The Joe Rogan Experience - #568 - Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Episode Date: October 27, 2014

Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a Ph.D in biomedical science and expert on nutritional health. Her podcasts and other videos can be found at FoundMyFitness.com http://www.youtube.com/user/FoundMyFitness

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day dr ronda i presume good to see you again good to see you too last time i saw you i introduced you to the wonderful world of head trauma indeed dr ronda. Rhonda got her first experience of a live UFC event. And just to preface it, you really didn't know much about the UFC at all before you went to this thing with your husband. And it was, well, you were pretty shocked. Yes. I mean, to be honest, I had no clue until, it might have been like the morning of, or

the day before. No, it was like the morning of the day before, something like that. I looked it up and it was like, I saw people were like in a cage fighting and I was like, holy crap. I thought it was, you know, totally, I don't even know what I was expecting. It was just some kind of wrestling thing or something. It was just like, you know, I think I was confusing it with the WWE. E?

E, is that what it is? Pro wrestling? The WW something wrestling. Yeah, that. So, UFC, I mean, just these little three-letter acronyms, you know. So, you had really never been exposed to any sort of mixed martial arts before? Nope, nope. That's so funny. of mixed martial arts before? That's so funny.

Not mixed martial arts. I mean, I was, you know, aware of things like Taekwondo and all that, but I just know that they exist and that they're kind of cool. That's it. That's about it. Yeah. Had you ever been to a boxing match before? No, I had never been to a boxing match. And I've really never really watched one.

I've seen probably clips or pieces of it like throughout my life at some point but um just no exposure in general i don't have a sports gene in my body while i love to like work out and exercise and you know i'm very uh addicted to the the brain benefits and other benefits i have never really like watched sports or been like interested in it like in general and i try really hard because my dad is a huge sports fan oh my god he plays baseball i mean he's 65 and he still plays baseball on like a men's you know league so and he watches football basketball like any sport any like manly sport you know he he and he watches football basketball like any sport any like manly

sport you know he he watches he knows everything about and uh he's not a big science guy so i try really hard to bond with him when i'm with him i'm like trying really hard to be interested or like he'll take me to a padres game you know in san diego and i'm like i try to like understand you know the like what's happening but it's it takes a lot of work for me. That's funny. With that said, that MMA experience was very unique. I've been to a baseball game. I've been to a football game.

I've been to basketball games. Those are the sports that I've actually spectated live at some point in my life. The MMA was a very different experience. It felt very like there was kind of a tribal component to it where you've got people cheering when the fighters are coming down the aisle. And I don't know the way the music, like drums and stuff were going. Something beating and then just the whole people fighting in a cage made me feel like this, you know, times back in the Roman Coliseum where they'd go and watch people fight. There's a lot of that in it. You know, there's definitely a lot of tribal, the tribal element of the music.

Yes. Different people from like different cultures have different music. Like a lot of the country music guys or country guys will come out to like country songs and guys who are like uh more urban will come out to the rap songs a lot of white guys come out to rap songs too but you know some guys will come out to like classic rock and everybody's like yeah i love that song i'm gonna root for this dude you know but it's uh there's definitely an element of that in it oh yeah there was music the music was cool and that that i think that also gave that tribal feeling. But then the cheering and how people were, like I had, it just, there was something moving inside of me that I was not expecting. And then, so it was cool in that regard where it was like, oh, this feels like some unique experience that I wouldn't get at, you know, that I haven't ever experienced at any sort of other sport event that I've attended.

So when you said something was moving inside of you, do you mean like you were emotionally moved? Like you got excited? Your heart raced? Yeah. Yeah. I felt like I was part of some community that, you know, I was like, wow, this is some kind of community that I get to experience for, you know, a day.

Yeah. It was some sort of unique event where i felt like i was just you know connecting with these people that are around me it's a very addictive community too i can imagine uh it was a lot of fun you know it was a lot of fun aside from the me you know looking at the effects on you know the brain and stuff what a lot of these fighters are experiencing aside from that it was it was a lot of fun i really really liked that that it was it was a lot of fun I really really liked that was the thing we all went out afterwards a giant group of us afterwards went out to eat and you Just were wide-eyed you had like like saucer eyes and you were like the amount of damage that you're why I just couldn't I couldn't

Stop calculating the amount of damage that was going on to these people's brains. Irreversible damage. Right. Yes. Well, that, coupled with our conversation the night before, where Denny was talking about friends that were fighters that were having memory problems. And immediately when he started describing some of those characteristics, I was like, that sounds just like an Alzheimer's, you know, patient. And just because I wasn't really aware of any of the MMA, you know, community, what it involves, what sort of, you know, it seems like there's a lot of, you know, there's not a lot of rules, like, you know, you can punch someone in the head, you can kick, you can choke, you can,

you know, boxing, I don't think they can kick and you know so so it seems like there was a lot of other stuff going on that was very traumatic it's so funny listening to you describe it because you're you're so educated in science and the human body and the effects of vitamins and various nutrients in the human body. So to see you get your first exposure to what's like a normal part of my life, it's like a daily part of my life, essentially, is being exposed to this stuff. So it's fascinating to watch you. I don't think they can kick in boxing. You're so removed. It's like you're an alien.

You've come from another planet and landed in the world of MMA for a day. Yes, that is kind of how I felt. Wow. But I'm right, right? The kicking is... Yes, you're right. You're right. You're right.

Well, there is a thing called kickboxing. There's a company called Glory, and they hold these events on Spike TV, which is an American cable channel, and they're allowed to kick they kick and they can knee they can't elbow though um it's like a modified version of what's called muay thai and muay thai is thai boxing and in thailand um they they're the experts in this very particular type of kickboxing where they do a lot of clinching they grab a hold of each other and knee each other in the body in the head and they elbow from the clinch and they they throw a lot of leg kicks they're known for their their kicking ability okay yeah i've seen muay thai like on twitter and people like you know tweeting at

me and stuff but i really i didn't know exactly what it was and muay thai is pretty wild actually i i didn't even realize people used kickbox I thought kickboxing was like a way to work out. I didn't realize there was actually people fighting. Seriously. Really? You really thought that? It was just a way to work out? Until just now. Wow.

That's so crazy. I'm in another world. I do a lot of, I was telling my husband the other day, people on weekends, they go out and they go camping and they hike and they go and they, you know, go through the woods and they find, you know, see all these new things in the forest, which I love to do, by the way. But every day what I do is I'm like hiking and forging through the human body. And it's like every day I'm sort of sheltered from a lot of other things because I'm just like, oh, he's reading about, you know, science and health and mechanisms. And so at times I'm, you know, with other things that are so common knowledge to people, I'll kind of like blow people's minds where I'm like, no, I didn't know. Like what are the things?

Are you like completely cultural norms that you're completely unaware of well a lot of sports things definitely television stuff um you know just any of that television world and people always you know relate to commercials and like i nothing it's like just years without a tv so well i have a tv and i still don't relate to a lot like someone just explained to me um that the show bones on fox has been on for like six years or something it was on the other day in a hospital waiting room i was watching it and i was like what this this show is how long has this been on and like it's been on forever i was like what come on like there's so many forever i was like what come on like there's so many shows i have no idea what they are i'll pass by us weekly and with someone on

the cover you know she's leaving him she started like who the fuck is she who's he who are they apparently they're huge celebrities right i have no idea who they are yeah that's that's so i'm i'm in that sort of uh mindset mindset so um, you know, back to the UFC event. Yes. So, watching the event was really exciting, but starting to look at, you know, these blows that people were taking to their head and the choking. There seems to be a lot of choking going on. Yeah. choking there seems to be a lot of choking going on yeah and you know some of those sort of i was you know just from what little i knew at the time it was already like wow this this seems like you

know some stuff's going down basically well the choking though it's not as dangerous i mean it's it's the the issue with choking is any grappling you're gonna develop microtrauma you're gonna have disc issuesrotrauma, you're going to have disc issues as you get older, you're going to have just a lot going on with the spine, and so there's some trauma. But for the most part, the choking is not too dangerous. There's one repeated issue that's been happening a lot lately. Never happened in the UFC, but it's been happening in smaller organizations. And it's a very particular move where someone will go for a takedown, which is, you know, you try to, the guy, they're standing

up and you try to take the guy down. And then the person who they're trying to take down gets the guy in what's called a guillotine choke. And a guillotine choke is your head is trapped under the armpit and you have your forearm underneath the neck and you're pulling up on the neck. And then the person who's caught in the guillotine tries to take the person down by picking them up and trying to throw them. And they land on the guy's head and people are becoming paralyzed from it. It's happened several times. It's happened in training a couple times. It's happened a couple times in fights.

But it's enough of an issue where it's starting to scare the shit out of me. Yeah. You know, that guys who get caught in guillotines try to slam their way out of it. They try to pick a guy up and slam their way out of it instead of trying to be technical and grab a hold of the hand and try to work your way out of it. It's just because that choke is so sudden. work your way out of it it's just because that choke is so sudden when you get caught in it it's such a nasty choke that the there's like one or two seconds when you have with a guy who's really good where you have to breathe where you know otherwise you're you're you're pretty much going to go unconscious yeah so that's one thing i was wondering with the choking specifically was

you know because choking you, you know, you can to some degree, cause some hypoxia in the brain. So, you know, you're not causing ischemic damage, which is like no oxygen getting in the brain, but you may have reduced oxygen. And the body compensates for that they, you know, the body will, because it senses that less oxygen is getting in the brain, it increases blood flow, you know, as a compensation. But if that can't, if it can't compensate, what happens, you know, you'll start to eventually, like, your motor control will get affected. And I was wondering if they use that as a technique, like,

because then that they're, because they're choking their opponent, now their opponent's motor control gets, you know, affected. No, the goal is just put the guy to sleep. Which is even worse, because that's the next step, which then you become, you know affected no the goal is to just put the guy to sleep which is even worse because that's the next step which then you become that happens all the time yeah so and there is you know that that hypoxic damage you know there is damage occurring what kind of damage is occurring when a guy gets choked out completely asleep well completely asleep so you're talking about you know not enough oxygen getting in the brain for just a few seconds. One of the things that can happen is that you can have lactate buildup. So, your brain, so you have neurons and you have supporting cells in your brain called astrocytes.

Well, they're glial cells, but astrocytes are a specific type of glial cells. They're really important. They do a lot of things for the brain, and they make up like 50% of like the human brain volume. They actually, they use glucose, and they use glucose in a way where they don't need their mitochondria. So they use glucose through something called glycolysis. And the byproduct is they make lactate. And the reason they do this is because the lactate then goes into the neuron and it goes right into the mitochondria and is used to produce energy. But that needs to be coupled to oxygen. So lactate is a really great source of energy for neurons because it's not, for the neuron to convert glucose into pyruvate, which then gets used as energy, it costs energy. But for lactate to get converted into pyruvate to then be used as energy, it's thermodynamically favorable because it doesn't cost any energy to do that. So, but this requires oxygen.

This is this oxidative phosphorylation mechanism that I've talked about before. But when you don't have oxygen there, then the lactate can't be used by the neurons. And so lactate will then build up and can cause, you know, it can cause cell death when you have too much of this lactic acidosis building up in their brain now that i don't you know with the amount of choking i don't think that's much of an issue because this is more for like a real like real trauma um like intense trauma more like a head trauma blow to the head or um you know even like the rapid acceleration and deceleration that occurs like car accidents car accidents mostly

yeah i don't think the you know the blows to the head you know people's heads are moving but it's not as it's not like a car hitting you where it's like really really rapid acceleration deceleration that's a real problem um so i think you know once i started to dive into this i started to read about traumatic brain injury. And specifically, I became interested in it because of the Alzheimer's connection. It was like, whoa, wait a minute, why are these young people coming down with symptoms of Alzheimer's like in like early, early age like that? There's some connection between the way the normal brain ages and something that's happening with traumatic brain injury. So I became really interested and started reading about it, you know, since I went to that UFC event. And really

fascinating, you know, I've been reading a lot about it. And, you know, these fighters, fighters, NFL players, you know, people, boxing, anyone that's taking blows to the head, you know, whatever sport, you know, that's some, you know, in some regard, you know people boxing boxing anyone that's taking blows to the head you know whatever sport you know that that's some you know in some regard you know i think even rugby things like that um you know these these people have a uh increased incident of alzheimer's in some cases just you know two two or three fold increased case of alzheimer's um and and it's an earlier onset you know and it's very like indistinguishable, indistinguishable in terms of like some of the, the pathology that occurs in their brain compared to like someone who's, you know, 75, 85, 85 years old and getting Alzheimer's.

So, um, I started reading about this, like what's going on. Um, and what happens is like even just a single blow to the head can cause, you know, it can increase the risk for Alzheimer's. And when you're having multiple repetitive injuries, that's, you know, increases the risk even more. And so, initially, like there's a lot of changes that happen. But when you have a blow to the head, you know, you've got the acute damage that happens. So, you know, tissue damage damage you can get like diffuse axonal injury things like that and that's from like a real trauma to the head um but you know even just like mild repetitive traumas what happens is you you get tissue damage and you release a lot of

reactive oxygen species which i've talked about before which are released you know every every day we're releasing that in our brains and our other cells through just normal, you know, metabolism. It's kind of like a byproduct of normal metabolism. So, in people that are not getting brain injury, it's happening a little bit each day. But with a brain injury, when you're getting a blow to the head, it induces a massive, massive amount of release of it. And it starts to damage the meninges so which which

form a protective membrane around the brain and those cells start to die reactive oxygen species as a protective mechanism it causes cells to die and the reason it does i've talked about reactive oxygen species before in the context of cancer when you get a little bit of reactive oxygen species before in the context of cancer. When you get a little bit of reactive oxygen species, such as like normal metabolism, you can cause damage to DNA. And, you know, when you damage the DNA, you can either repair that damage. If you don't, you can get a mutation. Eventually, that builds up and leads to cancer. But if you have a huge burst of it, like in the case where you're getting an injury, then you're talking about a protective mechanism that kicks in, which is like, okay, I need to kill the cell. And the reason I need to kill a cell is because I don't want to get all that damage that's

going to cause mutation and give me cancer. So it's a protective mechanism. So it's killing cells to protect itself. Yes, that's the biological mechanism as to why this huge burst of reactive oxygen species does kill cells it's a you know it's it's a conserved an evolutionary conserved mechanism and it really is important like if you're if you stand that's why part of the you know underlying um mechanism for radiation in terms of like treating cancer radiation is you know you're you're you're causing double

stranded breaks in dna it's just like you're damaging the DNA, and it's a huge amount of damage. So it causes cells to die. So this is happening in the brain, and it's really not a good thing because in the sense for this, you know, in the acute injury, you've got these meningi cells that start to die,

and then astrocytes, which like, you know, part of them like help form some of the blood-brain barrier. They start to die and then astrocytes which like you know they part of them like help form some of the blood-brain barrier they start to die and when those astrocytes start dying that form the blood-brain barrier what happens is the blood-brain barrier gets leaky and now you have things like um you know potassium chloride sodium leaking into the brain and causing astrocytes to swell causing you know water to flow in and you get you know edema in the brain like i lookedrocytes to swell, causing water to flow in, and you get edema in the brain. Like, I looked at this guy, Mark Hominick, I think, if you giggle, you can see a picture

of his swollen edema head, and it's just unbelievable. So that's part of the cause of this edema. So now what happens is that reactive oxygen species, those dead cells, the blood-brain barrier gets compromised. Immediately when that happens, this immune system in the brain gets activated. So you have another part of glial cells called microglia, which are like the immune cells in the brain. They get activated when the blood-brain barrier gets damaged. And they migrate up and they're trying to like plug up the hole.

So they're like, oh my God, the blood-brain barrier has been compromised. So they migrate up and they start trying to like plug up the hole so they're like oh my god this you know the blood-brain barrier has been compromised so they migrate up and they start trying to plug up the hole the problem is is now you've activated activated this whole immune response where uh it starts to cause the lump yeah look at that i mean that's just awful. When you see a lump like that, that fight should be stopped immediately? Yeah, I would say. Did he keep fighting after that? Yeah, he fought another round. Oh, wow. And won the final round with a big injury like that.

That's just unbelievable, honestly. So, in your opinion, as a medical professional, when you see that kind of swelling, this is not a guy who should be hitting the head again. No, I would say definitely not. There's a lot of consequences that can occur when you're – so when you already have this type of damage where this immune system's been activated, I mean, you're getting... So that's not just a, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but that's not just a wound that's bleeding under the skin. That's part of the thing that's happening. But in addition to that, you've got all sorts of cellular changes that are occurring. You're getting, like I said, damage to the meninges, damagerocytes that are um you know forming the blood-brain barrier and then you start getting those they start dying

and when they start dying a dead cell you know in addition to the the microglia the immune system in the brain getting activated to try to plug up the damage it also as soon as you have cells dying which in a case like this when you've got damage, it's happening on a huge scale. These microglia, they try to like eat up and get rid of all the cellular debris. I mean, that's part of what they do. They're programmed to do. You know, they get activated when you have a bunch of dead cells and they try to go eat away this damage. And the problem is, is that, you know, when that starts to happen, you're getting a, you're starting a cycle of neuroinflammation in the brain, which is very bad.

And, you know, what happens even within like hours of an injury like that is you start to get accumulation of something called amyloid beta plaques in the brain. So, you know, traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's, they have a lot in common in the sense where, you know, traumatic brain injury is massive amount of damage and it's happening in one instance or even just mild, you know, repetitive injuries. You may not get someone that has a swollen head like Mark, but, you know, just taking, you know, little blows to the head. Also, you know, you're causing, you're activating, you know, reactive oxygen species, you're causing cells to die, and you are activating the immune system, even with a mild injury. And what happens is that, you know, in addition to start activating this immune system, then this also causes the accumulation of these amyloid beta plaques to

accumulate in the brain. So, amyloid beta plaques to accumulate in the brain. So amyloid beta plaques is one of the major pathologies associated with Alzheimer's. What happens is, you know, as we age, we have a little bit of inflammation going on in our brain, you know, we have cells dying, we have, you know, this is on a little bit by bit scale every day. And so by the time, you know, seven, eight decades go by, you know, we've accumulated enough damage that, you know, stuff starts getting messed up. So amyloid beta plaques, they form outside of neurons in between glial cells and neurons. And what they do, if you know, you can even Google amyloid beta plaques, you'll see they form like these little plaques outside of the neurons. And this disrupts like

glucose metabolism and neurons and astrocytes, it causes even more reactive oxygen species to be generated. So now you're generating even more and more on a daily basis. And the microglia cells, the immune cells of the brain get activated when there's a plaque, just like they do when there's a dead cell, they're like, oh my god, what is this, I need to get rid of it. So they get activated, they secrete pro-inflammatory cytokines, they're doing all this firing, firing, and they're trying to eat the plaques. And so, you know, it causes this vicious cycle of neuroinflammation where then that causes more plaques to be formed. So, you have, it's a terrible, terrible cycle of neuroinflammation. These amyloid beta plaques form in in fighters and also in like nfl player

that they've you know looked at these plaques that are in the brains and they've they've even shown um by like pet scans that they form immediately like within hours and this even happens in children that have undergone trauma you know so there's something it's almost like the traumatic brain injury is like accelerated aging like like it's just instead of seven decades boom it's almost like the traumatic brain injury is like accelerated aging. Like it's just instead of seven decades, boom, it's like it's happening, you know, in an instant in the course of, you know, hours. And then it causes this huge cycle of neuroinflammation. So in addition to that, tau tangles start to form. This is another thing that happens in response to the activation of

these microglia cells in the brain where now um you've got something like inside your neuron you you've got a protein called tau and it's really an important protein because basically what it does is it's like it's transporting cargo all like a down the long axon to the synaptic cleft where neurotransmission occurs, where you form synapses to learn memory, those things are happening. It's taking it's, you know, transporting lipids, it's transporting glucose, it's transporting mitochondria that, you know, need to get to that synaptic cleft, you know, to produce energy. So it's like, it's, you know, it's transporting all this cargo to get there to do all this really important stuff for

your brain to function. But what happens is, you know, traumatic brain injury and also just normal brain aging. When you have this activation of the immune system and reactive oxygen species, it causes this thing to aggregate and it screws up its function. And now it can't transport any of that cargo. It's like the train became derailed. It can't get there. So now you can't get, you know, nutrients to the part of the neuron where it needs to get. You can't get mitochondria there, you know, which are making energy. And so you start to have things breaking down. You start to have synapses dying. You know,

that's part of the reason. So two neurons, when you learn something, you form a synapse, a connection between the neurons. And that's the whole purpose of the neurons. They want to form connections with other neurons. So that's, you know, that's what they're there for. And when you can't do that, if there's not enough energy and it starts breaking down, the neurons have no purpose. They, you know, it's like they can't, so they die. And so, this causes brain atrophy. And it happens, you know, in normal brain aging over the course of several decades, where you can look at an Alzheimer's brain, and it's just got massive atrophy. Well, the same thing happens with traumatic brain injury.

You know, these people are losing a lot of cells, glial cells and neurons in their brain, and it's causing brain atrophy. So, you know, the accumulation of amyloid beta and tau tangles are two prominent features of Alzheimer's that are disrupting all sorts of, they're causing, like I said, immunoneuroinflammation, they're causing reactive oxygen species to be generated. It causes this cycle where it just won't stop because whenever there's an amyloid plaque, you activate more microglia, and then microglia get activated, it makes more plaques, you know. it's it's just this horrible cycle that doesn't get broken.

And that's something that's that's really they found both of these things very prominently in in brains of people that have undergone TBI. I have a question about repeated trauma. So if you are in a fight, say, and you get hit and hurt and you get in trouble, but you survive and then you make it to the next round, do the impacts that you take after that, are they even more devastating because of the initial injury, your cells, and because of the production of reactive oxygen species and inflammatory response and these things that are happening, that is all a stress to the cell. So, the cell is already stressed. And when a cell is stressed, it is more susceptible to death. susceptible to death. This is kind of part of the mechanism by which cancer cells are primed to die in a sense, where cancer cells are, they're stressed because all sorts of, you know, stuff is going wrong in them. And they are primed to die. Like they, the cell is expressing what's called pro-apoptotic proteins in them, make cells that are proteins

that are, you know, going to make the cell die. But the cancer cells found a way to overcome that by expressing these anti-apoptotic proteins. So, it's like a balance between, okay, how much do I have that's going to make me die or not make me die? So, that's happening when you have a stressed cell from injury and then, like, for example, brain injury, they're also, you know, the reactive oxygen species causes those cells to make more of those proteins that are saying okay die die die so they're already primed to die even if they some of them die immediately but even the ones that haven't died immediately they may not be dead because there's enough of those ones that are

saying no don't die yet don't die yet there's enough of that protein there to sort of balance it out but then when you take another stress, boom, it just tips it. It tips it towards death. So stress plus stress is additive in that stress can sensitize you to death. Stress plus stress will definitely cause death. So that's something that, you know, having repetitive injuries, especially in a short time frame like that, you know, sensitizes them to death. So, plus, it's also, you know, you're making more of these amyloid beta plaques in your brain, you know, this is like, like I said, it's happening

within hours. So, like, the more injury that's happening, the more this is occurring. So, it's really a nasty thing. And with fighters uh just from watching that you know that one event that i went to i mean it was clear that you know pretty much all of them were taking injuries to the head um and so something that people may not be aware of when i say people i mean people in the mma community um is that there's something else that really predisposes these fighters to neurodegenerative diseases. So there's, they categorize them as there's different ones like pugilistic dementia, and then there's chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And these are all, if you look pathologically, they all share characteristics with Alzheimer's disease.

They all have these amyloid beta plaques that have accumulated in the brain. They have tau protein aggregating. There's inflammation, massive atrophy happening because these things cause cell death. These are all very common, and they're shared pathological features in all these neurogenic diseases i'm not sure what exactly if they if they can't call it alzheimer's because alzheimer's is an age-related disease so it's like you know calling someone who's 45 and has you know massive you know amyloid plaques in their brain and it's affecting their memory and you know it's affecting their behavior calling that alzheimer's is kind of weird is alzheimer's just a limiting word do you think that you're when

because when you're dealing with the very exact same right situation but brought on by trauma i don't know i i it's hard for me to definitively say that it's a speculation i think that looking at like i said i think these pugilistic dementiaistic dementia and the chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it's like Alzheimer's but on an accelerated rate. And it happens specifically as a consequence to traumatic injury to the head. I've seen it happen in a fight. Like I've seen a guy be one way and then have a fight and see a noticeably diminished ability to communicate. Yes. Yeah, that's one of the features of lack of oxygen to the brain

because now you can't have energy. Energy is not being made to facilitate neurotransmission and learning and things and communication like what happens when you have an injury is that everything gets diverted to repair it's you know energy you only make so much energy and you know so it's a constant battle and this is the same for people that are obese type 2 diabetics whatever type of chronic injury that's happening in the body, gut inflammation, you know, there's a lot of energy that's required to repair that injury. And so, energy gets diverted to repairing that injury. And what happens when you have all the energy that the cells are making go to repair?

Well, things that are, you know, normal function don't get it so your metabolism is kind of screwed up you're thinking you know these things are it's it's like a a triage almost where you're triaging this to the essential like i need to repair this damage if i don't repair this damage i might die um so it's like you shunt the energy to that repair process so things like short-term memory communication all that sort of gets um screwed up in a way so that makes perfect sense um that that would happen yeah because i've literally seen guys in i mean it's it's it's so non-scientific to judge them by the standard because you know it's just my perceptions but i've seen a guy be one way and then have a couple really brutal fights.

And then there's a noticeable dimness to the way they look, the way they talk. There seems to be like a loss. Like what time frame are we talking about here? A couple months. Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's been shown that the injury, the acute effects that I was describing in terms of the immune cells in the brain, the microglia getting activated and the amyloid beta plaques forming and all that stuff happens. And they showed that this continues to happen for months, even years later, even with just a single traumatic brain injury. So one rough fight can potentially affect a person the negative impacts compound over years yes yes they have shown a dose dependent uh effect in terms of even multiple mild

uh traumatic injuries they compound over years and they cause pugilistic dementia they cause you know these types of neurodegenerative diseases that are very very similar to alzheimer's um and something that i want to point out that um may predispose people to them more is genetics um so this is something that's very very similar to alzheimer's as well there's there's so we have know, different variations of genes, and these are called polymorphisms. Really, all a polymorphism is, it's a gene, but it's like, there's a slight variation in the sequence of DNA, and that slight variation in the sequence of DNA can change the function of that gene somewhat. I think if we were to really look deeply at polymorphisms, we'd find there's got to be a selective reason why we've acquired these sort

of changes. Like, there's got to be an advantage. Polymorphisms aren't mutations in the sense where, like, a mutation is random, you know, that just happens. polymorphisms are selected for and they occur in a decent percent of the population so you know there seems to be like you can you can always find even if the gene it changes the gene in in the sense where it seems like it's not doing something as well as it should be doing if we look hard enough we might find there's actually a reason why there's sort of like a trade-off right so anyway so gene polymorphisms, we've got, you know, they're very common ones. People are always looking at things like the breast cancer-related genes, like BRCA1, BRCA2, where it's like, oh, if you have a certain variation of this gene,

you have a dramatic, you know, increase in possibly getting breast cancer. Well, we've got a lot of different variations in genes. And one of them is associated with a dramatic increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. It's in a gene called APOE. And this gene is polymorphic in the sense where there's actually multiple variants of it. There's three different isoforms of it that are common in the human population. It's called APOE2, APOE3, and APOE4. And essentially, what APOE, it's a lipoprotein, and it's made in the liver, and also in the brain. And the liver, what its main function is, it's actually transporting cholesterol, like dietary cholesterol. And it's, you know, making sure it gets to your cells that

need it and bringing it back to the gets to your cells that need it and bringing it back to the liver to get recycled so it plays a very important role in cholesterol transport turns out in the brain in our astrocytes our astrocytes make cholesterol we have we produce apo e in the brain and it plays a very important role in transporting this cholesterol made from astrocytes to neurons. And it's doing other things also involved with amyloid beta. But the point is, is that there are, like I said, there are three variations. The main one is APOE3, and that's what the majority of population has. So, you get one allele, every gene you have, you get one copy from your mom, and you get one copy from your dad. So, you have of every gene and so that's what an allele is so most people have two copies

of apo e3 which is good because apo e3 is like it's considered the normal one like but 25 percent of the population has one allele of apo e4 and so And so, APOE4, so 25%, that's one in four people, just of the general population has one of these alleles that they either got from their mom or their dad. People that have two, so they got one from this, it's much more rare, it's like 2% of the population actually have two copies of the APOE so 25 percent of population has one copy of apo e4 and what happens is apo e4 increases the risk of alzheimer's by two to three fold okay so people that have apo e4 have an increased risk just two to three fold and this is recognizable in the dna test yes so you could potentially scan athletes? Yeah, so I'm getting to that. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so exactly.

So people that are fighters or NFL players, people that are any sort of trauma to the brain, if they're getting this as a part of their sports curriculum or whatever, those people that have one APOE4. So traumatic brain injury itself increases the risk of Alzheimer's by two to threefold, just like people that don't have traumatic brain injury but have this APOE4. People that have TBI and APOE4 increase their risk by like tenfold. So having just one allele, you have a guy who's getting blows to the head and he has an APOE4, he's taking his risk from two to three fold to ten fold to get, yes.

And we're talking 25% of the population has this. So, they've shown, they've done studies and they've shown, you know, traumatic brain injury dramatically increases the risk of neurodegenerative disease. It's also, you know, stroke, people with a stroke stroke had a stroke and have apo e4 you're talking about a tenfold increased risk of you know having a neurodegenerative disease so the problem is is that you're having apo e4 is you can't repair damage as well uh you know when you're when you have damage that occurs you know there's a lot of repair mechanisms that can happen so you can have what's called like if you lose like the synapses that are formed between the two neurons, amyloid

beta screws that up. But you can repair that damage by having like what's called neurite outgrowth. So you grow new projections to that neuron. That's one way to repair the damage. And APOE plays a very important role in that because it brings cholesterol and fatty acids to the neuron the membrane and that that's really important to be able to grow new synapses you need that apo e4 doesn't do that as well and also not only does apo e4 not do that as well there's also bad effects apo e4 itself um is it's the polymorphism that happens it changes the structure of it and so it's like getting degraded a lot so you don't have enough of apoey around and it chops it up and starts aggregating and doing bad stuff itself so it's like it's just terrible because what happens when

you have tbi when you have an injury the the brain actually increases apoey because it's like oh i got to repair some of this damage but if you have that apoey 4 it's increasingOE because it's like, oh, I got to repair some of this damage. But if you have that APOE4, it's increasing the bad part. It's increasing, you know, the bad stuff. So you can actually test for this variant using 23andMe, for example. So I actually recently did a 23andMe test. It's $99. And you spit in like a little tube and you send it off and to the to the 23 and me and they you know isolate dna from your saliva and then they look for very common polymorphisms so they look for apoe they look for um parkinson's related ones and cancer and all that so uh you know unfortunately the fda shut down part of their ability to to inform you uh whether or not you have yeah so that happened recently i think it was sort of a consequence to angelina jolie getting her boobs

cut off essentially god yeah so was that misinformed what she did um so i'm unfortunately i haven't really read exactly how everything went down. I just know that she did 23andMe and found out she had a polymorphism in one of the genes. But she didn't have cancer. No, no. So yeah, I think that sort of precipitated the FDA. So the way they test for these genes is by something called PCR, and it's not infallible. way they test for these genes is by something called pcr and it's it's it's not infallible so you can you know they can give you back your results and say oh look you've got this polymorphism associated with x disease which increases your risk for you know cancer by

tenfold and it could have just been a little error in the method so you know it's not like a foolproof proof technique and i think that's also part of the problem where it's like you're giving people back this genetic data and it's like they're taking it very seriously and obviously taking going to extreme measures to do things you know like like getting their boobs removed um but you still can 23 enemies not shut down like you can like i did it when they were already unable to give you um tell you exactly what polymorphisms you have. Well, I'm a scientist, so I didn't really care because they give you the raw data. And I can actually, you know, go through the raw data, which I did, and see what, you know, polymorphisms I have.

And I found out that I actually have one allele of APOE4. So, and it's so funny because it's really the only gene I cared about. Like, all the other stuff, like, I did 23andMe because I was terrified of having APOE4. And so, I have it. And it turns out my dad gave it to me and my dad has it. So, you know, like I said, having APOE4, just one allele of it, is already you have a two to three-fold increased risk for Alzheimer's. If you look at people with Alzheimer's, between 65 and 80% of them have one allele of APOE4. So basically, any person walking around with one allele has about a 30% risk of getting Alzheimer's. And it really, really has to do with your your environment the way you interact with

with your environment that that's going to shift you either into getting it or not um in what way multiple ways um so you know the the the apoe4 is like i said it's not working well and one of the ways so amyloid beta plaques building up in the brain, whether you're talking about an exponential rate because of injury, traumatic injury to the brain, or you're talking about just normal brain aging, decades and decades and decades, APOE plays an important role in taking that amyloid beta that's built up and bringing it to get degraded. It gets rid of it. But if you have APOE4, it just for some reason can't

bind to the A-beta plaque as well. And so it can't remove it. So you're talking about people that are not only accumulating more of it because, you know, of other things that ApoE4 is doing, but they can't remove it as well. So, you know, people that have two ApoE3s, they've got a better, but they can't remove it as well. So, you know, people that have two APOE3s, they've got a better, you know, mechanism of removing that amyloid beta. Well, there's another way you can remove amyloid beta from the brain, and that's from getting sleep, literally. So, sleep, when you sleep, what happens is your brain actually swells because cerebral spinal fluid gets pushed up into the brain. Your brain, you have this whole glymphatic system, like, you know, lymph vessels and things that are surrounding neurons and astrocytes and cerebral spinal fluid gets pushed into

the brain when you sleep. And it literally physically pushes out amyloid beta plaques. It removes amyloid beta plaques and other dead debris things like that just trash that's building up in the brain um and this is happening when you sleep so if you don't sleep if you're not getting enough sleep then you know people have this apoe3 that's another way they can clear it out of the brain but me i really need to make sure i get enough sleep because you know i don't have that other repair mechanism to get rid of the amyloid beta plaques has there been shown that anything else does it meditation anything along those lines

um in terms of the glymphatic system i don't i think that you know that seems to be a unique feature to sleep um something that's happening when you're, you know, especially, particularly when you're in REM sleep. But, you know. Do we know why it's, REM sleep is triggering it? Yeah, no.

You know, this is a new, relatively new finding, and I think we're going to start. New as in this decade? Oh, yeah. Like, new as in just a couple of years ago. So, it's something. God, that's so fascinating that something so significant and important is 2012.

Right? It's, you know, well, there's... the human brain's very complicated, and there's lots of little, you know, people that are doing research, they're looking at just little tiny aspect of this and this little... You know, because there's so many little details that you have to sort of interrogate to figure things out and how they're working. But the glymphatic system is something that's really cool because it gives a mechanistic explanation as to why another reason why sleep is so important. Now, does nutrition play any part in the your brain's ability to do this or to to mitigate this issue yeah so there's i mean nutrition plays a huge factor i mean if you look at people that are obese you know and or insulin resistant type 2 diabetic um these people also have an increased risk for alzheimer's disease i mean they have an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. I mean, they have an increased risk for like a lot of age-related disease.

I mean, it's like they're accelerating their aging process in general. But the fact that they also have an increase for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, is very, you know, it's interesting because it suggests, you know, something about not having the right diet um is also involved and there's multiple things going on here and you know i can't figure all of them out but you know part part of the reason is um they've shown that inflammation so obesity you've got chronic inflammation going on um also with type 2 diabetics and that inflammation actually causes the secretion of like pro-inflammatory cytokines which are you know they activate the immune system you know because that's what happens when the body's like wait something's here that's not supposed to be get rid of it and this is the same thing that happens in the brain that causes the amyloid beta plaques to start getting built up. Well, those things cross over the blood-brain barrier. Inflammatory cytokines cross over, get into the brain,

and start causing neuroinflammation. So, it's really like, they've even shown like if you inject, you can inject people with endotoxin. Endotoxin is what's like a part of the bacterial cell wall. It's released, you know, when bacteria are dying and it happens in the gut a lot, but it causes massive inflammation. And you can inject people with endotoxin and it causes learning and memory deficits and it causes depressive symptoms. Also, you can inject them with a pro-inflammatory cytokine, interferon, and that interferon also causes depressive symptoms because, you know, inflammation is being more and more linked to depression as well. But also, inflammation in the brain is, you know, causing the aggregation of these amyloid beta plaques to occur. So that's, you know, very interesting how literally inflammation

in your body, in your gut, you know, in the peripheral part of your body can affect your brain. It's, you know, you're... Well, there's, haven't there been, sorry to interrupt you again, but haven't there been some recent studies that have shown that the gut bacteria of kids that have Alzheimer's is usually an issue, that a lot of children that have Alzheimer's is usually an issue. That a lot of children that have Alzheimer's also have issues with gut bacteria. You mean autism? What did I say? Alzheimer's.

I'm sorry. Yeah, autism. Yeah. I literally don't know what I'm saying. Literally, words are coming out. Maybe I've been hitting the head too many times. But yeah, autism, spectrum disorders, and even Asperger's. There's been some sort of a connection to gut bacteria yeah yeah definitely i mean these uh people with autism

do have a lot of inflammation in their gut and um you know having inflammation in your gut what's going to happen it's going to get into your brain and it's going to cause neural inflammation in your brain and another thing that inflammation in the brain does is it activates, you know, you've got prostaglandins that are being generated, specifically E2 series prostaglandins. And the reason why that's bad in the brain is because generating E2 series prostaglandins inhibits the brain's ability to release serotonin. So you basically can't release serotonin from like a presynaptic neuron which is important you want you need to release serotonin you know serotonin is doing a lot of things in addition to regulating mood uh it's regulating behavior regulating impulsive behavior things like that um social behavior but you know this this inflammation

that gets into the brain literally stops serotonin from being released from the brain by activating the E2 series. And they've even shown, like, that study I was talking about, people where they injected a pro-inflammatory cytokine and they came down with depressive symptoms. symptoms if they gave those people epa like a very high dose of epa so uh icona penta icosa pentainoic acid which is one of the omega-3s um that that mitigated the depressive symptoms like they didn't get the depressive symptoms um because i think that what's happening is that inflammation is causing one thing that epa does very potently potently it inhibits the generation of E2-series prostaglandins. So in that way, gut bacteria, especially taking it in the form of probiotics, is probably a very important part of the human diet that is widely ignored by a lot of people, right? Yeah. Acidophilus.

Right. You're drinking kombucha here. I love my kombucha. But I said to you that this is the kombucha that's watered down so that it meets the whole food standards. Yeah. No, I had no idea. Yeah. Did you get this at Whole Foods?

I got it. Yeah, down the street. Well, the one up the street, they have the regular stuff, too. You got to know what bottle to get. And you need to have a license, like a driver's license that shows you're over 21. But it's only one half of one percent that's the cutoff if it's more than one half of one percent alcohol by volume then you have to have uh it has to have a liquor license to sell it which is preposterous you can't get drunk off of it no i had no i had no idea that this was watered down but yeah you know yes you know probiotics are very important um you know you've you want

so probiotics are doing things like generating lactic acid which are does a lot of things one is it's um killing off these pathogenic bacteria that can't live in an acidic environment in the gut um but also like i mentioned, you know, lactates also can be used by mitochondria. So, you know, you're talking about giving a source of energy for your mitochondria, you know, so that you can, an important component of not having a lot of gut inflammation is, yes, the balance between probiotics and and the pathogenic bacteria but it's also maintaining that gut barrier because you've got a lot of immune cells in your gut you know they're there because you don't want to eat something bad and you know

it kill you so they're there and they're ready to you know fight off anything that's you know potentially pathogenic so they have a purpose of being there. The way they don't continually, you know, continually start fighting off things is because there's a barrier, which is basically a mucus. It's called mucin, and your gut cells secrete it. And this mucin is important for separating the immune cells in your gut from the bacteria, because when that mucin gets broken down, then your immune cells are exposed to bacteria, which are supposed to be in your gut. And they're like, oh, bacteria. And they start firing all these cytokines and you start to get inflammation, which then breaks down the gut barrier more.

And it causes the same sort of cycle that I was talking about in the brain. You know, this sort of cycle is going on, can happen in the gut as well. that I was talking about in the brain, you know, this sort of cycles going on can happen in the gut as well. So, things like eating a lot of sugar, you know, like can literally like break down the mucin, you know, so it's like that's having that chronic inflammation is doing a lot of things. So, having the right balance of bacteria is one thing that's good, but also making sure that you're eating the right diet to make sure that you're giving your cells the right energy they need to do things that they're supposed to do. Like if we're talking about the gut making mucin. And sugar actually fuels bad bacteria in the gut as well, right?

Yeah, sugar does fuel bad bacteria in the gut. A lot of the bad bacteria in the gut like to get them some sugar. So then you're talking about having overgrowth of the bad bacteria. You know, so it's, there's a lot of... Which weakens your immune system. Yes. Sugar is a significant immune system weakening agent. Gut inflammation in general. do with if you think about having you know a breakdown of the gut barrier and all this

pathogenic bacteria which also break down the gut like that's what they do also um a lot of energy gets spent towards fixing that fixing that oh my god i gotta fix that i gotta repair this and that takes away from brain function and that takes away from cognitive and immune function immune function because now you know you're all the energy is going towards the gut to repair this chronic damage that's also happening and now your your immune systems don't you know when when you're fighting off a disease when you're fighting off a pathogenic you know whether it's viral or bacterial or whatever like that requires a massive amount of energy massive amount of energy that's that's an energy consuming process so it's a matter of triaging this energy to the right place it's like okay well you know if i if my gut's really healthy i'm i'm not inflamed i

have a good diet i'm getting my micronutrients i'm not eating a bunch of sugary crap you know you know the refined carbohydrates and thingsary crap, you know, the refined carbohydrates and things like that, then, you know, you don't have all this chronic damage happening that your energy is constantly, it's like a drain, an energy drain. It just keeps getting sucked into it. And that, you know, that affects all sorts of other functions in the body. So, and there's other explanations, but i like to think about it that way in terms of like a triaging of energy because it really just makes a lot of sense you know from an energetic standpoint looking at how energetically consuming fighting off diseases and how energetically consuming repair is and people that are obese or type 2 diabetic they're in a constant repair state

And people that are obese or type 2 diabetic, they're in a constant repair state. Constant. So, a lot of it is poor energy management because of your diet. Because of your diet, your energy is being taken away to a bunch of functions that you wouldn't ordinarily need it for if your diet was good. Exactly. Exactly. Like, it's really interesting. The lab that I work in at Children's Hospital in Oakland, we work with a lot of insulin resistant, obese children. We are also doing, you know, research on like adolescents and even some of the parents of these children, which are also obese and insulin resistant um and uh some of my colleagues in my lab have developed a like a nutrient bar they call it the corey bar and the nutrient it's like a micronutrient dense bar where it has

you know all sorts of vitamins and minerals and vitamin d and fiber has some polyphenols it has dha it has just a bunch of good stuff um instead of taking a bunch of vitamins it's all in like a matrix with fiber and stuff so that things are absorbed better and digested and um you know my my colleagues i i haven't been directly involved in this research because i look more at things like dna damage but um what what my colleagues have found is that giving these obese people whether we're talking about children or you know know, adolescents, adult, giving them this micronutrient bar, if you compare like giving it to a lean person, and you don't have them change their diet at all. It's like, you know, do what you're going to do, eat what you're going to eat, but here, take this twice a day on top of that.

What we find is that one publication that was done on lean people, lean people like immediately, their HDL goes up, you know, things start happening, they make more glutathione, like, all these positive changes occur. But obese people, it takes a lot longer to happen. Like, it takes a couple of weeks, whereas, like, you know, it actually takes even more than that. I don't remember the exact amount of time but uh it it takes longer to happen we think it takes longer because these people first all that energy that you know the stuff the micronutrients all these things it's it's being shunted towards fixing fixing and eventually as they start to fix then you start to see little changes happening but it doesn't happen right away like it happens

in people that are healthy and i use lean as a marker for healthy i mean it's not entirely accurate but generally speaking when healthier than obese exactly relatively speaking glutathione um do you take glutathione as a supplement um no so that actually um you know i wanted to talk about some of the the possible you know tbi we're talking about traumatic brain injury and you know i talk about all this terrible stuff but there are things that can be done to help um and you know glutathione is interesting because so glutathione is it's one of the major antioxidants in the brain which is why it's very important um you know, for brain aging in general. And it's been associated with a lot of studies in terms of more glutathione in the brain, you know,

decreased Alzheimer's, decreased damage in the brain going on. You know, glutathione is just basically three amino acids that are together. And it's glutamic acid, glycine, and I think cysteine. So, our body makes this inside of our cells. We make it, we have an enzyme called glutathione synthase, and that enzyme takes those amino acids and puts it together. And then once we have glutathione, we have other enzymes that are able to use glutathione as a potent antioxidant. Glutathione peroxidase, for example, this is another enzyme that uses that glutathione as a potent antioxidant. Glutathione peroxidase, for example, this is another enzyme that uses that glutathione to prevent that reactive oxygen species damage I was talking about that happens like one of the early events with traumatic brain injury. And it's

also one of the early damaging events that happens just with normal brain aging, which is happening all the time. We're making it right now in our brains. So, having glutathione in the brain is really good, and there's different enzymes that use it. So, glutathione peroxidase will use glutathione to basically reduce that oxidative damage so it can't damage the neuron or the astrocyte or whatever, you know, cell type that it comes in contact with. The problem is that with age, we decrease the expression of glutathione-related genes. And what that means is, you know, you have genes in your body, and sometimes they can be, expression just means you make more of it. So, when it's being

expressed, you're making more of it. So, that's a good thing. As we age, we decrease the expression. So, like everything, things fall fall apart and we don't make as much of these glutathione related genes um the thing with glutathione is you can't uh because it's made in our cells there's no transport mechanism to get glutathione into the cell like you know you you you can transport it in amino acids and the amino acids and you know this glutathione synthase uses those to make it in the cell. But there's no transport mechanism for glutamic acid, glycine, cysteine, like together to get in. And, you know, you can't just, cells have, you know, transport mechanisms to get stuff inside.

It's a regulated process. So taking glutathione orally is sort of pointless uh not to mention the fact that the gut isn't going to absorb it either it gets broken apart um there is liposomal glutathione that's what i take take that in the mornings yeah so liposomal glutathione um anything that's liposomal can bypass a lot of these transport mechanisms just based on you know the way so first of all liposomes can be absorbed by the by the gut but also they can get into cells because a liposome is basically like you know it's like a little lipid that has a phospholipid bilayer and it has whatever it has inside of it in this case glutathione which is soluble

and it fuses with the lipid bilayer of the cell membrane and basically just gets taken up and so then whatever's inside of it goes into the cell um they've shown in i've looked for studies to see you know liposomal supplemental liposomal glutathione like how much like is it getting into tissue is it getting into the brain for example because it's important and um i haven't found a lot of studies. I found one study that showed rabbits that were given oral liposomal glutathione were able to increase the glutathione levels in their brain, in their heart, and also in the liver. But they were given a massive dose. Like, they were given 400 milligrams, and they're about 11 pounds. So, that's like 6 grams for like a 180-pound man. So, what is 400 milligrams and they're about 11 pounds so that's like six grams for like 180 pound man

and what is uh 400 milligrams like what is that like in a physical form like what would you see is it would it be how many teaspoons would that be for oh oh i don't i don't know i mean you'd have to look at i think if it's in a teaspoon like it tells you the like milligram content per teaspoon i did look up online to see because i was like i gotta get me some of this and um I think if it's in a teaspoon, it tells you the milligram content per teaspoon. I did look up online to see because I was like, I've got to get me some of this. And the problem is that most of the liposomal glutathione is really expensive. And it's like between 100 milligrams and 400 milligrams per dose, like per teaspoon or per capsule. Which is what they gave to a rabbit, 400.

Right. But a rabbit weighs 11 pounds. The rabbit swallows it too too aren't you supposed to hold it in your mouth under your tongue no they were they they inject like they give it to the to the rabbit like they inject it in their mouth yeah but the way i've been told to take the liposomal glutathione is to tuck it under your tongue or squirt it under your tongue hold it in your mouth for 30 seconds and then swallow it does that make any sense at all no i have no idea how that what that would do but the idea being sorry yeah no i mean the point is is that you supplement like liposomal glutathione may be actually you may be getting it into your brain um it's just a matter of how much you know is it they didn't do a dose response in that study. And if it wasn't so darn expensive, there's other ways to increase glutathione.

But here's the thing. So, taking supplemental glutathione in the form of liposomal glutathione, of course, any other supplemental glutathione is just trash. Useless. Yeah, it's useless. You can't get it. Okay, so pill form, nothing. Well, I think they have liposome.

You can have it in pill form with liposome. Okay. But it just has to be liposomal is the point right yeah if it's not liposomal then you're not even getting it past the gut let alone into the cell right so um but the other thing is is that okay so here's the thing you're you supply your your cells with this liposomal glutathione but the thing is is, is that the enzyme that uses glutathione, glutathione peroxidase and these other enzymes, they decrease with age. So, while you're bypassing the, you know, the decrease in the expression of glutathione synthase, which is what makes glutathione, you're not bypassing the decrease in expression of this enzyme that uses it,

that's using glutathione to do its thing so that's also important and there's other ways that you can actually increase glutathione but just interestingly i came across a study recently like 2014 very like i think it was even just a couple months ago it was a traumatic brain injury study where they they had basically took mice and they induced traumatic brain injury by like putting pressure on their brain and what where they they had basically took mice and they induced traumatic brain injury by like putting pressure on their brain and what happens is they notice that you know the blood brain barrier was compromised all those things that i was talking about happens waters flowing into the brain and solutes and all that and activation of immune function all that stuff's

happening what they found was that if they put glutathione they actually because they did a pressure mouse skulls are much thinner than human skulls are and if they did a pressure wound to the mouse skull there was like a little tiny crack in the skull and they could put glutathione on top topically where the crack is and it would get through into the brain and what they found was that if they did it within three hours of the injury, they abrogated like 70% of the cell death that happens. Wow. It was amazing, but it was a three-hour time window. Can that be done to humans?

So I was wondering, well, so the thing, that's what got me on this whole liposomal trail. I was like, well, we can't, first of all, we don't even know anything about the human skull. I mean, we know about it, but we don't know whether or not you can put something topically after a traumatic injury and if it's going to get in. They're doing those studies now because this was actually a new discovery where it's like, oh, wow, you can actually get through the skull and get into the, at least under an injury type situation. So, the idea would be that you would inject something into the skin on the scalp um i don't know if they injected it but yeah go under the skin like pinch the skin

of the scalp go under and get in but whether or not that can be done in humans i don't know like i said i mean first of all humans have a much thicker skull than than some rodents right but um so they're you know going to be testing that but the other thing is is like okay well can you the key part of this study in my mind was they inhibited that reactive oxygen species which is um the instigator of this whole cascade this neuroinflammatory if they went downstream and try to inhibit inhibit inflammation it didn't have the effect because those things were already activated you already had cell dead cells because it's the reactive oxygen species starting it and causing the cell death and that was how they were

able to prevent like 70 of the cell death by giving that topical glutathione um so uh that was it was like wow well we got to figure out how to do that. Yeah, exactly. And so there's other ways you can increase glutathione. The liposomal is one. I don't know how robust, like I said, with that one study in rabbits, massive amount. We're talking about like for an 180-pound man. And I don't even know how much some of these MMA fighters weigh. They probably weigh even more than that. But, you know, 180-pound man, he's talking about six grams of liposomal glutathione which is a lot significant amount i mean considering how much

how costly is it's just not economically feasible in my mind right the the holding it under the tongue that i've seen liposomal b12 uh that's used okay in a similar way makes sense and b12 people it's sublingual like that people do that to bypass the whole stomach acid thing. But, you know, I don't know. Maybe there's something I just don't know about with the liposomal glutathione. Sublingual means, what does that actually mean? It means holding it under the tongue? Yeah.

The distribution method? Yeah. Right. So, to use liposomal and use it in a sublingual way, to tuck it under, does that make any sense? Would it go into your blood that way? I mean, I don't know why it would be any different than swallowing it. I'm wasting my time holding that shit in my mouth. I could just be not thinking about something that's obvious to me, or it's just a waste of time.

Have there been studies on that liposomal b12 taken sublingually i haven't really read any there may have been studies on that but i haven't i haven't looked in the literature of that i'll look it up right now yeah so the other ways to to increase so like i mentioned so there's there's genes that are glutathione related genes so you can increase the expression of those genes. Right away. Sublingual liposomal glutathione shows up in the first thing that you Google. If you Google sublingual liposomal glutathione, it's the first thing that pops up in Google.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's something I can certainly read about but i just off the top of my head can't think of why that would be more effective at getting into your cells it's saying right here the only way to get significant amounts into your body is with liposomal glutathione supplements uh either uh iv or injection is the other way. Yeah. Yeah, injection is another way. And that obviously bypasses the whole intestinal absorption thing.

Yeah. So what's interesting is they've done, so other ways to increase glutathione would be, for example, turmeric. Yeah, I use that stuff. It's awesome. Well, they've shown. So there's two different bioactive components in it. turmeric turmeric yeah i use that stuff yeah awesome it's all well they've shown so the there there's two different bioactive components in it one is the um curcumin and that has what that does curcumin is it first of all it's awesome it gets into the brain and it's you know an anti

it has antioxidant activity itself aside from glutathione but it also increases the expression of all the glutathione related genes so it turns on glutathione peroxidase glutathione synthase and another gene called glutathione reductase which actually recycles glutathione that's already been used or oxidized which is really cool because now you're talking about ramping up the whole glutathione system like all of it and and this curcumin does this um and so there was uh they've done studies in mice where they've done you know tbi related studies for traumatic brain injury where they've they've given them um they did intravenous and because of the the effects of you know you you basically metabolize curcumin immediately um it's like 40 minutes do you say curcumin or surcumin i always say curcumin yeah i know i've said it

wrong what do you usually say surcumin oh no i think it's curcumin i've just read it and tried to pronounce it i've never actually heard anybody say it until you oh really you haven't even said it wow no um turmeric i've heard but yeah the actual turmeric turmeric turmeric turmeric i think there's an r-t-u-r turmeric turmeric yeah okay but i fucked that up too yeah whatever i know what it's not important it's like a spice you know it's good stuff yeah it's like curries you know people using their curries but it's like massive anti-inflammatory massive not only anti-inflammatory it inhibits like the activation of nfkb which is like this gene that like turns on a whole variety of different genes involved inflammation so it's like blunting the whole inflammatory cascade and it activates all the glutathione genes you know and on top of that

it has antioxidant activity itself so it's like you know know, it's just like a triple whammy. So it's really cool. So curcumin is probably way better than taking liposomal glutathione. Well, I don't know because... Or maybe in synergistic form. Certainly synergistic. But the thing with curcumin is that it is also rapidly metabolized because it's a xenobiotic, which means it's not a vitamin or a

mineral it's something foreign to the body you know polyphenols egcgs from green tea all these things are the same a lot of herbal echinacea these are what are called xenobiotics and what happens when you take a xenobiotic is um it activates this whole pathway in the liver which is like you know the liver is like oh there's this foreign thing in my body that's not supposed to be here it's not a vitamin. It's not a mineral. Okay, I need to get rid of it. So, it metabolizes.

It's detoxifying, whatever. So, it gets, you know, metabolized rapidly. But there's something in black pepper called piperine, yeah, that inhibits xenobiotic metabolism so it's been shown in humans that if you give uh curcumin and piperine that you can increase the bioavailability of curcumin by two thousand percent in humans whoa which is pretty significant and so that's kind of cool because i'm like oh well of course i ordered some uh curcumin with with piperine and uh for myself because i've got you know apoe4 and it's just a really good thing um but with traumatic brain injury they've shown that you know if they give it to uh to mice they do it intravenously and they give them like a really

high dose um it prevents you know the whole inflammatory response the edema intracranial pressure like all that stuff is dramatically improved wow and this is again it's like a time window where it was like you know a few hours after the trauma after the trauma so it's you know but i think maybe even before if you're already if you already have it in your system you know the question is how much is it is it gonna like you know prevent the acute you know immediate thing i don't know to what degree but at least at the very least taking it every day you're talking about inhibiting some of that neuroinflammatory cycle that cycle that's really you know vicious because once you have

the plaques form which happens within hours in after injury then you're talking about you know it activating the whole cycle where it causes more and more for years and years and years so there's no negative repercussions to take me there's nothing there haven't yeah so in that study where they increased the bioavailability by two thousand percent there was no adverse side effects however since piperine inhibits um xenobiotic metabolism full force like you know it's it it's inhibiting this very generalized pathway that's used to detoxify and get rid of all sorts of foreign things, like even drugs, like antibiotics, whatever, you know, your statins, whatever you take. So, there is a concern, like, in my mind,

I haven't done a lot of reading on this, you know, to see what's out there in literature. But just from, you know, my understanding of the mechanism the mechanism i think it's you don't want to go crazy because it's like if you're taking a bunch of other stuff because it's going to increase the the half-life of all sorts of you know other xenobiotics which are just you know like i said a lot of different herbal things or you know you know things like curcumin and egcgs all that stuff so there's always that potential it's like well what else are you taking are you increasing the half-life of that too by taking this you know piperine with it and what is that doing so that's it you should definitely be cautious in that in that respect

so don't take too much of it but yeah i haven't seen too much of it like i you know when i did some searching for like the turmeric but the thing is is that I like the turmeric and not just the curcumin because there's another compound, you know, that's in turmeric called turmeric, aromatic turmeric. And a study just came out like a couple of months ago on this where it's actually, it does, it does a lot of the same things that the curcumin does and that it inhibits inflammation but it does something in addition to that it actually repairs brain damage because it causes the proliferation of neural stem cells in your brain so i know it's like and it was very robust there's there's two regions of the brain that you can actually, you have neural stem cells, which means you can make

new neurons. You've damaged neurons, neurons have died, you know, you want to replace those neurons. And there's two regions of the brain that can do that, the subventricular zone and the dentate gyrus. And so, tumorone actually causes the proliferation of neural stem cells in the subventricular zone. And to some degree, I mean, they're giving these mice, I can't recall off the top of my head the dose, but they were giving them

a pretty high dose. And what they found was that it increased the proliferation of them by like, you know, 60%, which is pretty significant. Part of the problem with age is that these neural stem cells, they start to proliferate less. And as they start to proliferate less, then you have less of them being made, and you also have less new neurons being made, so less neurogenesis. So, if you think about in the context of someone who's undergone a traumatic brain injury, they've undergone, they've had massive amounts of cell death occurring from that reactive oxygen species, from that inflammation. You know, they've lost neurons. That's a fact. So, if you can have something that's boosting the proliferation of their neural stem cells, that's a great thing.

It's not just a great thing for people that have had an injury. It's a great thing for just normal brain aging. I think it's also a great thing for, you know, people that are susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases like myself, because I have one of these APOE4 alleles, you know. So, I'm, you know, I've got to be really careful because I can't repair damage as well. If I can make sure I grow new neurons, then, you know, that's a good thing. I didn't know there was anything that you could eat that could help grow new neurons. I'd never heard of that before. anything that you could eat that could help grow new neurons i've never heard of that before yeah so tumerone is stimul it stimulates the proliferation of the uh neural stem cells in

the subventricular zone um this this study was really came out like less than two months ago that's incredible it's pretty incredible yeah so you could get smarter from eating tumor they did get smarter yeah that's insane they had improvements now i mean take this with the grain of salt in the sense where it's like the whole bioavailability thing in humans and how much are we that's always the issue it's like okay well they're giving mice you know a much higher dose and you know so that it's like bypassing first of all they're injecting it in some cases so it's bypassing the whole getting absorbed but the fact that it occurs is hopeful because it's like well eventually we'll find a way to overcome some of the bioavailability issues which you know we kind of are so is the bioavailability issue mitigated at all by a

large dose so like if you're taking like what what do you recommend as a dose like a thousand milligram pills or what i have of uh turmeric well in the case of the mouse studies it's mitigated by a large dose that's given intravenously so so i need to start shooting so you don't have but but how do you how do you shoot up turmeric yeah i you know i don't know i and and the question is what about up your butt they've got that suppository they have clinical trials that that That they're doing now With people With Alzheimer's Or people that

Have dementia Early dementia signs They're doing this With turmeric And I hope they use Piperine also Are they using suppositories Or am I just

Joking around I don't know I don't know what they're using Because a lot of studies Have come out recently In different model organisms Where they've looked Like at worms

And flies And mice And they have all these Different neurodegenerative you know sort of models where they look and study this stuff and they find hands down this turmeric is doing some cool shit like it's it's awesome and and these studies are they administering it orally or are they using injectables well if you're talking about mice mice, then a lot of them have been injectables. And this is where the studies are coming out. Yes. So the studies aren't on humans yet.

But they did get smarter. The people that they did it to that got smarter. They did. So the people, no, those were mice. The mice got smarter? The mouse performed better on learning and memory. Oh, okay. Yes, yes, yes.

So, but let's see, what was the other? There was another um interesting thing about the oh i know i went what i wanted to bring up it was i got sort of sidetracked when i was talking about the the neural stem cells um that are in the subventricular zone what's really interesting about this is that they um they readily go to the olfactory bulb, you know, smell. So their sense of smell is a good predictor of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and even just all-cause mortality. Like literally, you can have a decreased sense of smell and, you know, it can be a good predictor of your next, you know, five-year mortality.

And it's like, why is this sense of smell such a good predictor of you know people that are i'm gonna get alzheimer's soon also people that may just die soon and we're finding out again just recently uh within the past um couple of months that the olfactory bulb requires a constant supply of neural stem cells because the olfactory neurons, which are in your olfactory bulb, which is just right in front of your brain, those neurons, which are responsible for smelling things, you know, and they send signals to the brain so that you can, you know, experience it, so to speak, they require a constant supply of neural stem cells, which is coming from the subventricular zone. And so, when you start to have that process diminish where you can't supply those new stem cells to the olfactory bulb, your sense of smell goes away.

And so, that's why also it's a predictor of Alzheimer's because you're literally losing the ability. Now, don't, people are born with, people are born with a terrible sense of smell. That doesn't mean that you don't, that you're, like, not making neural stem cells. So, please don't freak out. Like, there's other reasons why you cannot have a good sense of smell that doesn't mean that you don't that you're like not making neural stem cells so please don't freak out like there's other reasons why you cannot have a good sense of smell the reason this is impacting me right now is because i know people who've been knocked out and lost their sense of smell yeah so wow yeah so that's um the uh the the tumerone that was given to these mice that improved their sense of smell and improved um you know there this is there's another thing also with this neural stem cell i'm i've known for some time that this sense of smell is a good predictor of alzheimer's but in just until i had i just didn't

understand why and this whole understanding the neural stem cells being having to replace it like constantly so it's literally like a marker it's like a marker for brain you know your brain ability to repair damage in your brain um i remember last time i was on the podcast you mentioned that study where they gave young blood to old mice and they essentially made them yeah again well i'm going to bring this back to the nose so i became very interested in that study and so essentially what they found is that you know there's something in the blood that's secreted in so it's in the plasma actually and it's called growth differentiation factor 11 and it goes it's made it's it's made more readily in young blood so it decreases you know with age like everything does and what happens is this growth differentiation factor 11 goes to the

brain goes to the muscle and it stimulates stem cell proliferation and it does it in the subventricular zone and so when they gave it like they did this when they did it in mice what they found was that the amount the mice you know their tissues were less aged the only way you can reverse tissue aging in that to that degree has got to be related to stem cells because when you already have all this damage like the only way you're going to repair that damage is by replacing and replenishing that population with new cells and because as we we age, the ability to do that, our stem cell ability proliferation decreases

and all that stuff decreases, we can't do it as well. And also, you know, the more reactive oxygen species we get, the more those cells start dying. So the fact that, you know, these tissues were able to, like, reverse in aging was really, you know, obviously indicative of stem cells. And what they found was, indeed, this growth differentiation factor is in the plasma more of it's in young people and it's causing the proliferation of neural stem cells and the sub-ventricular zone and also in muscle what they found was they could even isolate that growth

differentiation factor and you know inject it into old mice and it would have the same effect which is really cool because that gives hope for isolating it and for you know you know, inject it into old mice, and it would have the same effect, which is really cool, because that gives hope for isolating it and for, you know, basically people using it as a source to stimulate proliferation of stem cells. And there's actually a clinical trial that started this month at Stanford, where they're injecting plasma from young individuals that are younger than 30. And they're giving them to people with mild alzheimer's older people with mild alzheimer's and they're going to check the the you know cognitive effects you know immediately after and also long term so but the whole stem cell thing in the nose and it's it's very um interesting how it's like the nose that stem cell you know

neural stem cell uh capacity to make more of them can be you know you can see the status of that by your sense of smell um and you know the fact that you've you know observed fighters that have had decreased sense of smell that is alarming well there's one guy named gary goodrich who's a real veteran mixed martial arts fighter who was around during the early days of the ufc and fought in K1, he fought in Pride. He's like kind of a legendary mixed martial arts character. And he's dealing with some pretty significant traumatic brain injury now from years and years of fighting. And that's one of the issues that he had. He lost his sense of smell. And that makes total sense what you're saying.

Yep. I'm sorry to hear that. You know, I, like I said, the APOE4 thing is something I think is really, really significant. And I think that, you know, they've shown it with traumatic brain injury from car accidents. They've shown it with, you know, strokes. They've shown it in boxers. They've shown it with, you know, strokes. They've shown it in boxers.

You know, that having one of those alleles, you're talking about a tenfold increased risk of screwing up your brain. Do you think that that's something that they should screen for when they give someone a license to fight? I think that if I were a fighter, I would want to know. I'd want to know my risk. You're completely missing the psychology of a fighter fighters feel invulnerable like the idea of a fighter is that everybody else is gonna get fucked up but not me i'm gonna be different i'm gonna rise above i have a championship's heart a champion champion's heart champion's mindset i'm gonna get through things that other people can't endure you're not you're not going to if you have an apoey for a little you're not yeah you're you're bringing science into the world of fighting yes i i would love

for that to happen because you're talking about possibly changing the lives of like you know 25 percent of fighters fighters would still want to fight i guarantee you a good majority of them would still want to fight and they would just say well i'll cross that bridge when i come to it well if i start feeling the difference but the real issue is once you start feeling the issues you've only touched the tip of the iceberg of the amount of damage that you've actually occurred you've actually acquired yes and once you start becoming symptomatic in the sense where your memory short-term memory becomes affected like

what we were talking about with denny and our friend right that that that is typical of you know a 80 year old human being that has acquired 80 years of inflammatory reactive oxygen species damage in the brain you know then you start to see those symptoms. Do you remember there was a story a few years back of a football player? Do you remember the football player that fell off the truck, Jamie? Yeah, Chris Henry. Chris Henry, that's it. He was involved in some sort of a dispute with his girlfriend or his wife, I forget which one, and she took off with his truck and he chased her

and jumped on the back of the truck and fell. And fell off the truck while she was speeding down jumped on the back of the truck and fell. And fell off the truck while she was speeding down the road, cracked his head open, died. They did an autopsy on him and found out that he had the brain of a 70-something-year-old Alzheimer's patient. And he was in his 20s. Wasn't he? Yeah. Find out how old he was. I want to say he was 28 years old um and he had

i mean this is a guy who had not expressed any issues as far as like there's a bunch of different athletes now that are coming out and there's been an hbo real sports uh piece that they just did uh this past weekend that i watched about football players violent expression um that they just did this past weekend that I watched about football players, violent expression that they're directly relating to this traumatic brain injury that they're suffering from football. But this young man. 26. 26. And he had, see if you can find the article about him having,

does it say he had about his brain issue? There was an article where they did the autopsy on it. Researchers find brain trauma in Henry, 26 years old. There's chronic traumatic NC, I can't say that. Encephalopathy. There you go. Encephalopathy. Yeah.

Yes. God, Jamie, you can't even say encephalopathy. This is, well, there's multiple things that you brought up that we could discuss. I think, you know, one is definitely the accelerated brain aging that's happening from the repeated traumatic events where it's doing that. High school football, college football. Yes. And then pros, you're just slamming into things like a good chunk of your life. Right.

things like a good chunk of your life right and and and i did see one um press release or some some article that was like 74 out of 76 or something like nfl players or something somewhat don't quote me on those statistics but something that was very very almost like 90 of them had a beta amyloid beta plaques in their brain and tau tangles in the brain that were characteristic of alzheimer's disease yes it's 76 out of 79 and this is post post death right postpartum yes yes exactly what's part of that's depression that's after birth yes they gave birth and they got depressed because they thought they were men that depressed me if i was mad that's how hard they got hit um but yeah so uh the the other really interesting and thing about this traumatic brain injury is the effects on behavior you mentioned he like ran over he ran chased her car and jumped on the truck and fell off of it yeah like that's

that's impulsive behavior i mean that's like not that's not a normal thing you don't just like chase after a truck and try to jump on it while it's moving. But athletes and fighters and like really, you know, that's really common. Like that sort of impulsive behavior, it's super common for fighters. So, well, there definitely, there's one aspect of the fighting culture. I mean, you know, they're, you know, that's part of. It's also what leads you to do that in the first place is you have this ability to do like a lot a lot of them i mean i think

before they ever got any brain damage whatsoever they're impulsive people that's what led them to do fighting in the first place so you think that was part of the i don't know i mean i'm guessing certainly because i'm guessing based on my own life right so i don't know. I mean, I'm guessing. Certainly. Because I'm guessing based on my own life. Right. So, I don't know. Yeah. I think that, you know, people, so, impulsive behavior that's related to impulsive aggression that can be self-directed, like, suicide or self-harming, it can also be, like, aggressive towards others. Impulsive behavior can be, like, not long-term planning where you're just, you know, you're

not weighing out all the possible, you know know events that can occur and what's more likely to happen or not you know you just impulsively do something um there are polymorphisms that are you know related to serotonin related genes that are associated with that because serotonin plays a very important role in regulating impulsivity. So, people that are already genetically predisposed because they have a polymorphism, again, that gene variant that I was describing earlier when I talked about APOE, they have a gene variant in serotonin synthesis gene or in the serotonin release or in the transporter or in the receptor. You know, they've shown that there are associations with these and

impulsivity. You know, serotonin is one of the things that happens, I've talked about this before on the podcast, you know, you can deplete people of serotonin by taking away their tryptophan and they become impulsive. They become impulsive in terms of impulsive aggressive things, you know, when they do sorts of tests. And that's partly because what's happening is behavioral disinhibition. Behavioral disinhibition is, you know, there's signaling that's happening that's going on from the orbital frontal cortex part of the brain. And it's happening, it's signaling to other regions of the brain like the amygdala. And I don't understand exactly how serotonin does this or what its specific role is. I'd have to, you know, really dig into more neuroscience for that.

But I do know that it does play a very important role in that when you take away the serotonin, disinhibition occurs, which means disinhibition means now usually you're having inhibitory signals happen that say, okay, you know, you can't just go out and, you know, do something crazy. Like, you know, that's, you can't do it. And your brain knows that and there's certain signals that's happening. When you take away serotonin, those signals go away. And so now that inhibitory signal isn't there. This is something that I, you know, like I was doing some reading on some of these NFL players that have gone

crazy and committed suicide. Like Junior Seau, I think is one. Who shot himself in the heart, you know, because he specifically wanted his brain to be. Examined. Examined. And there was another football player. I don't recall his name, but he also committed suicide. I think he shot himself in his heart as well.

And then there was a pro wrestler, and I don't know his name, but he did a murder-suicide. So, these are all, you know, there's probably multiple things going on. The orbital frontal cortex plays a very important role in inhibitory actions. But when things start to get messed up in that region of the brain, including the serotonin, and I think, like I mentioned, the inflammation in the brain when you generate E2 series prostaglandins, which happens when there's inflammation in the brain, you, they've shown, they've shown this in many different studies in mice, you inhibit the release of serotonin. They've shown this in many different studies in mice.

You inhibit the release of serotonin. So you take that, you know, in and of by itself, and you're talking about not having as much of that serotonin plus the damage to the orbital frontal cortex and all these things are compounding. You're talking about like just massive changes in behavior that are occurring. And then on top of that, you may have someone that is like you said, they go into these you know sorts of sports for a reason they're already impulsive so they you're talking about people that may already be genetically predisposed they may already have some sort of alteration in their serotonin function and now they're depleting their serotonin release on top of that and they've got damage to their orbital frontal cortex it's like these things are compounding to to cause just total impulsive behavior and you know where they become aggressive and they do crazy things that they normally otherwise wouldn't do because they'd have that impulsive i mean sorry they'd have that inhibitory signal saying no don't do this you

can't do this like so you know i think it's very damaging in the respects of changing the behavior of these people, too, where they just become even more, you know, impulsive and aggressive. And they're already, you know, in the case of fighters, they're already fighting. It's already a culture thing, you know. So, it's something very interesting with the serotonin system also and the interaction between inflammation and serotonin. interesting with the serotonin system also and the interaction between inflammation and serotonin they've even shown the opposite like when you take people and you give them an acute dose of like an ssri and you flood the brain with serotonin just acutely just for like you know a couple of hours people become more adverse to harming others like when you do give them a you know like a one of those questionnaire things they become more adverse to harming others like when you do give them a you know like a one of those questionnaire things

they become more adverse to harming others even at the expense of saving other more people so serotonin somehow regulating you know these kinds of i don't know you know and there's neuroscientists and philosophers and all this that are doing this research and trying to understand doesn't it make sense though that happy people would be more kind and less likely to harm others and i've found personally that people that are most depressed are the most likely to fucking slash and burn right those those are the people that want to take everybody down with them it's usually the people that are really depressed that are looking to make other people feel bad yeah i think happiness is a is a component but I also think the impulsivity is another component that's important.

It seems that serotonin, if that really is what's going on, that giving someone a large dose of serotonin would actually make them less likely to want to harm other people, that's a pretty significant thing. Yes. That study was published, i don't know like 2010 or so i think and they're they're looking into they're doing a lot of follow-up studies on that like you know there's a difference between giving someone an acute dose of serotonin flooding their

brain and doing it constantly you know because when you're constantly doing it then there's feedback loops and you start to uh decrease the amount of serotonin receptors in the brain. Yeah. So that's, so, you know, but anyways, just the fact, what they're trying to understand is like, what is serotonin doing? Like, why is it that by giving someone a huge dose of it, they become more adverse to harming others? And I don't know the answer, you know. It just seems like they'd be happier, right? I mean, if you're, serotonin, part of its function is to promote happiness right this is one of the reasons why

ssris are termed antidepressants because people who are on depressants they take these regulates their serotonin gives them a big uptake in it and then they feel better um i don't know if this is clear cut but it does you know there's a lot of factors i'm simplifying the shit out yeah yeah it does affect mood yeah it does you do feel better um they've shown also the serotonin uh ssris affect pain like you pain so you actually feel less pain so it's not just a matter of feeling happier it's also a matter of not feeling as much pain and there's similar pathways between physical pain and social pain I have a friend who had depression issues and before being on ssris

He was like really angry like fuck everybody fuck this guy and like he would just say horrible things about people Once he got on the antidepressants all that went away Yeah now couldn't care less what other people do couldn't care less like who cares like someone's doing something bad or someone's saying something bad or whatever he's like i don't care just doesn't bother me i'm not i don't want to harm that person you know it's a complete shift in his mindset yeah serotonin does affect that that aggressiveness that you know like a you know it's it's definitely playing a role. It's more of a lash out sort of a thing. I think there's one of the issues with depression is that people that are depressed and people that do have depression issues, they kind of want to bring other people into their world.

Almost like they feel like that people, other people being happy is somehow taking something away from them, you know yeah yeah i do i think you know they want to surround they want other people to be miserable miserable with them i think in the sense also where it's like because it's justification it's like i'm here then it must be okay and you know if everyone here is also here with me then yeah then i'm you know it's not i'm i'm not abnormal there's not something wrong i've always wondered how much of that is what's going on psychologically how much of that is what's in their life and how much of the psychology and how much of what's going on in their life like what kind of feedback they're getting on a daily day-to-day basis in their life is actually

regulating their human neurochemistry yeah no there is a very complex interaction going on between the environment and the neurochemistry and this has been demonstrated you know in a lot of different animal studies you know where it's like so you you can actually alter someone's serotonin system by having an early life you know stressful event happen so you know, stressful event happen. So, you know, like in the case of mice, an early life stressful event is when the pups, when you're born and you're a pup and you're not nurtured as a pup. So, when you're nurtured, you know, the parent mice will lick the pups and when they get licked, they release serotonin in their brain when they're really, really young. And what happens when they release serotonin in their brain when they're really, really young. And what happens when they release serotonin in their brain when they're really young is all sorts of feedback, epigenetic feedback loops.

So epigenetics is changing the expression of their genes without actually altering the DNA nucleotide sequence, like a polymorphism is a different sequence of DNA. But epigenetically, they'll change the receptors in their brain that respond to like glucocorticoids, like stress hormones. And so when they have serotonin there, they increase the amount of those receptors, which means when they have more receptors to glucocorticoids, your body doesn't shoot as much cortisol and much of those glucocorticoids out because it has a lot of receptors there. It's a feedback. So calmer they're happier they're not as you know and anxious but if you take that away and those pups don't get licked they don't make serotonin in early development and those glucocorticoid

receptors you don't have as many and so the body is constantly it's like in a stressed state and these these mice grow up very very anxious fearful um just you know they're very their their brains develop differently isn't that the same with children that grow up in orphanages where they don't get cuddled and yeah i mean that's what i would be that's what i think it seems likely that and you take that in combination so you've got someone who's already genetically predisposed i like you know the serotonin system because you know we're talking a lot about that they're already they already have a polymorph and these things polymorphisms are common you've got people with polymorphisms in serotonin transporters serotonin

you know synthesis genes or their receptors and so they're already kind of vulnerable they're already you know they're not making as much serotonin or they're not responding it like normal. So they're already genetically vulnerable to that. And then you couple that with an early stressful event, and then it just screws things up even more. regulating serotonin synthesis. EPA regulates the release of it. They've shown that. I mentioned the E2 series prostaglandins inhibits the release. When you put EPA in, it mitigates that. So, having an anti-inflammatory omega-3, you know, is very important for people that are genetically predisposed to have their serotonin system screwed up. If you take that person and you think about someone who's already on the fringe who's already waiting to be tipped over into mental illness or behavioral just types of behaviors that are non-productive and you and you take their nutrition they don't they have poor nutrition their you know inflammation going on so all the energy is going sucked into the wrong

place and not up here where it needs to be. And then you add stressful environment. I mean, you're talking about dynamite for mental illness. And not just stressful environment, but negative feedback, like negative environment. Yeah. Poor relationships, poor friendships. There's a real hardcore negativity. Yeah. Yeah, they've even shown actually, in terms of the relationships, this whole behavioral epigenetics, so to speak, is kind of what it's called. And it's very interesting because it's talking, it's like the relationship between what's happening in your environment and how that's changing, you know, things, the neurochemistry in your brain, either at the level of neurotransmitters or receptors or whatever.

your brain either at the level of neurotransmitters or receptors or whatever they've shown that another so another thing that happens when you're uh cuddled when you're young um and they do a lot of these studies in mice um obviously but you release like like for example when your mother licks you you also there's also oxytocin being released and oxytocin sort of that bonding hormone that's made where the mother bonds with the child but also it's it's it's pair you know mate bond bonding as well and so when you take that away uh when when you know like like if you're not coddled or you don't get that attention early like that early attention from the mother in early life then um what happens is that the the offspring grow up and they make less oxytocin

like some epigenetic changes are happening where now they're not making as much so now they grow up and they don't bond to their children and it perpetuates and they don't bond to their relations so they have poorer relationships um similar thing happens with vasopressin which is it's very vasopressin regulates a lot of things it's also an anti-diuretic but interestingly it's also made in the brain and it's important for male like males respond to it um in the context of mating so like for example they they've shown in like prairie voles which are rodents that are monogamous they um they have higher level they have a higher level of receptors

for that vasopressin in their brain compared to other vole species that are not monogamous. And when they take away, when researchers take away the ability, like take away those, they basically antagonize the receptors so it can't bind vasopressin. Those prairie voles, which are monogamous

and they mate for life, all of a sudden that goes away to take it they become um freaks like yeah polygamous and stuff and they've shown this in like non-human primates too where i think it was like owl monkey owl monkeys they're monogamous and you look at and you compare them to um rehus monkeys that are non non-monogamous they're the difference is also at the those receptors for vasopress non-monogamous, the difference is also at those receptors for vasopressin. The monogamous ones have a high density of them in their brain. And then another study came out looking at humans in a Swedish cohort. They looked at males that

were in monogamous relationships, that were married, had successful relationships versus ones that were divorced, also ones that were just single. And they found that there was an association again with these vasopressin receptors in the brain where the men that had failed marriages, for example, or were not likely to even get married, they had less of these vasopressin receptors. So, it's really interesting that, you know, there's these social hormones that we're making that are really changed epigenetically. So, it's really interesting that, you know, there's these social hormones that we're making that are really changed epigenetically. So, these are also, like, for example, in the praevals, they release more of this vasopressin when they're mating. So, like, the act of mating with their monogamous, with their partner that they partner with for life, there's something that goes on with that mating event that bonding event that makes them more it makes them more monogamous exactly and it's happening i don't remember if

i think it was happening at the level of the receptor yes they were making more of the receptors the mating event uh caused them to strengthen that bond even more you know what would be fascinating is if they could figure out some way to experiment with bonobos who are patently polygamous. You know, bonobos are freaks. They just have sex with everybody. Really? They only have the only, like, restrictions. Like male and female, too?

Yeah, they do. Yeah, they're homosexual. The only restrictions are the mother won't mate with the sons. That's it. Everything else is a free party. And it would be fascinating if they could figure out a way to introduce that could can you introduce it yes yes you can make a transgenic and until recently transgenic by in form of diet or would you have to know so transgenic um in the

in the context of biology um means that we we take a a piece of dna like a gene that does something Geology means that we take a piece of DNA, like a gene that does something, and we put it into a species, a rodent, and we make it, like we can give rodents human genes and study their effects, or we can give rodents genes that we give them more of them and see what happens. Isn't that how Planet of the Apes got started? Probably so. That seems like a fucking disastrous idea. We do it in rodents. Yeah, but we did it in rodents i mean that's but we did it in chimps so now with this we there was some limiting ability uh with the cloning techniques and how we do it but now we can do it more readily so i think those studies are going to be done yeah

but you're you're right there's always the variability the yeah the uh chaotic factor it's like well what if wake up what if they like become really smart and they start welding right show up at the zoo and the chimps have fucking welding masks on making swords that would be kind of cool yeah in a way but also terrifying yes well they're mean a lot meaner than people the bonobos are bonobos aren't yeah which is really fascinating because they're like the least violent of all the primates or one of the least violent they almost never harm each other because they're having so much sex i wonder but chimps have a lot of sex too they don't have

as much sex as bonobos for sure but bonobos have so much sex that they don't use them in captivity you never see bonobos at the zoo and the reason being is that they're just so hypersexual, people would find defensive because Western culture is so ridiculously suppressed. If we had bonobos in the zoo, we couldn't say, well, this is the thing. What you're looking at here is a normal, natural expression of bonobos. They like to have sex with each other. They solve disputes with sex. They use sex for bargaining. And we know that chimps use bargaining for sex i said well i had an old bit about it was because one of the first things that they ever discovered about chimpanzees when they started experimenting with money they started giving chimps coins and they

could give those coins and get fruit with it so the first thing they did was give the coins to females and have sex with them so literally the first thing they did was give the coins to females and have sex with them. Smart. Literally the first thing. Once they realized the coins represented food, they would give the coins to the females, and the females would just have fucking stacks of coins up the ceiling, and all these males would be having sex with them. It's that associative learning, you know, where they've immediately been able to realize, okay, this...

Well, it's prostitution is genetic. Yeah, interestingly, back onto the i mean i guess it's not really prostitution but back on the whole lifestyle and uh how that changes your behavior they've also shown that in mice when they female mice so when female mice uh when they're not cuddled, so there's a lot of this in behavioral, you know, epigenetic stuff they're doing. They do a lot of studies on, okay, what happens in early development? You know, what happens to the brain? Like if you're not, you know, if you don't get attention, you don't get the cuddling, the licking, how do you grow up? Like what's going on and with the females what happens too is they uh when they don't get cuddled

and licked and all that they grow up with more estrogen receptors in their brain and they become more sexually receptive so estrogen is make you know makes females more sexually receptive and so what ends up happening is usually when you put a male mouse into a cage with a female mouse she may or may not mate with them you know and if you put if you put one male mouse into a cage with a female mouse she may or may not mate with them you know and if you put if you put one male mouse into the cage with her this is a normal like a mouse that's had cuddling and coddling and all that uh you put the second male mouse in let's say she made it with the first one you put the second one in and it's she's not going to just mate with this guy it's like she already made it you know she's not she's not promiscuous where she's just having sex and after sex after you know but what happens with those female mice that grow up without

that cuddling they have increased epigenetically increased the expression of estrogen receptors in their brain they become more promiscuous so you put it you put a male mouse in again and it will mate and you put another one in and it mates so it's changing the sexual behavior now you know isn't there a quarter i'm sorry but isn't there a correlation with human beings because human beings that come from troubled childhoods with a lack of love tend to be more promiscuous yeah i mean i i agree you know obviously i can't make that statement but you know i did yeah you did i'm not a scientist the more we learn about you know how these early life events are affecting behavior of our own brain and also of our offspring, the more we can start to apply this to humans. I think it makes sense.

I think there's definitely a correlation between growing up in poverty, growing up without having that family there that love nurturing supportive system um whether it's a single parent it's not it's not necessarily the case i'm not saying like i grew up in a single parent home and you know i'm not out there freaking yeah freaking getting my freak on well kind of i get my science freak on but um a little different a lot different yeah well i i i'm just saying i don't want to like say that everyone of course there's definitely you know exceptions but yeah but i do think that our increased understanding at the biochemical level of how the environment changes the brain you know whether we're talking about behavior cognitive function you know in general is very interesting and i

think that it should be uh extrapolated and sort of you know apply to humans and in hopes that we can start to make society better you know it's just so fascinating to me that a human being is essentially the product of an equation the equation of all these different hormones all these different neurotransmitters all these different epigenetic factors all these different life experience factors all these different things it's just that that's what produces a ronda patrick i mean it's it's amazing it's it's so it's so complex i i agree with you i think you know there's a lot of there's the things that we cannot control you know and the things that we cannot control are you know are polymorphisms that we're born with like me being born with apoe4 i can't control that or it's hard to control you know

being raised in a family where let's say you know you know, you're from a single-parent family and your mom's working hard. She doesn't have time to, you know, you don't get as much nurturing. Dad's gone, you know, that sort of thing. You can't choose that. I mean, you're very young, you know, when you're a young infant and young toddler, I mean, your brain is very susceptible to all these, you know, environmental interactions that's epigenetically changing, you know, the way that's epigenetically changing, you know, the way your brain is working. But things that you can change are, you know, as you, you know, diet,

diet's a really important one that you can change, you know, the whole ballgame, basically, is, you know, you're talking about, I really think there's a complex interaction between, you know, genetics, epigenetics, diet. And, you know, I'm not the only one that thinks that. I mean, there is, there's people researching all these different complex interactions. But I think what I like to focus on is the part that we can control and the part that we can control right now. And that is, you know, our lifestyle, what we as an adult, at least, you know, obviously, when you're really young, you're sort of beholden to your parents feeding you. And also, you know, that's the sort of unfortunate, but at a certain point, you know, it's like, when you're able to realize what's

going on, I think that trying to control what you can is really important. So, getting a good diet, you know, things like getting enough omega-3s epa in your brain is literally an anti-inflammatory it's extremely extremely important like you know the study where they're injecting people with cytokines that are causing inflammation that gives them depression and yet if they take epa with it they don't get depressed you know that's pretty significant it's massively significant yes it seems like it would be a huge issue with children as well. I definitely think it's a huge issue with children. They have these various fish oil gummy bears and these different little candies that you can give to children.

They don't really taste like candy. They kind of taste quite a bit shittier than candy. But they're sweet enough so they feel like a treat to kids. Yeah. I think that, you know, it's extremely important, especially early on, to get that EPA. I know I've talked about in the past, DHA is always, you know, talked about because it's high, there's a high level of it in the brain. And I even talked about it in the context of krill oil. I did some research after our last conversation. we had a conversation about that that's one of the

things that keeps coming up on my message board guys wanted to folks wanted to uh question you about that like what is the difference between krill oil and fish oil and what what are the benefits of krill oil and also how do you know whether krill oil is rancid because that appears to be an issue with krill oil really yeah uniquely with krill oil is rancid? Because that appears to be an issue with krill oil. Really? Yeah, uniquely with krill oil. Interesting. Okay, well, I'll tell you what I know, and I'll definitely tell you what I don't know. So the thing, you know, the reason DHA and EPI are very important is because they're both an important part of the brain.

They're both an important part of the brain. In terms of DHA, it's very important because it's part of the cell membrane, like in your neurons, your astrocytes, and other cells in your body. But particularly, it's concentrated in the gray matter of the brain. So, it's very important. The difference between, you know, fish oil and krill oil, and, you know, this is something that I made a video on recently, is that, so fish oil is usually molecularly distilled because they use it to, fish have, you know, are higher on the food chain and they've got concentration of more bad things like mercury and their fat. And so, they molecularly distill it to get rid of that junk because we don't want to

take a bunch of, you know, mercury. And also, they distill it because they want to concentrate the fish, the EPA and DHA, to make it more concentrated. So what they do is they take the EPA and DHA and they put this, like, ethanol backbone. Usually it has a glycerol backbone on it, which makes it a triglyceride. And they take that off and they do this ethanol backbone. It's part of the molecular distillation process, they distill it get the impurities away but then most companies leave it like that they don't put it back in a triglyceride form so they have this

ethanol backbone which is not recognized very well by pancreatic lipases in our small intestine so it doesn't get absorbed very well because that's you know an ethanol backbone is not common it's you know it does get absorbed but you just have to take more of it fish oil can be re-esterified into a triglyceride form where they put glycerol back on and that is is much better because it you know the the triglyceride is what these these pancreatic lipases are used to seeing so they they can absorb it your small intestines can absorb it better, so the bioavailability is better, essentially. But the problem is most fish oil supplements don't do that. There's a couple of exceptions.

I know Nordic Naturals is one. I like them. So that's the fish oil. Krill oil is mostly in a phospholipid form. And so the thing about the phospholipid form, much like when we were talking about with liposomes, is so the thing with phospholipid form is that the DHA and EPA and krill oil

can be easily absorbed by the small intestine, for one. It can be absorbed in its intact form without having to undergo all this enzymatic cleavage stuff. So it can just be absorbed intact and get transported to the cholesterol, like chlyomicrons, hdl ldl that can be transported there in full tact form um but so that's you know better bioavailability so to speak and there's been a couple of studies showing that there's like a 40 increase in

bioavailability from getting epa and dha in phospholipid form from krill oil versus getting in triglyceride form from fish oil so that's kind of cool um the the thing that's really cool about krill oil is that this phospholipid form um is is great because dha to get dha into the brain we actually have a transporter which means so there's you can get dha in the brain by just having it as a fatty acid, free fatty acid, and it can get carried into the brain. But there's also a specific transporter that has DHA in a certain kind of phospholipid form called lyophosphatidylcholine. Phosphatidylcholine is a phospholipid, and it is in krill oil.

And it's pretty awesome because that DHA lyophosphatidylcholine can transport DHA into the brain. It's actually an important way that DHA gets into the brain. In fact, when they knock out that transporter in mice, mice had 60% less DHA in their brain. So it's obviously an important pathway. The brain likes it in that form. So I think for that reason in and of itself, krill oil is cool for the Dha because it's in that lyso phosphatidylcholine form however um that's not the whole story i think that uh fish oil because fish oil concentrates the epa and dha to like insane levels i mean even though krill oil is more bioavailable you know it doesn't have high levels of epa or dha to speak but um your brain doesn't need that

much dha your brain conserves dha very very well um the half-life of dha is like anywhere between like six months to a year it's like very very long your brain is conserving it and the brain doesn't take up a lot you know so on a daily basis i think it's something like four milligrams a day so your brain isn't taking up a whole lot of dha but when it does take it up it likes it in that krill oil form that phospholipid form epa epa is the thing that your brain needs a lot of a constant supply and epa is so important for so many different reasons we're talking about you know that whole neuroinflammatory pathway that we you know i started out talking about, you know, that whole neuroinflammatory pathway that we, you know, I started out talking about with, you know, traumatic brain injury, with just normal

brain aging, with, you know, inflammation in general, anything going on in the body, you know, any sort of gut issues, all that stuff, that's affecting the brain. And so, you know, having EPA in the brain is so important. It's so important. And so I like to get a concentrated amount of EPA from fish oil. I get mine in triglyceride form. So I use Nordic Naturals. Because so I actually take both I take krill oil and I take fish oil because I think the krill oil is awesome for the DHA in that phosphatidylcholine form. And I think that the fish oil because I can get like, I try to get two grams, they've shown like multiple, multiple studies. I've shown whether I'm looking at cognitive function, whether I'm looking at

depression, whether I'm looking at impulsive behavior or, you know, other types of brain functions and behaviors, two grams seems to be a consensus in terms of benefits. So that's 2000 milligrams. Is that what that is? Yes. And so I get that from my Nordic Naturals EPA that I take. And then I get my DHA from the krill oil. The other thing about the krill oil is it has astaxanthin, which is a carotenoid that also accumulates in the rods and cones in the eye and also in the brain.

And the reason it does that is because it has a unique structure that is able to sequester singlet oxygen, which is produced by UV, like the sun. Singlet oxygen is the thing that damages our eyes with age. It's one of those reactive oxygen species that I talk about, and it damages the rods and the cones of the eye, and it's a cause of, you know, age-relatedrelated blindness whether we're talking about macular generation degeneration or other sorts of you know uh eye debilitating diseases so um astaxanthin lutein zeaxanthin these are carotenoids that are really really good and they accumulate in the eye because they're like basically every time we're out in the sun and that blue light hits um which cause which has the

elect the singlet oxygen in it it captures it and it stops it from damaging brain and also eyes so astaxanthin is really cool it's also been shown in clinical studies to you know improve hdl to have you know lower oxidation oxid lower oxidative stress all these good sorts of goodies that come along with it which i also think are really cool i like astaxanthin in terms of rancidity i personally the reason another reason why i take nordic naturals is because of the they isolate their fish oil under nitrogen conditions meaning there's no oxygen oxygen present so in order for these omega-3s to get damaged they need to be oxidized so part of the whole distillation process the pilling all that that stuff you're that's you

know you're exposing it to oxidative damage and so the fact that nordic naturals does all that that stuff you're that's you know you're exposing it to oxidative damage and so the fact that nordic naturals does all that in a nitrogen condition i mean there's no oxygen presence it's kind of awesome um now the krill oil rancidity uh i wasn't aware of how rinse rancid it gets just because i'm sort of new to the krill oil field i just did a lot of reading on this dha phosphatidylcholine form. It's probably a similar situation, right? Probably is. It's just oil from fish, bio oil. Astaxanthin is very good at, it's also good at preventing lipid peroxidation.

So it's, you know, it's doing some good stuff. It's an antioxidant. It's preventing a lot of that rancidity. Just a matter of maybe how much astaxanthin's in there. That's possible. I've seen various doses. So maybe more astaxanthin would help prevent the rancidity uh in that in that regard but um that would be you know one thing that i would look for if you're getting the crow oil try to get a higher level speaking of macular degeneration and eye issues yeah what what specifically is a good thing to

take for vision? I've heard quercetin. Is that what it's called? Quercetin, yeah. Quercetin is supposed to promote healthy vision? Even better than that is lutein and zeaxanthin. Yeah, lutein as well. There's a thing.

Yes. Pure has a macular health packet. Uh-huh. Okay. Or some supplement, they say, that has both that loot that's how you say it lutein lutein yeah lutein zeaxanthin quercetin yeah i'm not i'm not i mean that's quercetin is just got generalized um mechanisms where it activates nrf2 which is a transcription factor that activates glutathione so it's you know it's one of those broad spectrum kind of like the curcumin

where it turns on a lot of good good genes in the body um but really if we're talking about the idha lutein and zeaxanthin uh the they're really the main ones and lutein and zeaxanthin are present in like green plants kale's really high in it um zucchini you know these things yeah it has all these things this uh pure one the one that i take has um has lutein it has uh zeaxanthin zeaxanthin uh and uh quercetin as well as well as uh n-acetyl-l-cytine n-acetylcysteine. Cysteine. Is that what it says? Yes. Yeah. So, actually, that's another, and acetylcysteine is another way that you can activate NRF2 and also glutathione. And it's also a potent antioxidant. You know, I don't know. It's not like a general thing that's specific to the eye.

It's more of a, sorry, not a specific thing to the eye. It's more of a general thing. It can induce glutathione synthesis. So, it's, you know, it's one of those things that are, you know, good for multiple cells. But when I'm, if we're just talking about the eye, lutein and diazanthin, like if you look in other tissues, the only place you find it is in the eye, in the rods and the cones, in the eye and in the brain. That's it. That's where it accumulates. Whereas N-acetylcysteine eye and in the brain. That's it. That's where it accumulates. Whereas N-acetylcysteine gets in like multiple cells. It's just doing a general antioxidant thing.

So having the lutein and zeaxanthin, that's part of the, I think about this, I make a smoothie every morning, which has a lot of kale in it and other greens, but it's got a high concentration of lutein and zeaxanthin. Also my multibiotin has it as well. I think I'm confusing quercetin with something else because i think it was lutein that i was thinking about because i don't even think this yeah pure that's probably what you were thinking about yeah lutein is or quercetin does something else right yeah it's it's it's a polyphenol yeah it's good i mean it does a lot of good things you know that a lot of the mechanisms by which these polyphenols work is through that it's slightly toxic it activates all these different genes in our tissues that are you

know detoxifying enzymes like glutathione and other reactive oxygen species scavengers and things like that so n-acetylcysteine has been shown to activate all the glutathione genes so those you know it's like it's a it's one of those mechanisms where it's like it it like i mentioned before the hormetic response it's kind of like that um where it does something like that generalized response you would talk earlier about something that i always thought was bullshit that um that's the the that herbal shit that everybody always prescribes when people are sick echinacea echinacea i always thought that was nonsense i don't i don't know if it is or not i just i mentioned it because i know that it's in people's minds it's an herbal thing yeah it's one of those

ones that people always take a couple jobs echinacea when you're sick i've done it and never did anything i never felt any increased uh you know healing or recovery from colds. I honestly have no idea if it's real or not because I haven't read about it enough. I mean, I think the best thing to do, like we were talking about, is making sure you don't have a lot of inflammation going on. Making sure you're healthy. That's going to be the way to have the best immune response you can possibly have when you are exposed to something pathogenic it's fascinating the way human beings work because we always go to try to fix it once it's broken and don't try to prevent it from being fixed like there's a there's a lot of money there's a lot of money in health supplements but there's a lot of money in

like homeopathic remedies once you're already sick. Right. Like, I remember, I don't remember who gave it to me, but I remember this stuff. It's like these little sugar capsules. You pop the top and pour it in your mouth. I'm like, I'm eating sugar. Was it homeopathic? Yeah. And I'm like, this is nonsense.

And they're like, no, no, no. This is amazing homeopathic remedy for colds. I go, this is fucking sugar sugar you know what that is it's placebo effect is that what it is yeah yeah i think that what is that stuff called you know what i'm talking about no it's like you pop the top of it it's like sugar crystals no i've never i have no idea what you're talking about but i do know that homeopathic stuff is uh there's just no way that can be ineffective the way that dilute it to the to the point where there's like one molecule of the compound in it's just crazy um i did i was given to given that once and i took one i didn't know it was homeopathic but i thought it was like arnica or something i

took it but it was like little tiny little cap like sugar things inside of it and i could tell just by the way i shook the capsule i didn't i didn't pop it open maybe i was supposed to i don't know i just took the capsule but anyways that that's and what is arnica arnica is um it's it's anti-inflammatory herb anti-microbial i mean it's used for like you know mouthwash kind of thing it's it's potent at inhibiting um aerobic bacteria bacteria that are aerobic so so that's you know i i haven't done a ton of research on arnica but it's that that's one thing that it does do golden root is another one that's always partnered with echinacea or golden seal golden seal right that's right no you're right you're you're bringing back memories from that horseshit too i don't know because i just haven't looked into those i haven't looked into them it is i know the things that are good are the polyphenols, quercetin, turmeric in general because of the turmeric, the N-acetylcysteine.

Alpha lipoic acid is another way to increase glutathione. That's also important for mitochondrial function. So, you know, there are good things. And who knows some of these are alpha lipoic acid some people yeah yeah alpha lipoic acid is interesting because um my actually my mentor he is one of the pioneers that showed when you give alpha lipoic acid to old rats showed this like i don't know 15 years ago i guess it made them young again like their brain it like made their brains young so when you gave them to old rats it was like reversing brain

aging and how did they administer it was it intravenous you know i don't remember i don't remember if it was intravenous or not i can easily check that check that out but alpha lipoic acid does get absorbed um it actually gets absorbed better when it's not taken with protein interestingly enough because it binds usually it's it's something we make in our cell like plants make it it's in you know it's in food that we eat it's also you know we have we make it in our body um but it when it's complex to protein for some reason and i don't it's been so long it's been quite a few years since i read about this mechanism but something about it um does it doesn't get absorbed because it's like getting cleaved away or something with the protein so actually taking alpha lipoic acid supplement

should be taken on an empty stomach how many people i'm sorry go ahead yeah no it's just which is which is kind of different than other foods where you take them with more food. How many people listen to all this information? There's a lot of people listening to this podcast right now like, fuck, there's too much to really take into consideration. There's too much like, okay, alpha-buproxacin. I need some of that, but I don't want it. Protein. Okay, when do I take it?

Okay, liposomal glutathione. Is that legit? I need a lot. I need glutathione. Okay. Liposomal glutathione. Is that legit? I need a lot. Right. I need glutathione. Okay. So I'll take turmeric and then I'll get my, the same thing that I would get from, you know, there's people on the subway right now writing on their hands.

Right. Like trying to put all this shit in their head. How much stuff should you take a day? Yeah. And how much of this can you get from your food? Can you get any of this from your food? Yeah, absolutely. Like there's alpha-lipoic acid in acid in your food i mean obviously when you're cooking

what kind of proteins i think you know i think that it's you know joe it's been so long i can't i can't recall which ones have the most of it it's it's in a lot of foods but in terms of concentration wise i forgot um but the the thing is is you know, like I'll take alpha lipoic acid. It's not part of my staple, you know, my, what I really, really focus on is on micronutrients that are part of all these biochemical pathways that are going on in all of our cells, including our brain, those things I want to make sure I'm getting that's key. So getting the omega threes, getting my EPA, DHA, getting vitamin D, you know, magnesium, getting all my minerals, calcium, magnesium, getting my EPA, DHA, getting vitamin D, you know, magnesium, getting all my minerals, calcium, magnesium, getting that right, making sure I get all that stuff, vitamin C, like all,

I need all those micronutrients. And I want to make sure I get that. That's most important. The other stuff, you know, like the taking the curcumin or the turmeric and glyathione, things like that. You know, those are more, I think other measures that you can, I think first and foremost, healthy diet, you know,

making sure you're eliminating the inflammation at the source of it, which is, you know, making sure you're not causing too much inflammation by eating sugar, eating sugar and refined crap. Just eat. You want to make sure you're eating a lot of micronutrients, eating your meats, you know, that are not all crazy uh processed yeah nitrates nitrites nitrates are nitrates are

night oh there's a big well nitrates aren't used for um curing no they're in they're in celery they're in all plant they're like everywhere in nature um nitrites are um used to cure meat and like lunch meats and bake a lot of bacon i think has it um the difference is that nitrites um can form uh nitrosamines which are potent carcinogens so they basically what they do is they bind to your DNA and they form this bulky attic on your DNA. And what happens is when your cell tries to replicate, so that's DNA damage, a bulky attic.

So, nitrosamines, they like interact with your DNA and then when the cell replicates, like, it can't, the replication machinery can't recognize that DNA sequence because there's this big thing sitting there. And so, it just puts anything there and it's actually associated with a specific type of mutation. I think it's a G to T one. It's been a while. But that causes, that's associated with cancer, which is why it's labeled as a carcinogen. So nitrites can form that mostly because they're when they're in an aqueous solution, they can form nitrous acid, which then can react with amines, which are everywhere in proteins, like amino acids,

like amines. So, they react with that and can form nitrosamine. So, that's not a good thing. And nitrates, you can form, nitrates can form nitrites, like in the saliva. We have like bacteria in our saliva that can do that. And I've seen studies everywhere and anywhere ranging from like 5 to 20% or something like that. Where it can form nitrates. Or sorry, nitrites. Nitrates can form, so eating a lot of plants. Can form nitrites in your saliva.

Which get into your system. And is it a significant amount? Yes. Where it can be toxic well um so well there is i don't remember like what the toxicity i think that there is something that can happen but so there's a so there's a nitrates can form nitric oxide which is a vasodilator it's you know it's kind of a good thing and actually they use sometimes they use that to help people with like hypertension um nitrites can also form that but it depends on whether or not

there's enough antioxidant around like vitamin c or other antioxidants because nitrites because they perform this nitrous acid in aqueous solution they can immediately then go into nitrosamines but if you have this reducing agent around then you can shift them nitrites to form nitrous nitric oxide uh but which is good right which is good but so plants have a lot of vitamin c when you're eating the nitrates in the plants you're getting vitamin c you're getting all these antioxidants with it you know vitamin c's and kale celery all that stuff it's there so you don't they've done studies where they've looked at the amount of nitrosamines formed from either nitrites or nitrates and like so for meat like meat nitrites are uncured meat and they've shown that nitrates

don't form those as readily because it's forming the nitric oxide instead especially because there's a lot of vitamin c around which inhibits the formation of the nitrosamine if you if you take the um nitrites and the cured meat then you're not getting a lot of vitamin C around which inhibits the formation of the nitrosamine. If you take the nitrites in the cured meat, then you're not getting a lot of antioxidants unless you're eating them also with it. But in the case where you're cooking the nitrites, cooking is dangerous because, can be dangerous because when you cook, water, you know, water's happy, you water and and the nitrites uh in in the in the aqueous solution of water form nitrous form nitrous acid which then react with degradation products of amino acids from like bacon for example like has protein and they form nitrosamines so cooking can

form the nitrosamines and you can ingest them so cured bacon with with chemicals, that's what's bad for you. I'm not a big fan of eating nitrites daily or even weekly. I think if you love bacon, why not just buy the stuff without the nitrites? They make it without it. Yeah, you can get it at a butcher shop where it's not chemically treated. I think I've even seen it at a Berkeley Bowl where I shop. So nitrites are bad. Nitrates are plant formed. Yes.

And nitrates can form nitrites. It's just I know it was like a little confusing and complicated. And commonly misconstrued. Yeah. They commonly get. Yes. So yeah. Nitrates are not what are curing meat.

Nitrates are what's in plants. And you can form them. You can form them you can form nitrites from them however because of all the vitamin c and all that they don't readily form nitrosamines nitrosamines which is the bad stuff that it's the carcinogen that's that's what you don't want to form you it forms nitric oxide more readily so and nitrites can form nitric oxide but they also form nitrosamines and particularly if there's not a lot of vitamin c or antioxidants around they can get pushed towards that nitrosamine state got it yeah yeah that's uber complicated

it's so uber complicated i've seen this switched um all over the place on the internet actually so yeah it's almost it's i know a lot about it because my mentor studied nitrosamines and he was like one of the pioneering guys that was talking about how this DNA damage causes cancer. So he's told me about them, so I know a little bit about them, and he knows a lot more than I do. It just seems like one of those things where when you're talking about all these different nutrients, you're talking about, it's like like this is a real constant area of study for anybody who wants to be consistently healthy yeah anybody really wants to have a really nutritionally balanced diet and optimize their health and their potential to recover from

illness and prevent certain you know certain damage and free radicals and all the areas that could be problematic in our world and our diets. There's so much to think about. There's so much to calculate. I hear you. I think that one of the main things I think that my advice would be it's a lot easier to focus on what you should eat than on what you shouldn't. And I think that a more inclusionary diet is key. It's a lot easier to focus on what you should eat than on what you shouldn't. And I think that a more inclusionary diet is key. So focusing on what your body needs, you know, not only for short term, but what it needs for long term.

Focus on that more than focus on what you're eliminating from your diet. Because it's just, first of all, if you focus on what you're eliminating from your diet, then you're not going to be getting all the good stuff that you need. That's part of the problem. You're also thinking a lot about loss. You're also thinking. Damn, I can't even eat that. It's just like, it's so, there's too many little, it's easy to become caught up in a lot of minutia. And I know this because I've been there. And so, you know, getting caught up in all this little minutia, you know, it can take you forever to try to figure out what's going on.

And then in the meantime, you're getting distracted from the important thing is not is what you need. You know, your body, your body is very resilient. And if you feed it what it needs, you can fight off stuff. You're going to age better. You know, all these little chemical reactions and enzymatic reactions going on in all your cells, in your liver, in your kidney, in your brain, all these things are going to keep happening because you're feeding it. And when you have a little bit of toxic stuff, guess what? All these pathways are ready because they're so, they're

getting nourished, they're getting what they need, that they activate and they, your body has protective mechanisms to make sure it doesn't get cancer. You know, I explain that when you make reactive oxygen species, you can repair it or you can the cell will die but all those all those repair uh stress response mechanisms they require that you know you're you're giving yourselves what they need to do that so if you're so focused on what not to eat that you're not getting enough of what you need then your body's you know capacity to do that isn't going to be as optimal so i really like i really think it's easier especially for people that don't have a scientific background that don't have time i mean because it takes a

lot of time to sit there and read through all the scientific studies and figure out what's going on all the complex interactions you know i barely have time to do that and it's like i do this every day like i do research every day and on top of research every day. And on top of that, in my spare time, I do it. And it's still overwhelming. And I still can only get so much done. And you have the education to deal with all the information. And you understand what's going on. Right. The mechanisms behind it.

Yes. Well, you know, last time we were here, we talked about some of the disinformation that even medical professionals, guys who have written books without an understanding of the different, like we talked about vitamin E and the understanding of the different mechanisms involved in vitamin E absorption in the body. And people who have written books, they're incorrect about what's negative about high levels and what is good about high levels and what is, you know, how your body should be processing it and what different types of vitamin E there is. And that's just so, there's so many variables. There's so much going on. Yeah. I think that, you know, in addition to so many variables and it being so complex, we're also continually finding out new things. You know, I'm talking

about studies that were published two months ago in the context of traumatic brain injury and some of these neural stem cells. I mean, it takes a continual searching of the literature, you know, to keep up to date with all the new research. And that's incredibly difficult to do when you're occupied full time as, for example, as a physician, and you're treating patients already overworked. You know, these are things, it's extremely difficult for a lot of physicians. First of all, they haven't been trained in a lot of these biochemical pathways and nutrition and mechanisms. You know, I think that the training itself inherently is flawed. And that's something that needs to be changed at the institutional level. You know, I think that doctors need to be, there needs to be more of a focus on

understanding how nutrition interacts with genes, how diet interacts with genes, how, you know, these complex biochemical pathways, why they, why they need all these different micronutrients as cofactors to make enzymes work and all this stuff. That's lacking in the medical profession. I know that's lacking because I have several friends that are physicians and have told me. And also because, you know, even people that aren't my friends that are physicians have told me, you know, that they don't get trained in this way. So, I think that's really, you know, that's one of the flaws in medicine. But in addition to that, you have doctors that work really hard, you know,

and I, I respect them. I think that they do, to some degree, you know, they train hard, they work hard, and they're trying to somehow help people. They're trying to diagnose diseases, and to some degree that, you know, they do do that. But I think the problem is that they also can't keep up with all the new literature they can't keep up with the new research and also then there's the whole human component that comes in when you you've got your patient that knows more about you know something than you do sometimes ego gets in the way and your immediate response is sort of a jerk knee response where it's like no this can't be true because i'm the the leader i'm the person that knows this and well especially when you're talking about things like you were talking about the study

with the mice the the showing that the the neurons are actually it's stimulating the stem cell growth yeah that this is all so new and you're talking about something that's like a couple months old yes if your your degree was in the 90s good fucking fucking luck. No, it's true. It's, you know, it's, you know, I do like for me, I'm putting out some of these videos and I do this, you know, sort of I'm trying to do it more frequently. But some of my videos are a little more complex than like the general, you know, educational video. I try to really, you know know be comprehensive and bring it home and sort of you know make sure i explain mechanism and context and all those things and i've been getting emails from physicians that are thanking me because they're saying they never knew this and they don't have time and it's really rewarding in addition to like educating the public you know

like i think that's also very important making sure the public people that you know understanding how to prevent disease understanding what you need to to optimally optimally you know perform as good as you can now and to age as best as you can that's important but it's also important for physicians to understand things that they didn't get they didn't get trained in and they don't have time to read about it's almost impossible if you have a full practice and you're constantly treating people on a daily basis and exactly how much education is involved in getting a degree in nutrition well i mean when you if you're a doctor if you're a general practitioner how much of your time is really spent learning about nutrition and when you go to a doctor for advice about nutrition you're almost better off just fucking Googling it. Yeah.

I don't know how much time I think that relatively speaking to the rest of their training, I would say it's not much. And, you know, also getting a new degree in nutrition is also, I mean, like I got a degree in biomedical science. And I'm, you know, I've done research on aging cancer and now I'm doing some nutrition research. But I think that even getting a degree in nutrition has flaws because, you know, I think that some of these, some of the dogma with nutrition itself has been changing with new science and then getting people to like change their state of mind i mean that's always harder to do especially when they've been you know spewing this out for years and uh and also that a lot of you know degrees in nutrition you know like they don't have a real hardcore science in some cases like a science background where it's like i always like i like to change fields i'm changing my i've changed my field several times. You know, I've started out doing chemistry, looking, you know, at the very, very molecular level.

And then I went into, you know, aging research and then cancer. And now I'm doing nutrition. And now I'm getting, now I'm even getting into the brain. So, I think that it's kind of cool to also have different perspectives. Like, you know, where it's like, because you see things that other people have been in that field forever don't see right you know like you know the the neural stem cells and like i there's not a lot of nutrition people talking about neural stem cells and things nutrition that are important for that so it's uh yeah it's definitely it's hard for the for the average person to figure out what they should

eat or what they should supplement i know that you were saying that one of the companies that you're involved with does like nutritional scans on people you'll do like a blood work panel and then recommend what the person's deficient in yeah so i'm not involved with them i had done some um i'd done a couple of guest blog posts um a little over a year ago to sort of, because I liked what they were doing, basically. I liked the service they provided. What companies? Wellness FX. Wellness FX is cool because they are, they're basically consumer-based where it's like you sort of, you don't have to go get a doctor's prescription to go get your blood work and to look at things like C-reactive protein, your vitamin D levels, you know, your RBC magnesium, your lipid profile, you know, these sorts of things.

Omega-3, they measure EPA and DHA, and they also measure the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, which is also important. three to omega six ratio, which is also important. I mean, having too much of omega six fatty acids also leads to that inflammation, that generation of E2 series prostaglandins in the brain and the body, it's causing inflammation, you know, so having, having a good omega six to omega three ratio is also really good. So they do that as well. And I think that people that are going to get these tests done, and then they get their blood blood work and then they, you know, they'll, Wellness FX has like a panel of nutritionists and other physicians that I'm not really familiar with. They help people interpret and to what degree they know what they're doing, I can't tell you. But the point is, is that you have that information. You can, you know, you can also learn a lot from the internet, but also you can look at your baseline and make dietary changes and start to see how things change.

Like that's really important. You know, this quantifying, this quantified self movement, it's called, where you're basically quantifying your own thing, you know, blood work and things like that and figuring out how to optimize yourself. That's a lot of work. It seems like it'd be really problematic to find a lot of Rhonda Patrick's out there, though. I don't know how many of you there are. I'm not blowing smoke up your house because you're my friend and I love you But if there is a hundred Rhonda Patrick's out there running clinics, it would be awesome That means a hundred cities could have a place where you could go and you could get a someone who's really completely Absorbed in this sort of research like you are give you a real systematic

breakdown of your diet of your here's your profile this is what you're missing this is fucking difficult shit it is well thank you for that compliment but i um i think that you know the getting the blood work done and looking at these different micronutrients and biomarkers and lipid panel lipid panels is one aspect of it and i think the other aspect that i'm becoming increasingly interested in is getting the genetic data as well like 23andme so i you know i'm you know i'm trying to figure out a way somehow i can i i'm getting more and more interested in because i'm looking a lot at these complex interaction between genes and diet and i'm trying to figure out, okay, you have this polymorphism, you being me, I have it, ApoE4.

What do I do to make sure that I can give myself the best chance of not getting Alzheimer's disease? Right. Excuse me. What can I do for my father who is 65 years old now and is at a critical point? I got to make sure that if i don't somehow intervene now and make sure you know he's doing things right that he's going to get alzheimer's and and i probably want that even i want to make sure he doesn't get it even more than i do probably

because you know when you have it it's i feel bad for all my family members you know but i won't really know it's it's it's dealing with your close loved ones and them completely losing their mind and not remembering who you are i can't think of a worse thing that can happen you know except from death watched a bunch of documentaries on people with alzheimer's and it's brutal and like i said i've seen the traumatic brain version of it in fighters slowly start to appear and uh not just in real time but in highly accelerated real time like i've seen a guy go from being one way to two three fights later i see him a year later and he's a different guy and this is fairly common i see this you can literally see the struggle in their eyes wow you can see the struggle in the way they form sentences you know some of the you know i

talked about some things that are you know, I talked about some things that are, you know, possible to help, you know, people that are getting traumatic brain injury, repetitive traumatic brain injury. And obviously, I really, I really think that the APOE4 genetic test is, I would love to see that come into practice where we're talking. So, adopted by athletic commissions. I'd like to see that adopted. Maybe even NFL. Yes. I'd like to see talking adopted by athletic commissions yes i'd like to see that adopted even nfl yes i'd like to see it adopted by nfl i'd like to see it boxing um you know mma

i'd like to see all those types of uh athletic commissions adopted where it's like you know i don't want to say okay well they're going to say you're able before you can't do that because i hate to like take that away from someone you know i don't know maybe maybe maybe people will figure it out and there's some committee formed and they'll say you know what it's such a high risk that we are just can't have you it's like being a hemophiliac that wants a sword fight it is it really is it's just that bad i mean you're talking about going from just having that allele i'm already freaked out because i've got a two to three fold risk of alzheimer's disease and you're talking about going from that to a 10, in some cases, you know,

10, 15-fold increased risk. And not only increased risk, it's an earlier onset. It changes the onset like by seven years. So, you're talking about getting it seven years, almost a decade earlier than, you know, other people. So, that allele, like having that isoform and it's just an easy it's an easy test to do 23andme does it um and doctors do it as well you know there's a really a recent study published in the journal of alzheimer's disease that reported neuroscientists using a cellular model of the alzheimer's found low doses of delta- 9 Tetrahydrocannabinol which is THC which is from marijuana

actually has been shown to reduce the production of amyloid beta and prevented abnormal accumulation which is some of the early signs of the memory loss disease which is hilarious because marijuana has been known

to give people short-term memory loss. I mean, that's the one thing that potheads like myself constantly complain about. What the fuck was I just talking about? You know, that's like what, but only when they're on it. But when you are smoking marijuana or eating it, when you are intoxicated by it, the big thing is short-term memory loss. So it's interesting that you bring this up because in my whole traumatic brain injury quest, as I've been reading about, you know, recently, cannabinoids came up on my radar because new studies have just recently come out

related to also traumatic brain injury, where they found, for example, that patients that were admitted to the hospital after a traumatic brain injury, I think it was like a mild to moderate. So it was like Glasgow coma score of like four or five. It wasn't like a severe, severe or like totally like, you know, in a coma and all that. But they found that those people that were admitted after having a traumatic brain injury they uh those that had the highest levels of thc in their blood were the least likely to die and it was like there was a dose dependent thing where they saw you know people that had higher

levels were much less likely to die like in the hospital so um that sort of sparked my interest like what's going on i did a short little research and I found out that also even in mice, mice that were given a low dose of THC that was not high enough to have a psychotropic effect, it actually, so they gave mice this low dose, just a single low dose of THC, either 48 hours before the traumatic injury, so they induced traumatic injury in the mice, they typically put pressure on their little tiny mouse skulls, or they gave it to them one to seven days after the traumatic event had occurred. And what they found was that it dramatically reduced the whole neuroinflammatory pathway. There was less edema, there was less, you know, inflammation, less amyloid plaques were aggregated. So, this is

quite significant. So, I started reading just a little bit more. I haven't done a ton of reading on this topic. So, I really am no expert by any means. So, there's two different receptors, cannabinoid receptors in the brain. There's CB1 and CB2. CB1 is found on neurons predominantly, and CB2 is found on the microglia, which are the immune cells of the brain, which is really interesting because they're also found in the immune cells in the body. So it's like something about the CB2 receptor is specific to immune cells, whether we're talking about immune cells in the brain or in the periphery. But what's interesting is that cannabinoid activation of the CB2 receptors in the microglia, it prevents them from getting activated. It prevents them from throwing out all sorts of cytokines and causing

all sorts of neuroinflammatory cycles that happen i don't know exactly how i think that it's i think it's also well known that cannabinoids have some sort of anti-inflammatory effect in general um so that is one likely mechanism um and the other thing was the the cb1 receptor so they recently found this led me into this alzheimer's there was there were studies so the fact that it can protect from traumatic brain injury is and it's that it's an anti-inflammatory effect is also is showing that this is relevant for alzheimer's so when i did a search on that sure enough yes it's like lots of studies actually had been uh done on the effects of cannabinoids on alzheimer's and so um there was a recent study that showed that somehow the receptor, when you agonize the receptor and CB1 receptor on neurons, it protects, it does something where it's important for long-term potentiation.

And it's kind of a confusing mechanism, but long-term potentiation is when you have, so during learning, the learning process, when you're learning something new, you form, you've got a synapse that's forming between the neurons. And there's an enhancement in that synaptic signal. So it's like, it's enhanced. So it's solidifying that memory, that learn, whatever you're learning, it's making it stronger. And that's a very important mechanism for like neuroplasticity. stronger and that's a very important mechanism for like neuroplasticity so making sure that you're going to remember something long term you know because you've enhanced that signal it's going to be there and to do that enhance that long-term potentiation you can activate you can cause you know more like activating types of signals but you also get rid of the inhibitory

ones and the cb1 receptor seems to somehow get rid of those inhibitory ones. And the CB1 receptor seems to somehow get rid of those inhibitory ones when it's activated. And amyloid beta plaques, when they build up in the brain, they antagonize CB1 receptor, they prevent the CB1 receptor from doing that, you know, role it does in long term potentiation, which is part of the effects on memory, long term memory, too. Now, in terms of short termterm memory, I don't really know. It's kind of interesting because I had the same thoughts. I've heard that, you know, well, short-term memory is affected. It's very stereotypical.

When you talk to anyone on the street, they've heard that. Yeah. Oh, it's true, 100%. But I don't know that, you know, I would have to read a lot more on this topic, but there may be some sort of acute versus chronic effect where it's like there's something happening acutely while you're you know agonizing them while you're while you're you know taking the the cannabinoids and then versus the long-term effect and maybe there's some sort of trade-off maybe it's like short-term some things affected but in the long-term your

your your ability to have that long-term potentiation is good um so it's it's interesting the cannabinoid uh it's unfortunate that the there's not a lot of research being done in in that field i think that more and more people are doing more research on it as all these studies are coming out you just can't ignore it yeah well it's it's absolutely happening more and more especially now that there's money involved in it. Because of what's going on in Colorado and Washington State, there's so much money that's being poured into marijuana research now. Because people are starting to look at it in terms of, well, this is like some seriously financially viable stuff. Like this is not just like some sort of a fringe thing that people are trying to sneak

into the guise of medicine. This is a crop, and we have to look at it as this is a commodity. I mean, they're making hundreds of millions of dollars now in taxes, these states are. Wow, that's awesome. Colorado is going to be over $100 million this year. Washington state might surpass it once all is said and done. I mean, it's's going to be crazy and once the new elections start rolling in and these these uh options are on the ballots for other states there's a lot of states that are economically challenged that are going to probably jump aboard and california should be embarrassed that they haven't especially with fucking moonbeam jerry brown in sacramento the whole thing is ridiculous it should have been illegal a long, long, long time ago. But I think that there's going to be a lot more studies being done on the positive

effects because they've looked at so many different things. The reduction of interocular pressure for people who have glaucoma, people who have wasting disease and AIDS and all sorts of people who have appetite issues because of chemotherapy. I mean, you can go on and on and on, but now when you're finding Alzheimer's, the anti-inflammation properties of it, especially the differences between eating it and smoking it, you give you more benefits from eating it. A lot of people that can complain about chronic pain, they find it hugely beneficial.

It's a really good plan yeah that's um i think you're right as as more and more research comes out there's going to be a positive feedback loop where it's like you just and in addition with you know these other progressive states like colorado and washington state which are now you know it's recreational recreationally legal and it's not only that it's generating income which is like you just can't ignore that i mean that's money the money is too big at this point yeah and and people have a hard time ignoring money um well it'd be really hard for them to take it away now because what happens is the states get addicted to that tax revenue when you're talking about withdrawing 100 million dollars in tax

revenue when the statistics here's where it gets really crazy decrease in violent crime decrease in duir um and over and over and over there's like no there's no negatives there's like a guy jumped off a roof somewhere like okay that fucking guy might have jumped off a roof anyway that's terrible that's a terrible high driving even if you get in an accident you go in 10 miles an hour everybody's just bumping into each other it's really relaxed high driving accidents i mean we're talking about traumatic brain injury i mean getting hit by a drunk driver i mean you're talking about it's awful well it's just amazing really truly amazing how few drunk driving accidents there are in comparison to how frequent the the places where you can get alcohol as you're driving down the street if you drive down the street any street

you drive down you have drug dealers all over the place. Every restaurant you pass is a drug dealer. Every CVS store is a drug dealer. I mean, they're all selling drugs. They're all selling alcohol. I mean, almost every bar, I mean, of course every bar, but almost every restaurant, almost every drug store, they're all selling alcohol. I mean, it's incredible the availability of alcohol yeah and if you take that into consideration it's incredible how few alcohol related accidents we really do have what's interesting is that they're selling this drug that

you know alcohol it does it does a lot of damage alcohol does damage to your gut i mean you're talking about poking holes in your gut like sugar does it does that it also obviously your liver that's what most people are familiar with but the brain is my concern you know particularly because i can't repair damage as efficiently as my husband who has doesn't have this apoe4 um so when you drink and they've even shown in studies people with an apoe4 allele that drink alcohol um even increase their risk of alzheimer's even more because what you know when you're when you're talking about inducing cell death then if you can't replenish that you know cell death if you can't repair that

damage and apoe4 can't when you have that apoe4 it impairs the ability to grow new like i said grow new neurites and repair damage and that's very important um it also it's just it's so bad because it's like also causing more aggregation of you know amyloid beta and all that so that's the neurons are primed to die and when you add alcohol on top of that it's it's causing a it's tipping them over to death that stress plus stress like i was talking about so um you know i don't i don't drink a lot it's fun and i and i've always done it you know in social situations but after finding out about my apoe4 um every time i am in a social situation i'm having a dinner with a bunch of friends and

they give me a glass of wine and even though there's some benefits with polyphenols and the wine resveratrol and wine yeah resveratrol is one um and but the problem is is that i the bet the the it's like the pros and cons the cons outweigh the benefits in my mind because alcohol does so much damage that i can't repair so if you and i are drinking a glass of wine you know let's let's just assume that you're you don't have this apoe4 because one and four people have it there's three people in this room it's likely that neither of you it's like i'm the one me you know so he's got it look at him but you know what i'm saying is that you know i have to think about this interaction between the genes and the diet and me drinking the alcohol now

i know that i can't repair that damage as efficiently so it's it's like it changes it changes my my future behavior in a sense right and some people would probably say well you're not going to enjoy life and then you know it's like i'm not saying i don't ever you know drink and i do a lot of other really really good things to counteract that counteract that and i'm trying to figure out more good things but i think that in knowing that like for example exercise exercise also you know is is very, very important for people with APOE4, and they've shown this in studies that people that exercise more that have an APOE4 allele are less likely to get Alzheimer's. So, this is where this complex

interaction between genes and environment come into play. But it's interesting that, you know, cannabinoids, which are not found in every CBS store or any store within a block radius, actually have the opposite effect on the brain. They actually help repair the damage. They actually decrease the inflammation. It makes people like me, who are very hyper-aware of this Alzheimer's disease and all the mechanisms that are accelerating it and how to, you know, stave it off, it makes me think, well, that's kind of interesting that something that's, you know, seems to be beneficial from our studies that we've had published so far, you know, so when will we see that adopted in the medical community, you know, are we going to see changes, are

we going to start to see people given cannabinoids and, you know, I don't know if they're trying to figure out a way to uncouple the psychotropic effects from the anti-inflammatory effects. I'm almost certain that people are trying to figure that out. And I don't know if that's going to work or not. You know, there may be something about the psychotropic effect of it that's also important for, you know, there's no telling. Biology, I mean, it's the way it is for a reason, you know. I mean, it's the way it is for a reason, you know. But it's something that's on my mind.

It's on my mind now that I, you know, especially that I know I have this APOE4 allele, which completely changes a lot of, you know, things that I, when I think about exercise, I don't think about exercise in the sense of, oh, I need to lose weight. I want to stay toned and look good i think about it if i don't get exercise i am dramatically increasing my risk of alzheimer's disease if i don't get that exercise my brain is going to atrophy and i'm going to more it's going to be more likely that i'm going to lose my brain function and i'm going to change my behavior in older age. And that is terrifying. So the exercise, it's becoming like, I think people still really think of it in terms of losing weight.

And it's just, it's doing so much more. It's doing so much more. And I'm really glad that people do it to lose weight because at least they're doing it. But even just like a couple of weeks ago a study came out showing that exercise literally causes your muscle cells to detoxify something that we make called kynurenine which is actually a byproduct of tryptophan metabolism tryptophan as i've talked about before in our conversations can you know is a precursor to serotonin right so tryptophan, as I've talked about before in our conversations, is a precursor to serotonin. So tryptophan has to get into the brain.

And when it gets in the brain, it makes serotonin. Well, tryptophan can also form something called kynurenine. And when it forms kynurenine, this happens under conditions of stress or when there's some sort of pathological invader. So it's like it's an important part of the immunological response. So kynurenine is important to make T regulatory cells. So, I mean, you obviously want to be able to have this response mechanism. However, when you make too much kynurenine,

not only is tryptophan not being made into serotonin in the brain because it's getting sucked into this other pathway. In addition, kynurenine can cross the blood-brain barrier and it can form something called quinolitic acid which is like a neurotoxin it literally causes like too much glutamate to be released and it causes excitotoxicity and cell death and it activates microglia so it causes inflammation if you already have amyloid beta plaques in your brain great more activation of microglia you're going to keep making more it's like feeding into that already terrible cycle so exercise causes muscle cells to like convert that kynurenine into a another byproduct that can't get into the brain

so you're talking about another way that you know exercise is protecting the brain in fact in these the study that was published in cell they found that these mice they did this in mouse models when they injected the mice with kynurenine um it got into the brain and caused all these like neurotoxicity sort of effects but it also caused depression caused them to have depression which of course you know inflammation in the brain depletes the ability of the brain to release serotonin and that's one aspect of how inflammation's causing depression so you're not you're not making serotonin to cause depressive symptoms in these mice and they do all sorts of little studies where they look at exploratory behavior and all sorts of things in little mice obviously humans

are way more complex but then some people so when they made the mice exercise um the depressive symptoms went away that neurotoxicity they did better on learning and memory tests so yet another reason why you know exercise is freaking awesome for the brain for you know depression uh for me to make sure i'm not gonna you know get alzheimer's so for everybody for everybody we're out of time unfortunately we just rattled through three hours at an accelerated rate yeah you just blasted through yeah you were in a trance you were in a information disseminating trance well i certainly hope people learn oh they barely learned they're gonna have to go over it again with a notepad and they're gonna google the shit out of it and and i think we got a lot out of this the holy shit every time we talk next time

we got to talk about cryotherapy okay this is something that i've started getting into recently oh my god we got to talk about that um but god damn this was awesome totally awesome so much so much cool stuff and we'll talk more about behavioral epigenetics because that's fascinating we'll do it again in a month or so whenever thank you so much it's always awesome uh your website yeah so uh foundmyfitness.com is where you can find me and all my my stuff uh found my fitness on twitter found my fitness on twitter and also i've got a new android app coming out this afternoon so you can find it a launch yeah so you can find it there awesome and also i've got my um patreon where i'm now about to make a a mile another my first milestone so i'm

pretty stoked about it and um which means i'm gonna have to step up my game and get some more creative works out there for people to listen to beautiful awesome you're fantastic thank you so much it's always a pleasure ronda patrick and gentlemen Alright Tomorrow Joe Perry from Aerosmith Holla See you soon Bye Whew Whew