Eric Rieger
0:00 Hello gut check project fans and KB MD Health family. I hope you're having a great day. It's your host, Eric Rieger, soon to be joined by my awesome co host, Dr. Kenneth Brown. It's Episode 59. And we have an awesome guest. This is Dr. Kristen Willeumier. She is a neuroscientist. That's right. a neuroscientist. She has groundbait goodness can talk groundbreaking, science driven plan for revitalising nourishing and rejuvenating your most essential asset, your brain. And she is the author of biohack your brain how to boost cognitive health, performance and power. It's essentially the first book to outline a strategy for COVID long hollers including those dealing with neurological issues. So you can see this is going to be an incredible episode. Let's get to our sponsors. Of course, it's artron to go to artron to calm or easy enough. Just go to love my tummy, calm and get your daily polyphenols. Guess what? This neuroscientist Dr. Wilma? Yeah, she says it's a great idea to do it for your brain. Also, we're not even making it up. So head to love my tummy, calm, pick up your own artron to today, not just for yourself, but for your family for your kids. Get them on it, protect them, given the polyphenols that they need daily artron to love nighttime e.com and of course, you can get Incredible Food unrefined bakery.com That's correct, unrefined bakery.com get 20% off of your entire first order. Just by using code, get check. That's the show that you're listening to get check 20% off your entire first order from unrefined bakery. It's incredible food. It's doesn't matter if you're keto, paleo, gluten free. And you're like me, I don't know if I can ever have an awesome tasting muffin again. Guess what they have developed incredible food at unrefined bakery. I don't know why I'm giving y'all such weird pauses in between zone my words, I guess because I'm looking at my notes and we're falling down regardless. last not least go to KB Md health.com kB Md health.com and use code GCP to take 20% off of any order, anytime. from Dr. Chris Brown's CBD or his combo signature packages, you can take 20% off of any order at any time at KB MD health calm. So just so you know is we had an episode number 59. We do an intro several minutes into a discussion with Dr. Willa Meyer. We started recording and just didn't want to lose some of the exchange that we had at the very beginning. So without further ado, here's Episode 59. With Dr. Kristen, will, Mr. neuroscientist.
Unknown Speaker
3:10 Oh my god, I had a patient last night who has ulcerative colitis and fainted and just got sent to the hospital. So she's in the hospital as we speak. Her colon is horrific. her brain. When I imaged it, it's it is off the charts anxiety. And so she's sort of the perfect illustration of, you know, the gut brain connection. And was it her anxiety that led to you know, the issues with a colon in the gut? I think so. Because she's very lean and fit and thin and healthy. But I said to her last night, I'm like you need to stay in the hospital, because she didn't she didn't want to stay but she fainted. And her her colon and her. It is it is a scary, you know situation that she's going through and and then I have a patient when I found out about your supplement, who he has horrible gas and bloating. I'm talking horrific. And he follows a lot of the dietary and nutraceutical recommendations. I mean, I've he's been a patient for my god almost a decade. But I'm learning about yourself and I'm like, wait, he needs to try this. So, you know, I was curious about the efficacy and yeah, I mean, I hear I'm like oh, I have questions for you.
Ken Brown
4:32 Oh yeah, we'll send you will send you our resorts and all that stuff. And yeah, the whole backstory of that what's really hilarious is because I'm I was going to do the same thing to you. Okay, because I am giving a talk to the ataxia society this Saturday. Oh, wow. I had off the record. I had sort of forgot that I committed to it and yeah, happens to be the person that started this is a very good friend of mine actually was by a med school roommate. That She allowed her to. And so her why now in life is yes, try and help those that have a taxi. And so that's why I applaud her. It's not to let you know it's a small population of people, but it's, you know, horrific for people who are only present. But the beauty is because of your book when talking about the total volume of the cerebellum versus having 50% of the neurons. So the whole talk I'm, I'm, if you don't mind, I wanted to ask before I do this, I would like to quote you in the book and sure, do some stuff and put it in the talk specifically, I would love for sure your supplements and your brain health diet and all that other stuff,
Unknown Speaker
5:43 I would be honoured. And the beautiful thing about the book, you know, sometimes people ask me why I wrote it. It's like, you know, there's brain health books out there there. People know about supplements, you can go on the internet, but I am, I am blown away by what I have seen using neuroimaging. So it's like the book was really guided by what we've seen clinically with imaging. And as you saw, when you read in the book, you There was a time I didn't believe in supplements, like, Oh, my God, these really weren't yet right there. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's amazing. So I think, you know, probably both you and I, when you're in the profession, and you actually, you can look up all the research papers in the world. But when you see the changes in patients, and you see it, the measurable changes, whether it's imaging or whether it's your labs that you do you know, I'm a huge fan, so So, yes, please go quote, I'm happy to help you, you can email me if you have any questions.
Ken Brown
6:49 I love that. Because I think that when I read your book, I was like, holy cow, we are speaking the same language here. Yeah. And the whole gut brain thing. And you know, what we should do is what that will just flow into this. Because Yeah, I think you're giving away a lot already kind of talking about everything. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna Eric introduce you, but the podcast actually started about six minutes ago. Perfect. So if you're tuning in now, rewind it and do this. So
Eric Rieger
7:23 a very late introduction. This is taken away, Eric. Thank you. And this is episode number 59 of the gut check project. And if you've tuned in now, you've heard an awesome guest. This is Dr. Kristen Willem your she is a neuroscientist and she created this awesome book that that will actually she wrote this awesome book that Browns been holding up here. This is biohack your brain.
Ken Brown
7:49 Yay. And look how much handsomer I am with the book over my face. I love it. Okay, yeah. colour. Colour coordinated to the book as well, which I love.
Eric Rieger
8:05 Definitely, he definitely has. And basically this is biohack your brain and it's how to boost cognitive health performance and power. The first book to outline a strategy for COVID long hauls, including those dealing with neurological issues, cognitive decline, and brain fog. For years. Dr. William year has worked alongside with Dr. Daniel Amen. Rahman. Amen. Amen. who published over 30 books 70 articles just to just to prove the importance of brain health. Dr. Christian, William, your thank you so much for joining us on the gundry project. And I mean, what an awesome this is the probably one of the most unique coolest kickoffs of any podcast we've had yet. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Unknown Speaker
8:52 Well, well, first of all, thank you, too, both of you for inviting me to come on the podcast. I love talking to all things brain health, and gut health. And truth be told, I am a huge fan of gut health. I think brain health begins in the gut and it begins with every single item of food that you are putting into your mouth. Now, Eric gave a lovely introduction and I I should also share with your listening audience. So my background, I was the director of research for psychiatric clinic, outpatient psychiatric clinic, and I ran their clinical neuro imaging department. And so I have seen 1000s of brain scans are, by the time I left the clinic, we had over 130,000 scans. Why I love taking care of your gut and gut health is in psychiatry. One of the foundational principles we have whether we're addressing ATD ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, by Polar issues, the first thing we have to do is work on the eating patterns. What are the things that you are putting in your mouth? Because a lot of these psychiatric issues have inflammatory components. And where does inflammation start? in the gut? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's right. So it's really such a pleasure to come here and speak with experts today, you know, in this field, and we can have a nice sort of melding of the minds of things that you've done things that we've done to really help support people's long term health.
Eric Rieger
10:35 Well, I was fired up whenever can ask if I mean, we always talk about guests we're going to bring on in. And we've been really fortunate to have some some awesome ones. But essentially, when he brought up your name, we began to delve into it the we've talked about gut brain access for real really since episode one.
Ken Brown
10:54 Yeah, it's just I think
Eric Rieger
10:57 it's Cornerstone as a
Ken Brown
10:58 gastroenterologist. So Alright, so let me tell you a little bit about how I found you. Oh, wait, love. Okay, please. Oh, my family is a tennis family. But and I mean, like tennis family like the family is in Florida right now playing and clay court nationals, I got both my daughter and my son doing it. And we got into this huge discussion with Naomi Osaka and the French Open, said that she was going to just sit out because the anxiety of doing the press conferences and all this stuff. So it became it became a dinner table discussion with my family, because the pressures that go on with the individual sports and this and that, and so I like I do, I'm like, oh, man, I gotta like help my kids. So let's up. How do I biohack sports performance and a PDF of somebody that did this interview with the Montana State Bobcat magazine. Like, this is a great article, and I didn't read your name until the very end, you know, you know, the interview performed by Kristen Wilmore. And I was like, Who is that? look you up and I'm like, holy cow. She's got a book called biohack. Your brain just came out. I'm all about edit all about working with professional athletes. And so then that turned into I actually have a very close friend Jr, who played for the San Francisco 40 Niners for 12 years and was, was the NFL player representative for CTE for a few years. And he's still works with Steve Young, and he had his he had his zoom 50th birthday party not too long ago, and the whole, there was like 40 people on there, and it was just Hall of Famers all over. So I called Jr. And I was like, dude, you should have done this whole aim. inclement thing. And oh, yeah,
Unknown Speaker
12:43 yeah. It's I'm still taking care of football players from I started back in 2009. You know, where we did our work with the first 100 players. But my God, we've had hundreds of players come in, and I've watched them over the course of time, some of them are getting better. Now, unfortunately, if you play collision based sport, and you don't really proactively take care of your brain health, you know, some of them now have ALS, Alzheimer's disease at younger ages than we see in the general population. So we start to expect to see these diseases of ageing and your sixth decade of life, seventh decade of life, but in the professional athletes, we're seeing them in their fifth decade of life. And the reason why it's not surprising and this sort of goes into my background as a neurobiologist was sort of the first 10 years of my career, I'm in the academic setting. And I'm a neurobiologist, studying things at the level of the single cell and working in Parkinson's and understanding how neurons communicate with one another, and also having a great concept of synaptic plasticity, right. We read about it in the literature, but I've actually watched my beautiful neurons make contacts with their neighbours, it's, it's really extraordinary when you have the the perspective of what synaptic plasticity is, and and the ability of these beautiful neurons, one single neuron in our central nervous system can make between 10,000 to 40,000 connections. And that's 86 billion neurons we have.
Ken Brown
14:18 I just want to clarify one thing. So like when you we hear about this like, and there's been a lot of discussion about neuroplasticity. Huberman has his podcast and people are talking about it. Could you just define that?
Unknown Speaker
14:31 Yeah, neural plasticity is just the ability of a neuron to make additional connections with its neighbours. So what As I was saying, one neuron can extend a branch out dentre and dendritic branch out and connect with other neurons. And the way that we sort of increase our brain capacity over time is to be able to make as many of those connections as we can. This is why as we get older, this concept of synaptic play density or neuro plasticity is just the ability of, again, a single neuron to continue making branches. And how does that happen? That happens when we learn new information. That's why it's so important to continue to learn as we age, because that's how we grow these connections. Other ways to grow new connections is through exercise. But I like the new learning piece. Because the one thing that people don't realise, and I know I tell a lot of these fun little I call them fun facts, but they're really important. Because the brain reaches full maturity around the age of 2530. After the age of 40, our brain volume, right starts to decrease about 5% per decade. So your brain volume can get smaller. And you know, that's one thing that could concern people, but it the synaptic plasticity can continue on throughout life. So that's why, you know, there's certain interventions we can do to help maintain brain volume, which is where the exercise is important. omega three fatty acids are really important. And then there's things we can do to help maintain synaptic plasticity so that we retain our memories, you know, and we have the ability to live and be centenarians and still be happy, like Betty White, who I love bringing up because the woman is 99 years old, actually, she she comes and visits people in the building that I live in here in Los Angeles. And she's beautiful, right? So I see her often. She just turned 99. And she thanked her agent, because her agent continues to give her scripts and continues to get her job. So this is a woman who is still memorising scripts at age 99. So that's somebody who is able to retain her memory. So when people who were in their 60s are like, Oh, I forget where I put things. She's actually working her memory consistently because it's a part of her job. So this is something that all of us just need to remember to do. Maybe we should all start memorising scripts, or grocery list or memory.
Ken Brown
17:11 I thought you wanted to be I thought you you wanted us to become an actress. I didn't know. We've already been told that we have faces for radio. Oh, that's right. Oh my gosh. So I heard I digress. No, I love what you're saying there because the new synapses. One of the coolest, Michael Pollan, and you quoted him in his book, The I don't remember all the books he's done, but he did did a series on he just came out with a new book about some anyways, how plants interact with our synapses and stuff. He quote, he said something that kind of made sense what you're talking about, he goes, it's been described that if you imagine a, a hill, that guts that had snow on it, everybody starts to sled on it, if you if you go down enough times, eventually makes a groove. And then you sat in that groove. And by doing certain things, you need to lay some new snowdown so that you can find a new path. And that's kind of what you're describing.
Unknown Speaker
18:15 That's what new learning is. It's creating new paths. And then we're, I apologise if you're hearing the lovely fire. Can you hear the fire trucks out there?
Ken Brown
18:28 It's la bursting in your door, we're gonna we're gonna raise the bond money for you
Unknown Speaker
18:33 might actually hear the Sons of Anarchy out there as well, sometimes. motorcycle gangs
Ken Brown
18:39 are a little different right now. We didn't quite have the effect in LA in New York. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
18:46 But no, he's absolutely correct. It's, you know, in neuroscience, we have this phrase neurons that fire together, wire together. And it's the circuits that get repeated the things that we do every day, the thoughts that we think the the information that we take in whether we're reading or learning something new, it's all our brain is a dynamic organ that is continuing to grow and change every single second with every input that we get light sound, what we read, right, what comes in through our visual centres, everything. So part of why I wrote this book is to make us more consciously aware of the things that are in our environment that are impacting our health and our well being and our brain health. And because most people want to figure out how to retain their memories as they age, that was another reason for the book. But really the biggest reason you you noted it is working with the athletes who are really struggling with brain issues at very early ages. And the fact that we saw we could restore brain function through various Simple dietary and lifestyle modifications that anybody listening to this podcast could do. I mean, there's, you know, we've got all the bells and whistles in the clinical setting the neurofeedback, the current transcranial magnetic stimulation, the hyperbaric oxygen therapies, you've got the IV therapies. But even doing all of those, everybody still has to do the lifestyle piece. And that's as important, as all of these other technologies that we have that for some people could be cost prohibitive, which is why I, you know, I put those things more towards the back of the book, but we can still talk about them, because a hyperbaric oxygen chamber can actually revascularize the brain. So you can grow new new vasculature. And if you think about participating in a collision based sport, like football, now, I was an equestrian. So I spent 10 years showing horses falling off of horses. So when I speak about working with athletes, they're very much I'm very connected with them, because I've had my fair share of head impacts. The difference being in football, you know, they've put accelerometers inside the helmets. And I've studied how many impacts football players are taking in high school in college. So on average, do you want to take a guess? This is kind of fun. Since I have you too. I'm going to average so guess the average number of impacts a high school football player is having per season,
Eric Rieger
21:37 I would imagine it's gonna be a few 1000. I don't know though.
Unknown Speaker
21:39 It's actually lower. So it's around 650. So per season. And then college is about 1300. So then, if you're talking about a football player who's played four years of high school, four years of college, you're getting about 8000 impacts. But then you've got the G force.
Ken Brown
22:02 So that so the impact is now you've got bigger, stronger people. So the impact is much greater at the college level.
Unknown Speaker
22:11 at the college level, exactly. So the average g force in high school is around 28 G's per impact. So you can say anywhere between 10 and impact could be as low as whatever note 10 G's as high as 150 G. So they're lower impact and high school in college, they were averaging around 68 G's.
Unknown Speaker
22:33 Yeah,
Eric Rieger
22:34 I got a quick question on that. I think that long ago, I heard that. Not only is obviously the increase in the impact, obviously can be more damaging, but the sheer repetitive nature of it itself is quite damaging. Even if it happens to just be over and over again, it's kind of like water torture,
Unknown Speaker
22:54 you hit the nail on the head. So that's the biggest issue. It's the repetitive sub concussive impacts that are damaging the individual cells. So you get the shearing and the tearing of the axons and the cells. And they now need the time to, you know, restore back to, you know, sort of try to get back to normal function. And, of course, if you're playing a game where football players are hitting, you know, every play of the game, the lineman might have three or four impacts per play. There was a paper that came out that actually not only measured the number of impacts, but measured the linear and rotational forces. And it was I think, across both high school and college, the average linear acceleration in G forces was 188,000, g forces to the very delicate neurons in your brain, the rotational acceleration was over 3 million, like radians per second squared. So you know, somebody can go through a whole High School and collegiate career and maybe not have a diagnosed concussion, because the concussion is just a temporary alteration of mental status after an impact to the head or chest with or without the loss of consciousness. So, you know, 10% of the people might have, you know, a loss of consciousness or amnesia, but they recover quite quickly. But it's all those repetitive sub concussive impacts that you're talking about Eric that are causing the damage at the level of the neurons that are then causing the tauopathy. That's what the chronic traumatic encephalopathy is, it's just a tauopathy right, an accumulation of this misfolded abnormally folded tau protein phosphorylated tau protein, they're starting to see it first stage one CTS in the frontal lobes. And that shouldn't be surprising because football players hit the front part of their head right? The that's why they're spacey at first in the frontal lobes then stage two gets into the temporal lobes. And some parietal lobe stage three gets into the deeper cortical structures like the amygdala, hippocampus and Toronto cortex. And then stage four is now getting into the brainstem
Eric Rieger
25:12 changed since then, but I mean, I can remember playing and you didn't know to complain, unless, you know, unless you're injured, you know, Are you injured? Are you hurt? And that was kind of the, the thought process, you know, almost 30 years ago was to make certain that you don't complain unless you actually could show an injury. But nobody was really doing anything about brain injury that at that point in time, and I know that it's improved somewhat, but unless I'm falling down and throwing up or they feel like the spots, nobody ever stopped,
Unknown Speaker
25:45 you probably went back in the game after you throw up because I've watched you watch men play sports, rugby, it's like, Okay, I'm ready to go back. And plus, you have the adrenaline. I mean, I. So I was a competitive show jumper, I had several horses, one of my horses was a thoroughbred, off the racetrack, and I the fences, I would jump were four foot three, four foot nine. And I would race at them. I mean, I was a crazy, sort of, I was a maverick, I loved it. So I and I've fallen off hundreds of times. The differences, you know, the differences with football, that's a game where the impacts are coming. You know, you've got repetitive impacts on every play. Well, you may not you may only play 12 or 14 or 16 games a season. It's also the practice games. So you if you start to read the papers and say sometimes there's 95, practice games, and then 12 games in your season. So that's actually a lot of impacts that are happening. Now. You know, I don't I don't know what is going to happen with football. And there are certainly people who you know, have an extended career. I mean, we've worked with players, one of the players that was in our study, played 12. So he went to UCLA defensive lineman, his name's Fred McNeil. He played for the Minnesota Vikings was a first round draft pick, I believe pick number 17. Played 12 seasons on the Vikings played in a Super Bowl, they never won. When he left the NFL, he went to law school, I can't remember where he went. He went to law school, graduated valedictorian of his class, then became a partner in his law firm. So here's somebody who, right high school, I think he had a 22 year lifetime, sort of risk of from playing football, so 22 years in the game, but still was able to go to law school afterwards. It was clearly really smart. At the age of 57, is when he came in to our study, and he just came in to see what his brain look like. And when we did the brain imaging, the scan showed Frontotemporal dementia. So we saw low blood flow in the frontal lobe and the temporal lobes, he did not know he had that. But he knew he was struggling with depression, he was having memory issues, but he was still working. So then we sent him to the neurologist worked with him for seven years, he ended up getting diagnosed with ALS, and passing away at the age of 63. The reason why I share his story is he's the illustration of somebody can play football, and then have a 20 year 25 year period where they're just living their life. And then all of a sudden, you have the degenerative disease hit quickly. And we know you know in the world of neurology and neuroscience and neuroimaging, we know degenerative changes happen in the brain 1520 years at the cellular level before you have a symptom. So that's what's happening with the players. It's just happening earlier, which is why I think anybody who plays a collision baseboard should be on a brain health protocol. And that's just about being really mindful about the foods you eat. You know, I really wouldn't recommend drinking a lot of alcohol. It's not great for the brain. I mean, there, there's a lot of very intuitive things, and I talked about that in the book. But you have to be serious about it if you don't want to spend your 6/7 or eighth decade of life dealing with these issues. And because I was in a psychiatric clinic, we also worked with the underlying psychiatric problems, right? That they have a greater risk of depression and anxiety. So getting those things treated, is really helpful, and sort of having a better quality of life.
Ken Brown
29:38 So I just want to say this. After reading the book, I want to eat your brain right now. Because what you're talking about is so cool. But in your book, you do a step wise process to prevent this from happening. So anybody that's listening, even if you're not into the science that we're going to get into because it's it's it's beautiful. Well, I think that the, that when a neuroscientist like yourself comes from a background of research and you, you're wise to protect the brain. And my why actually, and we've talked about this is if I had one goal that I can do in my lifetime would be to prevent dementia. And the reason is, is that I believe that memories have no price, I would prefer to buy a memory than buy a thing. And I gotta teach my kids this that yes. And so as we live our life, if those memories get stolen from you, in my mind, that is, that is a life wasted in your own mind, although it isn't for the others around you, but in your own mind. So if I could do one thing, and what we are seeing in my world is gastroenterologist is that when we see Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's, present with gut issues 20 years before.
Unknown Speaker
30:53 So you see the 20 year language, you see the 20 year note you saw, and I wrote about this in my book, my father ended up having Parkinson's. And you will appreciate this. And I didn't really go into it in the book, but you know, he, so he's a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam, two tours, but exposed to Agent Orange. And then was a pilot for Pan American. So of course, there's all of the exhaust and things that you're exposed to and was a fireman. But my dad six for healthy, lean fit, no issues, no Parkinson's in our family, no psychiatric issues in our family. So I found it interesting about the age of 50 is when the tremor started coming on. You know, he was diagnosed later in his 70s and then passed away at 78. But he ate very healthy My dad was one of those people who is juicing and clean eating, I feel the glyphosate, whatever, the roundup whatever's in the Agent Orange, I feel my dad's issues really stem from that. And that all eradicates the healthy bacteria in your gut. And so I really for him, I feel environmental exposure was, you know, predominant in his parkinsonian issues. And, you know, I'm, I'm really about how do we help people live their healthiest life. And in the book I go into when it comes to food, I really talked about the Mediterranean diet with a plant based, sort of, they call it plant predominant, you know, it's, I still would allow for people to have meat, but really when I was working with the player, so I talked about running a brain directed weight loss group for football players, which is really quite comical, because when, when Dr. Ayman said I was doing that I thought he was crazy. I'm like, these guys are elite athletes, they already know how to work out be lean, but they actually weren't lean. When we were working with them, some of them work because they were active players. And some of them were older, so I had to get them slim. So it would help their brain health because we know excess inflammation in the body damages the brain and we publish research on that. But where does the information come from? It comes from the food. And it comes in the gut. And this is such a great teaching moment. And I'm here because I would love to learn from you. I mean, the meat What can I just ask you? What is your stance on me?
Ken Brown
33:37 My staff. So I've tried to be open minded about everything. And it's like all things. So when game changers came out on Netflix, yeah, like that's it. I'm all plant based. I'm going to be an elite athlete and I did the stupid thing which was I tried to do the meat substitutes and stuff like that, which I didn't possible burger. I didn't even well not that but whatever it was, I mean, and so then I realised that in there so I'm a big I'm gluten intolerant and didn't realise that they use gluten as fillers all sort of stuff. So that was I Eric will laugh at this pretty much everything I do I will just dive into an obscene levels now pretty much.
Eric Rieger
34:23 Pretty much that's just the male brain I applaud that.
Ken Brown
34:28 They come out with these scars be like don't do that. But like don't do it that way. I actually believe the way that I try to eat is mostly I'm okay with me. I tried to do grass fed grass finished beef. brasco originally, so it would My my, my dad would roll over in his grave. He was actually a butcher so it would be difficult to actually deny.
Unknown Speaker
34:56 a butcher Okay, I find okay. This is really fascinating. Your dad was a butcher and your gastroenterologist, and you read books like The China Study, which talk about the inflammatory nature of meat, and how it can release the bacterial endotoxins in your gut, and that can be inflammatory. So do you recommend that people keep meat down to one meal per day? limited to once per week.
Ken Brown
35:31 So this is a great jumping off point and spotlight off me real quick, because one of the things I loved in your book was chapter one was pretty much or maybe it was chapter two, where you're like, if I can ask you to do one thing, it's quit eating processed food. Yep. Yeah. So yes, I'm the same way. So when you say what do you tell your patients I, I struggle with? Let's avoid high fructose corn syrup, and saturated fatty acids. Let's get rid of those emulsifiers everything that you talked in your book? Yeah, that's hard enough to do. That's people doing that. So once you get into the it's like, a comedian was joking about it. He's like, yeah, my, my trainer neighbour was saying, maybe you're eating too much fruit as I was eating a doughnut, like, that's the problem.
Unknown Speaker
36:19 Right? The more fruit gets thrown out. And I'm like, No, you need the fruit. My God, you we need the antioxidants. As you know, in your supplement, which is polyphenols, right, we need our brain needs antioxidants, we need them from the diet, I feel it's the number one way to help preserve your long term brain health. Because the there's such a delicate balance between free radical production in the brain and antioxidant capacity. And free radicals are produced just by you know, metabolism. So we need to make sure our diet in our diet every single day, we're getting antioxidants. And I sort of made when I taught the Mediterranean diet to the football players and the patients in our psychiatric setting, it was very prescriptive. And I outlined the prescriptive nature of it in the book I I should have gone into it in more detail because people really seem to like it. But I make it like a pilot's checklist with people. And I just say, Hey, here's the things that I want you to get into your diet every day. We can modify, you know, if you're loving me, you know, well, meat can be inflammatory. And people, I'm going to find a really creative way, because I want them to stick with it for a lifetime. So I have a really sort of fun way of doing upgrades, but making it work for them. But the I really had a checklist for people, it was like, you know, three green leafy vegetables per day check, you know, one orange, red or yellow vegetable
Ken Brown
37:52 that was that was your adaption to the it's the mediterr.
Unknown Speaker
37:56 It's the Mediterranean diet.
Ken Brown
37:59 But but this is but this was your adaption when, in the part of the book where you said, This is my brain health diet. And yeah, you're saying that it's the Mediterranean with a checklist, you
Unknown Speaker
38:10 I gave it sort of in a prescriptive way. So people knew, you know, because like you said, everybody's unique, and they have the things that they love. And if you make it too difficult, they're just not going to do anything. And so sometimes the initial barter was, you know, if I was trying to limit somebody drinking too much coffee, and I talked about coffee in the book, because coffees a vasoconstrictor. And in the brain imaging world, we don't want to cause too much vasoconstriction. So I would make a barter, I'd say for every cup of coffee, I'd love for you to do a fresh green juice. And I would actually make it or I have, you know, sometimes they come in the clinic if I'm teaching it to a group of patients and be like, here, here's what it tastes like. You got to make it fun and accessible. So that's what I would do with following the diet. The The point being I need to get more clean, healthy nutrients in and let's try to get some of those processed foods and sugars and the things that you're very sort of used to eating out. And
Ken Brown
39:15 while I was just gonna say that what's interesting when you say used to eating as zero scientist, we know that if you look at the food industry, they hire very intelligent scientists to make junk food work on your brain. I've met with food chemists, I met them. Oh, yeah. Can you expand on that?
Unknown Speaker
39:35 Well, I just when we were designing supplements, sometimes you you know, you meet with people who are hired for that specific reason. And what do people love fat, sugar, salt, you know, it's very easy to put all of those things into, you know, a packaged food that's gonna sit on the shelf for however, you know, however long to be on the shelf, one of the most important things I would teach people, if anything, sometimes you just got to get down to the basics, right? Because if I can help somebody change one bad habit, we're already going to make progress. You know, sometimes my, the one habit that I would have everybody do is change how much the amount of fluids they were consuming in water. That's why I actually dedicate one chapter to water. It is so important. And I have my glass right here, you know, cheers. It's, you know, before food, sometimes I think the hydration piece is the piece that always gets lost. And when I made people chart there, how much water they were drinking, this was so fun. As a scientist, I charted everything, because I can't help somebody change something if I don't know what you're doing. And you might say, Oh, yeah, I drink enough water. And I'm like, Oh, I bet you don't. So let's, let's track how much water you're drinking and make sure you're drinking the right amount. And I would we, in my groups that I taught, I would say, let's not drink our calories. So let's get rid of all the juices, the sodas, let's just do water. And it's amazing how people who love soda, if that was the only thing they got rid of in one year, they could easily lose 20 pounds. So for me, for Burbank brain health perspective, if I'm getting you to just drink clean water every day with even if it's from your tap with a filter, fantastic. Let's get it out of a plastic bottle, because the BPA you know, from the plastics are not going to be great for your gut health. Number one, let alone your brain health. So let's try to have it in a glass. And, you know, I talk about I now get water bottled water, you know, that's actually a hyper oxygenated and slightly alkaline, I mean, you know, I can't help myself being in this field, you sometimes know too much. So you're going to go for the best. But I clean up the water, I try to get more of the green juicing in, because we know how important vegetables are. And if somebody just does not want to have a vegetable, a lot of times I can get them to do a fresh green juice that has lots of great enzymes. And you know, and we can get fruit in there. So I was really working on how do I unwind some of the really destructive habits that people just do repeatedly, you know, multiple times a day over the course of weeks, months, years, that are not really serving you. And that was I think that was the fun part of teaching those groups. It's like, Oh, my God, I Wow. And not only do I change their habits, then they're dropping weight like crazy. That's why I put a bunch of stories in there about people that had lost over 100 pounds. With me not. That's not even my area of expertise. And it was just happening because
Ken Brown
42:47 I mean your areas to change habits, which is changing brain, that's
Unknown Speaker
42:52 my area, my area of expertise is brains and brain imaging. But I you know, it was this really fascinating experience of watching people change their diet and very quickly lose weight. And seeing people who were in their 50s and 60s who didn't even think they could lose 10 pounds, lose 60 pounds in a year. Like, wow, I just shifted a few things in your diet, you just you I'm a cheerleader, probably like you. So I get really excited for people success. So I'm sure there was a synergy between myself and the players and the patients I work with and the you know, let's help you clean up the foods you're eating. And you know why they're important, especially because everybody that I work with, you know, to psychiatric clinic, we're also working to improve their mood. And the only way we can do that is by cleaning up those foods. Right, bringing the saturated fats down trying to bring down the saturated animal fats, bringing in more of the mono and polyunsaturated right healthy fats from plants and marine based, you know, omega threes and just it's about fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds, Whole Foods. It's not hard.
Eric Rieger
44:09 I got a quick question for you. Yeah, mentioned the green juice. Yes. And the you've mentioned also a few times that there may be technologies that may not have access because of cost. And for some people even time, right, you've mentioned green juice a couple of times what was an ideal green juice for someone to make at home.
Unknown Speaker
44:28 I love that. You know I mentioned green juice so much I started doing it 20 years ago. So I'm 4848 Now, every single day I've done some kind of green juice. Now I throw beets in it as well because I think it's an easy way to get a red you know something red in there. But I tell people just think green you know the base is typically celery or cucumber. And then you add kale, parsley, spinach edge, all throw in. I love pear So I put in a boss pair sometimes I put an apple in, sometimes they put a red bead in. The reason why I mentioned it is not only is it hydrating, so I drink usually 32 ounces of juice. So this morning, I start my day with two eight ounce glasses of water. The first is a water is clean water the second I usually put a little lemon in, then I do my juice, which is 32 ounces. So I you know the hydration is really how I like to start my day. And I feel that the juicing over time and I'm asking you the gastroenterologist and I've read about this, I'm actually priming my gut with these very healthy, nourishing enzyme rich fluids because the polyphenols and the vitamins and the nutrients that are in the greens are critical for your gut health and every single food you eat. Correct is helping to populate either good or bad bacteria. Dr. Brown?
Ken Brown
46:04 Yes. Read in your book when I told my patients to do this. And they said, What do you mean by green? I'm like, I don't know if it's green. Just do it. And so then they were like I'm doing green m&ms. I'm doing green Skittles with this
Unknown Speaker
46:16 Skittles.
Ken Brown
46:16 So maybe I should have looked more into what you meant by the greens. Thank you for asking that question, Eric. Yeah, I
Eric Rieger
46:22 just wanted to set you straight because I knew this was a problem.
Ken Brown
46:25 My patients were gaining weight, and they're just like, I'm like, so what are you doing now? They're like, I do one sprig of spinach, one sprig of kale and green m&m.
Eric Rieger
46:33 Yeah, I was doing today. green juice out of a sour patch. And I got diabetes. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
46:40 I'm coming after you, Dr. Brown. Yeah. You know what, I had fun having the football players do it, they all the coolest thing about working with pro athletes is they will do anything you tell them. And because they trust me, so I'm like, Come on, guys, here's what we're going to do, right, to get them to lose weight, I had to the volume of food that they were eating each day was around 4500 calories. So first of all, we're, you know, we're not at training table anymore. So you know, bring that down. And I did sort of the creative thing where, you know, if you can keep your meals from 500 calories, you know, if you can, you can have a burrito, that's 2000 calories. That's, that's a whole day's worth of calories in one meal. So I would creatively say, hey, whatever you're eating at noon, let's cut it in half and have your first part at noon, I say, you can have your second part at 130. If you're still hungry, and I did that at dinner, I said dinner, you can have your dinner, whatever at seven, and then at 815, if you're still hungry, you can have the other half. So you have to get I just had so much fun being creative with how in all my players were losing weight, so players were losing weight. And my mentor was like you're teaching this in our psychiatric clinic, I'm like I am okay. And it just kept going. It was this really beautiful. Because watching people change their foods, their bodies change, I knew their brain health would change for the better. And then we used the nutraceuticals. For the for the pro athletes, really to help support blood flow to the brain boost certain neurotransmitters, right? that are really important in memory. Because most people don't realise after the age of 40 is when our neurotransmitters, systems, we don't tend to make as many and that's how we start getting diseases like Parkinson's, that's the dopamine, you know, system is not functioning as optimally as it could and, you know, all simers, you know, we're talking about acetylcholine. So, you know, I mentioned in my book, you know, everyone over the age of 40 would probably be smart to take a whole food multivitamin, just for your brain health. So there was a nutraceutical component here. That was again very helpful for the players, but the goal being to really help improve perfusion to the brain and, you know, help to you know, omega three fatty acids, for example, are really important in building the cells, the neurons in your brain and for that synaptic plasticity, you need to have the building blocks which are in the omega three fatty acids.
Ken Brown
49:25 Yeah, and in your book you do a fantastic job of describing these are your basics. This is the the first line starting
Unknown Speaker
49:32 lineup starting Yeah, kind of made it a fun word analogy, like starting lineup where you know, here six, basic nutraceuticals pretty much everybody can take them. You know, I always tell people run this by your doctor. I mean, I was the director of nutrition in nutraceuticals. So not only was I responsible for helping to create and study the efficacy of these products using brain imaging, but I worked with our psychiatric A population who is trying to get off of medications and using nutraceuticals as a way to support their, you know, manage anxiety, depression add. So this is why I really became a fan of them because I saw how effective they could be. And if we could do a nutraceutical approach versus a medicine that has more side effects. A nutraceutical approach is sort of a wiser way to go. But then you started to see, okay, here's your starting lineup, the basics everybody could do, I did what I call all star team. So if you want to take your nutraceuticals to the next level, here's, you know, five other things that I think are really important. And then what I did what I call the injured reserve, which is, these are the nutraceuticals, we use for patients with brain imaging, or I'm sorry, with brain injuries, or say you had chemotherapy, and you have chemo brain, you know, or we're working on, you've had a toxic exposure, too much alcohol, these are the things that can help to restore blood flow to the brain.
Ken Brown
51:06 What I loved about it is that you addressed initially, that you understood that people may not have the resources to get these, right to get these supplements. And then in addition to that, at each end of the paragraph, this is what you need to look for in the supplement which was awesome. Also, I was gonna do this. Yeah, look for GMP look for this, you if you're going to get a fish oil, look for the symbol for non mercury and this and that, that was beautiful. so that people can do their homework and not just walk into target, and go, Oh, this is what I'm going to grab our Walmart or whatever, and I'm right. But um, you know,
Unknown Speaker
51:40 thank you for that. It's, you know, it's really hard. You walk into a whole foods and you have just sort of the shelves that are lined with nutraceuticals. And you just don't know, what do I take? What don't I take the you ask the person there who's working there? Hey, which one's good? And I because I've seen how these things work in our patients and know the levels. You know, it's very nuanced. And, you know, prior to being in the brain imaging space, I you know, I wasn't really using nutraceutical so I have a very, I really appreciate how they work in the brain. And a consistent use of certain nutraceuticals over time can really support brain health. And I think more people, even those who are on the fence. I've watched some doctors who work more in that sort of traditional medic Western medical world who I know a lot of them still aren't on the nutraceutical bandwagon. But I've seen the older doctors who are in their 70s or 80s, pretty much everybody starts taking a nutraceutical at some point for their joints. I mean, omega three fatty acids and our NFL population when we started just giving them they had a minimum of two grammes of fish oil per day, they started to have less joint pain. Because omega threes are anti inflammatory. They're like, Wow, I didn't even know that. So it's some of these little things that I think are really very valuable.
Ken Brown
53:14 Absolutely. There's one thing that I do want because I need your help on this. Yes. After reading your book, so I'm a I'm a morning habit person, and I'm an evening habit person. Yes. And my OCD wife nuts that I will do the same thing, which well,
Unknown Speaker
53:31 really, I would think she'd like that as a person of ritual.
Ken Brown
53:34 ritual. It's how I how I end the ritual that bothers her. So for instance, I have tea every night, I've candle meal tea, but I hate enormous Amazon mug, and I will make it and I will sit and after a long day and we'll try and watch some TV. And inevitably I'll start dozing off and she'll fall asleep. Just go to bed and I will drink about this most of the tea. And then she gets mad at me. She's like, you waste all this to you after reading your book. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. Dr. William, you're said after a night of sleeping, you have not had anything to drink. That's when I'm going to get up. That's why I make it so I can wake up and then I chugged my tea in the morning. So that's where I start my hydration process. You do i do do the Kevin meal tea in the morning as well. I do that. Not a health reason. But just because I don't want to be yelled up on the wife. I love eventually I will drink that.
Unknown Speaker
54:27 I love how she's like, okay, we're gonna make sure all of this tea gets drunk, do not fall asleep and not finish that tea. And I love it that it works very well for you as a sleep aid.
Ken Brown
54:39 Well, I think working really hard throughout the day, we're probably well, you know,
Unknown Speaker
54:45 I'm so coming from psychiatry, like more than 50% of people need help with sleep. It's just such a common thing. I was like, oh, it really works well for you. You're just exhausted. But they came a meal teas probably helping to
Ken Brown
54:59 say Hearing scientists and writing books and everything you just fall asleep. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
55:06 tell you something in our household. My husband is the real sensitive sleeper. He was super like, wakes up. He can wake up with me breathing like I could breathe too loud. He's like, Uh huh. And I fall asleep anywhere and everywhere. It's like a full shutdown.
Ken Brown
55:23 You know, what I think is going on with your husband that maybe you could comment that is okay. Your book? I believe? He has a large amygdala. Oh, yes. He probably. Yes, that chapter on that. And the whole amygdala thing, because I have Eric. We watched free solo with Alex hormone huddled hahnel. Three. Oh, have you seen free solo? No. Oh my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Okay. So basically, it's a movie about a guy who climbed El Capitan, with no gear at all, totally free solo.
Eric Rieger
56:05 He does it all the time.
Ken Brown
56:06 First person ever do it, and he just completely. But what was amazing is that he fell one time and it was a documentary. So his friend was, Oh, my, they didn't, you're gonna love this. They did an MRI on him. And they found that he has a little tiny amygdala, I no fear. No fear
Unknown Speaker
56:23 can probably if I'm probably impulsive, like there's that in our frontal lobes, you know, I think having a lower frontal lobe function might make you more impulsive and more of a risk taker. We see that with firefighters and police officers. I mean, what, what sane human being wants to run into a burning building like my father or, you know, be a chopper pilot in Vietnam? And, you know, yeah, I'm just going to go down and, you know, drop some people out picks up people, or a police officer or a free climber who has no gear and feels perfectly comfortable in that position. Somebody who, well feels very, you know what, that's somebody who does not fear death
Ken Brown
57:09 100% now? Uh huh. So he's a complete, unique individual. But in her book, you described how cortisol affects the amygdala can you get into that a little bit?
Unknown Speaker
57:21 Well, and how cortisol affects our brain, in general, my God, too much cortisol. So we have glucocorticoid receptors, a lot of them on our hippocampus, the area of the brain that is critical to learning and memory. So when we have chronic, unrelenting release of cortisol, like probably like most of us have done during the global pandemic. You know, our big our hippocampus can shrink. And we were talking about neuroplasticity, and synaptic plasticity, that that absolutely stops. So you have lower amounts of what we call BDNF or brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is what we need to help grow new neurons. Or that's
Ken Brown
58:07 another question, we're gonna talk about that next, just grow new neurons, neurons, because that was new to me. I was taught in med school, we can't do that. Okay, sorry,
Unknown Speaker
58:15 course you were taught in med school. No, but now we know the hippocampus, you can grow new neurons until you're 90. And I'll tell you, we need them in the hippocampus By that time, because, you know, I've seen a lot of, you know, we do volumetric, MRI, hippocampal, MRIs on people who are older with dementia, and you see that, you know, they shrink to the 14th percentile or fifth percentile. And then you wonder, you know, 100%, is where we want it. And, you know, as we age, that structure shrinks. And, you know, so I know, I'm getting off topic, I'm talking about the hippocampus, it's really important, because if we, if we don't maintain the hippocampal volume, we aren't going to be able to take all of the things that we learned during the day that are in our short term memory, all the new things, when we sleep, we take that information, and we consolidate it into our long term memory, but it has to go through the hippocampus. And so it's really essential that that region of the brain, we want to continue to work it and continue to do the things to help those neurons grow. And that's exercise and new learning. Those are like the two amazing ways to do it. But back to our friend who's the free climber. So you're talking about stress and he clearly has
Ken Brown
59:32 well i was i always joked with Eric that I feel like when we watched him do this and I'm just like he's got no I feel like my amygdala is like, pushed it's like it's so large. Yeah, pushing my cerebral low because
Unknown Speaker
59:44 emotionally You're right, that amygdala gets activated during emotionally charged events. And that's what what makes it grow. So the amazing thing are the people who are able to find their centre are to be calm and to keep, you know, cortisol levels down. And my I will tell you my father was the combat helicopter pilot, he used to tell me when he was younger, he never feared dying in Vietnam, the only thing he feared was that if he died, his parents would have lost their only son. He loved it. He absolutely loved being a pilot loved it. He's like, I wouldn't even know all the death that he saw and getting shot at. And his funeral actually said, my dad took the you know, they give you the vest that you wear the bulletproof vest, he folded it sat on it, because all the firing was coming up underneath the chopper. Oh, but here's, I wish my dad was lead because he's so lovely. Just had just the beautiful spirit kind heart. And he taught me about not being afraid. He just, we can decide how we want to view things in life. I think the gentleman who's the free climber was probably not afraid of death. If he fell, he would he would fall doing something he loved. So I just think he, in his mind, his perspective on things such that, hey, I'm going to go out and have fun. I love doing this, right? It gets my adrenaline going. It makes me happy. It's my joy. It's my passion. And so, you know, he had no fear any trusted himself. He's done enough climbs with all of his gear, that he's like, I've done this, right. He's repeated the pathways. Remember you were talking earlier about Michael Pollan talking about what's you know, synaptic plasticity, and it's like going down the, the fresh snow and the sled and you keep repeating that, you know, event so that those tracks are really strong in the brain? Well, this gentleman clearly had done that as well. And he had confidence in himself. So it's more his levels were probably down, but
Ken Brown
1:01:57 it's so on that same line, when we're talking about repeating yourself and the tracks. Yeah, in chapter eight, you have a great chapter about controlling your emotions, both negative and positive thoughts and rumination and preventing that rumination? Can you talk about that, because that was the first time I've seen a neuroscience approach to what I would almost consider some form of meditation.
Unknown Speaker
1:02:20 It is what you know, most of us don't really reflect on the thoughts that we have, you know, and thoughts. Some of them come from internally, and some of them, you know, we just get from the people that were around. That's why I also think it's really smart. As we get older, we're selective on the people that we keep company with. Because sometimes, you know, there's the people that make us happy. And then there's the people that don't write that irritate us. You get that thought cycle. And you're like, ah, but in I write the chapter on thoughts, because, again, I worked in the field of psychiatry, and what is what do we tell people have anxiety or depression, you know, anxious, people are fearing the future. depressed people tend to be thinking about the past. Oh, put rumination, ruminating thoughts. People who have ruminating thoughts, sometimes those are the ones who have the OCD, right? There's, there's a neurobiological wiring in certain people's brains where they can't get off the feedback loop. And what I've learned, this is why I talk about meditation. If you are one of those people, with there's many ways to help address thoughts. I mean, you can talk to a therapist and sort of talk through them, you know, you can take them out of your head and write them on paper. That's why journaling works for some people, or the meditation process, the whole goal of meditation is to it's, it's like observing a thought it's, you're supposed to just let the thought come through and leave come through and leave not hold on to it. We've got techniques like EMDR, they're different therapies that we can do to work with people to help them resolve a trauma or get through a negative thought. Because if you're a firefighter, and you know, you've lost a comrade, or you've, you've watched somebody die, I mean, that's a traumatic experience your amygdala is going to get, it's going to it's going to grow, your cortisol levels are going to be up and you might have a form of PTSD. And you may relive that memory. It's why sleep is so important, because sleep is one of the times our brain can actually work through those emotions. We actually does it while we're sleeping. So we're able to then get up in the morning and be able to sort of process it. So thoughts are really you know, they happen, you get 50 to 70,000. And they're just happening second by second by second. It's what we hold on to which thoughts that we're going to hold on to or let go. So meditation is the process of allowing things to just flow and to be in the present moment, not worrying about Future, not worrying about the past being here like I'm here with you to right now and fully present completely engaged, totally entertained to her awesome. And that's what we have to teach people to do is to live more in the now and not fear the future or stay stuck in the past, but I have, I have such compassion for people because sometimes there's the neurobiological wiring of the brain keeps people in these certain patterns. For example, you might have in your family, you might have OCD, or anxiety disorder. So to tell somebody with an anxiety disorder not to let your thoughts bother you. Well, that's, that's a wiring that they have. And we may need to do use some supplements like gamma to calm that region down. We might want to use some neurofeedback to help teach your brain to kind of calm that wiring down. Um, there are certain foods that you can eat, right, that can help release gabbeh that can calm that down, you can work with a therapist, so we have all of these modalities to help people redirect their thoughts. But the most important thing and I think you've probably learned that from the chapter is that our thoughts impact our body impact our physiology, right, our thoughts can increase our cortisol levels, like I could be sitting here talking to you right now and be super nervous. I'm not because you're, you two are so lovely. And it's a lot of fun. But in my mind, I could work myself up and get myself anxious and my heart rate goes up and my blood pressure goes up, my cortisol goes up, and then my gut could get all, you know, butterfly. So that's the power of our mind. And
Eric Rieger
1:06:44 I was gonna ask you, do you think because what you're outlining when you talk about somebody who suffers from anxiety, or really any type of issue? Oh, do you think they're we're going to get to a point where when someone goes in for an element of depression, or anxiety, etc, it's going to be more mainstream at some point, that we begin to go through their diet history, their exercise history, and you said to yourself being present. So when you're with someone, are you putting your phone down all of these different things, before we leap into a prescriptive measure? Because it seems as if over the last 40 years, reaching for the pill, is it's just been the easy, quick fix. And in ultimately, what we're learning over the last four decades is that's
Ken Brown
1:07:31 That's no way to live. Before you comment, I just want to say what's happening right now in the medical world is that in an intake evaluation, when you go to a primary care doctor, they are obligated to, to check certain boxes so that they can Yeah, when is this depression questionnaire? And if they score a certain amount? Yeah, they'll address it in the addressing is always or I shouldn't say always, almost always are often when they score a certain number if you if you're meeting certain metrics you against it. And the way to address it is by giving an SSRI, you are you obligated to do that? So it's like a DSM five. This is more of the primary care thing. So I see these when they come to me because yeah, as as you've already, you know, as you've already pointed out, I I the backwards, I don't think I ever treat a gut without treating a brain and the brain without treating the gut. So well. Yeah. But what Eric is saying is exactly right. So I just before you commented, I want you to know that the medical industry is sort of encouraging this pharmaceutical approach,
Unknown Speaker
1:08:41 I have compassion, and I can sort of put myself in everybody's shoes. You know, I have a unique perspective, because I worked in a psychiatric clinic where we do brain imaging on patients. And the reason why is the kind of patients that were coming into our clinic have complex comorbid psychiatric disorders. So they've typically failed. Three previous psychiatrists, they have on average, three to four psychiatric diagnoses are on five to six meds, and they're still struggling. So we use quantitative eg, and, you know, functional imaging to see what's going on. How is their brain working? And how can we use the most natural approaches first, and we can see based on the way the wiring is, which medications are going to be better? Do they need an SSRI? Do they need an snri?
Ken Brown
1:09:32 I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but what you just said is fascinating to me. You said based on the imaging, you can choose what corrections Oh, yeah, you count. That's a whole nother podcast. It was gosh, oh, yeah. And I really didn't have room in the book to get into that. But that raises the book.
Unknown Speaker
1:09:52 Yeah. The book is about inspiring people to take better care of their brain health and talking about what we did with a football player. And how we were able to restore some function in their brain. But this is, yeah, I have compassion because I understand doctors who see patients, you know, there's the standard anxiety medications. There's the standard psychiatric depression, anti depressant medications. And you're basically just trying to figure it out, like which box Am I ticking, right? If you want an snri, you want to give that to somebody who has a DD symptoms, and depression, right? Because you want to stimulate and calm the brain simultaneously. Whereas an SSRI you want to give if we're just working on calming the brain, like if somebody who has OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder has too much activity and the anterior cingulate gyrus, which is in sort of the front part of the brain, the frontal lobes, and it's just working too hard. So we want to calm that down. And an SSRI can do that very well. However, if somebody comes in and they're depressed, and they have low perfusion in the frontal lobes, an SSRI could actually decrease perfusion even more decrease, and that could, that's what leads to the suicidal issue. So you have to be really mindful, and that's where the neuro imaging can be so helpful. And again, you know, we think about how do we really help the patient? How can we get their diet, you know, structured in a way to create the neurotransmitters, right? That's, that's going to help, you know, omega three fatty acids. I don't care that we care whether you have ADD anxiety, depression, any kind of mood issue, you need to have an omega three fatty acid, we're starting to see in the medical literature in the traditional medical literature, like JAMA, published a paper that showed two grammes of an omega three fatty acid can help people with clinical anxiety. And that's, you know, coming from, you know, a very prestigious medical journal that's really advanced.
Ken Brown
1:12:01 So I want to comment on that, because right now, the omega three fatty acids or fish oil, for whatever reason, there's, it's this movement, that large, meta analysis regarding cardiac health, it does not show that and so my patients I quit taking it, because I heard that study that they talked about on Good Morning America, one study, yeah, the one study and I'm like, Look, I don't care about that for your heart. I know it helps your brain so get back on.
Unknown Speaker
1:12:28 Well, how about how about just as a blood thinner, I mean, how many people are taking 81 milligrammes of baby aspirin, right as a prophylactic to help keep their blood thin? Well, omega three fatty acids are great, you can do a vegan omega if you do not want to, you know, eat fish, if you're vegetarian or vegan, do a vegan EPA da ha, the thing with fish oils that I found very interesting as we would measure omega three fatty acid levels in patients and we found them to be very low. So most people aren't getting enough in their diet. They're just not eating enough. You know, chia and flax seeds and almonds and walnuts. I mean, I do every day. But it's like I'm a brain health person, I actually know how crazy they are. So I pretty much eat them every day religiously, plus take my omega three fatty acid supplements. But I think cardiologists should like them as blood thinners. And, you know, neurologists should support them, because they help maintain brain structure. They don't feel right now that they're helping cognitively. But we know it helps literally at the level of the single cell, the cell membrane, it helps with the stability of the membrane, it helps with the receptors that sit in the cell membrane. And we know, you know, a lot of them cell membranes in the brain and retina are comprised of da j and it literally grows brain volume. There's published papers on this and if you don't want to take a supplement, because you're not there yet, one serving of baked or broiled fish every week will do the trick. So get your fish and you know, just put it on your like, I call it my pilot's checklist, okay, you're gonna get your fish and you know, each week it's just really smart
Ken Brown
1:14:22 to do what I love. Now we're just sitting thinking I was like, Oh my gosh, my hospitals in Ohio so I'm part of a large nationwide hospital network that I have privileges. I'm not. I don't work a whole lot in the hospital. Eric seen it. They have a physician lounge where they give free food to the doctors. Oh, yeah. Oh my. No, my lats gross. It's so gross. And it's and everything you're talking about. And then when people talk diets, they always want to say oh, this is the fad diet to lose weight. Oh, this is the you want to go keto here. You want to go vegan here. What you're talking about is a brain health diet. That actually does all of that. That's how come your brain health diet was able to help people lose weight
Eric Rieger
1:15:04 it was and that's that's another thing is you don't have to eat for your brain you don't have to eat for your gut, you don't have to eat just because you want good nails if you're eating the right things. Everything is I mean they were everything changes
Unknown Speaker
1:15:18 everything. If you eat clean, healthy foods, everything changes, your gut is happier, your brain is happier, your waistline is slimmer, you're sleeping better. And that's why it doesn't have to be hard. But I've realised working with 1000s of patients right over the past decade, and making them do the food journals. Usually I have them do the journal for about 10 weeks, 12 weeks. So if we're stumbling somewhere, I can take a quick look and see where we're, we've gone awry, and get them back on track. But you saw the stories I put in the book, my God, people stay on them for you. Literally they stand them for years, I could have somebody come on the podcast with me and they can just rave and go, Oh my god, I you know, I got my little food scale. Everybody does it a little differently. But it's funny, you can have many ways to get to the same endpoint, which is great brain health.
Ken Brown
1:16:11 So the book is fantastic. And I don't want to take up too much more of your time. Because your time is, this is so fun. Well, I really enjoy anybody listening, the bio hack your brain. What I love is you open with the easiest thing. Yes. You get to the point where it's like, Look, this is this. And if you don't want to overthink your diet, I'm going to give you a checklist to do. Yeah. And then towards the back. You threw a couple things out and one of them while I have you here. Yeah, it was like a paragraph and URL visual training. Yeah. What is that?
Unknown Speaker
1:16:50 Yeah, that's so cool. It's funny, I learned about that with the professional athletes. And they are starting to do that now where you can go and train. There's a thing called the Dyna vision board there. It's not cheap. But you can, a lot of the pro athletes do it, where they the board will have things that light up. And you have to very quickly, you know, as quickly as you can hit the lights, right? And then they it's, it's actually really fun. I wanted to buy one for myself just to like work on the information processing speed and efficiency in my brain. And the football players use it because the game moves so quickly. And you have to see things in your peripheral vision as well as frontal. So not only can they do the board with the little pegs lighting up and you have to sometimes you do left handed sometimes you do right. Sometimes they'll put little cognitive games in there, like in between. So it's it's extraordinary. And of course, you know, pro athletes and athletes are always fake trying to figure out how do we up level our game, just like a lot of pro athletes know that the hyperbaric oxygen chamber is pretty amazing. And they're what's fascinating about hyperbaric oxygen, I will tell you because we studied it in our players and have published in it. One of our colleagues got the cover of the Journal of neuro trauma, we showed what hyperbaric oxygen therapy does to the brain after one session versus after 40, which is sort of what the standard recommendation is for somebody who has a traumatic brain injury. Even one session of hyperbaric oxygen helps increase blood flow you saw globally throughout the brain, you saw little increases all around. By the time you've got 40 sessions. I mean, you've really regrow new vasculature throughout the brain. And that, you know, I looked at that I thought to myself, wow, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, not hard to do. It's it's not inexpensive, it can cost 150 to $250 per died, you typically have to do 40 dives. No traumatic brain injury is not one of
Ken Brown
1:19:06 its bones. But you know what your your your brain is worth it right? Because it helps to drill it literally
Unknown Speaker
1:19:14 um, it's really like epigenetic. So it can upper down regulate up to 8000 genes, right? Down regulate pro inflammatory genes, you know, up regulate read expense, a hyperbaric
Ken Brown
1:19:28 chamber and a and a neuro visual training centre to the company. If we can have that. Maybe we can have Dr. willamina come down to Dallas and teach you how to use Yeah, I mean, be fine. These things sound I hope none of the invite or listen. You know, I've
Unknown Speaker
1:19:44 just it's funny, I've just seen too many cool things like I'm clearly a brain nerd because I love you know, I love the technologies. I love seeing what we can do to help strengthen our brain support our brain. It's not hard and I will tell you that hyperbaric oxygen therapy, it's not one of the, you know, 14 indicated uses for it. You know, you don't have a diabetic foot wound, you know, no carbon monoxide poisoning. I mean, there's really indicated uses for that. But I will tell you, the evidence is now increasing for its use of both acute and chronic traumatic brain injury. Because there's very little downside with the exception of cost. And it can cause issues with the eye, like people have glaucoma or cataracts. So you have to be careful, because you're, it's 100%, partial pressure, oxygen, usually about 1.4 atmospheres are greater, you have to do for 60 to 90 minutes. So if you have people, you know, with the eye issues, that's just a lot of pressure and can cause problems there. But for the most part, you know, we've had hundreds of players that have done it, you're starting to see these things pop up in locker rooms, you know, the sports teams know about it. So when we talk about higher level or, you know, out of the box, therapies that athletes are using, probably like LeBron James, you know, they they find out about these things, and are using them for their their health. And it's amazing, again, for the brain, anti inflammatory. It's great for people done hyperbarics pre and post surgery. So if you do a session before a surgical procedure, it can help. It can help prevent any infections during surgery. Woman post, you can use it for wound healing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So
Ken Brown
1:21:38 putting it all together, if we can develop some sort of hyperbaric chamber that like drops supplements in you, while you're hitting the visual training thing. You do eco microbial Transplant at the same time. So he,
Unknown Speaker
1:21:52 here's what you have to do you do the IV therapy. So you do the IV glutathione before you go into hyperbaric chamber, or the IV vitamin C before you go in the chamber. So we've got you there. Wow. And then when you're in the chamber, you can watch any movie you want. So it's actually quite relaxing. It's fun, it's fun. It's fun.
Ken Brown
1:22:13 I want to try it also. I'm telling
Unknown Speaker
1:22:15 you, I had no idea. And that was just the epilogue those little things in the epilogue because my publishers like we don't want anybody to you know, we want this to be really accessible to people and it sounds like you've read it and it
Ken Brown
1:22:29 is awesome. So there is so many cool things in this and what you did is a fantastic job of describing it and leaving so many loose ends that if you want to go deeper, clearly you can go deeper, but you gave a guide to the to the general person in a truly as it fits the title biohacking. So I think that term bio hack really resonates with people that just want to get to the point and just do it and you did
Unknown Speaker
1:22:55 the bio hack piece, you know why we call it that is if you can change the brain and show through measuring objectively show with neuroimaging, that there is a change. To me, that's a bio hack.
Ken Brown
1:23:08 I got one little thing that I want to talk about a little bio hack related to the Harvard study that I pulled the article and looked at that regarding eating blueberries on a daily basis. Yes, since your brain age. Yes, that's all related to the proanthocyanidins. Well, Eric, I've done multiple podcasts with other PhDs describing how those proanthocyanidins work. And that's kind of our world with that. So we love we live in that world, we actually have a study out of England where it says that you can eat four bowls of berries or two doses of the type of proanthocyanidins that we haven't tried to so I could go on another hour about that. But that was awesome that you put that in there.
Unknown Speaker
1:23:47 So the entre on trying to first of all, I have patients that need this, like I have somebody who if this works as well as I think it could would come on your podcast and
Ken Brown
1:23:58 rave we're gonna do is I'm gonna send Eric to your clinic. And when somebody is in a hyperbaric chamber, he's like a funnel like a beer bomb and has run Asante on it. Yeah, it's
Eric Rieger
1:24:09 a it's poly phenol flog. Wha.
Unknown Speaker
1:24:12 Well, that's what you were saying. Let me just ask you. What is the first the name of the first thing that you have in it? I have never heard.
Ken Brown
1:24:20 So this is beautiful. So we had a PhD named Sylvia Molina on okay kibra Colorado, and this is her deal and how I actually figured this out. I did clinical research on IVs and stuff. Well, the Colorado happens to be the largest, most stable tannin which is a large polyp. It's a large proanthocyanidin input together. And so by doing that, it really does not become absorbed and in her research, this will blow your mind. Okay, when it gets to the colon. If you ever have proper microbiome, it will break down the temperature on the chestnut into smaller phenolic compounds that more people are familiar with, like curcumin? Yes, of course the 10 egcg egcg green tea extract. So everybody thinks it only comes in green tea. The science of this phenolic compounds is super complex. And oh yeah,
Unknown Speaker
1:25:12 this particular compound, you're telling me breaks down into all of the individual compounds?
Ken Brown
1:25:17 Why it's so cool, so cool, like a giant building block. We have a whole podcast on it, where she where she lived in Spain. She came on a podcast and English was her eighth language. She's she knows a few words. It was a fantastic tacular, one of the most lovely people. And she's super into all the stuff that we're talking about, by the way, all these we've had the who's the PhD for Colorado State? Oh, that. Van Deaton. Charlene Van Buren was also doing this. So I had this fantastic that's kind of like when I stumbled on I was looking for something about Naomi Sokka found your thing that I found your book and I was just like, Oh my gosh, I love is when you're this deep into something you have such a passionate Why? Yeah. It's so yeah, so we found. So I developed this for IBS. And then she's telling me Oh, no, it's way bigger than what you think
Unknown Speaker
1:26:10 you actually, I'm gonna have to listen to her podcast episode. And I just I have, you know, certain segment of patients that I work with that are still struggling with gut health issues that are doing the green juicing. And some of the thing I know they're sneaking in their bad foods, too. So I was curious,
Ken Brown
1:26:29 maybe that's all my protocol, but by adding the green m&ms, and
Unknown Speaker
1:26:33 he might be on the green m&m protocol. So I really you know, I'm all about experiments, I kind of feel like everything I do is a big experiment. And now that I know about this, I am I've got a couple people that have to take this and if it if it changes the gut health the way you've described, I mean, the blood centre
Ken Brown
1:26:53 the size will send you samples to help some of your people and like all things. If it helps one person great if it you know if it doesn't, and we're just trying
Unknown Speaker
1:27:03 to help older doesn't hurt, right? poly phenol, it's like how can you go wrong with that? We need more. We need
Ken Brown
1:27:10 that as a as a as a Yeah.
Eric Rieger
1:27:15 You just made our pay that on YouTube. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
1:27:20 But it's, it's true. No, I speak truth. And I love to see the science behind it. And man, what a pleasure meeting both of you today. What a fun conversation. Thank you so much. First of all, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you for getting the book and reading it so happy you loved it.
Eric Rieger
1:27:36 Honestly, just kind of incredible. Going through the book. And now talking to you what I've, I mean, I feel like we've got like 74 episodes more than we need to book. There's just so many different things that you have. But this book, gut check project family, check this out. biohack your brain. This is Dr. Kristen, will in New York. And she's, I mean, honestly, you're incredible. Thank you so much for joining us today. I do want to things. Yeah, well obviously have a link in our show notes. But where should people connect with you? And where should they buy the book?
Unknown Speaker
1:28:09 Well, thank you so they can connect with me on my website at Dr. Willa meyer.com. Dr. wi, LL EU Am I er. And you can buy the book wherever books are sold Amazon Barnes and Nobles, your local bookstore. I mean, it's everywhere.
Ken Brown
1:28:28 And you are literally the sweetest person I've ever met. Because we're an hour and some end of this and we've been mispronouncing your name the whole time. It's really minor not willing to hear Oh,
Unknown Speaker
1:28:40 you know what it actually has? Its volumi A and French and Dutch. And so suddenly, oh, yeah. Let
Ken Brown
1:28:47 me show that from now on. Like, how did you read Dr. Dr. Wilson years? Dr. William, I'm like it now. We're friends. It's valuable.
Unknown Speaker
1:28:57 It's that you know, it's funny anybody from a foreign country. So it's in the books in German and Russian and Chinese and a couple other languages. So when I speak for with foreign countries, they say sort of the proper pronunciation but in America, people say Wellemeyer. I'm,
Ken Brown
1:29:14 I'm good with whatever your thank you for joining us. We'd love to have you again.
Eric Rieger
1:29:23 Thank you so much. Oh, yes. Really fun. You guys are great. Well, it's awesome. And thanks for taking time out of your day to to hang out with Ken and I anything, it's
Unknown Speaker
1:29:33 my pleasure. And I love to send you an autographed copy of the book. I'll send one for both of you. And then you can
Ken Brown
1:29:40 chat to someone in the French version so I can practice. I read in the book if you learn a new language. It helps neuroplasticity
Eric Rieger
1:29:50 and I learned in this podcast that you live in a fire station.
Unknown Speaker
1:29:55 I live very close to the firehouse which is good being the daughter of a former firefighter that's
Ken Brown
1:30:01 a really good thing, right? So it's probably comforting.
Eric Rieger
1:30:05 Yeah. You just go to sleep. It is so your dad. This is our home.
Unknown Speaker
1:30:13 I hear I hear sirens and I smile. I was like, Oh, that's my dad. Trust me. I take care of a lot of firefighters. That's one of my passion projects. So football players, firefighters, people with degenerative diseases and psychiatric issues.
Eric Rieger
1:30:30 Wow. Well, Dr. Kristin, thank you so much for joining us, everyone. This is episode number 59. Check us out show notes. We've got all the good stuff and we will see y'all on the next trip around.
Ken Brown
1:30:43 Remember, buy the book biohack your brain