The Dr. Hyman Show - Why You Probably Need More Omega-3s In Your Diet

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and FOND Bone Broth.   Omega-3 is a fatty acid your body uses in all kinds of ways. Its benefits for our body are hard to overstate. But unlike most fats, your body can’t manufacture omega-3. Instead, it’s an “essential nutrient,” which means the only way to get it is through your diet.   In today’s episode, I talk with Paul Greenberg, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and Dr. Daniel Amen about the importance of essential fatty acids like omega-3 for sleep, brain and heart health, and more.   Paul Greenberg is the bestselling author of Four Fish, American Catch, and The Omega Principle. A regular contributor to the New York Times and many other publications, Mr. Greenberg is the writer-in-residence at the Safina Center, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, and the recipient of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature.   Dr. Andrew Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientist making the largest discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets.   Dr. Daniel Amen is a physician, double-board-certified psychiatrist, 12-time New York Times bestselling author, and founder and CEO of Amen Clinics, with 10 US locations. Dr. Amen is the author of many books including the mega-bestseller Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, as well as The End of Mental Illness, Memory Rescue, Healing ADD, and Your Brain Is Always Listening. His new book, You, Happier: The 7 Neuroscience Secrets of Feeling Good Based on Your Brain Type, is now available.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and FOND Bone Broth.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.   To experience the amazing health benefits of FOND Bone Broth, go to fondbonebroth.com/drhyman and use code HYMAN20 to get 20% off your purchase.   Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Paul Greenberg Dr. Andrew Huberman Dr. Daniel Amen

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When they started separating out people who had a couple of portions of fish a week from those who didn't. The ones who didn't eat fish and took the fish oil supplements got better. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones,

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Podcast. There are many benefits of omega-3 fatty acids. As an important component of cell membranes, they are used by the body in a lot of ways and are especially prevalent in the brain. But unlike most fats, your body can't manufacture omega-3s. Instead, they are an essential nutrient, which means the only way to get them is through your diet or supplementation. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on why we need omega-3 fatty acids to optimize our health. Dr. Hyman speaks with Paul Greenberg on fish consumption and supplementation of omega-3s for heart health, with Dr. Andrew Huberman on the importance of essential fatty acids for optimal sleep, and with Dr. Daniel Amen on omega-3s and brain health.

Let's dive in. Let's talk about fish oil. Yes. Because you wrote a whole book about this. I did. The Omega Principle. I did. And as a doctor, I think that omega-3

deficiency is a huge contributor to all sorts of problems my patients have. And over the years, I've tested thousands, tens of thousands of people for their levels of essential fatty acids, including omega-3 fats. And I found significant deficiencies among across a wide range of populations, especially vegans. I mean, they're like zero. And that affects mood, brain development, nerve function, regulates inflammation, heart health, brain health, dementia, depression, cancer. I mean, and yet so many of the studies that have come out that have been published recently have seemed to debunk the idea that omega-3 fats are beneficial for heart disease or cancer or anything else. So the population is left confused,

as usual, by nutrition advice because we're all told that fish is healthy, that if you eat fish, looking at the studies on fish, you will have better health outcomes. But then there's all this contradictory information that if you eat omega-3s from pills, it doesn't do anything. So what's the deal? Where are we at? Okay. Well,

first of all, let's just clear the air about fish. Fish is just great because it's a lot of protein per calorie. It's a lot of nutrients per calorie. And if you're eating fish for your, you know, often for dinner, you're not eating other bad stuff, right? So if you swap eating fish for your, you know, often for dinner, you're not eating other bad stuff. Right. So if you swap in fish for beef, I think generally speaking, you're going to be ahead of the game. That's just sort of my general opinion on this. You may differ from me. You know, I would say I would qualify that saying in a perfect world.

Yes. Right. But in a world of factory farm meat and pristine fish a hundred percent yeah in a world of you know regeneratively raised grass-fed meat versus polluted ocean fish i'm not so sure right right okay but let's keep in mind what the average american is doing right the average american is having feedlot meat yes Yes. And if they have a choice between, say, like cheapish wild fish that they could pick up in the market versus that feedlot beef, I think they're ahead. So there's that. The omega-3 question, I think, has a lot to do with what people have called the threshold effect.

You know, it's very true that if you go on a vegan diet, that your omega-3 levels are just going to plummet. And I know this personally because I actually have been experimenting with a vegan diet. My body is a laboratory, but for the last- So you have no omega, you have no omega-3s, but no mercury now. Right, exactly. Exactly. And my, so my, you know, I went to omega quant, which is one of the tests, just like a finger

prick test. And I had below 5% blood, omega-3 blood lipid levels, which I would say you would qualify as being deficient, right? Are you more depressed? That's a whole other story. But when I was eating fish every day, meanwhile, for three meals a day, my omega-3 blood lipid levels were 11%, 12%. Somebody said to me when they saw that, probably similar to those of Sicilian

fishermen, circa 1890. Right, exactly. You know, that's, and then probably what we should have had maybe in Neolithic times. So in between vegan and fish every day, though, I think that there's a compromise, which is equivalent to about two portions of oily fish per week. And that if we do that, I think we'll probably hit that threshold effect. A couple of cans of wild sardines. A couple of cans of wild sardines, a couple of cans of wild salmon. I think we'll probably hit that threshold effect. Now, where it gets sticky

with the omega-3 supplements is when they start to do some of these randomized control trials around omega-3 supplements, I think a lot of times they don't necessarily take into account who's eating fish and who's not eating fish. And they throw the supplement on top of everything. So like most recently, there was the VITAL study, which came out of Brigham and Women's Hospital. So, you know, in that case, they actually did keep track of who was a fishery and who wasn't. But across the whole spectrum, they showed pretty much a null effect when it came to coronary heart disease, right? You know, from five years of taking a gram of omega-3 every single day for five years. So pretty significant. No result

Um, I should qualify that by saying that when they took out strokes They did show something something of a degree of effect on heart attacks overall. That was my reading of this Yeah, there's been other studies that have shown benefits for people who had a heart attack preventing second attacks like the Jesse study and others But yeah, yeah But so anyway When though you start looking, when they started separating out people who had a couple of portions of fish a week from those who didn't, the people who didn't did show significant effect on cardiovascular disease. So the ones who didn't

eat fish and took the fish oil supplements got better. Right, because they crossed the threshold. Right. Because that omega-3, and what's really interesting was, did you look at that? That didn't come out in the headlines. Didn't come out? Well, you know. Do we have to talk about headlines? I don't know. You're the journalist. Well, I don't write the, you know, I don't get to write the headlines. All I do is write the stuff, and they stick the headline on top.

But then I thought it was really interesting, and I'm surprised that there wasn't more agitation in the African-American community where they showed a huge effect was in the African-American community. A benefit. A benefit of omega-3 supplementation. And I think there are two reasons for that. One, I think that that population is probably not eating oily fish. You know, if they're eating fish, they're probably eating like, you know, frankly, it's economically lower, you know, lower income strata. So they're going to be eating things like tilapia.

They're going to be eating things like catfish that have lower levels of omega-3. So they're not getting it. The other thing is, I think that like, generally speaking, the African-American community doesn't get adequate attention from the medical community. So just the mere fact of having regular contact with the medical community. I Think had a calming effect. I think it did something but nevertheless I think that those two results that the that the non fish eaters and the african-american community both showed more than A no result to me doesn't necessarily mean that the whole thing was a waste of time

It shows that there is the threshold effect. Well, that's why I say if you don't have a headache, an aspirin doesn't do anything, right? Correct. It's like, well, if you have plenty of levels, high levels of omega-3 fats in your blood, you're not going to see an incremental benefit. That's right. If you have zero, you're going to see a significant benefit.

That's right. And that's why like my own personal experience, you know, when I went and ate fish every single meal for a year. You banked your omega-3s. Well, no, but prior to that, I was a fisherman and I fished twice a week. Just that was part of my thing. So the rise in omega-3 blood levels that I achieved as a result of that diet, in the end I saw no change in cholesterol, I saw no change in blood pressure, and none of the typical things that are often associated with an omega-3 supplementation.

I didn't see that. Well, it depends on what else you were eating. Right, right. So, I mean, that's the other thing with these studies, is like, okay, well, if everybody's eating the standard American diet, and you throw in a bit of fish oil pill, it ain't gonna do anything.

It ain't gonna do. If you're eating processed food, and sugar, and starch, yeah, you're not going to have a reduction in any disease. Which brings me to what I think is the ideal diet. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to roll it out for you. All right. Let's go. Which is that, so I've been on a vegan diet for the last eight months and I have seen my LDL cholesterol plummet. I've seen my blood pressure go down. I've seen my weight go down. All these different things. I did see my omega-3 levels drop significantly to the point of actually, I actually did start an algal oil omega-3 supplement to bring my levels up. I believe that the ideal diet would be mostly vegan with a couple of portions of oily fish

per week. And I even have a name for it. Pescatorian? Pesc for it. Pescatarian? Pescatarian. Pescatarian. Yeah. So Pescatarian because when you think about it, like I'm actually writing an article right now

for Eating Well magazine where I went to Crete this summer. I took 15 students from Northeastern to Crete and we sort of retraced the steps of the Mediterranean diet. Yeah. And I've been spending the last few weeks at the Rockefeller Archive in Sleepy Hollow looking at the results of the original all-bough numbers out of Crete.

You look at their diet, right? It's mostly legumes. Well, first of all, it's mostly soluble fiber, barley, whole grains in their bread. Then you have a lot of legumes, a lot of nuts, and a little bit of animal protein. So what I would suggest, given the state of our industrial meat sector, if you had that little bit of protein, two portions a week, that was really well-sourced fish or shellfish, things like mussels, for example, which are a really good choice, that that would give you everything you needed.

You wouldn't have to take a B12 supplement. I mean, I've been struggling with veganism all year because I feel why do you do it well partially because another book no well no you know what happened is um i just you know i turned i'm 52 now so like all those mid life crap that you start to see showing up in your blood numbers bothered me right right? So my cholesterol was high. My blood pressure was borderline. And then I had a calcium score. Yes, of course. And my calcium score was like 90. So, you know, I don't know how you would...

It's not terrible, but it's not great. It's not great, right? So they immediately wanted to put me on statins, and they wanted to put me on blood pressure medication. My blood pressure was varying between, say, 130 over 80 and 140 over 90. So again, you know, da-da-da. So I was like, I don't want to go on blood pressure medication. I don't want to go on statins.

I've heard good things about a vegan diet. I want to see, can I address these things through a vegan diet? So I did, and largely my cholesterol went from total cholesterol like 260 to about 185 my blood pressure more or less normalized around 130 over 80 sometimes you know the blood pressure goes all over the place um calcium score is obviously probably not going to change although the ornish studies say that right you know maybe it will relax my veins and arteries and blah blah i don't know but my one struggle that i had with a vegan diet is like how can the freaking diet be good if i have to take a b12 supplement and i have to take vitamin d and iron yeah and omega-3 fats and many other things so exactly so so that's why

i thought a pescatarian diet where i'm basically vegan, but having a couple of portions each week might be that makes sense. I mean, you know, I call it the pegan diet, which is sort of paleo vegan. But, you know, I think I think the you know, there's something called the vegan honeymoon when people go from eating a traditional American diet to eating a whole foods plant based diet, because, you know, Coke and chips are vegan, right? Absolutely. So, you know, you could be eating pizza and pasta all day. If it's a fake cheese, you could certainly be vegan. And that is not healthy.

Right. But when you get over this vegan honeymoon, over time, I see these massive nutritional deficiencies. B12, iron, zinc, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, and it has serious health consequences. And I think that, you know, I've written a lot about this. I think the question is, you know, is grass-finished regenerative beef harmful to your health? And I think the evidence just really isn't there. I think, you know, there's been, you know, massive large reviews of the data. Yeah.

And when you look at it objectively, there may be some, you know, signal of harm for some studies, not for other studies. Yeah. And it's not a robust signal. In other words, you know, with smoking, it was a 20 to 1 effect. Yeah. Well, this is a 0.2 or 0.3 or 0.4, which doesn't mean anything in an observational study, probably not that much. And I think that it's the quality of the food we're eating that matters. And I think if we're eating a little bit of grass-fed meat in the context of a plant-rich,

mostly plant-based diet, which is what I do. I think that makes sense. And I think- How are your numbers? Yes. I shared mine. What are yours? My blood pressure is like 100 over 70 or 60.

Wow. Amazing. And my lipids, my HDL is very good. My triglycerides are low. I think I'm one of those people that's called lean mass hyper-responder. So if I eat too much saturated fat, my LDL goes up. But I think it really is very individual. Some people I put on a butter and coconut oil diet

and their lipids drop like a stone. Really? Interesting. Yes. I think there's a lot of heterogeneity and variation genetically in the population how people respond to different foods and diets. So there's no like one perfect diet for everybody some people need more carbohydrates i think it's really uh individual yeah um and i think the the uh the last question i want to ask you is and i think the take home for me is check check your omega-3 levels yeah see what your ratios are

yeah see you know if you have trans fat in your blood, if your omega-6s are high. Yep. You know, look at what's going on with your levels and then do something about it. Absolutely. Eat anchovies, mackerel. I call it the smash fish. Wild salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring. Yep. I would throw mussels in there. Mussels.

I love mussels. High in omega-3s. Super cheap, by the way. Yes. And also, did you know, like, mussels have a carbon footprint lower than lentils? And what about the whole idea of these being filter feeders and getting high levels of toxins? I mean, you know, there are, it depends, you know, there's the old Yiddish expression, don't s*** where you eat, right? Right.

To me, mussels and all the shellfish that are out there are kind of a reminder to us that the ocean should be a food system and not a waste disposal system. And, you know, of course, nobody wants to eat something disgusting, right? But it's a constant reminder that we need to keep our waters clean. And there are clean waters out there. Mussels are grown in suspension on ropes, so they're not sitting in the sediment. So they have the potential to be super clean and good. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark here. Now bone broth is a wonderfully healthy addition to your diet, but finding a good option can

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are so important. I mean, in a double, several double blind placebo controlled studies that I've read, it appears that getting a thousand milligrams or more per day of EPA. So not just taking a thousand milligrams of fish oil, but making sure that you're getting above that threshold of a thousand milligrams of EPA from quality sources compares just with similar effect as SSRIs, prescription antidepressants, but without the side effects, right? Which is incredible. And that if you are taking SSRIs, it allows you to take a much lower dose to still be effective. To me, like incredible data. And then the other one is that getting ferment, ingesting fermented foods, one or two servings a day.

Sauerkraut for the brain. Yeah. Sauerkraut for the brain or whatever given culture. Because what I learned, and this is very new and emerging data. There's a guy at Duke. He's incredible. He was a nutritionist, but then he has PhD in nutrition, excuse me. And now he's a neuroscientist.

His name is Diego Borges, not to be confused with the Argentine writer Borges. He's Ecuadorian. And he found that there are neurons in our gut of the vagus nerve. So these are neurons that live in the gut endothelium. And they sense three things. They fire electrical signals to the dopamine centers of the brain in response to fatty acids, right? When fats are, you know, meats and things are broken down in the fatty acids, amino acids of other kinds. So from protein and sugar. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Sure. amino acids of other kinds so from protein and sugar sure and what and so these neurons can

easily be tricked into signaling the brain to release more dopamine and because dopamine is really the molecule of craving into craving more of whatever activated those neurons and so if you give these neurons enough epa or enough amino acids so protein and essential fatty acids the dopamine centers of the brain are just firing like clockwork, which is going to enhance mood, motivation, energy. I mean, dopamine in proper amounts is a beautiful thing. Too high, obviously, you don't want,

but you're not going to get it too high. Look, people don't get addicted to chicken breasts, but they get addicted to sugar. Right, and I actually think that's because these neurons seem to be responding best to particular amino acids. They seem to want glutamine of all things. They seem to want the omega-3s.

And what's interesting is that even if they numb the taste so that people can't taste sugar, if people ingest sugar, these neurons fire. There's receptors in your gut, right? And they crave more sugar, even if they can't taste the sugar. So I always thought that the dopamine release to sweet things was because it tastes so good.

But the Borges lab results and some other work on dopamine more generally, from my colleague Anna Lemke at Stanford, shows that dopamine isn't so much about pleasure. We all, including myself, we're taught it's about pleasure. Dopamine is about craving more of whatever it is triggered dopamine release. Yeah.

Whether it's heroin or cocaine or sugar. Right, or sugar. Or sex. And so these neurons that trigger dopamine release, they are powerfully affected by these quality omega-3s and by amino acids. And then what's really interesting is that they trigger the release of dopamine, but then you say, well, okay, that should be pretty simple. We should, like you said, people don't get addicted to chicken breasts. And I wonder whether

or not that's either because omega-3s are too low. So these neurons are not, the full concert of these neurons is inactive. Or it could be that for some reason that the other things that people are ingesting has messed up these neurons. And so the whole brain body relationship is disrupted. And it's, I guess, Robert Lustig is his name at UCSF. Yeah, yeah. And others are now showing that some of the emulsifiers in foods and other things like that, what they do to the gut endothelium, I never really understood how the gut brain

thing worked. But what I realized is, is that these microbiota, they don't care about us. What they do is they, they're trying to find conditions in the gut where the mucus is pH of the mucus is just right. And that if people ingest emulsifiers and sugars, what happens is these neurons and Borges lab has shown this, that these, that these neurons that are in the gut endothelium and can sense amino acids and can sense essential fatty acids, they actually start to retract their processes into the deeper layers of the gut. In other words, if you ingest the wrong things, pretty soon the neurons in the gut remodel the bad kind of neuroplasticity and you lose your

gut brain sensing system. And so it's not just a matter of giving it the right things it's really about for many people it's going to be about repairing this system and and allowing that this portion of our nervous system to to grow back now the nice thing about peripheral neurons is that they grow back so in it wait i just gotta i gotta unpack that because what you said was just so profound right there. Basically, you're talking about uncoupling the natural ability of our body to sense its environment and to self-regulate in the right way to create health when we eat processed food that contains ingredients that screw up the gut microbiome or the lining. And all of a sudden, the brain in the gut microbiome or the lining and the all of a

sudden that the brain in the gut or whatever you want to call it the neurons in the gut start to change as a result of the crappy food we're eating and make us less able to seek out and want the foods that are good for us and tend to make us seek out and want the foods that are bad for us. Exactly. That is a massive brain state shift for me because I never really understood the mechanics of how that happens, but it's clearly true. When people are eating bad foods, they want more bad foods, and they keep eating more and more of them. And there are many reasons for that, but the gut story is just fascinating.

Yeah, these neurons, and really, I tip my hat to the Borges lab. It's cool. You know, science, as you know, can get really entrenched, and then someone comes from a completely different perspective of, you know, his background in nutrition, and he described, it actually is a relevant story here. He had a friend who was, she was very overweight, and she ended up having a gastric bypass surgery

and she lost a lot of weight and her diabetes went away. And, but she also started craving runny eggs, you know, easy over running eggs. But previously just the thought of runny eggs made her nauseous, made her want to vomit. And he heard that story and he realized that cravings themselves are modified by the conditions of the gut. How could this be? So he started exploring what are these neurons in the gut? Who are they? What brain areas are they talking to? It's very clear that these neurons, they innervate the gut. They're part of the vagus nerve connect to the brain areas that release dopamine and create craving. And so the health of these

neurons in your gut is strongly going to impact what you want. And so what, so what I love about the literature and I, I haven't had anything to do with the research I'm describing, but, but I've spent a lot of time with that work. What I love about the work that he's doing and others are doing is that it really points to a, the brain body connection is mediated by neurons. B that what we crave and what we seek really can change. I think that a lot of people that are having a hard time shifting towards a healthier eating or healthier relationship to light. So we talked about a few moments ago,

it starts becoming reflexive because not just because it's better for us, but because our nervous system actually remodels itself in ways where the good stimulus starts to evoke dopamine release. Yeah. I find that for so true. If I, if I go off track, I just want more of the best stuff. If I stay on track, I want more of the good stuff. Like I naturally will crave the things that are good for me. But I think what's happened through,

through our radical dietary changes is we've gotten so far away from our natural sort of ability to seek out things that nourish us, and we've lost that. Animals have that. They're not going to be running around eating things that are going to make them sick

and gain weight and cause damage to their gut microbiome or whatever. But they're not thinking about it. Their body naturally will seek out, oh, I want this plant because it's got this nutrition in it or this one has this phytochemical. They're not thinking that, but their body is telling them where to go

and where to look and what to eat. We've sort of really decoupled our ability to be in touch with our natural healthy cravings and been hijacked by the food industry to desire all these foods that are driving us into worse and worse states of dysfunction poor health and poor brain states and poor brain function yeah it's it's interesting because the discussion about light and discussion about food are remarkably similar from the perspective of these neurons in our eye they don't think they'll respond to light at 1 a.m.

when you're watching Netflix, just as well as they'll respond to sunlight because of their sensitivity at that time of night. They don't care. They'll work for you or they'll work against you. They don't have a mind of their own. They're just cells. These cells in your gut are the same.

And so I think that what's exciting as more and more of the neuroscience emerges and these other fields like nutrition start to really infiltrate neuroscience in a positive way, we're starting to realize that giving the brain and the body the proper stimulus, and there is a proper stimulus, there is a right time of day to get sunlight

and light in your eyes, and there's a wrong time of day. There's a right time of, there's a right set of nutrients, amino acids and fatty acids are what your body really craves but we've been giving it decoys, right? Sugar is a decoy. It really is a decoy. These neurons unfortunately respond to sugar, connect to the dopamine centers of the brain.

And as I mentioned before, even if we don't taste the sugars, they're triggering these, these mechanisms. So I think that neurons are, are both beautiful and, and remarkable, but they're also dumb. They'll, they'll send these signals to your brain, to a variety of things that you give it. So you want to know what is the proper input? Like, what do I need to give these neurons? When do I want, need to give it sunlight or or amino acids essential fatty acids because that's really what we crave there's no essential carbohydrate and i'm not an anti-carbohydrate person i eat starches i actually find them very useful for falling asleep at night yes they really

help well it's not only what to eat is what to eat when right right we we are we're totally flipped in this country we eat all of our sugar and starch and carbs in the morning not so much at night yeah i tend to do the opposite i'll fast in the early part of the day and then i eat meat and vegetables throughout the day and then starches at night that's just what works from a neurotransmitter perspective to be alert and then asleep the other thing i realized the other day is that it's weird because really healthy clean proteins taste better than dirty proteins but really healthy clean clean carbohydrates, it takes, they don't taste, they're not as intuitively tasty as like chips and things like that. Like what?

Well, I feel like a really good, I eat meat. So a really good steak tastes delicious. A lousy steak or like beef jerky is never as good as a steak. Whereas a bowl of white rice is like, maybe it's just the way I cook it, is as tasty as, as a bag of potato chips. Right. For me, I'd much rather eat a sweet potato and a bag of potato chips. Yeah. I probably need to up my culinary game. Like, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, we, we think, um, you know, we, we sort of willfully want this or that food. I know I'm, I'm wanting this, but it's actually, our brains are sort of taken over because we've not been treating them properly and we're craving all the wrong things and we're not craving the right things. Yeah, absolutely. And I've said this before, like when

I walk by, for example, like a Starbucks display and I see all the muffins and, or anywhere, you know, like any, and a croissant, it just doesn't look like food to me. Yeah. Like why would I eat that rock? That stuff has lost its appeal to me as well. One thing that's relevant here that I think actually is useful knowledge. And my colleague, Anna Lemke, who's a psychiatrist, studies dopamine and craving. She explained something to me that it makes sense when you hear hear it but it's not intuitive before that which is if you've ever tasted like a delicious piece of chocolate or you had a delicious experience i'll let people use their own mind to that or something really really wonderful that you love the sensation

in your mind is not one of pleasure believe it or not what is it it's a sensation of craving more and you can do this if you're a chocolate lover i don't want to send people on a chocolate i can eat too much chocolate yeah the point which i'm like i'm over this sure but absolutely there's a point where you hit a threshold but dopamine we know this from animal studies and human studies what dope and this is one of the reasons it can create addictions in its extreme form, is that pleasure and pain have this reciprocal relationship. And when you eat something that tastes really delicious, if you just insert your mind into the process for a second,

unless you're being very mindful and really kind of doing the Buddhist thing of really just tasting it, the way dopamine release works is it makes you think about the next bite. And this is true. Imagine any experience. Oftentimes it's not just about the presence of the thing you're in, unless you've done a lot of conscious work around experiencing pleasure and all it's like immediate container. And this is what, I mean, this is why people gamble. This is why people eat more sugar. This is why people get addicted to anything. And so I mentioned it because when the first time I heard it, I thought, no, that's not

true. I really love this experience or this thing. But then I started to pay attention, start to realize that oftentimes our mind goes to yes and more, please. Yes. And more, please. As opposed to just, and that's dopamine release in full form.

And so dopamine release is a little bit of like a jet pack that gets attached to us that puts us toward a destination. And dopamine isn't bad, but I think once people understand the nature of craving, they can be in a position to maneuver around it better. 97% of the population's low in omega-3 fatty acids. They have suboptimal levels. I actually did a study of 50 consecutive patients who came to our clinic who were not taking fish oil. 49 of them had suboptimal levels. Yeah. I mean, it's striking when you start to look

and test, which most doctors don't. I mean, you actually are scanning people's brains. I scan their bodies through testing that looks at all these variables that most doctors don't look at, right? How many doctors look at omega-3 levels in your body? Most don't. But it's essential for my practice because I can't tell what's going on if I don't know what's happening. No, it's 25% of the membranes in your brain are made of omega-3 fatty acids. And so if they're low, your brain's not going to talk very well to itself.

Yeah. I mean, if you're listening, I think most people, and I think this is true. I've seen it in my family. I've seen it in my patients. Most people with some type of mental disorder, there's a stigma. There's a sort of a blame game going on. And there's a shame about it. What your work is really doing is stopping that, saying that's just nonsense.

It's like, would you shame somebody for having cancer or diabetes or an autoimmune disease? No, you wouldn't. You would try to sort through what's going on and look at the biology and that's what you've done. So tell us why people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, ADD, panic disorders, bipolar, you know, schizophrenia, even addiction. Why, why should they be hopeful now? Because if they see it from a brain perspective, what we've learned is you're not stuck with the brain you have. Probably the biggest advance in neuroscience over the last 20 years is this concept of neuroplasticity,

that you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And every day you're making about 700 new hippocampal cells. So the hippocampus has stem cells and the hippocampus, you know, is Greek for seahorse. So every day you're making about 700 new baby seahorses and your behavior is either helping them grow or it's murdering them. And one of the things I think is really interesting, my 16-year-old daughter, she and I, I'm 65, we're both making about 700 new baby stem cells in our hippocampus.

Hers are more likely to stick around than mine because of blood flow. So new research, brain cells don't age. It's your blood vessels that age. So anything that damages your blood vessels damages your brain. So if you know how to increase blood flow, so things like exercise and ginkgo and beets and rosemary and pepper. I mean, really simple things can actually help improve the function of your brain. Ping pong, that's your thing. Table tennis. But you're not stuck with the brain you have.

You can make it better. And most people don't know that. I was just in Florida. By the way, Dr. Amen is a mean table tennis player who whips my ass every single time. It's embarrassing. And there's actually a study from England on who lives the longest. So they looked at sports.

And so if you don't play any sports, you don't live long. Tennis players live seven years longer. If you play football or soccer, you don't live longer than anybody else. Because you're butting your head with the ball people who play racket sports live the longest and that's why i play table tennis all right because you got to get your eyes hands and feet all to work together while you think about this spin on the ball yeah yeah i picked up tennis when i was 45 and i work out as much as i can and it just makes me so happy and i think it

has kept me younger and well it activates your cerebellum and the cerebellum you know you're the young people listening you're not going to know who this is it horrifies me i call the cerebellum the rodney dangerfield part of the brain it gets no respect even though it's 10 of the brain's volume it contains 50 of the brain's volume, it contains 50% of the brain's neurons. And the cerebellum is not just involved in coordination. It's involved in processing speed and thought coordination. And so when you play tennis, you're activating the cerebellum, which has reciprocal connections with your frontal lobes. So it's actually making you smarter, more focused.

It's really a great game yeah i get so and there are no head injuries with no tennis or table tennis you're not paying attention the ball hits you no sometimes actually when i'm really clumsy i'll hit myself in the head with a racket but that's not usual um so this this conversation is fabulous because we're reframing mental illness to brain health. And you have in your book, The End of Mental Illness, a simple way of thinking about this. You call bright minds,

the 11 risk factors that steal your mind and how you avoid them. Can you take us through that? So a number of years ago, I realized if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, if it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat

the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind. And bright minds is the mnemonic we came up with. And the B is for blood flow. Low blood flow is the number one brain imaging predictor of Alzheimer's disease. It's also associated with addictions. It's associated with depression. It's associated with ADHD and schizophrenia.

So you want to do everything you can to protect your blood flow. And 40% of 40-year-old men have erectile dysfunction. Do you know what that means? 40% of 40-year-old men have erectile dysfunction do you know what that means 40 of 40 year old men have brain dysfunction because if you have blood flow problems anywhere it likely means they're everywhere right and so you know you have blood flow problems if you get a scan because spect is a blood flow study uh if you have hypertension if you have any form of heart disease if you don't exercise yeah um so it just gives you some very simple things to do the r is retirement and aging when you stop learning your brain starts

dying and you know i turned 65 this year and i've seen thousands of 60 70 80, 80-year-old brains. And the news is not good. It's sort of like, you know, as we age, our skin begins to fall off our face. The same process happens in the brain, unless you're serious about it, right? I mean, I have your scan 10 years apart. And as you got older, your brain got better. Well, how exciting is that, that you're not stuck with the brain you have? The eye is inflammation that, I mean, both you and I know it's a disaster.

Inflammation is a disaster for every organ in your body. It's true. Including your brain. And so people can measure their omega-3 index, their C-reptoprotein. Just go on to what you can do. It's important to underscore this. We know from the research today

that depression is inflammation in the brain, that autism is inflammation in the brain, that ADD and dementia are inflammation in the brain. And if that's true, then the question is, what's causing the inflammation? How do you stop it? And how do you fix it? So tell us about that. So if you have a low omega-3 index, taking omega-3s can be really helpful. You have to get your gut right. Because having this thing, and I'm a psychiatrist, I didn't know one thing about leaky gut until i read the ultramind

solution and then i'm like oh you have to get your gut right because if your gut's not right your brain's not right you're likely to have things get inside your body that have no business in your body which causes an autoimmune or an inflammatory response so food really matters sugar is pro-inflammatory and foods that quickly turn to sugar bread pasta potatoes rice um you want to you often say eat them like a condiment right uh that last recreational drug recreational not even a condiment sugar and is a recreational drug it's it's it's fine but didn't you say the four white powders yeah the deadly white powder definitely white powder white flour white sugar cocaine and too much salt that so diet really does matter and our processed foods are loaded with pro-inflammatory omega-6s. So corn and soy, we're overloaded with them.

I mean, not that they're evil, but they're not the right choice as primary staples in our diet. But also things like infections and mold and other things. We're going to get there. So the eye is inflammation the and so get your gut right omega-3 fatty acids the g is genetics and the big lie with genetics is i have obesity in my family and that's why i'm fat well the fact is i have obesity in my family i have a brother and sister who are 150 pounds overweight but i'm not why you're wearing a skinny suit because i know the behaviors that make it likely

to be so so genes are not a death sentence what they should be is a wake-up call and tell you what you're vulnerable to so that you get serious about prevention. I mean, you're in better shape now than when I met you 15 years ago. Sure. You lost more weight, you get more muscle, and you're 15 years older. And I work on it, right? But it's because I love what I do. And quite frankly, I have four children. I never want to live with them.

I love them. I want to be independent for as long as possible. I don't want them being worried about taking away my driver's license. That means I have to take care of my body because my body will then take care of my brain. But that causes you to think ahead, which is, of course, a brain function. The H is a national epidemic that nobody knows. It's head trauma. Head trauma is a major cause of psychiatric illness,

and nobody knows about it because psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage and family counselors, counselors, they never look at the brain. And so that fall out of a second-story window that caused you to be angry and depressed, nobody's thinking about rehabilitating the damage that occurred that's why you really shouldn't let your children hit soccer balls with their head play tackle football and if you've been in a car accident and then you got depressed somebody should look at your brain and then you should go about rehabilitating it. And that's what I did with the big NFL study. And we published a study.

80% of our players get better in as little as two months. It's amazing. By putting them on our Bright Minds program. So I'm pretty excited about that. The T is toxins. And when I first started scanning people, I mean, it was really clear that marijuana alcohol cocaine methamphetamines heroin are bad for your brain but then i would see these toxic scans of people who never use drugs yeah and i'm like oh no and i had not one lecture on mold exposure when i was a psychiatric resident or heavy mercury or mercury poisoning or lead exposure and none of that and so

we often find ourselves working up a toxic brain and did you know 60 of the lipstick sold in the united states has lead in it so i think that is the kiss of death and so i know you know this app think dirty and when i downloaded it you can scan all of your personal products i threw out half of my bathroom because it was basically toxic yeah that things like parabens and phthalates they're called hormone disruptors which we're going to get to in a second but you don't want whatever goes on your body goes in your body and affects your body. So you have to get rid of the toxins and basically it's decreased exposure and support the four organs of detoxification. Kidneys drink more water. God eat more fiber liver stop drinking i'm just not a fan i mean we can talk about it um but it

disrupts liver function and sweat with exercise or take saunas people take the most saunas have the lowest incidence of alzheimer's disease um so m is something and i call mind storms it's abnormal electrical activity in your brain so if you have a hot spot in your temporal lobes or cold spot what we see it's akin to seizure activity so sometimes anti-convulsants can really help a ketogenic diet has anti-convulsant yes properties there's this great book it's written in 1980 by um jack dreyfus who's the founder of the famous dreyfus mutual fund and he said a remarkable medicine has been overlooked and it was dilantin which is an old anti-convulsant he'd been going to see psychiatrists forever he said three days on

dilantin he didn't need a psychiatrist anymore um because it had balanced his brain. And so the second eye is immunity and infections. If you look at a map of the United States and you look at the highest incidence of schizophrenia, overlay the highest incidence of Lyme disease, they're identical. It's incredible. Anybody in the West or the Northeast or the Northern Midwest should be screened for Lyme if they have a psychotic disorder.

You just need to screen them for it because if they have it, treating it may actually treat their, quote, mental illness that is not mental. It's brain. You treat the brain. Yeah. N is neurohormone deficiencies. D is diabesity. You know, as your blood sugar goes up and your weight goes up, your brain gets smaller, as we talked about.

It's getting your weight right, your blood sugar right. And S is sleep. This is how you keep your brain healthy. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. 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 all the experts that I know

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