The Dr. Hyman Show - What Damages Your Brain And How To Reverse It

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and AG1. About 30 years ago, when I became seriously ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, I felt like I simultaneously had dementia, depression, and ADD. My brain felt broken! That’s when I discovered Functional Medicine. One huge benefit I experienced when I reversed my chronic fatigue syndrome was how well my brain improved. Over the years, I fine-tuned my approach for a sharper, faster, and better brain.  In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I am talking about things that can lead to a broken brain and my top strategies for improving brain health.  This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and Athletic Greens. When you sign up today, ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef free in your first box plus $20 off. To receive this offer, go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, Athletic Greens is offering 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting drinkAG1.com/HYMAN. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What leads to a broken brain? (5:36 / 3:00)  Fixing your brain starts with fixing your body (7:19 / 5:40)  Things that damage the brain (8:21 / 6:15)  Brain-boosting foods and supplements (10:51 / 7:43) 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. People don't connect how they feel with what they eat, or how much they rest or sleep, how much they exercise, or how much time they take for friends and community and connection, and how much bad news and media they're exposed to. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. One of today's episode sponsors is ButcherBox. I'm always being asked how I get enough high quality protein into my diet and where to find it. With all of the conventionally raised animal products flooding the supermarket,

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which are part of my weekly meal plans too. Grass-fed ground beef is the first protein I recommend for people who are trying to get more comfortable in the kitchen because you can just throw it in a pan with some sea salt, herbs, and spices and make a great meal. One of my favorites is sauteing it with lots of fresh garlic, onions, peppers, cumin, chili powder, and oregano, and just tossing it in more bed of greens for a super easy homemade taco salad. Just talking about it makes my mouth water. It makes me hungry. If you've been looking for a way to get more high-quality protein in your own diet, be sure to check out grass-fed beef from ButcherBox, along with all their other humanely raised antibiotic and hormone-free meats. They make eating well easy,

delicious, and accessible. Right now, ButcherBox is proud to give new members two pounds of ground beef in your first box, plus $20 off. To receive this offer, go to butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy. That's butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy to receive two pounds of ground beef plus $20 off. Now, the basis of any healing protocol should be whole real food. But with all the GMO foods and long transportation, storage times, and monoculture farming methods, depletion of our soils, food's not as nutritionally dense as it once was, even good stuff. And that's why I recommend supplementing a whole foods diet with a high quality multivitamin as a basis for any health oriented program.

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All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hymen. And now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy when they have to place for conversations that matter. And today, if you have a brain, if you care about your brain, if you want to learn how to take care of your brain, you better listen up because we're going to talk about how we can improve your brain health. And we're doing it as part of our health fight series, which are small little bits of information that can help you take small steps to live a healthier life over

time now do you ever feel like you can't focus for more than 50 minutes at a time or you lose your thoughts we're in the middle of a thought or you feel like you're in a daze or a brain fog or maybe you're just depressed or anxious or have ADD or worse, right? I know these feelings. I've had them. About 30 years ago, almost, I developed chronic fatigue syndrome. And it felt like I had dementia, depression, and ADD all at once. My brain was broken.

I really couldn't focus. I couldn't pay attention. I used to be able to see 30 patients a day, remember all their medical history, dictate them at the end of the day with no problem. I couldn't remember where I was at the end of a sentence from where I started. I couldn't read my kids a book out loud and actually understand at the same time. My brain really was broken. I couldn't sleep.

I was exhausted. And I learned that I had mercury poisoning, and that broke my brain. My brain was just a mess. I had terrible brain fog. I couldn't focus for much time. I was a physician trying to like practice medicine. It was really tough. I couldn't even remember my patient names.

And I knew I had to do something different. And that's when I discovered functional medicine almost 30 years ago. And when I reversed my chronic fatigue when i detox from mercury when i fix all the other systems in my body my mitochondria my gut my immune system everything that was going wrong i was able to reverse my chronic fatigue syndrome and my brain got better and since then i've written 18 books in 20 years my brain is great i feel good and i'm sharper faster and better than ever and if you want to get that same transformation, you should listen up because I'm going to tell you how I did it. And now everybody might be a little bit different, but we don't learn how to take care of our brains. We know how to prevent heart disease. Eat this, don't eat that, exercise, don't smoke, control your blood pressure,

your cholesterol. But most of us have no idea how to take care of our brain, which is, I would say, a pretty important origin. Maybe more important than our heart. You can always get a heart transplant. You can't get a brain transplant. And that's a problem. Maybe one day, but not quite yet. So I want you to experience what it feels like to clear your head, to have a sharp brain, to fix your broken brain if you have one. And most of us have some degree of that. So today we're going to talk about what causes a broken brain and what are the top strategies

for helping to improve brain health and optimize your brain. What causes a broken brain? Now, most of us never learn how to manage our own health. We don't get an instruction manual when we're born. We don't get a guidebook. We don't have help like we do with our apps, help section. And we basically fumble our way through and we try to use all sorts of practices we think might be helping us, but they're actually harming us.

We eat too much sugar to get energy. We drink too much caffeine. We have too much alcohol and we manage our emotions and our and our mental state through self-medication sometimes even worse drugs and we use it to manage our minds and our moods but we don't connect these behaviors with how crappy we feel so the key insight here is that your brain is not just this disembodied organ that is sitting in your skull connected from the rest of what's going on in your body. We learned about the blood-brain barrier in medical school, but that's ridiculous. The brain is constantly interacting and communicating with everything going on in your body.

Yes, you have a blood-brain barrier, but it's not like it's something that's just inviolable. It's permeable and things go across and impact it. So everything that's happening in your body impacts your brain. In fact, the title of my book, The Ultra Mind Solution, was how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. Fixing your body first. And then you can see, well, then maybe I have some issues with my thoughts and my emotions and my feelings and my trauma, whatever. But if you are eating a crappy diet, if you're drinking too much, if you're smoking, if you're not exercising, if you have mercury poisoning, if your vitamin D is low, if you're B12 deficient,

if your thyroid is not working, your brain's not going to work. So you just got to figure out how to get your brain healthy. So fixing your brain starts with fixing your body and optimizing all the inputs into your system and minimizing the bad stuff, right? The bad inputs, whether it's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, bad bugs, drugs like caffeine, alcohol, sugar, whatever is causing your brain to not work. The brain is pretty resilient and it can recover and heal given the right conditions.

And I've seen miracles. I've seen people reverse Alzheimer's, reverse autism, reverse ADD, reverse depression, things like bipolar disease, schizophrenia. I mean, you just wouldn't even imagine how powerful this is. In fact, Christopher Palmer, who's been on the podcast, talked about how he used a ketogenic diet to reverse Alzheimer's and optimize mitochondrial function as a key way to treating mental illness. There's departments of metabolic psychiatry at

Stanford, of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard. So we now actually have an understanding that the stuff I was talking about 15 years ago, by the way, was way ahead of its time and also extremely important to understand if we're going to fix our brains. So what's the worst things we do for our brains? Well, we have too much sugar and fine starch, carbs, and not enough good fats, and not enough intake of the right nutrients. A lot of nutrient deficiencies, omega-3s, vitamin D, magnesium, to name a few, that are critical for brain health. And that affects over 50% to 90% of the population with deficiencies in those nutrients.

Also, we're exposed to all kinds of weird things in our diet that are chemicals, like artificial sweeteners, like MSG, environmental toxins that actually cause damage to the brain, heavy metals, all these things damage our brain. So a lot of things cause brain damage, not just what I mentioned, but things like lack of sleep, too much stress, not exercising, overuse of certain substances like alcohol or other drugs. Now, I found over the years, really fascinating to me, it's really quite amazing that people don't connect how they feel with what they eat or how much they rest or sleep, you know,

how much they exercise or how much time they take for friends and community and connection and or how much bad news and media they're exposed to. I had a patient who said, I'm so tired. I don't know what to do. I'm always tired. My brain's not working. I said, well, how much do you sleep at night? He goes, well, five, six hours. I'm like, well, get eight hours sleep and try to see what happens. Sleep reviews don't connect the dots.

Once you make those connections, you can start to change those simple habits. It can have profound effects on your health long-term and make a lot of little small changes that can make profound impact. Now, feeling fully focused, fully energized, having great brain health, it requires really following the principles of functional medicine, which is taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff. It's taking out the bad food, toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, adding in the good stuff. The right whole foods, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, relaxation, connection, meaning, love, purpose. All these things are necessary for our brain to function properly.

And most of us don't get enough of the good stuff. We don't get whole real food. We often are deficient in nutrients. We're not exposed to enough natural light. We don't get enough fresh air. We don't drink clean water because most of it's polluted. We don't have periods of deep rest and relaxation. We don't sleep enough.

We don't live in rhythm. We don't exercise. We're too focused on being busy in our careers and all kinds of stuff to focus on community and meaning and purpose and love. And, and so we basically have to optimize those things in order for us to be healthy. One of the things that I really focus on, well, food is the number one thing that controls your brain. And we've seen miracles by simply people changing their diet from treating depression to Alzheimer's to everything from ADD to, to even schizophrenia, as I mentioned.

So eating real food is so important. When I say real food, I mean real food, not processed food or ultra processed food, whole, organic, fresh, local, unprocessed food. Basically, it has a barcode or a label you might want to get rid of. If your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't eat it. Does she know what a Lunchable is or a Pop-Tart? Probably not. Drunk food is just bad uh fast food is bad ultra processed food is bad some processed food is okay a can of sardines is processed right it's in a can it's got salt

maybe oil can of tomatoes is processed it's tomatoes water and salt that's okay but if you can't recognize where it came from like a pop tart you probably don't want to eat it and some things that seem like real food are really not like yogurt yogurt is often filled with high fructose corn syrup colors additives gums thickeners all these things are pretty pretty nasty for us also you want to eat a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables i know you hear me say this all the time but these are full of phytochemicals. These impact the brain, the deep dark reds, yellows, oranges, greens, blues are so important because the color is where the phytochemicals are. It's where the medicine is. These are anti-inflammatory compounds or detoxifying compounds, antioxidants. They're mitochondrial boosting, energy producing compounds, brain powering molecules.

We need to eat that. So get lots of colorful plant foods blueberries dark green leafy vegetables um also go for the slow carbs not the fast carbs right i'm not saying no carbs i mean basically broccoli is a carb right but it's quite different than white bread or from sugar cauliflower and ice cream and um are all carbs right but if you know cauliflower it's good for you but an ice cream sundae is probably not right so eating whole plant foods also will have lots of fiber helps to reduce the surges of sugar that cause some of the problems in fact we call now alzheimer's type 3 diabetes it's like diabetes of the brain from too much sugar. So eating lots of fiber helps slow the surge of sugar, nuts, seeds, lots of veggies, whole grains, beans, all really can be very helpful. And it also keeps your gut healthy. And by the way, your gut and your brain are

connected. You need to maintain your healthy microbiome to actually protect your brain health and prevent alzheimer's also fat the brain is made up of 60 omega-3 fat it's mostly fat in your brain so you need to be a fat head and going on low-fat diets are pretty bad for the brain um in my book east back yet then i talk about fats a lot and when the good fats what are the bad fats and how to get the omega-3 fats from your diet from algae or fish my brain worked pretty good before but I actually have gotten on a better fat diet including some things like MCT oil which is really powerful for the brain and my focus and my clarity has just gone through the roof now also you want to optimize protein. We need protein because if you lose muscle because you don't eat enough protein, it leads to this cascade of problems with

low muscle mass, fatty deposits in your muscle, leads to prediabetes, lowers your testosterone, which you need for brain function, lowers growth hormone, which you need for brain repair, increases cortisol, which causes brain damage, literally causes the shrinking of your hippocampus the memory center of the brain so you want to make sure that you're having enough protein ideally animal protein which is better able to build muscle and when you age faster your brain takes a hit it shrinks so you can keep your brain good by eating good fats and the right amounts of protein, omega-3 eggs, protein shakes. I like Virginia Lee May's goat wafer protein shake in the morning, nut butters, fish for breakfast. All that is great.

Also, stop poisoning your brain. Get rid of all the bad stuff. Sugar, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, food additives, preservatives, environmental chemicals, all of which really are a problem. Supplements are also very important for the brain. A good quality problem. Supplements also very important for the brain. A good quality multi-magnesium is important for the brain, calms the brain. It reduces the stimulation of the NDMA receptors, which is actually producing Alzheimer's risk. Vitamin D is important for the brain. Omega-3 fats, probiotics, all the B vitamins, folate, B6, B12, are critical for your brain and your neurotransmitter function and

you can find all these versions the best versions the cleanest versions at my online store at store.drhyman.com along with other brain boosting supplements so you need to design a plan for your life that includes your overall health but you ought to incorporate some of these important practices for your brain but the good news is what prevents brain problems, prevents heart disease, prevents cancer, prevents diabetes and everything else. So now I can do a million different things, but these principles are really important for brain health. Now, if you've tried all these things and you're still struggling, you got to dig a little deeper. For me, it was mercury poisoning. I was exercising. I was trying to eat well. I was doing all the right things, taking my vitamins, but it still wasn't better. So sometimes you got to figure things out. It

might be Lyme disease. It might be mold. It might be food sensitivities. It might be some gut issues. You need to probably work with a functional medicine doctor to figure it out. And you can go to ifm.org and you can find a practitioner certified in your area. So taking care of your brain is important. Don't neglect it. It's an important organ. And if it starts to go bad, you can fix it, but don't wait too long. So that's it for today's Health Byte. Be sure to share with your friends and family on social media. I'd really love to hear how have you helped your own brain problems? So there's mood disorders, attention disorders, memory disorders. What have you done to help optimize your brain? We'd love

to learn from you. And we hope to see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing,

which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods, to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use, and that my team uses, to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter.

I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.