Hey, guys. Welcome to the ultimate human podcast. I'm Gary Brecker, the human biologist. I'm your host, where we just go down the road of everything longevity, biohacking, anti-aging, and wellness, everything that takes regular human beings and turns them into ultimate humans. Today, I'm just doing a quick short on depression, because as I read the statistics about depression across the country, Johns Hopkins recently put out a report that about 26 % of all Americans, which is one in four Americans, suffer from a diagnosable medical mental disorder, meaning 26 % of Americans, one in four Americans, has a diagnosable mental disorder. And I certainly don't believe that quarter of the population has gone crazy. In fact, I don't believe that even a fraction of the population has the level of mental disorder that we're being told. When we talk about mental disorders, moods, emotional states, what are we really talking about? Well, we're talking about mood and emotion being affected by chemicals called neurotransmitters. Remember that if you ask me, Gary, what is a mood? What is an emotional state? I would say that it's a collection of neurotransmitters, very often bound to other molecules like oxygen.

And when you have a deficiency in certain neurotransmitters, it becomes very difficult to manufacture certain moods. Every mood that a human being can experience, every emotional state that you can experience is nothing more than a recipe, a collection of neurotransmitters put together, stirred up, entering the brain, and creating an emotional state. Now, it's a little more complicated than that. But to understand the physiology of mood and emotion, we have to understand what ingredients go into the recipe of creating healthy emotional states. If you think about elevated emotional states, things like passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, all the, Hell, yeah, I won the lottery emotions. These emotions at the upper tier, the upper end of the spectrum, these euphoric type of emotions, and generally have a large component of serotonin. At the lower end of the spectrum, things like fear, anger, jealousy, resentment, despair, depression, what I would call lower-end emotional states, number one, do not contain oxygen as a part of their molecular structure. Secondly, they do not contain the same neurotransmitters that elevated emotional states contain. What if you were a bakery chef and someone came up to you and said, Listen, you can bake whatever you want.

You just can't use butter. Well, it doesn't sound like a big deal. It's just one ingredient. But if I took butter out of a baking recipe, just imagine how many different recipes, just how many different recipes that that would affect cookies, pastries, pies, brownies, cakes, all kinds of things would be affected just by taking one ingredient out. Now, imagine inside of a human being that we just deplete one neurotransmitter. I say, Well, you can manufacture any emotional state that you want. You just can't use serotonin. Well, now you've only taken serotonin out of the recipe, but any emotional state that requires that neurotransmitter, you cannot assemble, which means that it's very hard to reach elevated emotional states when you have low production and low bioavailability of the neurotransmitter, serotonin. In fact, in the United States, one of the ways that we define depression, is an inadequate supply of serotonin. According to some definitions, if you are low on serotonin, you are by definition depressed. You would think that if the definition is low serotonin, that the fix would be to raise serotonin. But that's not what we do. We take people that are depressed and we put them on SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Basically, what these do is they ration what little serotonin you have. By definition, they never raise serotonin. By definition, they don't really end depression. This is why people that are meant to be on antidepressants for 90 days or six months are on antidepressants for 12 or 14 or 16 years, because the issue in many cases is a deficiency in neurotransmitters. Now, remember, with regard to serotonin, which is how many of us in the medical community define depression, if you have low serotonin, the question is, where is serotonin made? Where do we get serotonin? You can't just eat a serotonin sandwich. There are not serotonin capsules that you can take to magically raise your serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is actually methylated in the gut. Remember, 90% of the serotonin in your body is here. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here, which is often why depression does not begin in our outside environment through a cluster of symptoms. It actually begins right here in our gut through a process called methylation. There are genetic tests you can do to see if your methylation is working properly, or you can look to supplement for some of the key nutrients that are very often linked to depressive symptoms.

I'm going to put a couple of clinical studies in the link below that show that certain deficiencies in things like methylfolate, SAME, and certain B vitamins, what's called methylated B vitamins, the bioavailable form of B vitamins, can actually be the physiologic link between your body being able to methylate neurotransmitters, create neurotransmitters, and have adequate levels of them to support healthy mood, and actually being depressed on and off throughout your entire lifetime. If you've ever been depressed or you know somebody that suffered from depression, very often there's not a specific trigger that's causing it. There's not a specific life event that you can point to that says, This person or I am depressed because of this specific event. If that's something that you're suffering from or a loved one is suffering from, you're going to want to read the clinical studies below because it may very well be a nutrient deficiency and not something coming from a cluster of symptoms. Back to serotonin for a second. If we understand that serotonin is methylated in the gut, we take a neurotransmitter called tryptophan, the one that's famous for making you sleepy after Thanksgiving dinner, and we take tryptophan and we methylated into the neurotransmitter serotonin.

Imagine if this methylation process is impaired because you have a deficiency in certain B vitamins. You have a deficiency in methy B12, you have a deficiency in methyphylpholate or acetylsalmethionine. These are just fancy names for vitamins, minerals, and amino acids that are naturally found in the human body. But several of these are actually converted by the body into their usable form. And 44% of the population has a gene mutation that does not allow them to properly convert these types of vitamins. So it's not just that you need to supplement, because I find that a lot of people just supplement for the sake of supplementing. We need to supplement with the methylated forms of vitamins, meaning the most bio-available, already broken down form of a vitamin. For example, you've probably heard of follic acid or follate. Well, follic acid and follate are methylated, broken down by the body into something called methylfolate, 5-methylfolate. If you can't make this conversion and you have a deficiency, it may be this deficiency that is impairing your ability to synthesize serotonin and causing depression that you've had on and off throughout your entire lifetime. That doesn't really have a specific trigger that you can point to or traumatic event that you can point to that's causing your depression.

Two things I would encourage you to do. Number one, if you are supplementing with multivitamins or other amino acids, minerals, nutrients of any kind, look to see that these supplements are methylated. See if it says the methylated form of this supplement. That's the first thing. The second thing, if you really want to take a deep dive, you can have a genetic test done, and you can look at what genetic abnormalities you might have that are causing certain nutrients in your body not to be able to convert into the usable form. The nice thing about genetic testing is that you only do these tests once in your entire lifetime. You'll never repeat these tests. It's your genes. We don't really fix genes. We can turn them on and off, and we can actually supplement for their function or for their deficiency. But there are four of five participants in a recent clinical study that did report a significant reduction, up to an 85 % reduction in the incidence of anxiety and depression just by supplementing with methylated nutrients. So I hope you found this video helpful because it's just science.