This is open mind.

Today we're diving into a topic that's especially trauma. We're not just talking about the big life shattering events, but the smaller daily stressors, what experts call little t trauma that can accumulate and deeply affect our health. Whether it's relationship issues, work stress, or even just the constant pressure of social media, these experiences can take a real toll. Now we're gonna explore how these kinds of trauma can impact your body from your brain to your gut. Now, it's not just about emotional upset.

It's about understanding the biological changes the trauma triggers. We're going to unpack the science behind trauma and discuss how functional medicine approaches can help in healing and managing its effects. We're here to provide you with the resources you need, but not only to help, but to thrive. Whether you're dealing with the aftermath of a major event, or just the wear and tear of your daily life, this episode is for you. So let's get started and dive deep into how we can hack our body's trauma responses.

Hi, I'm Doctor Mark Hyman and welcome to health hacks.

We often think of trauma in terms of dramatic events that leave visible scars. But it's so much more complex than that. Trauma can stem from monumental big t events like natural disasters or personal assaults and abuse, as well as the cumulative effect of smaller everyday stresses known as little t trauma. Today we dive deep into the science of trauma, exploring not just the psychological impacts, but how trauma physically reshapes our body and our brain. From the way our genes express themselves in response to stress, to the changes in our gut microbiome, trauma leaves a lasting imprint on our physiological well being.

Understanding this can help us unlock new pathways for healing. So join me as we uncover the connections between mind and body in the context of trauma. We're going to look at everything from our diet to our microbiome, and how that can influence our mental health, and discuss innovative approaches to treatment that go beyond traditional methods. So let's jump in. Now, when discussing trauma, it's really essential to recognize that not all trauma is the same.

It can be categorized as big t trauma and little T trauma. Now, big T trauma refers to major, often life threatening events. It includes experiences like natural disasters, serious accidents, physical or sexual assault, and other significant life threatening events. This leaves lasting, deep scars that affect every aspect of our life. Now, little T trauma might not seem as dramatic, but it's still impactful and encompasses subtle everyday stressors and events that accumulate over time.

Examples include ongoing stress at work, car troubles, relationship difficulties like divorce or cheating, financial hardships, and feeling constantly overwhelmed. Though these might not seem as severe as big T trauma, they can add up, and they can take a serious toll on our health and well being. Both types of trauma disrupt our body's natural balance, leading to chronic stress and chronic inflammation and chronic disease. So let's dive into how this actually translates into biological effects in our body. What actually is the mechanism through which stress and trauma disrupt our biology?

Well, it has to do with a field called epigenetics, and this is a really important framework for understanding how our life washes over our genes and regulates not what genes we have, but how those genes are expressed and whether or not they're turned on or off. And those gene expression patterns determine who we are in any one moment from our physical health and our mental health. Trauma, especially early in life, can impact the expression of certain genes that regulate really important regulators of our biology, including what we call the HPA axis. That's our hypothalamic pituitary axis, how our brain and pituitary interact with our adrenals and regulate the stress response. These genes also affect immune system function, and a lot of immune system dysregulation is seen in trauma, our neurologic system, like the vagus nerve, and that can be affected by trauma in a big way and become dysregulated.

Now, altered gene expression can lead to the increased susceptibility to a lot of diseases and problems, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, which is really common from trauma, and even health risk behaviors like addiction. It can also lead to other trauma related issues that are related to chronic disease. And we'll get into that in a minute. Now, this can happen even before our birth, because our genes are influenced by how stress influenced our mother and father. And this is kind of mind blowing.

There was a study looking at parental Holocaust exposures and found an association with the downregulation of glucocorticoid signaling and the innate immune function in adult offspring. What that means is that if your parents were victims of the holocaust, then your own stress response is different, and your immune response is different in a worse way if you're an adult. So if you're a child of a Holocaust survivor, you have significant changes in your gene expression related to your parents trauma. And that really is describing something that's really quite scary in some ways, because it's not even what happened to our lives, what happened to our parents or grandparents lives, and that leads to intergenerational transmission of stress and even trauma. In other words, the trauma of the holocaust was written in the epigenome of the parents and was passed down to the offspring, affecting how they handle stress.

Now, just a little background on epigenome. Your genes are fixed. You say you have 20,000 or so genes who you are in this moment. This is called the exposome. Now, these epigenetic changes can occur at a really young age.

We see this phenomenon called adverse childhood events or experiences called aces a c e s. This is a well described tool to understand how traumatized someone was in their childhood and how that trauma could affect them later in life. And there's a simple questionnaire, it's called an ace questionnaire, and you can kind of get a score. And the higher your score, the more likely you are to have changes in your biology as a result of the trauma. Now, these adverse childhood experiences cause epigenetic changes and affect, for example, DNA methylation, which is the way our epigenome is controlled, and that alters gene expression.

So your epigenome is controlled by this chemical process called DNA methylation. We've talked about methylation before, but essentially, it's basically a chemical reaction that involves methyl groups and is regulated by often b vitamins, b six, folate and b twelve that affect which genes are turned on or off. Now, a review paper that was titled epigenetic modification and stress response genes associated with childhood trauma is an incredible review of the literature on this. And basically that, in English, means there's changes to our epigenome that relates to stress response genese, and that's associated with trauma in childhood. Now, what are the examples of epigenetic modification?

Well, these epigenetic changes affect how different genes, for example, produce different proteins and how they're expressed. For example, genes that are really involved in regulating different enzymes or biological proteins, these proteins regulate our biology. So when you have abnormal gene expression or epigenetic changes that are adverse changes related to trauma, for example, it affects the way a lot of proteins are expressed, that regulate our mood, our behavior, and even our biology at a deeper level. So, for example, MaO, or monoamine oxidase, is an enzyme that is made by a gene. Because genes basically make proteins, that's what they do.

One third of all the proteins they make are enzymes. Now, monoamine oxidase breaks down neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline, which are important for regulation of your emotions. So if this gene is not working well, you don't get the proper expression of MaO, and you get altered neurotransmitter function and altered emotional regulation. There's another gene called nr three c. One doesn't really matter the name, but this encodes for receptors for cortisol, for the stress hormone, right, for glucocorticoid receptors, and also plays a role in blood sugar control.

Now, childhood trauma affects methylation status and affects the stress response of this particular gene. So you end up having altered stress response receptors and heightened response to stress. We see this, we see this in holocaust survivors. They tend to be more anxious, depressed, more likely to have PTSD. And the offspring also have this, which is passed down generationally.

And it goes down multiple generations, not just to the child, but often even to the grandchildren in the next generation. Another gene is called HTR. This is a serotonin transporter. It's found in the gut, in the brain and the central nervous system. And for example, these variants are influenced by harsh parenting or child abuse.

So if you have this particular gene, if it's expressed in the wrong way, can lead to a bad response to serotonin and it's a result of abuse. Another important protein is called BDNF, or brain derived neurotrophic factor that is supports the growth and survival of your neurons. I call it miracle growth of the brain. Trauma can reduce BDNF. Now, why is that important?

Well, BDNF increases the connectivity of your brain. We call neuroplasticity, the connections between neurons and the ability to have an improve thinking, cognition and ability. It also affects decision making, emotional regulation and the brain's ability to adapt to new experiences. So when you have low b and nf, it's really bad. And in fact, when you have Alzheimer's or dementia, it's very, very low.

All these are part of the reason why these high scores on the ACE questionnaire, the adverse childhood events, are linked to an increasing risk for developing addiction, mental health issues like depression, anxiety and chronic diseases of all sorts. For example, four more, which is the score on the ACE questionnaire, are associated with an increased risk for binge drinking, risky behavior, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, disability, autoimmune disease, and lots more. Now, according to the CDC or the center for Disease Control and Prevention, one in six adults report four or more types of adverse child events. That's a lot of people who have had shitty childhoods that are either big or little trauma. Now, five of the ten leading causes of death have been associated with ACE high ACE questionnaires.

In fact, a study of over 5000 school age kids reported that most children were exposed to at least one adverse childhood events, or ACE, and approximately 27% had reported six or more throughout their lives. That's a lot. So a quarter of kids have six or more. That's a very high score. Those reporting four or five or greater than six aces, or two and a half times more likely to eat energy dense foods and crave sugar and carbohydrates.

We know anecdotally that people who have trauma tend to have more issues with weight gain, with obesity. In fact, sexual trauma is one of the things I think of when I see obesity, both for men and women, but most often for women. And it's important to ask these questions and help these patients deal with the underlying trauma so they can actually deal with their underlying metabolic health, because their metabolic health is secondary to the dysregulation of their biology by the trauma. And that can be fixed. And we're going to talk about how we deal with trauma, how it can be healed, and some of the innovative therapies that we have now to deal with trauma that we never had before.

Now, our genetics also put us at increased risk depending on our genes. Now there's about 20,000 genes, but there's about five to 7 million variations in those genes. We have about the same amount of genes as an earthworm, but what makes us different is these variations in the genes affect their expression, and that creates our unique biochemical and genetic individuality. Now, these genes are what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms, or snp's. A nucleotide is one of the four building blocks of your DNA.

You have ACTG, and these are just the letters that represent these little nucleotides that are the kind of building blocks of your DNA. Three of these together make a gene. So act or Gac or whatever, these are the building blocks of our genes. And when you have a three letter code, it codes for a particular protein, and that's how your body works. So your basic genes are making proteins based on these coded instructions.

And many of the proteins, about a third of the proteins are enzymes, as I mentioned. Now, one of the most important enzymes, and about 35% have a variation. It's not truly a mutation, but it's a variation in this enzyme that makes it function a little less well. And this is involved. For example, the one of them that's most important in mental health is called MTHFR.

The big medical word for it is methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase. Don't even worry about that. But essentially it's an enzyme that's involved in regulating DNA methylation and folate metabolism. And you can't properly regulate folate and metabolism if you have this gene, and you may need special kinds of folate. Now, when you have this gene, you're not good at taking the folate from your diet and converting it into the active folate called methylfolate.

When you have this problem, because you need proper methylation in order to make your neurotransmitters, it's one of the key functions of them, then you can't make enough dopamine and serotonin, and that has effects on your mood and cognition, and youre a, your likelihood of having mental illness. And when you see these variations in MTHFR, it's been associated with the onset of several psychiatric diseases, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, autism, and adhd. Now, the good thing is you can actually measure this, and you can test your mthfr. And I recommend people know what their methylation status is because it's very important, because you can override it and bypass it with the right nutrients and the right supplements. In fact, at Function Health, which company I co founded, allows you to get access to your own lab data and do testing without having to go through a doctor insurance company.

One of the add on tests we do is MTHFR, because it's that important. What are the other impacts that stress has on our brain directly? Well, stress disrupts the communication between the amygdala, which is our lizard reptile fight or flight brain, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the logical reasoning brain. It's the sort of adult in the room. So we have both the lizard dinosaur brain, and we have the human prefrontal cortex wise, thoughtful brain that makes us not do stupid stuff most of the time.

When you have high levels of cortisol, which is from stress, it inhibits the prefrontal cortex, the adult in the room, and it increases the reliance on the amygdala. So we call this the amygdala hijack. The amygdala, hijacks the frontal lobe and takes control. And that means you have poor impulse control. You engage in more fight or flight behaviors, more aggression, are more based on fear, and this is not a good way to go through life.

So you really want to have your prefrontal cortex working, and you don't want your amygdala overactive. There's been tons of research on this by David and Austin Perlmutter, who talked about this in their book brainwash. We'll put a link in the show notes, but they're both good friends, and they really did a lot of work on looking at how this all is functioning. Now, the overactive amygdala leads to this heightened response of fear, and that leads to more anxiety, poor decision making, and low vagal tone. Vagal tone is really important because that calms your nervous system down.

So low vagal tone and higher epinephrine also is bad because it activates your stress response even more because the brake on the stress response is your vagus nerve. It's the relaxation system. You have an stress system and you have a relaxation system, and that's inhibited by stress, and that leads to higher levels of epinephrine, and that causes dysregulation, particularly in the gut brain axis. And that even causes more physical symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome. Now, high cortisol also has other bad effects.

Chronic stress and elevations in cortisol will damage the hippocampus. So the hippocampus is really important for memory, and it's what shrinks. When you have Alzheimer's and we see stress responses do decrease the size of the hippocampus, it also reduces what we naturally do all the time, which is make new brain cells. This process of neurogenesis, high stress also causes brain inflammation or neuroinflammation. And that can lead to all sorts of dysregulation.

Most psychiatric diseases and neurodegenerative diseases are caused by neuroinflammation. Of course, that begs the question, what causes neuroinflammation? We'll get into that. But essentially, it's our processed, inflammatory diet, it's toxins, it's our alterations in our microbiome, it's stress, it can be infections, it can be allergens. All these things can affect our body in ways that drive neuroinflammation.

But when you have neuroinflammation, it causes emotional dysregulation, causes mood disorders, memory issues. There's a wonderful book about this topic of trauma called the body keeps score by Bessel van der Kolk. And it's one of the best sellers out there. It's been around forever. But he really explores the profound impact of trauma on the human body, the mind.

So the body keeps a score. And it's true. Often this is missed in medicine. And one of the things that I do in my medical practice at the ultra wellness center is we do a deep dive questionnaire on trauma. And if we identify that someone has had trauma, we take that very seriously, and then we use that as part of our approach to helping them.

So let's just back up a little bit. And what actually happens when you experience trauma? What is the biology of trauma, exactly? It drives inflammation in the body, in all the diseases that I mentioned, whether it's neurodegenerative diseases, mental health disorders, physical problems like diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disease, these are all inflammatory diseases, and particularly trauma causing inflammation in the brain. Now, I wrote about this in my book, the Ultra Mind Solution, 15 years ago, and thank God it's starting to make its way into the mainstream.

There's a whole new field of metabolic psychiatry that is connecting our metabolic health to our mood and mental health, and looking at the role, for example, of our mitochondria of nutrition, of our gut microbiome. All the things that are pretty much ignored in psychiatry are now becoming mainstream folks at Harvard, Stanford, other major institutions that are looking at this. A lot of new research looks at certain diets, for example, like ketogenic diets for mood or mental health disorders. For example, doctor Chris Palmer at Harvard has been using ketogenic diets to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disease and many, many other serious mental health disorders with incredible success. Doctor Casey means talks a lot about this in her book, Good Energy.

Doctor Sabani Seti, who's at Stanford, has a whole department of metabolic psychiatry, where she discusses these topics in detail and does research on them. That actually is incredible, because before, all we had was therapy and drugs, in other words, therapy and psychiatric medications, which typically don't work that well. This really shows promise in the treatment of trauma and mental illness in a way that we've really never had before. This is one of the most exciting times in psychiatry, psychiatry. We've kind of had a pretty dark era of mental health, and now that we have these fields of nutritional, metabolic psychiatry, we can start to think differently about how do we approach mental health.

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Visit betterhelp.com healthhacks today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelph.com healthhacks. H E a L T H a C A K S so what is metabolic psychiatry? Well, it's the sub field of psychiatry that focuses on targeting and treating metabolic dysfunction to prove mental health outcomes. And we'll talk about what exactly this means right now.

It's really exciting because it acknowledges that there's a huge connection between metabolic dysfunction in the body and metabolic dysfunction in the brain. In fact, the brain is the most metabolically active organ in the body. And if it's not working, if the metabolism brain is not working, your brain isn't working. And when your brain isn't working, you end up having brain dysfunction, which can lead to the manifestation of a whole host of psychiatric diseases, as well as neurodegenerative diseases, attention disorders, autism spectrum disorders, which have been also bound to be metabolic dysfunctions of the brain. And we'll get into what that means.

It has to do with our mitochondria, which is my favorite topic. I'll talk about that in a sec. But the research is pretty staggering around the metabolic ill health of Americans. 93% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. So what does that mean?

Well, it means that they have one of five things. One, they either have an abnormal cholesterol. Two, they have abnormal blood pressure, elevated blood pressure. Three, they have elevated blood sugar. Four, they've had a heart attack or stroke, or five, they're overweight or have obesity.

Now, that means 6.8% of Americans don't fit that criteria. That's pretty terrifying. In fact, a 2021 study out of Stanford found that insulin resistance, which is exactly what we're talking about when we talked about metabolic dysfunction, can double your risk of depression, even if you have no prior history of mental illness. In fact, obese individuals are up to 55% more likely to develop depression in their lifetime. So the question is, what is causing this metabolic dysfunction?

Why are we having this? Well, it has to do with, first, our mitochondria, and our mitochondria, the little energy factors in our cells that take food and oxygen and burn them and produce energy in the form of ATP that runs everything in our body. Now, these little mitochondria are kind of smart. They have their own DNA. They move around the cells like no other organelles.

They're engulfed by these ancient set of organisms that then took in a bacteria. And they're basically like little bacteria that live inside of you, and they have huge ability to regulate so much of what's going on in our body. In fact, if you don't have energy, you don't have anything, and you die. When these mitochondria become overloaded or dysfunctional because of too many calories, too much processed sugar, carbohydrates, environmental toxins, abnormal gut microbiome issues, stress. I mean, all these things affect the mitochondria.

They're like giants, sort of listening devices for everything that's happening in your environment. And if we're not treating them well, they don't perform optimally. And all the things we do in our society pretty much harm our mitochondria. And that leads to rapid aging. It leads to metabolic dysfunction and a host of other problems.

As a byproduct of some of these insults, what they do is they also increase the production of free radicals, which then creates oxidative stress and inflammation, which further damages our cells. Now, what does all that mean? Well, you're familiar with oxidative stress. It's when a car rusts or an apple turns brown in the air, your avocado is brown, or apple skin turns brown. That's called oxidation.

And that. That oxidation is a normal biological process. We need some of it, actually. It's a positive regulatory force in our bodies. But when we have too many insults or we over alert our mitochondria with too much crap and bad food and toxins, it can't handle the load of oxidative stress.

And then that oxidative stress gets out of control and drives inflammation and causes cellular damage. And what that does is that leads to lower production of energy in the body, because the mitochondria can't produce energy at the rate they need a, the brain has less energy, and then you get more inflammation in the brain. And basically, this is how metabolic disease drives mental illness. Now, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and neuroinflammation are all linked to a number of different mental health conditions, particularly to complex PTSD, and they're absorbed also in the autopsies of brains, of schizophrenic patients. So we see all this when we look at the microscope.

We do the pathology. It's so funny, because in the past, neurologists would look at the brain, but psychiatrists would not look at the brain. And yet what's going on in the brain determines your mental health. And so it's sort of in this black hole. But now scientists are actually able to look at the brain, at its metabolic function, look at autopsy data, look at metabolic studies, look at brain imaging studies, look at neuroinflammation studies, and are actually able to link so much of what we thought is just sort of emotional or psychological to physiological processes that can be modified.

They're not necessarily a result of some character flaw or moral failing, but actually the result of insults that can be modified and changed. And that's really the exciting news here, that we are in a revolution of psychiatry right now, a complete renaissance, or we're shedding old ideas that have kept us, I'd say, imprisoned in a world of psychiatric medication and therapy as our only two options, and giving us a whole new slew of options, improve our metabolic health and improve our physiological functioning as a way to improve our mood and our behavior and our brain health. And this is really exciting. It's really, really exciting because this is really something that's never been done before in the history of humanity, is sort of first understanding the biology of brain dysfunction as it relates to mental health. It's also mitochondrial dysfunction is also the major driver of accelerated biological aging, which we also see in people with PTSD and schizophrenia.

They age faster. So then the question is, what is causing mitochondrial dysfunction or metabolic dysfunction? I would almost use those interchangeably, although metabolic dysfunction can use a little more broadly, things like insulin resistance but it's all connected. I mean, the body's just one interconnected web. So we're just teasing these concepts apart for the purpose of helping you understand them.

But you have to understand that everything is just one thing. You don't have a bunch of separate parts. They're all one integrated system. And we have mitochondrial dysfunction, you have metabolic dysfunction. What I've talked about is a concept in functional medicine is you're either dying of too much or dying of too little, or you're sick from too much or sick from too little, if too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good stuff.

And we are living in a sea of too much bad stuff. What am I talking about? Well, our standard american diet, that's the too much, right? Our sad diet makes us sad. Literally 73% of the us food supply is ultra processed food.

Meaning if you go in the grocery store, that's what it is. 60% of the average American's diet is ultra processed food. Almost 70% of kids diets is ultra processed food. That means 30% of red diet is real food. The rest is junk.

Now, I always say there's no such thing as junk food. There's junk and there's food, and they're not really the same thing. And these are food like substances. Ultra processed food are highly industrialized science projects produced that in ways that are destroying their normal biological functions. There's chemical structures altering in ways that have differential effects on the body.

Because food is information in the molecules in food, we know how to regulate and process and metabolize and use to our benefit. When we're eating foods that are deconstructed, that are hydrolyzed, altered and chemically different than our natural food supply, which is essentially most of what we're eating. It's destroying our ability to be healthy in ways that are required because of the right foods we eat, and we're just eating the wrong stuff. Now, these foods are high in fats, they're high in starches, they're high in sugars, they're high in chemical additives. In fact, the average person who's eating about 60% of their diet as ultra processed food consumes 22 pounds of chemical additives every year.

These are emulsifiers, thickeners, artificial sweeteners, flavorings, all kinds of weird science projects that we shouldn't be eating. My basic rule is, if you read the label, nothing. Not the nutrition facts label, but the ingredient list. And there's things on there that you don't have in your kitchen that you would cook with, like, salt and pepper. Right?

You don't have a, sir. A sort of a jar of maltodextrin or a jar of butylated hydroxytoluene, or you don't have a jar of sulfateme. You know, you know, these are things that you should not be eating. Now, when you have too much sugar, too much starch, too much processed carbs, too much food in general, and too many of these industrialized oils, which are easily oxidized. Oxidized and.

And cause inflammation, it damages the mitochondria. Now, sugar consumption also does a bunch of other things. It triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, in the reward system, an area called the nucleus accumbens. This is like the pleasure center. It's also the same area that's stimulated by cocaine or heroin.

Now, this makes us addicted. It makes us crave more food. It makes us kind of overburden our dopamine receptors. So we need more and more to make them feel the pleasure. Right?

So, you know, that's why alcoholics, you know, may need to drink a huge, huge amount of alcohol to feel the pleasure. Or you. You develop accommodations to narcotics or heroin or. Or pot or food itself or sugar. So you need more and more to feel the same pleasure.

Also, we eat too many of these inflammatory fats, not enough of the anti inflammatory fats, too much of the refined omega six s, and not enough of the anti inflammatory omega three s. Now we need a. We need omega six s. They're an essential fat, linoleic acid, important. Omega six intake has more than doubled in the US over the past 100 years.

And omega three intake has stayed about the same or gone down. This offsets the proper ratio of omega six and omega three s, leading to inflammation. And it used to be maybe two to one or three to one omega six to omega three in our diet historically, as hunter gathers, now it can be up to 20 to one. And I had a patient, Janet, at Cleveland clinic, who I've talked about. She.

She had type two diabetes. She was massively obese. She had heart failure. She had a host of other problems. And when we looked at her omega six to three ratio, it was 20 to one.

Also, we see a lot of other things that affect our metabolism and our mitochondria, which is nutrient deficiency. Now, there are a lot of things that are required to make energy from food when you eat and you breathe. These get processed like gasoline and air intake on your car, in the engine, which is your mitochondria. But each step to turn food into energy in the form of ATP, requires nutrients as helpers and co factors for all the biochemical steps down the assembly line to make energy. And when you don't have enough of these nutrients, and many Americans don't, 90 plus percent of Americans are nothing, getting the minimum amount of nutrients at the RDA level to prevent efficiency disease.

So, so 93% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level. For example, how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Not very much. Probably 60 milligrams. How much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets?

30 units. How much vitamin D do you need to be optimally healthy? Probably like 3000 units. Right? So, so we're talking about a hundredfold differences in nutrients and we're just talking about deficiencies at the minimum level so you don't get deficiency.

90% of Americans don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. And we know that fruits and vegetables have a huge effect on the positive well being. There was a study in, in Australia called the Smile trial, which is a great name. Essentially they swapped out a junk food for a group of people and get them on whole healthy food. And their group got to eat their whatever diet they were eating.

And they found that when they swapped out the whole real food for people who are eating junk food and then compared it to a group that still eat the junk food, the people ate the real food were much happier and their depression scores and their mood improved dramatically. These fruits and vegetables are a really important source of folate and other B vitamins. This is important for methylation and the production of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. So you need the right B vitamins to regulate your brain chemistry. Now research also shows the more fruits and veggies you eat, the better your psychological health.

95% of Americans aren't getting the RDA for fiber. Now fiber is important because it plays a huge role in gut health, which is critical for mental health by the gut brain access. In fact, you know, as hunter gatherers, we probably had about 150 grams of fiber per day per person. And in America today, it's about eight to 15 grams. And we need about at least 50 grams of fiber a day.

I remember being in Africa last year, I went to the Hadza tribe and it was extraordinary because they actually had very high amounts of fiber. They eat about 20% of their diets, honey, but they had about 150 grams of fiber because they were hunting and gathering and they were gathering a lot of roots and tubers and super fibrous stuff, but they ate it. And a lot of it just provides food for the microbiome. And that creates great gut health, and that's important for mental health. So you've got to have enough fiber, 95% are deficient.

I said 93. But depending on where you look at the data, it's 93, 90, 95. It's a lot of people are deficient. At least one nutrient. For example, we need magnesium to make ATP.

This is the energy source that our mitochondria make. It's like the gasoline for your body. And up to 50% of the population is deficient or low in magnesium. 95% of the population is deficient. One of the following, vitamin D, zinc, selenium, copper, iron, even folate.

And these are critical cofactors for antioxidants and enzymes that help to regulate free radicals and also help produce energy in the mitochondria. We also need omega three s, which help with neuroinflammation. And less than 20% of Americans meet the RDA for fish consumption, and probably 90% have low omega three s. And that's important also for cell membrane function and for mitochondrial membranes. And the membranes are basically the interface between your cells and the rest of your body.

And so all the cell communication, all the regulation of everything, control of all the pathways, everything is dependent on proper cell communication. If you have crappy membranes, you're going to have bad communication. Lower fish consumption is also linked to a higher risk of depression. And that's important because you need the omega three s. B vitamins also are critical.

They serve as co factors that support energy production. In fact, you know, vitamin b two and b three, riboflavin, niacin, are critical cofactors in the very production of energy in your cells. Vitamin D also really important for mood and mental health. Now we know that there's seasonal affective disorder, or sad, which is often found in the wintertime when people are not exposed to sun and get sunlight and vitamin D. And by the way, 95% of Americans have inadequate intakes.

And I would say on the testing that I've done in tens of thousands of patients, probably 80 or more, maybe 90% of people that I test either low, deficient or insufficient. Your level should probably be between 45 to 75, although up to 100 is safe. And if your level is less than 45, you're at high risk for many diseases, including infections. Covid one study showed that if your vitamin D level was over 50, that you had no risk of dying from COVID which is pretty amazing and way better than vaccines. What else can affect your mitochondria?

Well, let's get into the next big scary thing. It's toxins. Too much of the bad stuff, right? Heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, they damage the mitochondria. They also accumulate in the brain.

That leads to neurotoxicity. And it's really, really critical because these environmental toxins come up, the works. They bind to enzymes. They are direct poisons to the mitochondria. They cause adverse metabolic effects, and they're a huge factor.

And many people have heard about lead, for example, causing behavioral changes in children and add and aggression and violence. That's what we actually did to take the lead out of the gasoline, the lead out of paint, because we knew it was affecting these kids and causing cognitive losses and iq changes. Mercury, the same thing. You might have heard of the term mad hatter from the Alice in Wonderland. Well, the Hatters in the UK used to use mercury to make the felt stiff in the hatsheen, and they would go crazy because mercury would make them crazy and so on and so forth with arsenic and others.

And these, these really damage the body. The gut is another area where we can get too much bad stuff and has to do with unhealthy gut microbiome. So we're talking about too much bad stuff. We're talking about too much bad food, too many toxins. An altered gut microbiome.

And this, this is related to the brain through what we call the gut brain axis. In fact, scientists have called the gut the second brain. And they're kind of, it's almost like an independent brain, but it's, it's in direct communication constantly with your brain. Your gut brain and your brain brain are constantly talking. And it turns out the microbiome plays a huge role in mental health.

In fact, Uma Naidu, who's been on the podcast a number of times, she's at Harvard, she's described this well and has written a number of books about this. So it's really important to get your gut healthy. Now, the gut brain axis is a bi directional communication system. It constantly sends and receives signals to bidirectionally, including neurotransmitters, cytokines. It does it by the vagus nerve, and it turns out there's probably more neurotransmitters in your gut than in your brain.

Now, the gut microbiome impacts our mood, our immune system, our cognitive health. We know this, for example, in regular medicine, we just don't pay attention to this fact, when you have someone, for example, with liver failure, their liver can't detoxify some of the metabolites from the gut microbiome, and they literally go crazy. They get something called hepatic encephalopathy, which basically means they become delirious and delusional and crazy because not because they're crazy, but because their toxic gut bacteria are causing them to be crazy. And this is not just true of people with liver failure, but of many of us who have altered gut microbiomes. And the gut is really important because it produces neurotransmitters, regulatory things like short chain fatty acids that are important in regulating inflammation throughout the body, and cytokines and much more.

And when you have healthy gut bacteria, the lactobacillus bifidobacterium, bacillus ackermansia, these produce good neurotransmitters like gaba, serotonin, dopamine, and short chain fats like butyrate, which also help to strengthen the gut barrier, preventing leaky gut lowering inflammation. It crosses the blood brain barrier and protects against leaky gut. So this is really, really important. In fact, Ackermansia is interesting because I was talking to a scientist who's produced a probiotic of ackermansia. And in the soup that it grows in, they found very high levels of gaba.

So in other words, this particular bacteria increases gaba. Now, what is gaba? Gaba is a neurotransmitter that is like valium. So the valium or Xanax or those benzos, as we call them, they bind to gaba receptors in the brain. And that's how they cause a relaxation or a calming down of the brain.

And by the way, if you have the right bacteria, it can do the same thing. Now, when you have lower levels of the good bacteria that produce these short chain fatty acids, which are basically the fuel for your colon, but also regulatory compounds, they have a higher risk of depression and anxiety. So lower levels of these, and we can measure them. When I, when we do testing at the ultra wellness area, we test all the, we test toxins, we test nutrient levels, we test methylation, we test a stool to look at short chain fatty acids. And we treat people with all sorts of complex disorders, from mental health disorders to neurogenic disorders to metabolic issues, pretty much anything.

We deal with complex chronic illness at the Ultra Wellness center. You can check it out@ultrawellnesscenter.com. dot we have a great practice of doctors with over 100 years of experience in functional medicine. Together. So the point is, here we can actually diagnose and test these things.

This is not just laboratory medicine, and we can help you treat these problems more directly. If you have too much bad bacteria, like, or too much overgrowth of yeast or parasites, or not enough good bacteria, this causes dysbiosis. And this is what causes a dysregulation in our immune system and our overall physical health and our mental health. And this is not just really about mental health issues, but just so you know, these things cause all sorts of systemic diseases, like autoimmune disease, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia, and much more. What's also interesting is that a lot of people had food sensitivities or even celiac disease, which is often undiagnosed.

It's often diagnosed for ten years. And there's a whole range from mild non celiac gluten sensitivity to full blown celiac. There's also different kinds of reactions to gluten that may not be measurable on the classic test, because it has to do with your innate immune system, the ancient non antibody regulated immune system, that just creates a systemic immune response, as opposed to antibody responses, which we're looking at with celiac. Now, what's interesting is 17% of people with schizophrenia have celiac disease. Maybe that's what's causing it.

We also see about the same 20% of kids with autism have celiac disease. I think 39% of people with type one diabetes have also celiac, often undiagnosed. There's also other problems that happen in the gut that are really common, given our diet and stress is sibo and c fo. This is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and small intestinal fungal overgrowth. And when you have these abnormal bacteria growing in the wrong spot in the upper bowel, this causes the production of what we call endotoxins.

These are toxins made by bacteria. Then they irritate the gut lining. That causes leaky gut. Those toxins leak across the gut lining into your bloodstream, and they drive systemic inflammation, which is the big driver of everything, including all mental health disorders. If you have a mental health disorder, by definition, you have inflammation in the brain, and taking Prozac won't fix that.

It might help to mitigate some of the effects of it, but it won't fix it. And when you have systemic inflammation, it impacts the vagus nerve. That's your relaxation response. It impacts the HPA axis, which is a regulatory pathways from your brain pituitary to your adrenals, and it worsens your stress response. So it's kind of a vicious cycle.

Your stress response will worsen inflammation. Inflammation, worse, a stress response, and you're in this vicious cycle. What we do know is that if you have trauma or stress or chronic stress, that has a big impact on our gut health. It can cause a leaky gut and activates the immune system, even if you're healthy. Like, they've done studies with military recruits, and they put them on a forced overnight march with a big backpack on, and by the morning, they all have leaky guts.

Okay, not that there was something wrong in the first place, but just stress itself is going to drive a leaky gut. And then this creates activation of the immune system, inflammation, and then further disrupts your brain and the HPA axis or the hypothalamic, pituitary, adrenal axis, the. The brain's regulation of your stress response. Now, what is the conventional approach to treating trauma? Now, there's many other things, obviously, can we talk about related to trauma, but those are the big things that we think about.

What is the conventional approach to trauma, and does it actually work? Okay, well, let's talk therapy. It can be cognitive behavioral therapy or what we call CBT or dialectical behavioral therapy, or I, uh, DBT, which can be helpful. They're helpful, but it's not a cure. Right.

My mentor, Sidney Baker, say. Said to me, it takes a lot of aspirin, uh, to make you feel better if you're standing on a tack, right? So if you've got, let's say, bad gut flora or environmental toxins or eating too much sugar or crap, you can take all these treatments, but they're not going to work as well as if you fix the underlying thing, and then maybe they'll help or maybe you won't need them. So, we also have other things besides therapy. We have drugs.

And drug therapy for mental health has just been a dismal failure. And when you look at the data carefully, they just have marginal effects. They can manage symptoms sometimes, but there's just some studies, for example, of the antidepressants, like SSRI's, like Prozac, Zoloft, lexapro, celexapaxel. While they can be helpful, they often are no better than placebo in terms of improving the symptoms over the long term, and they do have side effects. There are also other drugs, like benzodiazepines, beta blockers.

SSRI treatment is just based on this whole theory of serotonin, that you have low serotonin that leads to depression, and yet there was a huge study, a huge review published in one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world called Nature in 2022, that basically said there's not enough evidence to support the fact that the serotonin theory of depression is right. Now, some research suggests that there is a beneficial impact of these SSRI's, but it actually might not be due to what we think, which is the reuptake of serotonin inhibition, but due to their effects on lowering inflammation in the brain. So they might be unintended anti inflammatory compounds. Basically, all we have in traditional therapy is talk therapy of various kinds and drugs, which has lots of side effects and unfortunately don't work that well. So what's the functional medicine approach to treating trauma?

How do we deal with the root causes? How do we treat the body as a system? How do we understand this network effect in the body, and understand how we deal with the causes and remove those that are impeding our brain's function and our overall health? And how do we add those things in that help our body function better? What do we need to add and what do we need to take away in order for your brain to function better?

So I encourage you to check out my conversation with Doctor James Greenblatt. We talked a lot about this in our podcast. Now, one of the fundamental principles of functional medicine is this simple idea that we have to identify the impediments to health that are existing in any individual, and there may be different among different individuals causing the same disease or symptoms, right? Like I always say, the body has only so many ways of saying ouch. So we have a limited set of responses in the body to a very limited set of insults, and we can identify what those are.

So, my mentor, Sidney Baker, basically talked about this simple idea that we have to get rid of the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, we have to identify the things that our body doesn't like, that doesn't agree with it, and we have to identify those things the body needs that it's missing, and add those things in in order to thrive. So, the lizard, quite short, right? So, there are very few things that are, are factors that are driving poor health. It's either too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. So what's the bad stuff we have to identify?

It's toxins. And this can be biological toxins, like mold. Toxins can be metal toxins, like heavy metals, it can be chemical toxins, like plastics, pesticides, petrochemical toxins, which are ubiquitous. It can be allergens. And this can be true allergies or it can be food sensitivities.

It can be infections of all sorts, bacterial, viral, tick infections. And I would lump in. There also imbalances in the microbiome, which is not classically an infection. But this idea of dysbiosis in the microbiome, bacteria being a role, it can be stress, physical or psychological stress, or poor diet. And those five things influence our biology.

They wash over our biology. They cause dysregulation. This is called the exposome. And then there's stuff that we need that we're missing, right? It can be the right food, whole real food, and it may be personalized based on your, and your genetics and your, and your own unique situation.

It's the right level of nutrients, optimized level of nutrients, which again, are different for different people. Some people might need a thousand units of vitamin D, so you might need 10,000. It's the right balance of hormones, it's the right kind of light at the right times of the day. It's clean air, it's clean water, it's sleep, it's deep, restful sleep. It's restorative activities like meditation and relaxation.

It's movement and exercise. It's connection and love and meaning and purpose. These are the ingredients for health. And when you don't have these, you don't thrive, right? So it's basically taking out the stuff that your body doesn't like and adding in the stuff your body likes.

So when you look at this metabolic dysfunction in the brain, what is going on? What is this whole field of metabolic, nutritional, psychiatry, what are the factors going on? Well, there's a lot of stuff happening. There's insulin resistance, there's nutrient deficiencies, and there's a lot of things that are really not helping your mitochondria and your metabolic health of your brain. And we have a huge driver of poor metabolic health because of the diet.

We're eating because of the standard american diet, and that leads to mental health crisis. So you also need to sort of look at why is this happening, right? What is the bad stuff that's causing this mental health crisis and this consequence of trauma? Well, it's ultra processed food, right? That would be the top of my list for many reasons.

And the data is so clear on this. And we see papers coming out almost every day on the role of ultra processed food, not just in obesity and heart disease, but also in mental health crises and anxiety and depression, and worsening ptsd and aggression, violence. I mean, these are really good studies that have shown clearly in randomized controlled trials and observational data that ultra processed food is just bad for us and especially bad for our brains. And this includes the refined carbs in it, the sugar and all the additives and chemical ingredients that alter our brain function. We have other things that we need to get rid of, right?

Environmental toxins, which is harder to do. And you can go to the environmental working group ewg.org that shows you how to reduce your exposure in skincare products and household cleaning products, and also products that are related to your food. For example, the dirty dozen clean 15 list for what fruits and vegetables are least are most contaminated and list goes on. Fish, meat, whatever you need to do that you have control over, you can do to reduce your exposure. And of course there's other kinds of toxins like toxic relationships.

And however difficult that may be, it's important to either reduce or cut those relationship out of your life. Life's short and then you want, of course you want to add in the good stuff, real whole nutrients, food, high quality animal protein with all the amino acids you need to actually help your brain and mood. Lots of anti inflammatory fats like omega three s and olive oil. Lots of fiber. Lots of low glycemic, polyphenol rich vegetables and fruits with all the colorful compounds that are modulating your biology in the beneficial way.

Lots of antioxidants in there help protect your mitochondria and protect against oxidative stress. A lot of the phytochemicals in plant foods are incredibly important for mitochondria. For example from pomegranate. If you can metabolize this, the pomegranate elijah tannins with your gut microbiome. The microbiome will produce something called urolithin a that has incredibly beneficial effects on mitochondria.

Rejuvenating them make new mitochondria, clean up old mitochondria. And so this is just from one plant. Im just giving an example. But theres so much we can do just by simply upgrading our diet. Now these antioxidants protect us and they also feed the gut microbiome in your gut.

So healthy bugs love these phytochemicals and that helps strengthen your gut barrier. You also need a lot of things like zinc, which is high in animal protein and it's a common deficiency in mental health disorders. It's crazy. I heard a patient of mine once tell me about her brother who had schizophrenia and turned out he had a significant zinc deficiency and he had very high amounts of zinc and he'd read about this in the scientific literature and took high dose of zinc and cured his schizophrenia. Now that doesn't mean that all cases of schizophrenia are caused by zinc deficiency.

They're not. And this is one of the fundamental problems in medicine today is you know, because you know the name of your disease, you think you know what's wrong with you. You don't. The name of the disease just describes people who share a common collection of symptoms and has nothing to do with the cause. So you can't say you know what's wrong with you because you know the name of your disease.

That's just the starting point, not the ending point. The other thing that's really important for your brain is omega three fats in your diet because they're critical for brain health. In fact, 60% of your brain is made up of fat, and most of that is omega three s. Now, ketogenic diets are interesting because they have shown a lot of promise in fixing metabolic dysfunction. Now, a lot of metabolic dysfunction is because of the high sugar and starch and processed food in our diets.

And metabolic dysfunction is caused by that. And one of the best ways to fix metabolic dysfunction is a ketogenic diet that's about 70% fat. Your car can be a hybrid car, runs on electric or gas. The same thing with your body. Your body can run on electric or gas.

The gas or the dirty burning fuel is a carbs and the clean burning fuel is the fat. When you use this diet, it's been used in medicine for a long time, in epilepsy, fixing irritable brains, right? But guess what? Anybody who's got a mental health disorder, has an irritable brain, has an inflamed brain. And so in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, it's extraordinarily helpful.

And it helps the brain, quote, body improve and corrects a lot of the mood symptoms. People say, brain, body, mind, body, body, mind, it's the same thing. There is no body mind, there is no mind body. It's one system, it's bi directional. The brain affects the body, the body affects the brain, and it's happening in dynamic time all the time.

Now, the research on this is coming in at a staggering pace. And it makes me really excited to see, because I saw the smoke signals and read the tea leaves about 15 years ago when I wrote my book the ultra mind solution. But now when I go back and look at it, it's still really relevant. It's just that there's just been hundreds of more studies validating what I saw and what I found now, there was a small pilot study at Stanford medicine found that a four month ketogenic diet intervention led to significant improvements in psychiatric symptoms and metabolic health in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Now, these are almost untreatable conditions, right?

You basically can give people a chemical straight jacket that dumbs them down and numbs them out. And we say that's treatment, but that's almost punishment. I'm concerned they lose who they are. What if you can get back who you are simply by changing your diet? On average, participants had a 31% improvement in mental illness severity.

Based on validated clinical metrics and ratings, 79% of participants with symptoms at baseline showed meaningful improvement in their psychiatric condition, especially those who adhere to the diet strictly. So the more strict adherence to the diet, the better off you did. On average, participants not only got better mentally, but they lost 10% of their body weight. They reduced their waist circumference by 11%, had lower blood pressure, lower body mass index, lower triglycerides, lower blood sugar, and improved insulin resistance. That's amazing.

These are hard things to treat, but simply through food as medicine, you can do that. Now, the participants also had other great side effects, right? Like better sleep, better mood, better energy, and overall quality of life. Now, the proposed mechanisms include providing an alternate source of fuel, like ketones for the brain. And when ketones are the fuel for the brain, it works better.

It reduces neuroinflammation, it increases gaba, that relaxation, neurotransmitter like valium, and it helps regulate mood, it enhances mitochondrial function. Because your mitochondria love fat, they don't like sugar so much. I mean, they run on sugar, but it creates a lot of exhaust and byproducts, and it's a lot harder to metabolize. You know, it's like how your car, if you're running on gas, you produce a lot of exhaust and a lot of noise. And when you have an electric car, it's like, quiet and there's no exhaust.

It's kind of like that. So how is this all working? I think we're still trying to figure it out. I mean, it probably has to do with the impact of all this on our brain metabolism, on the mitochondria in our brain. The weight loss and improvements in metabolic biomarkers obviously help because it improves our levels of inflammation.

Now, there's always more research needed, and we need maybe to understand better than mechanism, but it doesn't matter if we're seeing improvements we should be applying. This is safe it's effective. There's no side effects. And yet scientists and doctors will be slow to adopt this because it's one difficult to implement because people don't like to change their diet. And they go, we don't have enough data and we don't know.

But that's nonsense. If something like this is working, we should be applying it at scale. And by the way, there should be like billions of dollars flowing into this research, which it's not, because it's about food, not a drug. And unfortunately, the NIH and the National Institute of Mental Health don't, don't fund research like this, although they need to. We need to focus on gut healing.

So not only improving our, our diet, but also learning how to heal our gut. And I always talk about tending the inner garden, healing the gut. It's really important and it's done through a whole process. In functional medicine, we call the five r plan, or program. But the short form of it is just get rid of the bad stuff.

Right? Food sensitivities, junk food, get rid of bad bugs. Use probiotics to inoculate the gut with good bacteria like bifidobacterium, bifidobacterium infantis longum lactobacillus, different forms like helveticus plantarum. They've been shown to reduce cortisol and symptoms, anxiety and depression. There's actually these whole class of probiotics called psychobiotics, like psychoactive drugs or psychoactive bacteria that produce beneficial compounds.

But you can also get this to your food, like yogurt, kefir, fermented veggies, like sauerkraut, kimchi. Probiotic supplements. Also, you want a lot of prebiotics. This is non digestible fiber that your body can't eat, but your bacteria love it and they feed and they grow on it. It grows the good bugs.

It increases these important compounds we talked about before, these short chain fatty acids. It reduces inflammation and helps prevent a leaky gut. So basically the pre and probiotics. And what are those? Well, there's inulin.

Inulin is from chicory root, garlic, onions, leeks, asparagus, green bananas, Jerusalem artichokes. These are all prebiotic foods that you can include in your diethyde. Psyllium is also helpful. And then you need gut healing nutrients like glutamine, zinc, carnosine, licorice root, slippery elm, bone, broth, glutamine, all these, these help heal the gut. And you want to avoid the foods that are potentially issue, right?

Processed food, dairy, gluten, alcohol and certain drugs like anti inflammatories are all damaging to the gut. So you want to get rid of those. What supplements should you use to actually address nutrient deficiencies? One of the things that's important is to look at your nutritional status. Most people don't know, because what, what we say is that these nutritional deficiencies are not like something that's going to cause rickets or scurvy, but they're low level deficiencies or insufficiencies that end up causing dysfunction in your body in a way that lead to what we call long latency deficiency diseases.

These are diseases that may manifest later. Like, for example, if you have low vitamin D at a severe level, you'll get rickets in the short term. But if you have sort of moderately low levels, you might get osteoporosis when you get older. That's an example of a long latency deficiency disease. And most people walk around have no idea what their deficiencies are.

In fact, at the company I co founded and the chief medical officer of Function Health, we have found that 67% of people tested have a nutrient deficiency. Not at the level of optimal health, but at the level of a deficiency disease. That's 67% of people. That's a lot of people. And this is, I think, a health Ford population, not the average Americans.

And functional health is a personalized health platform that allows you access to a large amount of your own lab data over 110 miles markers for $4.99 a year. It gives you autonomy to know what to do about them. And insights from the world's top knowledge experts on how to support your health, including me. Now, for example, there's other things that might be in excess that are too high. For example, high copper level can be a factor that's connected to altered mental health, including depression, anxiety, stress, psychosis, bipolar disease, irritability, adhd and autism.

So these are things that can be fixed. In fact, taking extra zinc and reducing your copper intake can help correct these. Now, copper is important. It's an essential nutrient. It's necessary for immune function, for endocrine function, for nervous system function, it's involved in converting dopamine to norepinephrine.

And when levels are high, it can be a problem. Like if it's in the right amount, it's good, but it's too much, it's bad. Just like anything, too much vitamin D is bad. If it's too high, too much vitamin A. But you need these, right?

And this can lead to overstimulation and hyperactivity and different neurological pathways and neurotransmitters. Now this is not uncommon in women. Estrogen itself can cause you to retain copper and accumulate copper in your body. It's also due to the large use of oral contraceptives, exposure to xenoestrogens, environmental chemicals to growth hormones, copper, fungicides, zinc deficiency, which is common. So high copper actually reduces zinc absorption and vice versa.

And they compete for absorption. So you get the high zinc in your diet or you can take zinc supplements, it actually can correct copper excess. So zinc deficiency is also linked to lots of things like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, eating disorders. So you know, taking a good multivitamin can be helpful. Sometimes extra zinc, making sure you don't taking too much copper.

Measuring copper and zinc levels are really important for assessing this. Another supplement that's really important is omega three s. And the data is very good on this for positive changes in mood, behavior, aggression, even dementia. So I encourage people to take omega three s. Vitamin D also very important for your brain and your brain function.

Magnesium glycinate or magnesium threonate, which is some the form that crosses the blood brain barrier, helps reduce anxiety, produce calmness. I always say that magnesium is the relaxation mineral. B vitamins really important in neurotransmitter function, particularly b six l methylfolate, methylcobalamin, that's b twelve and folate. Folate, the right forms zinc very important. So these are critical compounds that we need to regulate our mood and behavior.

Also there's mind body approaches and there's other neuro regulatory approaches that you can use that are a little bit different. For example, EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization response. Essentially it's using eye movement to actually help to regulate your stress response. And it was developed by the american psychologist Francine Shapiro. It involves guided eye movements while the patient recalls traumatic memories.

And also walking can help activate EMDR in a similar way and helps us process our emotions. That's how I like to take a walk. Acupuncture can be helpful. Reiki energy medicine, yoga, meditation, breath work, all can help calm your nervous system. There are adjunctive therapies, but there's a whole new field of psychedelic therapy which I want to talk about.

And I've done a number of podcasts with Michael Pollan, Tony bosses and Paul Stamets and others talking about psychedelic therapy and how that affects our ability to heal from trauma and reset our brain. Now psychedelic therapy is one of the most exciting advances in the field of mental health, particularly in the field of trauma therapy. And more and more data is coming out from academic centers around the world that are deeply looking at this in a psychedelic research renaissance that, for me, is really exciting, because up until now, there's been not a lot of useful therapies that have been able to be applied to people with really serious trauma and other mental health disorders. And these seem to work in unique ways that we don't quite understand. You don't need a lot of different therapies.

It's not like a drug you have to take every day. There's just episodic. Every few months or a few sessions can make a profound, long lasting difference. And I think they do this in part by affecting both the structure and the function of the brain. We'll talk about that in a little bit.

So, what are psychedelics? How do they work? What do they do? How does it actually make a difference? Well, there's psilocybin, which comes from psychedelic mushrooms, DMT, which is a compound dimethyltryptamine, which is, by the way, released at birth and a death that can be from ayahuasca, or what they call the toad, which is the sonoran desert toad.

MDMA, which is often referred to as ecstasy in the past, but has now has real medical therapies. Lsd, ketamine, ibogaine, which comes from the iboga tree, which has been affected for addiction and trauma. All these have been shown to induce significant structural changes in the brain and functional changes in the brain's neurons, especially in the prefrontal cortex, which is the adult in the room that often is missing in these mental health disorders. Now, these substances have been used for centuries. They've been used in all sorts of cultures around the world because they have profound psychological and spiritual effects.

And they've been used mostly in indigenous cultures for spiritual reasons, not. Not as a medical therapy. But recent developments in scientific research have actually provided insights into how these substances actually affect the brain function and, in fact, how they can help heal your brain from trauma. Because trauma is not just a psychological phenomena, it's a physiological phenomena that's manifested in brain dysfunction and brain changes. Now, there's structural changes in neurons that these psychedelics affect.

They stimulate neurogenesis, so they help form new brain cells. They increase neuroplasticity and complexity of the brain, which allows new connections between neurons. They help the brain rewire its connections, which may be the explanation for how they can help you deal with long lasting trauma from rape or sexual abuse. Or worse, they increase something called brain derived neurotrophic factor. This is the miracle growth of the brain that helps brains heal and grow and repair.

And there's these functional changes in the brain are impressive. They decrease the activity in something called the default mode network. Now, this default mode network is really important in overall brain functioning. It's sort of believed to be the neurological basis of the ego. And so when your ego is present, it's sort of like the sense of self, the separateness, the meanness, the defense of me against the world.

And often when people have mental health issues, they're very identified with themselves and their ego. And, you know, if you look at sort of meditators, like the, for example, tibetan meditators who've been living in a cave for 40 years, and they bring them out of the cave and they put them in an MRI machine and look at a functional MRI, their default mode network is really dialed down. So their ego is really dialed down, and they, they actually feel connection and one with everything and the sense of bliss and love and connection, which is sort of ironic for someone living in a cave. But basically meditation helps you feel more connected. And this ego basically leads to sense of separateness.

But when you help suppress the default mode network, which these psychedelics do, it actually helps blur the boundaries between yourself and the external world and leads to a feeling of unity and connectedness and love. Now, this can be a profoundly therapeutic experience for people, something they've never experienced before. It helps people gain new perspectives by increasing communication with neurons they normally don't interact with and allows for sort of updating of the rigid thought patterns and behaviors. Think of it like a software update for your brain. Literally software update.

And these psychedelic compounds seem to upgrade and repair these glitches in your psychological software. Now, most psychedelics come from plants, they come from the earth. And theres this interesting. I dont know, its kind of a crazy idea. I call this idea symbiotic phytoadaptation, which I made up years ago, which is that weve co evolved with plants and we benefit from them.

You know, how do these psychedelic compounds know where to go in our brain? Well, somehow they really do. And its just like other phytochemicals that regulate our biology. But these psychedelic assisted therapies that are emerging really going to help people who dont respond well to medications. They can help treat addiction like ibogaine, which is amazing.

Ibogaine is used to treat opioid addiction, alcohol addiction, food addiction. And what's really amazing, the research out this is merging. I had Deborah Mash on the podcast if you want to listen to that. About ibogaine, a research has really shown that a single, single, just one eye begin treatment. Like you might remember, most psychiatric drugs have take forever.

It reduced the opioid withdrawal symptoms and achieved opioid cessation or sustained reduced use independent individuals for long as twelve months. So think about that. There's like, you know, as a doctor, when someone comes in with opioid addiction, or when someone came in with alcohol addiction to the emergency room and they're withdrawing, it's a profoundly physiological response in the body to the withdrawal of this substance. The same thing with sugar, to sugar addiction. I think this might be a treatment for sugar addiction and obesity at some point, you know, when you.

When you take a drug once and it, it shuts off this withdrawal, something is happening. It's like a brain reset. It impacts dopamine, serotonin, glutamate systems. It helps to curb withdrawal symptoms. It promotes neuroplasticity and increases the expression of BDNF and also decreases the affinity for opioid receptors, which is basically a opiate receptor agonist.

So it all really helps. There are weird kind of hallucinogenic effects that last about four to 8 hours. It's clear from the blood in 24 hours. It seems to have long lasting effects. There's a metabolite of ibogaine called nor ibogaine that may last 24 to 30 hours, which has a longer half life.

And maybe it can be used as an adjuvant to psychotherapy. So this is quite interesting. There may be something use over time. Now, it has some side effects that can affect your heart rate, and it can prolong something called the QT interval and lead to slower heart rate. It can cause other issues, but if you use intravenous magnesium beforehand, it actually can limit those effects.

And you can again learn more by listening to my doctor's pharmacy episode with Deborah Mashdeen. Now, there's treatment centers not in the US, unfortunately, but in Mexico. There's a place called beyond, another one called clear sky recovery. Of course, not for everybody. It may be contraindicated people with bipolar, schizophrenia, psychosis, or people with panic disorders.

But the key here is these are not drugs that you take at a party. These are drugs that are taken in the context of a therapeutic environment. We always talk about set and setting. You make sure you have an experienced therapist if you're going to explore these therapies, if you're going to be doing psychedelic assisted therapy, and make sure you do it the right way. Now, there's a lot of stuff standing in the way.

Unfortunately, there's legal and regulatory barriers. Some psychedelics, like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, are classified as schedule one drugs under the Controlled Substance act, which makes it hard to get them. It's hard to get approval for research and funding. But it's coming. It's coming.

Some psychedelics are actually far along in clinical trials, like phase three trials like MDMA for PTSD. Hopefully this will be approved this year, maybe next year. The regulatory process is a bit clunky and complex. It's amazing we can approve vaccines in a couple of minutes, but it takes years to approve a drug that could dramatically impact the mental health of our society. But that's just the way things work.

There's a lot of social and cultural factors that limit it, the beliefs about it. There's a lack of understanding about the benefits of these due to sort of the war on drugs in the sixties where if you took acid, you were going to jump off buildings and all these horrible videos that were produced by the government. It's created a stigma around them, and it basically, unfortunately influences public perception policy. Now, there are some medical and logistical challenges. Psychedelic assisted therapy can be expensive.

There's not insurance coverage for it, making them inaccessible to a lot of people, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who may need them the most. There's a lot of costs associated with conducting rigorous clinical trials. That's a barrier. And nobody's really funding this because it's not like a drug therapy that you're going to make billions of dollars from. There's also a need for certified professionals to administer these psychedelic assisted therapy safely in a therapeutic setting.

But the good news is there's a whole nonprofit called mapS. The multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies has been led by Rick Doblin over many decades. It's a nonprofit that's dedicated to developing the medical, legal, and cultural context for people to benefit from the careful use of psychedelics and other substances. They are the leader of psychedelic research, especially MDMA, for PTSD, for eating disorders, anxiety, depression. Maps phase three trial of MDMA assisted therapy has demonstrated statistically significant improvement in PTSD symptoms after three sessions.

So think about that. People have been suffering from trauma related symptoms for decades, right? From rape, sexual abuse, from war trauma, whatever it is. And just three sessions of MDMA assisted therapy has more effect than any other therapy we've ever studied, right? This should be headline news.

In 2017, the FDA designated MD assisted therapy for PTSD a breakthrough therapy and put on the fast track for approval because the results were so profoundly better than any other thing that we've ever studied. Now, one of those studies showed that 67% of the participants in the MDMA treatment arm no longer met the criteria for PTSD, following three dosing sessions with MDMA, compared to about 32%. And the placebo group who underwent therapy sessions but didn't receive the active drug. That's just an astounding result, right? I mean, 67% of people who took MDMA were essentially cured of something that is incurable, according to traditional medicine.

You can manage it, you can medicate it, but you can't cure it. Despite this, the FDA panel recently rejected its approval for the treatment, voting that the risk outweighed the benefits due to concerns about the lack of crucial psychological and physiological safety data. However, these are extraordinarily safe drugs with very low toxicity compared to, I mean, aspirin, just take a little too much, you get kidney failure or tylenol, a little too much, take, you know, liver failure. These are extremely toxic drugs, and these have a very, very high safety profile with very low toxicity, even at high doses. The Johns Hopkins center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research by Roland Griffiths, who sadly just died of cancer, produce high quality, peer reviewed research that has significantly advanced our understanding of psychedelic therapy.

Their studies provide a lot of empirical evidence that support the safety and the efficacy of psilocybin therapy for a whole host of mental health conditions. Smoking cessation, Alzheimer's, alcohol use disorder, chronic pain, anorexia for military veterans, and lots more. Now, if you want to explore more about these therapies, you can go to clinicaltrials dot Gov, that's a database of privately and publicly funded clinical trials around the world. And you can search for trials involving psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, or maybe the condition you're looking to treat and learn what's happening out there in the world. Oregon has legalized psilocybin therapy, allowing for the regulated use of psilocybin and licensed facilities starting in 2023.

Outside the US, places in Mexico, Costa Rica are great. There's a place called holos, there's a place called beyond in Mexico. There's a number of these centers around the. Around these areas that can be really helpful. So, I know it's been a lot, but I think, you know, we have to face trauma head on as a society.

It's affecting how we interact with each other. It's affecting how our families are and the health of our family relationship. It's affecting our ability productive and functional in the world. And unless we deal with our own trauma and our own wounds, which all we all have, you know, even if it's just little t trauma from, you know, a parent that wasn't around that much, or maybe you didn't feel quite loved, or you had somebody who yelled was a rageaholic, these would be considered minor traumas, but they register in her biology, and they need to be healed. So I encourage everybody listening to take this seriously, to learn how to look at their own trauma and their own wounds as a way of really upgrading their health.

Because as I mentioned earlier, if you have any of these adverse childhood events, whether it's little or little or big t, it's going to affect your health and you can do something about it. And that's what this whole podcast is about. So, as we wrap up today's episode, I hope you've gained some good insights into how both big and small traumas affect our body and our mind. It's clear that the impact of the experience go far beyond our immediate emotional response, and they influence everything from our gene expression, to our gut health, to our risk of cancer and autoimmune disease, diabetes, obesity, you name it. And remember, recognizing the defects is the first step towards healing.

And there's powerful strategies from the perspective of functional medicine that can support your journey to recovery. It's also important to note that you're not alone in this. Seeking help and discussing your experiences can be really powerful, whether it's adjusting your diet, exploring new therapies, learning more about how your body reacts to stress. Each step is a move toward better health, so keep tuning in for more insights into how you can take control of your health in ways that empower, rejuvenate you. Stay.

Stay healthy, stay informed, and I'll catch you next Tuesday for another episode of Health Hacks.