that it seemed to be things that we like, but it actually keeps, it spirals out of control. And so we have to get a way to solve that, whether it's inventing parallel platforms that people can use where that's not happening in social media platforms

or whether it's regulation or legislation. and this has gotten to be quite dangerous. It's multifaceted, but most importantly, we have to have a dialogue about it. And even more important than that is that you, the person that's watching, the person that's listening today, you have to be the CEO of your health. You have to be the CEO of your family's health

because ultimately, you know, regulation can do a lot, but it can only do so much. We at the end of the day have to drive education for ourselves and for our family, and that's what this podcast and your work is all about. So let's continue down the topic of inflammation. patient comes to you today, right? What are the signs and what are the ways that the patient says, ouch, that are an indication to you that they have rampant chronic inflammation

that is taken over and hijacked their body? It's not that hard. Pretty much anybody with any chronic disease, inflammation is a player. And so whether you have the typical things that we understand is inflammation, like autoimmunity or allergy or eczema or skin disorders or the silent inflammation that's causing heart disease and cancer and diabetes and obesity and Alzheimer's. Anybody with a chronic condition is typically inflamed at some level. So my job is to then navigate and figure out what's causing it because when you get to the root

of inflammation, you don't actually have to treat the diseases directly. I don't really treat diabetes. I don't treat Alzheimer's. I don't treat heart. I don't treat cancer. I simply change the biology of the body to normalize function to reduce inflammation. And as a side effect, these things go away. And I think that's a really important concept because if we don't understand that root cause medicine is the way we need to go forward,

then we're going to just be constantly spinning out on all these new drug treatments and spending billions of dollars to address this. addressed to something, they found, oh, Alzheimer's is an inflammatory disease of the brain. So, what do you have to do? Well, they did a whole study taking Advil. It didn't work, and it caused all these side effects. Why? Because they didn't get to the root of the inflammation. Recently, a big study came out on aspirin.

Doctors have been saying, take aspirin to reduce inflammation, to prevent heart attacks. Well, if you read my stuff over the years, I've always said, bad idea. There are maybe some people who would benefit, but aspirin is not a side of it. affect free drug and kills as many people as asthma or AIDS a year because of bleeding, stomach bleeding, gastronetal bleeding, brain bleeding, strokes, hemorrhage. So the recent studies show that, oh, sorry, guys, we were wrong. You can't just take aspirin or reduce inflammation in heart attacks because it's going to kill you. It's more likely to kill you than the heart attack, so stop taking it, which was a huge shocker

because if you talk to any cardiologist or talk to any primary care doctor, everybody was on board. And I was kind of shocked because I looked at the actual science that was supporting this. And I even look at the American College of Cardiology Risk Calculator. There's actually a calculator on the American College of Cardiology website to put in whether or not you would either get harmed or have benefit from aspirin. And most of the people who are on aspirin actually don't even qualify or didn't qualify according to the previous guidelines. Now there's a whole bunch of people who shouldn't even, according to those guidelines, be taking it. So I think it's backwards to say we're going to shut off inflammation with anti-inflammatories or immune suppressants.

I mean, they're talking about using drugs like Humera, which is a $50,000-dollar-year anti-inflammatory drug that's used for autoimmune disease for depression. Why? Because depression is inflammation in the brain. The key isn't to shut off inflammation with the drug is to get rid of the source of inflammation. How does traditional and conventional medicine, again, well-intentioned, how does traditional and conventional medicine look at and treat chronic inflammation? Like how do they, where do they think it comes from? And then how do they decide how to tackle it?

You know, it's just shocking to me that there really isn't a conversation about why. Oh, we know Alzheimer's is inflammatory. Oh, we know depression's inflammatory. We know heart disease is inflammatory. We know cancer's inflammatory. Okay, so we need to give you anti-inflammatory drugs. there's no questioning of, gee, why in the first place is your immune system so pissed off? What's creating inflammation? And we know so much about it. It's not hard. It's our diet,

our inflammatory diet, it's stress. It's our microbiome issues. It's triggers that, for example, might be from latent infections or allergens or toxins, all these drive inflammation. So as a functional medicine doctor, my expertise is in being an expert in understanding toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, and diet because those are the things that drive inflammation. And so every individual has a different cocktail of things that are off. But my job is to figure out what is their particular triggers and get rid of them and then help their body, on the other hand, calm the inflammation down. So there's a whole bunch of things that cause inflammation, but there's a lot you can do to reduce inflammation. And it's not by taking Advil or aspirin or steroids or some chemo drug or a biologic

that costs 50 grand a year. It's by the simple things that we know how to do. Food is medicine, anti-inflammatory. Exercise is medicine, anti-inflammatory. Sleep is anti-inflammatory. Meditation is anti-inflammatory. And then there's a whole bunch of supplements you can take to help reduce inflammation like omega-3 fats and vitamin D and probiotics and zinc. and all the phytochemicals you can eat in your food that actually help reduce inflammation, all the spices and all colorful fruits and vegetables. So there's so much you can do to reduce inflammation in the ways that we see. Now, if you have some latent thing, right, if you have a lot of heavy metals,

or if you have a terrible bug in your gut or bacterial overgrowth, or you have some particular gluten sensitivity, you're going to have to deal with those things, too. But for most people, the basics just works so well. Well, let's talk about those basics. You talked about food and you talked about some of the foods that help, and we'll chat a little bit more about that. But what are some of the examples of the foods that might hurt? What are some of the foods that are out there that could be driving or at least supporting the process of chronic inflammation? And why do they support that process?

What we're eating and what we're not eating, right? So we're eating too many inflammatory foods. 60% of our diet in America is ultra-processed food. And what is that? Talk about the stuff that you see on the shelf. What is an example because, you know, one thing I've realized and why I want to break this down is that if you go to Times Square, if you go here in Santa Monica where we're recording and you go up to most people and you say, hey, do you eat healthy? Most people are going to say, yeah, I eat healthy because everybody has a different definition of what it is. Or you ask somebody, do you eat a lot of processed foods and most people say, no, I don't eat that much, a little bit here and there.

So describe it. What are we talking about here in ultra-process foods? There are a few commodity crops that are supported by all our government supports from the Farm Bill that are the raw materials for processed food. corn, wheat, and soy. And they're turned into all sorts of weird products. The corn is turned into all sorts of food additives and high fructose corn syrup. The wheat is turned into highly pulverized flour, which is highly inflammatory. The oils that come from soybeans and corn are often highly processed and inflammatory.

So we're eating a lot of ingredients that are derived from these commodities. products in ultra-processed food that we're not even aware of. So when you read Maltodextrian or something on a label, you don't know where that came from. That's a byproduct of corn from a science project in the factory. When you eat high-fructose corn syrup, same thing. So we're eating ingredients that are made from commodity crops. They're basically the same three ingredients made into all sizes, colors, shapes of chemically extruded food-like substances.

So if you actually cover over the packaging and look at the ingredients, you literally would see the same ingredients on almost every processed food. We know with a few little tweaks here and there. And you can't actually even tell what it is by reading the ingredient list. That's an ultra-processed food. If you buy a can of tomatoes and it says tomatoes, water, and salt, you know what that is. If the ingredient list is, you know, 14, 15, 35 items, and half of them you can't pronounce

to recognize they wouldn't have in your medicine cupboard or your kitchen cupboard, then you should not eat them. I mean, why should we be eating butylate hydroxy tallyene or orthodextrin or all kinds of weird compounds that are not our natural food supply? So those are ultra-processed foods.

And it's a huge component of our diet and it's highly inflammatory. So that's 60% of calories on average. And when you think of all the people who don't eat that much processed food, that people are eating, it might eat 70, 80%.

Right? When you average it all out of all Americans, it's about 60%. And kids, it's even worse. It's 70%. 70% for kids. I think 67 and something.

It's like terrifying to me. So that is really what we should be focused on not eating. It's driving inflammation. And sugar and starch is number one, two, and three. All the food additives, we eat about five pounds of food

at a year and they can be inflammatory, for example, all the thickeners, emulsifiers, things like kerogenean and gums that are used in processed food, they often have something called microbial translutaminase, which is a gluten product that they used to hold the food together, and all these mulstifiers, they cause leaky gut. So these damage your gut, and when you have a damaged gut, then guess what? The floodgates open, like we talked about earlier in the podcast, you start getting food proteins and bacterial proteins leaking into your bloodstream, your immune system gets all pissed off and it creates this vicious cycle of inflammation. So eliminating all that weird stuff is so important.

If you read the label and you don't know absolutely everything that's on there and you can't pronounce it, you wouldn't have it in your medicine cabinet. Don't eat it. Let's talk about next another category that is directly connected into inflammation. And that is sleep. And one of the biggest drivers of sleep that is affecting so many people is sleep apnea. Talk about sleep apnea and its direct connection to inflammation for most people and how can increase weight gain and a whole list of other things that are there. It reminds me this guy, actually.

Sleep apnea is basically where you have multiple episodes of stopping breathing at night. So you will snore. You might stop breathing for seconds or minutes. Your sleep's interrupted. And it's often not diagnosed because you're asleep and you don't know you're doing it. your partner might yell at you or scream at you or move to another room or put in earplugs. But you can actually use devices. One of them is a great little app.

It's called Sleep Cycle. And it just records your sleep on your phone and you don't need anything. It's just to put your phone by your bed and you can have it on airplane mode even. And it records your breathing and your sleep and you're snoring. And so you can see and hear you're snoring from the app. So I know my stepfather was a big snore. He never believed it. severe sleep apnea, and I literally recorded him with my cassette recorder back in the 70s

because he didn't believe me when you can hear him just snoring like an elephant, you know? So it's really common. It's often associated with being overweight with having a thick neck with sometimes structural issues, narrow palate, various things with your teeth. So you can be thin and habit, but there may be airway issues. There can be central sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea, so it can come from your brain or from your obstructive airway. And what that does, have those repeated wakening to the night

and the decreased quality of sleep, it actually causes insulin resistance. It actually causes diabetes. It actually makes you crave more sugar and eat more sugar and carbs. And you can often fix weight issues or diabetes or obesity unless you fix sleep apnea. And it reminds me of a patient I had when I was at Canyon Ranch,

who was a lawyer, and he's like, look, I can't lose this weight. I'm 50 pounds overweight. Can you help me? I'm like, okay, well, talking about your life. Well, I'm a lawyer. I'm like, okay, and start getting into me. How do you sleep? Well, okay. And I said, well, I'm tired all the time. I said, well, what do you mean? So, yeah, well, I have to have a stand-up desk. This is before stand-up desk were possible. I mean, we're popular stand-up. I mean, we're popular stand-up desk for it, a CPAP machine, and he lost 50 pounds like that. And his insulin resistance went away. Simply by sleep apnea. And he had terrible sleep apnea. We gave him a treatment for it, a CPAP machine. And he lost 50 pounds like that. And his insulin resistance went away simply by sleep- So sleep is so important in regulating your metabolism and inflammation. And we think of snoring as kind of like a funny thing when we might hit our partner or laugh at our parent or grandparent. But really, as a dear friend of both of ours, Dr. Stephen Lin, a dentist down in Australia, and he says, snoring is choking.

So you have to think of snoring as choking at night. So if you know if you're snoring or anybody else is snoring, you're choking. And you're choking and that prevents you from getting the right amount. of air and another version of that that's milder is breathing through your mouth. You've done some episodes on this. I've done some episodes on this. If you're breathing through your mouth at night and not through your nose, which is how we're designed to, that's also a sign that you might have a mild form of sleep apnea that needs to be addressed because it's directly tied into promoting inflammation in the body. Let's talk about another category of things that is a driver

of inflammation and that's our sedentary lifestyle. Talk to us more about that. Yeah, I mean, sitting is inflammatory as we're sitting here and do our podcast. And that's why so much of us are struggling is because when we don't move, we are actually increasing the poor metabolic function that we have, increasing the risk for muscle loss, increasing the risk for insulin resistance, increasing risk for just chronic inflammation in our body. So being sedentary is a huge risk for inflammation. On the other hand, exercising enough. but not too much, right? If you over-exercise, if you're ultra-marathoner or marathon runner, it creates more oxidative stress and inflammation in the body. But if you do regular exercise,

you literally can reduce the inflammation in your body. And that's one of the most important things besides your diet for regulating inflammation. You talked about stress. When you sit down with your patients and you talk to them about their lifestyle, what are the biggest contributors that you see over and over again, top level that are the big factors that drive chronic stress, individually from patients. You know, what is it? Is the relationship, is the lack of meaning and purpose? Like, what are the things that are out there that you see time and time again that are

really the drivers of the stress that everybody's dealing with? It's a great question. You know, why are some people more resilient than others? Why does people roll with the punches and others just get completely knocked off center? And one of the things we use in our practice at Cleveland Clinic and Lennox and Delta Wellness Center is we call the ACE questionnaire or adverse childhood events. And it's essentially a set of 10 questions or so that you get a score for that tracks trauma, where you abuse as a child, where you unsafe, just a whole series of questions that help understand

if as a child you experience lack of safety or worse, abuse, trauma, incest, so forth. the higher score, the more chronic disease risk you have, the more inflammation risk you have, the more likely are to have autoimmune disease, to have allergies, to have chronic illness. So looking at someone's childhood is so important and those impacts of trauma. And I think we're just beginning to understand how widespread that is. And, you know, for example, one in four Americans is a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Think about that. one in four Americans is like 80 million people.

That's a lot of people. Okay? I wonder if that's the 80 million that has autoimmune disease. I don't know, but it might be. And so as you begin to look at how do we manage the inflammation response, that's the first place I start. And then I look at how do people navigate their minds? Because your mindset plays a huge role in chronic disease.

And so if you're able to regulate your thoughts, if you're able to not be constantly triggered and activated by your environment, if you're able to have a level of equanimity, which can be cultivated and developed through practice, right? That's what meditation does and yoga does and prayer does. And there's a whole series of practices of whatever calls to you that you can do that really helps to reduce the level of stress in your system. if you don't learn how to do those things, then you just kind of have this unregulated, unmitigated stress response that drives so much chronic disease and that keeps you inflamed.

So, yes, I mean, we have to, one, look at the original sources and we have to look at, you know, how we navigate our lives and how our thoughts are and how our relationships are and how our community is. And so there are a lot of ways to work through that. And I think it's so important for people to understand that they need to build the structures in their life that are. constantly battling inflammation. So what is that for me? It's basic practices that I do. I meditate every day. I exercise. I eat an inflammatory diet. I take the supplements that help my gut microbiome

stay healthy. I make sure I have low levels of toxins that I'm exposed to. I make sure I connect with people I love, build community, have deep relationships. That's to me what I do to mitigate and to discharge the stress and inflammation. Because if you don't, if you don't intentionally do, it, it just accumulates. And it's tough because we are living in a bubble. So it's sort of like being in the Truman Show. We don't even know we're in it. And we're just victims of or in the matrix. And we don't know we're in it. So how do you get out of that and go, okay, I'm just going to pause for a minute and kind of reset. And I think that's a really important set of practices that we can all be doing. And it can be fun. It doesn't have to be difficult or stressful.

One of my favorite is is hot and cold therapies. So sauna, steam, ice plunge. It's amazing for discharging stress. Literally, your whole system will sort of reset. I remember working in a residency, and we had an enlightened residency where we only had to work 30 hours in a row, not 36 hours. I would get off noon, a day after call, and I would drive up to this hot springs in California, and I would soak in the hot springs, and then I would go in the ice pool, and the hot spring was super hot, and the icing was super cold, and it would go back and forth, back and forth. And I just know all my fatigue, all my stress from working on the hospital and the call and the trauma just would go away. And I would like reset.

And, you know, now it's a thing. But back then we just kind of was weird. But it's so powerful. So you have to learn for yourself. One of those things that you can incorporate that you like into your life on a daily basis that help regulate you. Let's go back to the gut microbiome. You listed that as one of the top things that a disrupted gut microbiome or a dysregulated gut microbiome, is one of the key drivers of inflammation.

You have in your lifetime on multiple occasions had a gut that's been messed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? We won't get into a whole journey. We made a couple documentaries about it. If people wanna watch them, they're at Dr.hyman.com slash plus. Sign up for a free trial. You could watch them, broken brain,

longevity docu-series, we've talked about them all. Yeah. But high level, what was missing for you when your gut was dysregulated and how did you begin to take the steps to bring it back into repair? I mean, I, you know, I didn't have the usual things. I was always a weirdo.

So for me, the first time was mercury poisoning. And mercury is powerfully damaging to the gut. It will bind to all the enzymes. It'll cause leaky gut. And it creates bad bugs growing and yeast overgrowth. So for me, I developed, you know, chronic diarrhea, bloating, irritable bowel, bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth. fungal overgrowth. And that was really, really, really hard to treat until I got the mercury down.

That was my first foray into bad gut. Then I kind of corrected it after I got the mercury out and rebuilt my gut. And then about five years ago, I had a bad tooth and ended up having a root canal. The root canal went bad, got the tooth pulled. And the dentist, who was a holistic dentist, said, you better take this antibiotic. And I'm like, okay. And I just was a little nervous about it, and it's a particularly antibiotic that's great for dental infections called clindomycin, but it's also the biggest cause of what we call C. difficile, which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills 30,000 people a year. Very difficult to treat, and they're using fecal transplants to treat it almost 100% cure. And the typical antibiotics that are used

don't work that well. So I basically developed C. difficile, which was a terrible intestinal infection, colitis, and that caused colitis. And then that developed into inflammatory bowel disease. I was having 20 bloody bowel movements a day, severe pain. I mean, it was just, I lost 30 pounds. It was bad. And all my normal tricks didn't work. Why? Because my whole system was so screwed up by the mold in my house and by this infection that took over that even taking prednisone didn't work. And I was, you know, next step was taking a biologic and I didn't want to do that. And so I began to sort of figure out how do I really reset my system? And sometimes you just need a powerful set of tools to drive the body out of a stuck

inflammatory cycle. And based on my experience of the science and what I understood, I use a combination of things that just almost immediately flipped my system. One was ozone therapy. It was hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I use high dose intravenous vitamins and vitamin C and also stem cells. cells. And those four things, and exosomes, those four things really flit my system out of this stuck inflammatory cycle. But that was weird and that's rare. And most people I don't need to do that with,

but I'm a weirdo. So I get all the worst of everything and then I have to figure it out and then I kind of learn how to sort of make my body work better. Well, one of the unique things that came out of that is that once you got your system back to baseline and it was really bad, right? It was really bad. We've talked about that before. But once you got it back to baseline, you went down this whole rabbit hole of how the power of phytochemicals, as you talked about earlier, phytonutrients, phytochemicals, these plant compounds on a regular basis can help you maintain this level of where you're at. So talk to us about this. How is this that food is really information in this category of phytochemicals? Yeah. So for decades, we've known that prebiotic fibers are

healthy and prebiotic foods are healthy. What is a prebiotic? It's something it feeds the good bacteria. So it could be various kinds of fibers that are in plant foods, special foods like artichokes, asparagus, plantains, Jerusalem artichokes, all have these special fibers that are really good food for the microbiome. We also knew the probiotics are important to probiotics. There's all kinds of strains. We also knew that that we need to make sure we have the right amount of just general fiber as well. So those are those are things we understood. But what I didn't understand was the importance of the phytochemicals in food to feed the good bugs. Because not only do they eat the fiber, but they also are stimulated and love

certain phytochemicals. For example, there's a really important bacteria that I had almost none of, which is called acerminemia mucinophilia. Mucinophilia means mucin loving, right? Mucin is mucus. Why do you have that? Well, you want to protect your intestinal lye. and not get a leaky gut. So this bacteria creates this incredible, thick mucus layer that prevents bad stuff from getting in. But if you don't have this bacteria, you can't get that. Well, when I had this problem,

you couldn't actually take an Acrimancia probiotic. Now they have them. But Acrimancia love polyphenols, which are these colorful compounds in fruits and vegetables. They love cranberry. They love pomegranate. They love green tea. They love curcumin.

They love all these, credible plant compounds. And so that was a huge insight. So we need prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols to create a healthy gut, which is why eating a colorful diet is so important. Beautiful. And you've written about Ackromancey. I will link to the blog post that you have there. You even talk a little bit about this kind of shake, which includes pomegranate concentrate and a bunch of other things. Cranberry and green tea. So we'll link to that as well. That really helped me, by the way. That really helped me reset my gut. I created this cocktail hell of stuff that was designed to incorporate all the knowledge that it had over 30 years of

functional medicine. And there was a lot of different things in little containers and things. We've now created something called gut food, which will soon be available on getpharmacy.com, which combines all these things into one simple powder that you can mix in water or in something else and actually consume it and it will help to provide the food for your gut. We're calling it gut food. Let's talk about testing when it comes to inflammation. Are there tests that you use and recommend, both with patients that you work with, but also if people don't have access to a functional medicine doctor, are there tests that you recommend they ask their doctor for to help them understand how inflamed they are?

Yeah. I mean, there's two aspects to this. One is checking for inflammation to see if you're inflamed and then checking for why you have inflammation. It's two different things. So why your inflammation may be imbalances in your gut flora, it may be toxins, it may be allergies, it may be allergies, it may be your diet, it may be stressed, right? So we have to go down those rabbit holes. In terms of the actual measure of inflammation, we're getting much more sophisticated about it. So there's a common test that your doctor can do called C-reactive protein, and that's really

important. It has to be high sensitivity C-reactive protein. That can help you determine if there's a generalized level of inflammation. It's good, but it's not perfect. Then there's a sedimentation rate, which is an age-old test. It looks at how long it takes your blood to settle. If it's got a lot of inflammatory proteins, it doesn't settle to the test you very fast. can be assigned. So there's common things we use. We can also look at cytokines. You can look at interleukins and we can look at two endocrosis factor alpha and other biomarkers of inflammation. But that's just scratching the surface. There's a whole, as I mentioned earlier, there's this scientist at Stanford who's measured these unique analytes in your blood that doctors

normally don't test that are the most predictive of aging and chronic disease. So we should probably be testing things like that. So those are the ways we kind of to measure inflammation. We can also look at auto-antibodies. We can look at allergens. We can look at immunoglobulin levels. There's a lot of ways you can look at what's going on with the immune system. We look at T-cell function and lots of things. So the basic tests are available through conventional medicine, but the key is not just seeing if you're inflamed. The key is to ask why you're inflamed and then go down the rabbit holes of looking for the causes. Can you share a case study from your practice of anybody? Because we have so many different

names for modern diseases that are driven by inflammation. But if you can think of one person who had the right mixture of a lot of different root factors that you helped and worked with to get their inflammation under control and then get back to health. Absolutely. I'm just thinking of so many patients that are flooding my brain right now. But I'll just share one story of a woman with rheumatoly arthritis, terrible migraines, and a lot of gut issues.

And, you know, typically she was seeing her rheumatologist and getting all my rheumatology drugs and really struggling. And so I said, well, okay, these are all inflammatory problems. Migraines, gut issues, rheumatoid arthritis. Let's look and see what's causing it. So it turned out she had very high antibodies to gluten. So she was gluten sensitive. And quite significantly, she had bacterial overgrowth in her gut. And she had super high heavy metals. So systematically, I got gluten out of her diet. I healed her gut. I got rid of the heavy metals. And she had complete recovery.

And all the things that were abnormal, her C-reactive protein, her rheumatoid arthritis antibodies, her migraines, her leaky gut all normalized. And now it's 20 years later and she's still amazing and got rid of all those diagnoses because they were all caused of inflammation. You talked about diet, you talked about additional therapies like sauna, hot and cold, other things like that. We talked about exercise. Talk about supplementation. How does it play a role and how could it be helpful on the topic of inflammation? Well, you know, just the most basic things can be helpful, right? So there was a study published that showed that if you take a multivitamin,

your C-reactor protein level goes down, which is awesome. But that's just one thing. And what is the mechanism of that that you think? Yeah. So we have a system in our body to control inflammation. And that system requires nutrients. And many of us are nutrient depleted. So, for example, a multivitamin will reduce C-reactive protein. And it does so by activating all sorts of enzymes. So what are vitamins and minerals? They're basically helpers. One-third of your entire DNA codes for enzymes.

What enzymes do, they turn one molecule to another molecule, one chemical to another chemical in your body. And all the enzymes, we have require co-enzymes or co-factors, helpers. And what are those? Those are vitamins and minerals. And so some of us need a lot more of this one or that one. And if we're low, which a lot of us are, this is not my opinion. This is the government's own surveys and diagnostic testing and giant studies of tens and tens of thousands of people, that over 90% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level you need to prevent deficiency disease.

So not how much you need for optimal health or immune function, but how much vitamin do you need to not get scurvy? I mean, to not get rickets? Not very much. How much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? not very much, but how much vitamin C or vitamin D do you need to regulate your immune system and reduce inflammation? A lot more. So many of us are deficient in nutrients. That's the mechanism. And then there's specific nutrients that are really important in inflammation. Omega-3 fats, number one. We need the omega-3 fats like EP and D-CHA that typically come from fish oil.

We need the vitamin D levels to be adequate and not low because vitamin D regulates hundreds of genes, that regulate inflammation. We need to make sure we have adequate amounts of things that help to boost detoxifying compounds in your body like glutathione, which comes from the, for example, broccoli family, when you eat these compounds, they help to increase glutathione, but also you can take first supplements to do that, like an acetylcysteine. You think the government is now restricting in some ways, which makes me very nervous, but this is a substance we've used for, you know, a long time, decades and decades since I've been in medical school in medicine as a therapy to help recover people from Tylenol overdose and liver failure, from kidney failure, from

die contrast, and many other things. So for asthma and lung inflammation, so it's one of the most powerful anti-inflammatories in our body. So I take supplements to increase glutifion, which really helps. So there's a few things we can do strategically. And then, of course, there's things like curcumin and there's polyphenol supplements and various other things you can take. But those are the most important. Talk to us about the role that fasting place, fasting in all its different forms when it comes to chronic inflammation that plagues so many people. Yeah.

So our bodies were designed to deal with scarcity. And we have hundreds of genes that help control starvation and put our bodies in a healing and repair state when we are lacking food. We have almost no genes that help us deal with abundance and excellent. like the 500 extra calories of corn syrup that every American is exposed to since 1970. So when we are in a state of scarcity, our bodies kick into action a whole set of mechanisms that reduce inflammation, that increase antioxidant systems, that build muscle, that get rid of fat, burn fat, which is good in the case of starvation, and that help to increase stem cell

function and many, many other beneficial factors, improve mitochondrial health, clean up your cells, get rid of waste. I mean, it's quite amazing what happens when you have scarcity, when you starve, which is a good thing because you want to keep alive as long as possible. So everything is in your body is like, I'm just going to fix everything, so I don't die. So how do you get to that state? Well, there's a lot of techniques that are now being talked about, and they all have the same mechanisms, whether it's time restricted eating, which is eating within an eight hour,

or 10 hour, 12 hour window, whether it's intermittent fasting, which is having a 24, 36 hour fast once a week or more prolonged fast, whether it's fasting, mimicking diets, which are calorie restricted diets for five days of 800 calories, whether it's a ketogenic diet, which restricts carbs and increases fat, that's actually what we get in when we're not eating. We get in a ketogenic diet. When we don't have food, our body's going ketosis, but you can do that by eating more fat. So all those ways of eating actually activate the body's own healing mechanism. And what happens? Well, you reduce inflammation. You increase antiocese. You increase stem cell production, you increase muscle, you increase bone density, you increase

cognitive function and brain chemistry and neuroplasticity. You do all these things simply by activating these ancient healing systems that are designed to protect us from starvation. So it's kind of like controlled starvation in a way. And that's a good thing. And I think it's really important for us to think about how we do those things on a regular basis. And I try to incorporate those strategies regularly in my life.

So now we're going to go to. our community, our YouTube comments, our Facebook comments, Instagram, and podcast community that emailed in. We're going to take a few questions here, and we're going to start off with the first one. And the first one we have here is what role do grains play when it comes to inflammation, chronic inflammation in the body? Can grains help or hurt chronic inflammations in the body? Great question. Pends on the grain. White flour surely is one of the most inflammatory foods on the planet, whereas ancient grains like Himalayan tartary buckwheat may be one of the most anti-inflammatory foods on the planet. So it's not grains as a whole. It's which grains in what form? How are they grown?

Where were they grown? What were they grown with? Are they full of pesticides? Are they full like why I was saying? I mean, there's so many layers of things that will actually determine the answer of that question. In general, though, the way we eat grains in this country is as white flour. 90% of the grains we eat in this country is white flour. Very few people are. eat whole grain foods. Maybe there's a whole wheat bread, but if you look at the label, it's mostly white flour with high fructose corn syrup with a few flakes of whole wheat thrown in there. It's not like the dense breads you get in Europe or Germany. So I'm not against grains, but I do think that there are our challenges for people who are a lot of eating a lot of flour.

It's probably one of the most inflammatory foods. And if you have a leaky gut, if you have an imbalance in your microbiome, if you're not having an intense, system in your gut. Grains can be a problem. So I tend to eliminate grains if I'm really aggressively trying to reduce inflammation, not forever, but for a short period of time to try to reset the system to heal the leaky gut and get people functional again. And if you, if you, if you do that, you also do a number of other things because grains are starch and depend on how much you eat, right? Having a half a cup of black rice or a half a cup of buckwheat may not be a problem. But typically we eat huge amounts of grains, and that drives another pathway for inflammation,

which is insulin resistance or prediabetes or blood sugar problems. And so we have to understand that we have to reduce the starch and sugar in our diet. And one way of that is actually reducing grains. But whole grains can be part of a healthy diet. It's just when do you get to eat them, who gets to eat them, in what context, with what other foods, and where do those grains come from? And are they, you know, modern hybridized grains that are full of starch and sugar? Or are they ancient grains that have all these phytochemicals and other beneficial properties? Next question. How does hormonal balance or imbalance related to inflammation?

So the biggest driver of chronic inflammation is stress, which drives all kinds of hormonal dysregulation. It screws up your hormones, the sex hormones, your insulin, bloods. sugar, cortisol, adrenaline, and that really drives huge amounts of inflammation. So if you actually are highly stressed, that will drive a lot of the pathology. I mean, insulin is another hormone. That is a big one that drives inflammation. That's one of the biggest ones. We talked a lot about that. You'll see people who are taking hormones, for example, estrogen or the birth control pill. And it depends on what you're taking. If you're taking, for example, Premarin, it raises inflammation in the body. It causes a high CRP.

so does the birth control pill. So a lot of people are taking the birth control pill. I'm not saying people should stop the birth control pill, but you want to make sure you mitigate the effects of that. And recently did an Instagram live with the founder of Eben, Sarah Morgan, talking about the ways in which, for example, medications deplete nutrients and affect the body adversely. So, for example, if you're on the pill, the birth control pill,

you may need to take certain nutrients to mitigate the effects of that and help reduce inflammation. So certain things I would say, never take like Premarin, which is a hormone that drives inflammation. But I certainly wouldn't tell everybody to stop the birth control pill, but I think you have to know what you're doing and actually offset the harm by taking the right nutrients to actually mitigate the damage and the inflammation that comes from that. Last question here before we go into final thoughts and conclusions. Can inflammation be tied to our genetics? Are some people more prone to developing

markers of inflammation, especially chronic inflammation? Absolutely. I mean, we're all heterogeneous. You know, we have 20,000 genes, we have about 5 million variations in those genes, and some of those variations predisposed your inflammation. And we test those. I do that in my actual practice looking at saliva swabs that measure DNA. And we can look for variations in certain genes that affect the cytokines like interleukins and TNAF alpha and other genes. And we can see, oh, you're someone who if you get some trigger is way more like. to be inflamed. So there are people who are predisposed inflammation, but that doesn't mean they're predestined to inflammation. So they need to identify, one, the sources of inflammation

in their life and get rid of them. We talked about those. And they need to include anti-inflammatory strategies in their life, an anti-inflammatory diet, more polyphenols, probiotics, antioxidants, and obviously other anti-inflammatory strategies like adequate sleep and exercise and stress reduction and so forth. So hot and cold therapies, we just need to upregulate the anti-inflammatory system and calm down the inflammatory system. So yes, there are people who are genetically predisposed, but it doesn't mean they're predestance. So not everybody will have access to a functional medicine doctor. Obviously, if they do, that's fantastic and amazing. You can go to IFM.org and find somebody in your area. It is often expensive. Insurance doesn't cover it, and it's not available to everybody, but if you can,

it's a great thing. If you can't, and for example, they wanted to explore the top of genetics, a lot of people have 23 and Me data. Are there any of those websites that you like or would recommend to people that they can plug in their raw data and get back some of these unique markers that they have to pay attention for their own genetics? I mean, there are the genetic genie, which is sort of an interpretive guide where you can plug on your 23Media data, which can be helpful for looking for problems with methylation and glutathione and detoxification and some of the inflammation genes.

23 me only does a small slice of your genome. It doesn't look at everything. So we do more clinical testing, and I tend to do that and focus on that. So there may be so much going on right now in the space. I may not be familiar with it, but there probably are companies that are looking at inflammatory genes that are available to consumers. The question is, what do you do with that information? And I think that's the challenge for people about how do you change your diet? What are you doing?

It gets a little granular, so it's usually better to work with someone who's experienced to understand these tests, how to mitigate your risk, and to create a lifestyle that actually helps to reduce information.