Transcript - Dr. Daniel Amen- Alzheimer’s, Brain Food PDF
Preview Transcript - Dr. Daniel Amen- Alzheimer’s, Brain Food
Transcript of “Dr. Daniel Amen: Alzheimer’s, Brain Food & SPECT Scans - #227” Bulletproof Radio podcast #227 © The Bulletproof Executive 2013 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen Warning and Disclaimer The statements in this report have not been evaluated by the FDA (U.S. Food & Drug Administration). Information provided here and products sold on bulletproofexec.com and/or upgradedself.com and/or betterbabybook.com are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The information provided by these sites and/or by this report is not a substitute for a face-to-face consultation with your physician, and should not be construed as medical advice of any sort. It is a list of resources for further self-research and work with your physician. We certify that at least one statement on the above-mentioned web sites and/or in this report is wrong. By using any of this information, or reading it, you are accepting responsibility for your own health and health decisions and expressly release The Bulletproof Executive and its employees, partners, and vendors from from any and all liability whatsoever, including that arising from negligence. Do not run with scissors. Hot drinks may be hot and burn you. If you do not agree to the above conditions, please do not read further and delete this document. 2 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen Dave: Hi, everyone. It’s Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio. Today’s cool fact of the day is that if you’re someone who has a really great sense of direction even in places where you’ve only been once before, your brain maybe a little bit different. It turns out that different nerve cells in your hippocampus are activated in different locations so your brain is basically drawing maps of where you are through your nerve cells. Those grid cells function as your brain’s GPS. They’re impacted when someone has a stroke or develops Alzheimer's. Today’s guest, it’s a great honor to have him on, is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts in using brain imaging to everyday clinical practice, 9 times New York Times bestselling author, founder and CEO of Amen Clinics and someone who actually is responsible for me being a biohacker today. I’m talking about Dr. Amen. Dr. Amen, welcome to the show. Dr. Amen: Thanks, Dave. It’s so nice to be with you. Dave: Dr. Amen, the reason that I say that you’re responsible for me being a biohacker today is that more than a dozen years ago, I read your very first New York Times best seller and I said this is interesting. I went out and I found someone who trained with your for many years. I ordered a SPECT scan which is the type of brain imaging that you’ve used, thousands and thousands of times to get a better understanding of what’s going on in the brain. What I found was my brain was in bad shape but it meant that there was something that I could work on. Without having the idea that says look, I can change the metabolism also change the function of my brain. I would have just felt like it’s just because I’m weak or because I’m not trying hard enough and it would have kept doing what didn’t work. Having a picture of my brain really did change my brain and ultimately changed my life so first, thank you. Dr. Amen: You are welcome. 3 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen Dave: You’ve also been a speaker at the Bulletproof Conference and you’re featured in Moldy, the documentary that’s coming out on June 4th which is really exciting because you talked about the effects specifically of toxins on the brain and I did had a chance to do a follow up brain scan with you just last week. It was down in your offices. I was really pleased that my brain scan looks very different now than where it did before. When I had my first scan down, I didn’t know it but I was living at a house that had substantial amounts of environmental toxic molds, very likely stachybotrys which is one of the worst ones. Are you okay with mentioning what my brain looked like? I’m okay if you say that it looked beyond a description that it looked like someone who’d been using some sort of drugs or something. Do you remember what you were saying there? Dr. Amen: I do. It looked toxic. I mean, it’s the first thing I saw that your brain had really low activity compared to a healthy brain in a pattern that we often see either in drug addicts or people who are exposed to environmental toxins or people who have an infection. I mean there was clearly something not right with your brain. The scans always teach us to ask better questions which is why does it look like that. If you’re telling us you’re not doing drugs and your wife backs that up because sometimes drug addicts lie, then we’ve really have to go after and find out why does it look like that. Dave: I was blown away because no one has ever said you had the brain of a heavy drug user even though I wasn’t using any drugs at the time. With the thought of using drugs all the time is important because I could barely keep going. When I had that scan done though, I was getting my MBA at Wharton while working full-‐time at a startup that ended up selling for a value of around $600 million. I was successful in my career barely, absolutely not successful in my relationships and successful in school barely. When I saw that picture at the time, it was like, “Great. At least I can work on something. Now, I know that 4 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen I have hope.” To hear a dozen years later, your take on that is like, “You look like you’re a heavy duty drug user.” My whole life I thought it’s just because I’m weak. It’s because I’m not trying hard enough. I was putting all this effort that was to fight against the toxin that I didn’t see that was in the walls of my house basically. How common is that? How often do you see some sort of toxicity? I’m not talking drug users but people who are poisoned to buy something in their environment that affects their brain. Is it common or uncommon in your practice? Dr. Amen: It’s very common especially for people who are not getting better. It’s why I got hooked on imaging because I mean you could come and you could say, “I’m having trouble with my focus and my mood is not good.” Most psychiatrist would do a checklist with you and go, “You have depression, you have ADD, it’s your character and give you psychotherapy or medication,” all of which could hurt you if they don’t really understand the cause. Without looking, we don’t know. By looking it causes us to try and find out why. I mean, you had to ask yourself why does this psychiatrist know anything about mold. They didn’t teach me one thing in medical school or during my psychiatric residency but as soon as I started seeing toxic brains in people who I believe were not using drugs, I’m like well, why is that? Actually, it was a woman in Northern California who came in and just the nicest woman. She had a toxic brain. That’s when we discovered she had mold in her house. When she moved down and we rehabilitated her brain, she just felt so much better. Dave: You’ve been doing this now since 1989. That’s roughly pushing on almost 20 years now of doing brain imaging and running across this. How does the brain imaging that you use, work? Someone who hasn’t read any of your 9 New York Times bestsellers and your latest book about ADD, can you walk us through how SPECTs works and then how you’d apply that to say, “Hey, here’s how you can work better.” 5 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen Dr. Amen: I went to a lecture on brain SPECT imaging in 1991. It just radically changed everything I did. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study. It looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. It’s different than a CT scan or an MRI, those are anatomy studies, they show what the brain actually, physically looks like. SPECT looks at function. If you just think about a car engine. If you pop the hood, an MRI or a CT will show you, well, this is what the engine actually looks like. SPECT is like turning it on and seeing how it actually works. It basically tells us 3 things about the brain, healthy activity. Good activity too little or too much. Then my job becomes understanding why it is the way it is and then balancing it. If it’s too low, in your case, then we got to go, well, why is it too low trauma, toxins and infections. Now, let’s rehabilitate it and if you think about how do you … I like orchids. I have them in my office. If the orchid was damaged either by toxins in the soil or storm, what do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you stop the toxins. You get rid of the toxins and then you give it the highest quality nutrients, air, water, possible so that it can heal. You have to put the brain in a healing environment, but without looking, quite frankly, you don’t know. You don’t know is it a toxin, is it a head injury, does their brain work too hard or not hard enough. We’ve now done 110,000 scans on people from 111 countries. I love it because I like getting my patients better fast, a big criticism of me when I was a child psychiatry fellow. My supervisor loved me but he said, “Dr. Amen’s biggest problem is he wants people to get better fast.” I’m just not that patient because I know if I was suffering I wouldn’t want to be 3 years on a psychiatrist couch. I would like go so let’s find it and fix it. I have this bias fraction but if I don’t look then I’m flying blind. I like to say a picture is worth a thousand words but a map is worth a thousand pictures. That’s what we do with SPECT. We map your brain and a map tells you where you are. When you first came to us, it’s like your brain is not in a good place. It gives you the pathway to teach you where you 6 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen want to go. What I’m so excited about your map is it was really trouble when we started but now it’s much better. I’m just so excited about that. Dave: I was too. I didn’t plan on talking to you specifically about my brain map there and in fact I’ll take a screenshot of it. I think I have to get the digital version from you or some of that but I’ll actually post my before and after on the blog so people can see what a radical transformation, getting rid of toxins from your environment and from your food. Eating enough fat for your brain and all those things where you and I are I think pretty aligned. I’m sure there’s some differences in small nuance things. Directionally, we’re both like could you get the good stuff in? Are you in a position to talk about that news? You gave me a case of something special at your office. Can we talk about those yet, those coconut things? Dr. Amen: Of course. Dave: Let’s use those as examples because you have these amazing chocolate coconut things that are … I actually ate almost the whole case. My kids got only 1. This is just a great example of how you formulate this amazing … I don't know if you call it a treat or a bar. It’s almost all fat. Why do you make something like that that’s almost all fat? What’s it called? It’s a really cool name but I’m thinking like Brain on … Dr. Amen: Joy. Dave: Brain on Joy. Dr. Amen: We have just the chocolate one called Brain and Love. Why is this psychiatrist making chocolate bars? It’s a symbol of abundance that getting well is never about deprivation. You got to shift your mind. It’s abundance of the right things that serve your health that can also taste amazing. The whole low fat craze, that was a mistake. 60% of the solid weight of your brain is fat. Low cholesterol levels have actually been associated with homicide, suicide and depression. That cholesterol is not the problem, that it’s sugar. It’s high inflammatory diets 7 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen and knowing what I know about your work, I mean we’re very aligned and basically like with the orchid, you want to stop poisoning it and only give it nutrients that serve its health. I really think of high healthy fat. Not all fat is good, high healthy fat, low-‐ glycemic, high fiber carbs. Carbs are not the enemy, it’s bad carbs that are the enemy. Colorful foods, not Skittles but foods with many different colors because they have huge antioxidant support and protein at each field because protein helps stabilize blood sugar levels. When your blood sugar goes low, blood flow to the brain goes low and then you have more, make more bad decisions. Dave: Did you just say that having blood sugar in the brain is good for you? Dr. Amen: Having high blood sugar levels is associated with brain atrophy. We want to stabilize your blood sugar. When blood sugar levels go to low, blood flow to the brain goes low and then people make bad decisions. If you have problems with addiction, and you don’t want to relapse you have to eat healthy food often enough so that you don’t get hungry. That is associated with relapse. Dave: There’s this whole trend where we demonize something. Sugar is bad and generally eating sugar is not a good choice but that doesn’t mean that having some blood sugar in your body is a bad thing. You die without it and just like you said, you make worse decisions when you don’t have enough brain fuel. This has been a large part of the more recent toxin that’s been around. Where does willpower come from? If you have no energy in the brain, whether from sugar or from fat, you don’t like what happens. If you had a kale salad with fat free dressing, for lunch, you simply don’t have enough sugar or calories to fuel your brain and it’s no wonder you’re going to be a little bit cranky. Do you actually see them on brain scans or someone is really hungry? Does their brain look different if they’ve been fasting for a few days or they’re just calorically deprived or too low in blood sugar? 8 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen Dr. Amen: There’s actually an interest in people who are around the net and actually in some very popular books talking about how important fasting is. I’m not a fan. I’m a fan of routine, of doing really great things for your brain because when you fast and your blood sugar goes low, people are just more likely to make bad decisions. Sugar on the other hand, are high sugar diets because you know when they took the fat out of the food, they replaced it with sugar. Diabetes has skyrocketed. One of the big things we’ve learned is that even high normal blood sugar levels. Blood sugar is normal between 65 and 100. They found that people are up closer to 100, had brain atrophy. It accelerates brain aging. I like your blood sugar around 85. I think that’s healthy for you. One of the things we should talk about is if you really want to keep your brain and healthy as you age. You should never have normal labs. You should have optimal labs. See, neither you or I or most of the people watching have ever wanted to be normal or in the middle of our classes or the bottom of our classes. I’m always thinking about what’s the optimal range of vitamin D, blood sugar, cholesterol, C-‐reactive protein. I don’t want you normal because quite frankly normal is sick. If you live to 85 or beyond, 50% of people will have Alzheimer's disease. That’s normal and I want no part of that. Dave: We’re going to call that out in quotes on the screen when you say that because normal is not good. The whole point of Bulletproof Radio, we have more than 200 episodes. I like to interview people who are experts and not being normal and people who are all about super human performance. Now, I want to ask you. I came in because I basically hit the wall. My brain won’t work anymore. I can feel something is wrong but have you ever had someone like an Olympic athlete, a top, someone who’s a CEO of a Fortune 500 company or someone come in who’s doing pretty well. I like my life. I’m abundant, I’m high performance, I’m helping lots of people, I’m strong, I’m well. Would you scan a brain of someone who’s already a super high performer? What do you often find? Is there 9 Bulletproof Toolbox Podcast #227, Dr. Daniel Amen something to find or are they just perfect brains and that’s why they’re performing well? Dr. Amen: Well, I have a whole group of incredibly beautiful brains. It generally goes with their life that the exercise but not too much which is really interesting things. My extreme athletes usually do not have healthy brains. They eat well. They’re not smoking, they don’t really think about alcohol as a health food. Maybe they have anywhere from 2 to 4 glasses a week but not 2 to 4 glasses a day. Their habits generally reflect the health of their brain. Aging is more about actions than chronological years when it comes to the brain. Dave: When someone with one of these beautiful brains comes to you. They have beautiful brain and beautiful life, are there tweaks that they can do to get even more brain performance or are they already so absurdly high that really it’s like there’s not much to be done here. Dr. Amen: Well, no. There’s always tweaks. We can always do better. I actually have a program called The Brain Warrior’s Way. The reason for the title is because I’ve just come to deeply believe we’re in a war for the help of our brain. Nearly everywhere we go, someone is trying to shove bad food down our throat, a toxic thought in our head, hook us to a gadget that will distract us from being in full relationships. If you have the mindset of a warrior which means … It doesn’t mean you’re fighting. Most successful warriors never fight. It’s because they plan, they’re aware, they know who is friend and who is foe. It takes that mindset. Most of us can be into that. My favorite example of an incredibly beautiful brain, happens to be my mother’s. In 1991, I started scanning people. I got so excited about the technology. I scanned everybody I knew, a friend who had temper problems. I scanned a cousin who had suicidal thoughts. An aunt who had a panic disorder and then after I’ve done, I don't know, maybe 100 scans or so, they scanned my mother and she just had a drop-‐dead, perfect brain. It was irritating quite frankly. I had scan myself and it wasn’t nearly as good. I looked at her when I showed her perfect brain and I said you ruined my 10
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