Increase Your Cognitive Power – A Simple User’s Manual For Your Brain

What are you thinking about?

Me? Oh, I’m just thinking about what to write next (and how meta this sentence is). Meanwhile, you are wondering where this article could possibly be going.

Those thoughts happened spontaneously — painting the crowded canvas of our reality with meaning — only to be replaced by another thought in the next moment. But how does this happen and why is it happening?

During this article, we will co-pilot your brain together to explore your cognition and answer the intriguing question — what, how, and why do we think? With a deeper understanding of your cognition — a term we use to describe the range of mental processes relating to the acquisition, storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information — you will be able to make yourself healthier, happier, and wiser.

What Are We Thinking

What we think is easy enough to describe. If I tell you to think of candy, you use your cognitive abilities to retrieve the information related to the term “candy.” You are overcome by thoughts, feelings, and memories that are related to your past experiences with candy (the taste, the feeling, your favorite kind of candy, etc.). This process was made possible by cognitive abilities you used in the past to acquire and store information, and you probably didn’t notice that this process took place until something triggered the memory of that past experience.

Now, as you think about candy, your memories may seem completely accurate, but you are, in reality, manipulating the information in your mind based on many unconscious and conscious factors. You are probably thinking about what it tastes like and looks like, but you are likely to forget about how much it costs, what is written on the package, and the promise you made to yourself about eating “healthy.” This is a perfect example of your cognitive ability to retrieve information and manipulate that information, and it happens every time you remember something.

In the split second after you read the word “candy,” you experienced every facet of cognition unconsciously, but as I took you through your cognitive processes you were able to experience it consciously. By making our cognitive processes conscious and understanding what affects cognition, we can harness its power to relieve suffering and better our lives in every way. But before we do, we must first develop a more intimate relationship with the most powerful tool we have — our brains.

How Are We Thinking

In your brain, you will find about 100 billion nerve cells called neurons. Each neuron consists of a cell body and branch-like projections (one axon and multiple dendrites) that send and receive messages from other neurons.

Neurons send messages by transmitting electrical impulses across tiny gaps called synapses. These messages and the pathways that are formed between neurons are the physical components of your cognition.

In our first three years of life, our brain has up to twice as many synapses (think neural connections) as it will have in adulthood. These synapses help accelerate our learning by forming neural networks so that we can adapt to our environment as quickly as possible. Our genetics provide the basic blueprint for our synaptic connections, but our environment and how we adapt to it ultimately determine the neural connections in the brain. For example, when I mentioned the word “candy,” your neural connections that are related to the term “candy” fired together and created the experience of a past memory, thought, and feeling. But If you have never heard of candy before, your brain will try to find what it means by using contextual clues. For example, you read earlier that candy has a taste, so that must imply that candy is a certain type of food, right? There is no relevant experience of candy stored in your brain, so it tries to construct one from the context it is given. Once you have a candy bar, however, that experience is stored as neural pathway in the brain. That new neural pathway may be triggered to fire the next time someone mentions candy, which provides you with a little taste of the pleasure or pain you experienced the last time you had a piece.

This example explains the “what” behind the formation of our cognitive abilities. Neurons wire together and form intricate connections and fire together to convey a thought, feeling, and/or memory, but why does this happen?

Why Do We Think So Much?

Although the purpose of cognition is a complex topic that is hotly debated, let’s keep it simple. Cognition is necessary for our survival. The ability to acquire, store, manipulate, and retrieve information allows us to adapt to the environment we live in.

Most animals have these cognitive abilities, but consciously manipulating cognition may be an ability unique to humans. This statement, however, may not be true. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, argue that the freewill we think we have over our cognition is just an illusion. Much of what we think, feel, and do is dictated unconsciously by our genetics, our past experiences, and our environment in such a way that it makes us the victim of our brain rather than the victor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmO5uwzFg0M

On the other hand,  a group of researchers conducted four experiments that may provide evidence against Sam Harris’s contention. These researchers found that we can consciously control the way unconscious stimuli affects our behavior. This means that you can completely change your reaction to unconscious stimuli like what happens in your brain when you read the word  “candy.”

We can easily rewire our neural connections to create the feeling of disgust rather than excitement when we think of candy. We can also use the power of intention, along with nutrition and environmental changes, to enhance our cognition.

How to Enhance Your Cognition

Even if we don’t have freewill, we can still use our internal environment, external environment, and self-awareness to enhance our cognition and better our lives.

1. Change Your External Environment

Your environment has much more power over your brain than you think. Your brain is using your senses to pick up information from your environment every 13 milliseconds. This constant flow of information triggers specific thoughts, feelings, and reactions that you don’t notice until you experience the thought, feeling, or reaction. This suggests that one of the most powerful ways to better your cognition is by changing your environment.

When it comes to hacking your environment here’s a simple principle you can follow — make the things that you should do easier than the things you shouldn’t do.

Here’s an example from my life. To make sure that I don’t eat highly refined food, I never buy it. If my family buys refined foods that are tempting to eat, I will make it more difficult for me to eat them and easier to eat healthy food. To do this, I make the food I want to eat easily accessible and put it in places where I will not see any unhealthy options. This removes candy eating triggers from my environment, which reduces the chance that I will eat candy again.

Other ways to hack your environment are to use essential oils like rosemary, listen to music, and experience nature. The smell of rosemary essential oil has been found to increase alertness and quality of memory, so diffusing it in your workplace may help boost your cognitive performance. Music has potent effects on our brain as well. The effect of music is so potent that it is being used in the treatment of cognitive disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers suggest that the positive effects of music include a calming effect due to the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Binaural auditory beats and apps like brain.fm may also help you improve focus and creativity.

Related: Understanding Essential Oils: A Complete Guide For Beginners

Another potent cognitive enhancer is nature. Studies have shown that simply looking at a picture of nature stimulates the vagus nerve, which improves mood and self-esteem and reduces blood pressure.

But what happens when we can’t change our environment? You’re not at home, you’ve run out of rosemary oil, the only sound you hear is a jackhammer from the construction workers on the street, and the closest tree is miles away. What can you do?

2. Develop Self-awareness

You can use self-awareness to thrive in any environment. Self-awareness is your conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motives, and desires. By developing self-awareness, you can become conscious of the feelings, motives, and desires that are stealing your cognition away from things that are more important.

To develop self-awareness, direct your focus with specific questions. Dr. Relly Nadler suggests asking yourself five simple questions:

  • What am I thinking?
  • What am I feeling?
  • What do I want now?
  • How am I getting in my way?
  • What do I need to do differently now?

These questions will help you shift your focus and find a better way to act now and in the future. You can also use these questions to assess past experiences so that you can plan a new action for the future. Using the questions in this way can help you use your present cognition to enhance your future cognition.

The most popular way of developing self-awareness is through meditation. By simply sitting and focusing on your breath and nothing else for 10-30 minutes every day, you will train your brain to be less reactive, which reduces stress and enhances cognitive function.

Must Read: How To Be Happy

3. Change Your Internal Environment

You cannot out think poor nutrition. No matter how peaceful your brain and environment are, you will always have poor cognitive function if you aren’t healthy.

For example, if you eat candy and other refined foods every day, your body will be in a chronic state of inflammation as it tries to save your cells from oxidative damage due to free radicals and other oxidants found in the refined foods.

Eating more fruits and vegetables can increase cognitive function, especially cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and kale. When we chew cruciferous vegetables, a compound called sulforaphane is created. This compound is designed to protect the plant from small predators. In humans, it sets off a cascade of processes in the body that detoxify and protect the cells from oxidative damage. After the damage is healed, you can use Lion’s Mane mushroom extract to prevent the loss of cognitive function, while inducing nerve growth factor — a neuropeptide that maintains a healthy brain and grows nerve cells.

Related: Sulforaphane – Why Your Cells Need Cruciferous Vegetables

Supplementing with vitamin B1 and coconut oil also help boost cognitive function by ensuring that your neurons have sufficient energy. Coconut oil contains medium chain triglycerides, which provide an alternative fuel source for brain cells and may prevent neural cell death. Vitamin B1 helps your neurons use energy sources, like sugar, more efficiently. To prevent cognitive loss — especially if you have Alzheimer’s disease — it may be best to supplement with vitamin B3 and curcumin from turmeric. All of the other B vitamins also play an essential role in preventing the loss of cognitive function while improving general health as well, and for we recommend taking a B vitamin complex that has all of the Bs as opposed to just one or two B vitamins, which can throw your body out of balance.

But before you start adding these supplements to your shopping cart, it is important to note that the most effective methods of improving cognition are free.

Increasing your physical activity can improve brain volume and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 50% and learning a new skill forms new synaptic connections and prevents the loss of synaptic connections and brain volume as we age.

Related: How to Improve Brain Health and Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer’s

To take advantage of both of these benefits at once, go to a movement class, practice a sport, play a new sport, take up yoga. Your brain will thank you by being sharper and more efficient than it ever was before.

If you experience a rapid change in your behavior and/or notice no effect from making the changes suggested in this article, you may have something else going on. So it is important to consult your doctor and get the proper referral.

Putting It All Together

By changing your environment, developing self-awareness, and nourishing your inner environment with brain-boosting foods, you can enhance your cognition and live a life that consistently makes you happier, healthier, and wiser.

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Eliminate Road Rage, Control Your Temper – Avoid the Amygdala Hijack of Your Brain

What do these three scenarios have in common?

  1. Road rage when someone cuts you off
  2. Running away from a hungry lion
  3. Reacting to criticism about your most deeply held beliefs

Surely road rage can’t have anything to do with being chased by a wild animal that weighs 2-4 times more than you. And how could either of the first two scenarios have anything to do with being criticized? Let’s think about it.

Our Top Priority

Our top priority is survival. In order to ensure survival, we rely on portions of our brain, like the amygdala, to identify threats and respond to them quickly. Our response to a threat is estimated to take only 12 thousandths of a second. The response is so fast that your heart starts racing, your blood pressure rises, and you start reacting emotionally before you even can consciously realize what is happening. You may even do things that leave you asking yourself, “What was I thinking?”

The Amygdala Hijack

In his bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman refers to this response as the “amygdala hijack”. One of the most famous amygdala hijacks was when worldwide soccer role model, Zinedine Zidane, headbutted Italian soccer player, Marco Materazzi, in the 2006 World Cup Finals.

Zidane shows us a perfect example of what happens when our rational mind is hijacked by our amygdala. But how can a man go from calmly jogging away to headbutting another man in the chest just a couple seconds later?

It’s the same thing that makes you want to get revenge on the person who cut you off or run away from imminent danger. It is also the same thing that activates when your deeply held beliefs are criticized and condemned.

The (Not So) Sympathetic Nervous System

You are driving on the highway, listening to your favorite song. You’re dancing, singing, and doing whatever it is that you do when no one is looking. Then someone merges into your lane without warning. In less than a second, you go from a state of bliss to wanting to kill the person who just threatened your life. Your heart beats harder and faster, your blood pressure and breathing rate increase, your adrenal glands secrete the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine, and you are ready for battle!

This is what happens every time your sympathetic nervous system is activated. This reaction is commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” response, and it is activated when your brain registers something as a threat.

This response seems overly exaggerated, especially in the context of modern life, but if you consider the environment that we evolved to survive in, it becomes clear why we are wired this way.

Imagine you are foraging for some fresh fruit and suddenly you hear the crumbling of leaves behind you. In less than a second, your amygdala receives the message from your thalamus (the part of the part the brain that relays sensory signals), defines it as a threat, and activates the sympathetic nervous system. As you turn around to see whether if it is a lion or a mouse, your heart is already racing to prepare your body to sprint for your life. If it’s a lion, your body is ready to run away. If it’s a harmless little mouse, you may feel anxious for a couple minutes, but at least you are still alive. You are much better off reacting as if “that’s an animal that will kill me” than “it’s probably just a little mouse.”

Related: The Gut-Brain Connection – How it Affects Your Life

Perceived or Real, It Is Still a Threat.

For most of us who are reading this right now, our safety is almost always guaranteed. So why do we still get stressed?

Let’s go back to the beginning of the article. Each scenario we discussed has one thing in common – a threat. A threat is anything that we think could be threatening to our well-being.  This can include anything from an unexpected noise to a negative criticism about our work. Even a random thought that we have while we are on the verge of falling asleep can be perceived as a threat. As soon as a threat is perceived, our brain fires up our sympathetic nervous system so that we can take action now.

The Origin of Our Perceived Threats

In the first couple years of life, around 1,000 new neural connections are formed every second. This is a fancy way of saying that when we are babies all we do is learn. We learn how to use this sack of meat, bones, and organs that we call a body. We learn about our environment and the people in it and how to get food and safety from them.

From birth through our teenage years, our limbic system (the emotional center of the brain) is constantly undergoing development. This development is shaped by our genes and our past experiences whether they are vicarious or personal. Our future emotional responses are shaped primarily during this phase of development.

Survival First, Happiness Second

As we are developing, our brain is constantly looking for threats to our survival. When there is a risk involved with a certain stimulus, like a thought, sound, taste, or feeling, our amygdala will be triggered so that we can have a fighting chance to survive. Unfortunately, the rational part of our brain is not fully developed until our mid-20s, so the threats that we react to rarely have a rational basis. This is why a seemingly abstract stimulus like the sound of rain may trigger relaxation for one person while the same sound activates the sympathetic nervous system in another.

Anything can be perceived as a threat and trigger a sympathetic response. Many of us live in this state of fight or flight all day long without realizing it, continuing to react to perceived threats as if they are life threatening. On top of that, most of us start our day with a caffeinated beverage like coffee, which activates our sympathetic nervous system even more. Adding caffeine to a body that is already chronically reacting to threats is the perfect recipe for chronic stress, chronic tension, and chronic pain.

Chronic Stress and Chronic Pain

According to the CDC, as of 2012, about half of all adults have one or more chronic diseases. Most, if not all, of these chronic diseases are partially caused by and worsened by chronic stress. Chronic stress is also one of the major causes of chronic pain.

However, stress is necessary for health. For example, exercise is a way of stressing the body that is essential for our well-being. Being exposed to the cold is another stress on the body that leads to positive health benefits. But if you go to the arctic circle and run without stopping, you will quickly perish.

Related: Understanding Stress, Chronic Stress, and Adrenal Fatigue

This is because stress is only good when it is followed by relaxation and recovery. Stress is bad when it becomes chronic. Stress becomes chronic when the body has no opportunity to rest and recover because it is too busy responding to threats. If the body is constantly responding to threats, it can never heal, adapt, and grow, which leads to chronic disease and chronic pain.

Related: What Causes Chronic Inflammation, and How To Stop It For Good

Your Body’s Natural Healing System

To balance the effects of stress that are caused by the sympathetic nervous system, we have another branch of the nervous system that triggers our body to rest and digest called the parasympathetic nervous system. When our environment is free from potential threats, our parasympathetic nervous system takes over.

One of the most important aspects of the parasympathetic nervous system is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve. It wanders through the center of the body, innervating most of the major organs. When your vagus nerve is active, it reduces your heart rate, improves your digestive function from your mouth to your large intestine, and increases your sense of safety and comfort with yourself and others. Combine this with the benefits of not feeling stressed, and a sense of peace washes over you, peace that you would never feel if you listened to that angry voice that said to headbutt that terrible driver in the chest.

Reacting to your triggers will only lead to an even greater stress response now and in the future. The best way to control your stress response is by consciously activating your parasympathetic nervous system.

How to Activate Your Parasympathetic Nervous System:

Mammalian Dive Reflex & a Bowl of Water

All mammals have the mammalian dive reflex. This automatic reflex activates as soon as our face is immersed in water. Its purpose is to prepare us for extended periods of time underwater by activating the parasympathetic nervous system via the vagus nerve while restricting blood flow to the major organs. To take advantage of the benefits of this natural reflex, all you have to do is submerge your face in water for as long as you comfortably can.

Smell an Essential Oil

Obviously, carrying a bowl of water around isn’t practical. Fortunately, there are other options. Smell is the only sense that isn’t processed by the thalamus (the gatekeeper of the brain). This is why certain smells can bring up vivid memories and change how you feel in an instant. Some smells that are known to increase relaxation are from the essential oils chamomile, rose, patchouli, and lavender, but there are tons of essential oils to choose from. Find what works for you and carry these with you to help handle stress throughout the day. You can also diffuse essential oils before you sleep and while you meditate.

Start Meditating!

Meditation is a powerful antidote to stress and suffering because it shows you that you do not have to react to your every thought and emotion. By taking the time to meditate, you give yourself permission to stop reacting, which keeps you from firing up your sympathetic nervous system. With enough time, meditation can give you the ability to choose what you react to, sparing your sympathetic nervous system for when you need it most.

Human Connection & Oxytocin

Intimate conversation, hugs, massages, kisses, and sex all trigger the release of a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is a hormone that plays a variety of essential roles in the body, most of them related to love and connection. When we are connecting with people we trust, oxytocin is released. This makes us feel safe and close with them (much more so when physical touch is involved). Oxytocin also decreases the stress response and inhibits the amygdala’s response to threats.

Sound

Singing, humming, and laughing all stimulate the parts of the vagus nerve that innervate your larynx and pharynx, which will trigger a parasympathetic response. If you don’t want to sing, hum, or laugh, you can receive the benefit of sound through music instead. Listening to music can completely change your subjective experience. Some of the profound effects that music has on us can be attributed to how it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Obviously, choosing the right music is paramount to this technique.

Breathing

Changing how you breathe is something you can do right now to relieve stress and pain. Slow, controlled diaphragmatic breaths stimulate the vagus nerve and decrease sympathetic activity.

You can learn how to breathe properly and discover the 10 profound effects that breathing has on the body.

Food

What we eat changes how we feel. If we eat food that we are allergic to or food that is overly processed and full of toxic chemicals, our sympathetic nervous system will be triggered to deal with the threat of the food.

On the other hand, when we consume a nutritious meal that is full of vitamins and minerals, healthy fats, protein, fiber, and carbohydrates, we feel satiated and happy due to the increased parasympathetic response.

We can also relieve chronic stress by complementing our diets with the natural supplements and herbs mentioned here.

Nature

Nature is a powerful antidote to stress and a parasympathetic nervous system activator. Although one of the best ways to get a dose of nature is to go hiking, just looking at pictures of nature increases vagus nerve activation.

Self Awareness

What do you do when you are on the verge of headbutting that guy in the chest? You can’t meditate.  You don’t have food on hand. You ran out of your favorite essential oil.  You have no music. Hugging him is not an option, but you can use the power of your prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex provides you with the ability to be conscious of your decisions and their consequences. While your amygdala is mobilizing all weapons for war, you can use your prefrontal cortex to bring awareness to the situation.

To develop self-awareness, direct your focus with specific questions. Dr. Relly Nadler suggests asking yourself five simple questions to keep your body from being hijacked by your amygdala:

  1. What am I thinking?
  2. What am I feeling?
  3. What do I want now?
  4. How am I getting in my way?
  5. What do I need to do differently now?

These questions will help you shift your focus and find a better way to act. If you can’t remember these questions, simply remind yourself of the “future you”. Every one of your actions comes with consequences that the “future you” will be responsible for.

As you change the way you react to perceived threats, the way your brain perceives those threats will change. Eventually, you will only react to circumstances that legitimately threaten your safety and survival.

Other Brain Hijackers to Watch Out For

There are some important things to mention that hijack your brain that are not addressed by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Three of the most prevalent (and stealthy) brain hijackers are heavy metals, B-vitamin deficiency, and chronic pain.

Heavy Metals

Mercury, arsenic, manganese, cadmium, lead, and aluminum are among many metals that are toxic to the body. Each metal disrupts the body in different ways by creating oxidative stress and deactivating our antioxidant defense processes.

Metals like mercury and lead easily cross the blood brain barrier and create chaos by impairing the function of genes and enzymes related to the health and communication of brain cells. This means that heavy metals can impair almost every function of the brain from memory to decision making and impulse control.

Fortunately, we can counteract the negative effects of heavy metals with natural foods and supplements. Allicin from garlic, anthocyanin/flavonoids from cherries, grapes, and berries, catechins from tea, cocoa, peach, and berries, and circumin from turmeric all act as antioxidants and can either chelate or deactivate heavy metals. Vitamins A, B1, B6, C, and E, as well as spirulina and chlorella also have potent antioxidant effects that can deactivate these heavy metals.

Related: Top 5 Foods that Detox Heavy Metals and Toxins – With Protocol

B-vitamin Deficiency

The brain accounts for 20% of the body’s energy expenditure and B-vitamins allow the brain to use this energy efficiently and effectively. When we are low in B-vitamins it dramatically changes how we live our lives. For example, just a mild deficiency in vitamin B1 can cause irritability, emotional disturbance, and memory loss, a deficiency in vitamin B3, B6, or B7 can cause depression, and a lack of vitamin B9 and B12 accelerates cognitive decline.

If you consume meat, fish, eggs, leafy greens, and green vegetables as part of your diet then you are probably getting enough B-vitamins. However, it may be best to have a vitamin B complex on hand if you are feeling depressed, fatigued, or not as sharp as usual.

Related: Mental Health, Physical Health & B Vitamins – Nature’s Valium

Chronic Pain

Pain changes the brain. When we experience pain our decision-making abilities plummet and dealing with the pain becomes top priority. As pain becomes chronic, it creates subtle changes in our medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. This causes a minor change in personality that may be characterized by reduced adaptability and resilience and poor decision making.

To learn more about chronic pain and how to relieve it, read our article on chronic pain.

Save Your Brain from Being Hijacked

Your brain is designed to keep you alive. It will jolt you out of a relaxed state to save your life from a perceived threat, even if it’s just a snake that you saw on a YouTube video. By activating your parasympathetic nervous system, you will be able to control your sympathetic nervous system and prevent amygdala hijack. With practice, you will only use your sympathetic nervous system when it is legitimately warranted.

Heavy metals, a deficiency of B-vitamins, and chronic pain can also stealthily hijack your brain. Foods like garlic, turmeric, berries, and chocolate and vitamins A, B1, B6, C, and E can keep heavy metals from damaging your body and brain. It is also important to ensure adequate B-vitamin intake by eating meat, fish, eggs, leafy greens, and green vegetables and supplementing with a B-vitamin complex if you feel depressed or fatigued. And for those who have chronic pain, even if it has been around for decades, it can be relieved and function can be improved with the guidance of the right health practitioner.

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How Health Affects Body Odor

What do people smell like? If you live in a developed country, your answer is likely to mention a perfume or a soap or some variation of a product designed to keep people from smelling. The modern person is terrified of smelling “bad.” The personal care market in the U.S. is projected to take advantage of this fear to the tune of 11 billion in revenue by 2018. But these products merely cover up the way we smell. None of them address or fix the way we smell.

Why Do We Smell?

We smell because of our bacteria.  The sweat produced by the apocrine glands at our armpits, genital area, and other select body locations is largely odorless until it’s broken down by our bacteria into thioalcohols. These thioalcohols are sulfur based compounds, which helps explain why some people smell strongly of onions or garlic. Scientists have identified the bacteria that breaks down into largest amount of thioalcohols, Staphylococcus hominis, but they aren’t sure about the role of the other bacteria on the skin.

Smells are incredibly useful in ways we aren’t even aware of and don’t fully understand. Smells help you recognize family, find a mate or partner, and identify stress or potential danger. In the face of stress, signals from the nose change the way you react to visual cues. The sensitivity to negative facial expressions, for example, increases when the nose smells stress signals. The nearness to stress signals also increases the body’s startle reflex and instinctively causes us to avoid or withdraw from the stressful smell. If you’re a lady, smells can also influence your monthly cycle. Women who smell signals from other women in the ovulatory stage of their cycle are more likely to experience lengthened menstrual cycles.

Smells and Your Health

Sick people have a different odor. Dogs know it. An organization called “Medical Detection Dogs in the U.K.” is using dogs and their noses to detect early warning signs of both prostate and breast cancer. Dogs can also smell changes in blood sugar levels. While humans may not be able to smell illness on that level, unhealthy smells do register. Researchers in Sweden elicited an immune response in volunteers to see if the smell of the response could be detected later. Those who smelled both the T-shirts worn by the volunteers experiencing the immune response and an unworn T-shirt reported that the worn shirt smelled less healthy and less pleasant.

The body gives off multiple warning smells for a variety of conditions. Since your smell is determined by your bacteria, and bacteria determines your overall health, paying attention to these smells can serve as an early warning system. The type and location of the smells can tip you off as to potential health issues.

A persistent sweet or fruity smell in the mouth can be a sign that the body is releasing large amounts of ketones, a sign of diabetes. On the other side of the smell spectrum, “bad” breath smells can indicate that the body is having difficulties processing out toxins properly, releasing them through the mouth instead.

Smells in the groin area, while potentially embarrassing, can also be excellent indicators of a health issue. Pee that smells like ammonia could indicate a urinary tract infection. Especially strong fishy or musty smells are evidence of a bacterial infection, although the actual infection could run the gamut from various sexually transmitted diseases to yeast or Gardnerella infections. Most people have a subtle smell down there, but noticing a stronger than usual musty, fishy, or sour smell allows you to do something about it, like ramping up the cranberry lemonade and the raw veggies and cutting back on the sugar (see Detox Cheap and Easy).

Now let’s talk some shit. While there are lots of caveats and exceptions, for the most part, how gross a bathroom smells after a #2 is dropped is indicative of how poor one’s health is.

Related: Natural Cure for Yeast Infection

Smell also plays a role in how other people perceive you. We’re subconsciously able to smell and identify immune responses. We’re more attracted to the smell of a healthy person. People are more inclined to identify with or seek out a person who smells healthy.

The Impact of Deodorant

If smells tell us so much, why do we cover them up? Because we’ve been conditioned to be terrified of the way we smell. Early deodorant advertising campaigns capitalized on the fear of rejection, first telling women they couldn’t get a man due to their smelly underarms and later convincing men their smell was unprofessional. Deodorants and other scented personal care items are considered a must in the modern world.

There is the distinct possibility that the products that make us smell acceptable in society actually damage our bodies. The lymphatic vessels that enable the spread of breast cancer are located in the armpit where aluminum and paraben-laden deodorants are applied. Aluminum is a known neurotoxin. Parabens are known to have estrogen-like effects and encourage cells in the breast to grow and split. Deodorant may not be the cause of cancer, but an overloaded and toxic lymphatic system is never going to result in good things.

In addition to exacerbating health issues, deodorants wipe out defenses. They don’t discriminate; they kill both the smelly and the beneficial bacteria. Matters are not helped by the increasingly sterile environment we live in, where antibacterial soaps and handwashes ensure that good bacteria is gone before it has a chance to do anything.

Related: How To Make Your Own Natural Deodorant at Home – Recipe

Making Better Choices

Nothing is going to improve your smell like eating well. Upon hearing that bacteria is the reason you smell, it’s easy to want to get rid of it for causing bad smells, but the flip side is the important part. The bacteria causes the good smells, too, and that can be cultivated. A diet consisting of mostly organic, fresh, raw produce with minimally processed food and refined sugars will feed beneficial bacteria. Better bacteria leads to better body odor. Products with aluminum and parabens kill all of that good bacteria and leach into the body, disrupting the body’s working and potentially leading to serious disease. Reading labels and choosing better products or making your own chemical-free products are solutions that will not only leave you smelling better, you’ll feel better.

The Smelly One

No one wants to be the smelly one. But the definition of smell can be relative, as someone who is used to the natural, healthy smell of the body will find perfumes and scented deodorants overwhelming. These products will also never be able to completely mask the body’s natural signals, leaving the user to forever bandage a wound that won’t close.

It all comes back to the bacteria. Treat your microbes right, and you just might save a lot of money on colognes and antiperspirants. And if somebody ever says about you, “He thinks his shit don’t stink!” you can know with confidence that it probably smells a lot better than theirs. Check out the recommended reading below for more on your microbes.

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You Need Sulforaphane – How and Why to Grow Broccoli Sprouts

Brain Enhancing, Fat Burning, Cancer Preventing, DIY Homemade Supplementation

It is not another drug or folk remedy. You can prevent many forms of cancer, improve gut health, establish healthy body fat composition, enhance brain function, detoxify your cells, and reduce depression with this one miracle compound.

It’s called sulforaphane, and it is naturally produced when cruciferous vegetables are damaged. We initiate the reaction that creates sulforaphane with the process of chewing, which allows us to reap a plethora of benefits that make the scientific research on sulforaphane look like a late night TV ad.

The Scientific Sales Pitch

Although there are many proposed effects of sulforaphane, let’s stick with what has been studied. Sulforaphane has been shown to prevent the growth of many cancers including breast, prostate, colon, skin, lung, stomach, and bladder cancer. The risk of common diseases like diabetes, heart disease, gastric disease, neurodegenerative disease, ocular disease, and respiratory diseases are reduced with the consumption of sulforaphane as well. Even behavioral disorders like autism have been helped with sulforaphane supplementation. And if that isn’t enough, sulforaphane has been shown to decrease fat gain and improve body composition in mice. All this is possible because sulforaphane stimulates protective and detoxifying mechanisms in the cells. This allows the cells to eliminate environmental toxins like mercury and air pollutants from the body and repair themselves from the damage caused by oxidative stress.

The Best Source of Sulforaphane

With positive and protective effects on almost every cell in the body, sulforaphane is like a health insurance policy for your cells. This compound can be found in raw or minimally cooked cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts.

It is important to note that sulforaphane cannot be produced from vegetables that are cooked at a temperature above 158 degrees Fahrenheit. This is because the enzyme that helps create sulforaphane is deactivated when is heated above 158 degrees Fahrenheit.

The enzyme that helps create sulforaphane may also become less active in mature cruciferous vegetables, so it is uncertain how much sulforaphane you will actually get from mature plants. This is where crucifer sprouts save the day. Due to their increased enzyme activity, crucifer sprouts are the best source of sulforaphane. But one sprout, in particular, may provide the most sulforaphane of them all. That sprout is the broccoli sprout.

Where To Get Broccoli Sprouts

After seeing the benefits of broccoli sprouts it is tempting to add that $10 bottle of broccoli sprout capsules to your cart, but don’t let the tempting price fool you. At $10 per bottle, you are spending 20x more than if you bought broccoli sprouts in the store, and supplements can’t even guarantee that they actually have any sulforaphane or enzyme activity.

With store bought broccoli sprouts you can at least guarantee that you are getting sulforaphane in your diet. However, store bought broccoli sprouts will run you about $1 per ounce when you can easily grow them at home for the cost of ~9 cents per ounce.

With one 64 oz mason jar, a seed strainer lid, broccoli seeds, a glass bowl, and water you can grow up to 15 pounds of sprouts per pound of broccoli seeds. That means you can have a half pound of sprouts every week for over 6 months. Fifteen pounds of broccoli sprouts would cost you $240 if you bought them in the store or almost $5,000 in capsule form, and you can get them for less than $50.

How to Grow Your Own Broccoli Sprouts

Growing your own broccoli sprouts is simple and easy. It doesn’t require gardening skills, and after less than a week you can have up to half a pound of delicious broccoli sprouts for the cost of less than a dollar.

Here is what you need:

  • Organic broccoli seeds for sprouting (~$15 per pound)
  • A 64-ounce mason jar (~$10 per jar)
  • Strainer sprouting lids that fit the mouth of your jar (~$9 per lid)
  • A glass bowl
  • A cool, dark place
  • Optional: full spectrum light
  • Optional: salad spinner

Estimated yield: 3 tablespoons of seeds will most likely sprout to a half pound of broccoli sprouts in about 5-7 days.

Step by Step Guide to Sprouting Your Broccoli Seeds

Step 1

Put 3 tablespoons of broccoli seeds in your mason jar, cover the seeds with cool, distilled water or spring water (60-70 degrees Fahrenheit), and swish the water around gently. Put your mason jar, with the sprouting lid on, in a cool dark place for 6-12 hours to allow the seeds to soak.

Step 2

Drain off the water by tipping the mason jar to let the water pass through the strainer. Take the glass bowl and rest your mason jar inside of it so that the remaining water can drain. Put it in a cool dark place for 8-12 hours to let the seeds drain and sprout.

Tip: make sure the jar is tipped enough so that the seeds can drain and have adequate airflow. The most common cause of poor sprouting is inadequate drainage.

Step 3

Rinse the seeds 2x daily and put the jar back in the bowl in a cool dark place so it can drain. It might help to set reminders on your phone.

Here’s what mine looked like 60 hours after the beginning of the first rinse:

Tip: Try not to expose them to too much light until most of them are sprouted with tiny yellowish leaves.

Step 4

After 3 to 4 days you will notice white sprouts with tiny yellowish leaves coming from the seeds. When this happens for most of your seeds, you can begin exposing them to indirect sunlight or a full spectrum light bulb so that they can start to green up. Continue to do the same rinsing process as before.

84 hours after the beginning of the first rinse:

Step 5

After a day or two of light exposure, rinse them once again, and let them drain overnight. The next morning they will be ready to eat!

After the first day of sun exposure:

The finished product, about 6 ounces of broccoli sprouts from 2 and a half tablespoons of broccoli seeds:

 

Bonus Step: How to Increase Sulforaphane content by 3.5x

Studies have actually been conducted to find out how to increase the bioavaliability of sulforaphane from broccoli sprouts. One study found that If you want to get the most out of your broccoli sprouts, you must never expose them to temperatures greater than 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit). However, if you let them sit in 65 to 70 degree Celsius (149 to 158 degrees Fahrenheit) water for 10 minutes, you can increase sulforaphane content by around 3.5 fold. The greatest increase was found at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) with a rapid decrease when the sprouts were exposed to greater temperatures.

To try this broccoli sprout hack at home all you need is a pot, thermometer, a glass bowl, a timer, water, and your broccoli sprouts. Put your broccoli sprouts in a glass bowl while you heat up the water in the pot until it reaches 70 degrees Celsius. Cover your sprouts with the water and set your timer for ten minutes. Check the temperature of the water that the sprouts are in every couple of minutes and add 70 degree Celsius water to the broccoli sprouts periodically to maintain the temperature between 65 and 70 degrees Celsius. After 10 minutes, drain the sprouts, pat they dry, eat them, add them to a smoothie, or store them in the refrigerator.

If that description was to confusing, check out how Dr. Rhonda Patrick hacks her broccoli sprout sulforaphane content:

How to Store Your Sprouts for up to Six Weeks

To keep the sprouts fresh and nutritious for six weeks follow these steps:

  1. Eight to twelve hours after the final rinse and drain, pat your sprouts dry and/or use a salad spinner until the sprouts are reasonably dry. Nothing kills produce quicker than refrigerating it wet.
  2. Put the sprouts in a plastic bag or container that will ensure minimal exposure to air. If they are exposed to too much air they may dry out completely.
  3. Refrigerate them for up to six weeks and eat them whenever and however you like.

Enjoy!

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How to Improve Brain Health and Reduce the Risk of Alzheimer’s

Aging is an inevitable process that we go through, and it has the most profound effects on the brain. After the age of 40, the brain decreases in volume by at least 5% every decade, and this rate increases with age. This loss in volume translates to a loss of long-term memory, slower reaction times, decreased working memory, slower processing speeds, and detriments in sensory and/or perceptual function. These effects can be reduced and even reversed by addressing these four processes:

1. Neuronal Cell Death

In our adolescence, we have 1.5x more neurons in our brain than we do as an adult. As we learn and grow, our brains form new synaptic connections that allow our neurons to communicate. This allows us to do the things that we want to do efficiently.

As we reach our early 20’s, our brain starts to refine its connections. Underused neurons undergo apoptosis or programmed cell death. This is a natural process that allows us to remain good at what our environment requires us to do while unneeded neurons and synaptic connections are removed.

Neuronal cells can also be damaged and eventually die due to traumatic injury, environmental toxins, cardiovascular disorders, infectious agents, and genetic diseases.

2. Reduction in Synapses and Synaptic Plasticity

As we age, the amount of dopamine and serotonin in our brain decreases. This leads to a decrease in synapses (the connections that allow for communication between neurons.)

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) activity also decreases with age. BDNF increases our ability to form new synaptic connections (synaptic plasticity) and triggers the development of new brain tissue (neurogenesis).

3. White Matter Damage

The white matter of our brain is made of myelinated axons. These are like electrical cables that carry the signal from one neuron to another. As we age, the myelination (fatty insulation) of these axons deteriorates. This process is what reduces our reaction time as we age.

4. Impaired Vascular Function

The health of our circulatory system is as important for brain health as it is for heart health. The primary cause of impaired vascular function is oxidative damage that leads to inflammation and plaque build up. This process is caused by consistent exposure to environmental toxins, refined foods, trans fats, and/or head trauma. Damaged blood vessels lead to an easily permeated blood-brain barrier that allows toxins and infectious agents in. The brain’s ability to receive nutrients and remove waste (like beta amyloid plaque) will also be impaired.

Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease

These four changes are largely to blame for the effects that aging has on our cognitive function. This process is accelerated to a catastrophic degree in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s Disease: Brain Aging Accelerated

What makes Alzheimer’s disease so catastrophic is that it accelerates the synaptic damage and neuronal loss common with aging, while impairing the regenerative properties of the brain. This leads to a rapid decrease in brain volume and function.

Many genetic and environmental factors lead to the accelerated damage of neurons and their synapses. In a brain with Alzheimer’s disease, this leads to the accumulation of beta amyloid plaque and damage of the neurofibrillary tracks that help move nutrients and other key materials throughout the cell. As plaque builds up and the tracks become tangled it leads to a snowball effect of neuronal damage and cell death throughout the brain. This unforgiving process is what makes Alzheimer’s disease the sixth leading cause of death among older adults.

Although genetics, specifically the APOE genes, play a major role in our brain health and the progression of Alzheimer’s, there are many things we can avoid, changes we can make, and treatments we can use to improve brain health and reduce neurodegeneration due to age and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks, but first, we must understand what accelerates the aging of the brain and Alzheimer’s Disease.

How to Shrink Your Brain

Do the Same Thing Every Day

Every time we reach past our comfort zone by learning or experiencing something new, we increase the rate of neurogenesis and make new synaptic connections. On the other hand, if we do the same things every day without reaching beyond our competency, our brain will focus on pruning down its synaptic connections and more neurons will undergo apoptosis. As the process continues, your brain will become smaller and smaller.

Eat A lot Oxidized Polyunsaturated Fats and Trans Fats

When these fats enter our body they create chaos in the circulatory system which leads to an immune response to deal with the trouble that the oxidized fat and trans fat is causing. Our body handles these fats by depositing it as plaque which leads to atherosclerosis. This process also occurs in our brain, which contributes to the accumulation of beta amyloid plaque and tangling of the neurofibrillary tracks.

Eat Plenty of Refined Sugars

High blood sugar levels are associated with the increased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. When blood sugar is high, the sugars tend to interact with the residues of proteins. Together they form glycation end-products (AGEs). These AGEs create oxidative damage and inhibit enzymes like macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF) that are important for protecting the brain aging.

Make Sure You Are Chronically Stressed

Although acute stress can enhance your learning ability, chronic stress impairs working memory and prefrontal cortex function. When the function of the prefrontal cortex is impaired, we cannot reason effectively, and our emotions can take hold and control us more easily.

Live in a Polluted Environment

The process of brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease is accelerated by the accumulation of metals in the brain. The primary way that this can happen is through the nose. Nanoparticles of metals from car exhaust, industrial pollution, and smoking can cross the olfactory areas of the brain and accumulate in areas, like the hippocampus that are most affected by Alzheimer’s Disease.

Drink Alcohol Every Day

Drinking alcohol accelerates the shrinkage of the brain, which leads to cognitive decline that mirrors the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease.

The best way to reduce brain aging is by eliminating the things from your life that age your brain. There are many other factors that contribute to brain aging that we have not discussed, but we know for sure that if you continue doing any of these six things, your brain will start shrinking rapidly.

How to Grow Your Brain & Keep It from Aging

Increase Your Physical Activity

Increasing your physical activity can improve brain volume and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 50%. Even people who had mild symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease increased their brain volume by increasing their physical activity. This means that you can grow your brain by simply taking a walk every day.

These profound effects are due to the fact the exercise helps reduce inflammation, anxiety, and insulin resistance, while stimulating growth factors (like BDNF mentioned above) that improve the health of your brain cells and blood vessels.

Do Something New Every Day

When we were children, we were filled with curiosity. Every moment was an experiment that led to a new discovery like walking or crawling. During this phase of development, our brains were primed and ready to form new synaptic connections, so that we could thrive in our environment. By the time we are in our 20s, our brains are almost fully developed, and we begin to form patterns and habits, leaving our curiosity behind.

As we age, we must stimulate our curiosity again by learning new things, going on adventures, and reaching outside of our comfort zone every day. This will trigger a process in the brain called scaffolding, which stimulates the brain to form new connections with different neurons in new ways. This allows the brain to function more efficiently and age gracefully.

Drink Coffee or Tea

Habitual caffeine intake may protect against cognitive impairment. In studies done on mice, caffeine has been found to suppress the buildup of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain. On the other hand, OLM’s stance on coffee is not positive; try circumin:

Try Circumin

Like caffeine, circumin can prevent plaque build up, and it removes plaque as well. This potent anti-inflammatory molecule makes up 5-10% of turmeric. It is known to lower cholesterol, reduce oxidative damage, and remove metals that accumulate in the brain like iron and copper. Check out How To Optimize Curcumin Absorption for more on circumin.

Supplement with Vitamin B3 and B1

UCI scientist Kim Green conducted a study on the effect that nicotinamide (vitamin B3) has on mice with Alzheimer’s disease. This B Vitamin completely prevented the loss of cognition in the mice. Clinical trials are now being carried out using vitamin B3 as a treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease.

Thiamine or vitamin B1 is also a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Our brain uses up 20% of our energy, and in doing so, it uses enzymes that depend on thiamine for their function. When we don’t have enough thiamine, it can lead to memory deficits and excessive plaque buildup. With enough thiamine, the cells in the brain can metabolize sugar effectively and function properly.

Cook with and Consume Coconut Oil

Coconut oil, especially the medium chain triglycerides found in coconut oil, provide an alternative fuel source for brain cells, which may prevent neuronal cell death. It has been found to help improve cognitive function in women with Alzheimer’s, people without type 2 diabetes who had Alzheimer’s, and people with severe cases of Alzheimer’s. Coconut oil is also a great oil to cook with because it is not easily oxidized like polyunsaturated oils. Check out what else coconut oil can do for you.

Eat More Cruciferous Vegetables

Cruciferous vegetables contain sulforaphane, a compound that activates a transcription factor called Nrf2.What this means is that sulforaphane helps to set off a cascade of processes that detoxify and protect the body and brain from oxidative damage. sulforaphane works synergistically with circumin to reverse the aging of our cells due to oxidative damage.

The best source of sulforaphane is broccoli sprouts, and they can easily be sprouted at home in 7-9 days. If you don’t have access to broccoli sprouts, any cruciferous vegetables will do. Check out this salad recipe.

Increase Your Acetylcholine

Acetylcholine is the most used neurotransmitter in the brain and body. It is essential for muscle contraction, alertness, concentration, focus, and memory. Feeding your body with the components of acetylcholine and/or blocking the enzyme that breaks it down can be very effective for reducing the effects of brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

One of the primary components of acetylcholine is choline, and it is an essential nutrient that you must include in your diet. The best sources of choline are egg yolks, heavy cream, fatty fish, fatty meats, and liver. Make sure you source your meat, dairy, fish and eggs for people that treat their animals humanely and feed them what they are meant to eat. This will ensure that your animal products have a high amount of good quality fats and choline.

To ensure your brain gets the choline it needs, you can take a supplement like Alpha-GPC. This is a form of choline that can easily cross the blood-brain barrier. DMAE is another supplement that increases the level of acetylcholine in the brain while reducing beta amyloid plaque.

Other supplements like galantamine and huperzine-A increase acetylcholine in the brain by preventing the enzyme cholinesterase from breaking down acetylcholine.

What if Nothing is Helping?

Take the holistic approach, and improve your brain health by improving the health of your whole body. The gut and the brain are inexorably linked. Just like you can dimish cognitive function with poor health choices, you can improve brain function with a better diet. Research in brain regenration is making groundbreaking strides lately. Recently, many studies on mice have surfaced that use commonly used technologies, like ultrasound, to reverse Alzheimer’s disease. In one study researchers used a “…focused therapeutic ultrasound, which non-invasively beams sound waves into the brain tissue.” These sound waves activated the brain’s microglial cells so that they could do their job of removing the beta amyloid plaque. The results were tremendous with 75% of the mice with Alzheimer’s disease regaining their cognitive function. This means that this treatment may help reverse Alzheimer’s disease by using the brain’s own natural waste removal processes. This may be the miracle we have been searching for to treat Alzheimer’s.

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The Gut-Brain Connection – How it Affects Your Life

Your brain is the commander-in-chief of your body. It constantly receives information from your internal and external environment and decides the best course of action to take for your survival. The brain carries out this action by sending messages through the nerves of the nervous system to the appropriate parts of the body.

For example, when the sympathetic nervous system is activated, it will help simultaneously change the behavior of the heart, lungs, eyes, brain, digestive system, adrenal glands, bladder, and skeletal muscles. All of this is done to achieve one goal – survival. On the other hand, the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system stimulates digestion, recovery, and rest throughout the organs of the body when we are not faced with a threat.

These two branches of the autonomic nervous system help us explain how our brain controls our body, but can our body control our brain?

You are the Sum of Your Neurobiology

In his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains:

…who you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology.”

Neurobiology is dictated by more than just the brain. Just like any government, even a dictatorship, the leader is influenced by other members of the governing body. Even though the brain can affect every organ in the body through the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system, the brain cannot veto the power of the gut.

Other common diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may actually start in the gut.

Our Second Brain

The gut is sometimes known as our second brain. In fact, it has its own branch of the nervous system called the enteric nervous system that can function on its own, even if it is disconnected from the brain.

The enteric nervous system also resembles a brain because it:

  • has glial cells to support the neurons in the gut
  • contains 500 million neurons
  • uses 40 (and possibly many more) neurotransmitters
  • produces 50% of the body’s dopamine (important for motility)
  • produces 95% of the body’s serotonin (important for the enteric nervous system’s growth & cell protection)
  • has a barrier that resembles the blood brain barrier
  • may even have its own memory

How the Gut Influences the Brain

The brain and gut are intimately connected by the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve connects with most of the organs and plays a prominent role in activating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Around 90% of the signals passing along the vagus nerve come not from the brain, but from the enteric nervous system to the brain. This is because one of the brains most effective ways of learning about its environment is through the gut, and this relationship starts before we are even exposed to the outside environment.

The Development of the Brain & Gut Connection

When we were in the womb, we were constantly picking up signals about the outside environment.

Is there enough food?

Is it safe out there?

What adaptions will I need now to ensure survival?

All of these questions were answered by the chemical signals that we received from our mothers through the umbilical cord, and the development of our brain and gut depended heavily on these signals. For example, if there was a lack of nutrition in our mother’s diet, we may be predisposed to obesity due to altered metabolic function.

What we are feed in our youth also greatly impacts the development of our gut and its enteric nervous system. Breastmilk is essential because it promotes oxytocin and serotonin release, which promotes gut growth and the development of a healthy gut microbiome. When the gut is able to develop with a healthy gut microbiome, the risk of food allergies and gut issues later on in life is greatly reduced. A damaged gut, on the other hand, increases the risk of obesity, depression, anxiety, autism, multiple sclerosis, and cardiovascular disease.

Other common diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may actually start in the gut. For example, in people that died from Parkinson’s disease, scientists found the same protein clumps that damage dopamine-producing neurons in the gut as they did in the brain. The same phenomenon exists in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Plaques and tangles that form in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s disease also form in their gut. This means that we may be able to use gut biopsies to diagnose and treat these conditions before they take hold of the brain.

Stress and the Gut

When we are stressed our sympathetic nervous system is activated to prepare our body for survival. At the same time, the hormone Ghrelin is released from our stomach. Ghrelin is known as our hunger hormone because it stimulates appetite and promotes fat storage. This explains why when we are stressed we may feel the compulsive need to eat.

Ghrelin also inhibits serotonin activity, which leads to digestive issues and increased anxiety and depression over time. Anxiety leads to more ghrelin production, and this starts a vicious cycle of stress that may have been triggered by a stressful fetal or neonatal environment.

Recommended Reading: How Candida Leads to Depression, Anxiety, ADHD, and Other Mental Disorders

Irritable Bowel Syndrome – When Gut & Brain Disharmony Becomes Chronic

Stress also increases the risk of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a digestive disorder that affects 10-15% of the world population. IBS  is what happens when the enteric nervous system, gut, gut microbiome, and brain are in disharmony.

It usually begins with a stressful childhood. Traumatic events, like maternal separation, can lead to a dysfunctional connection between the brain and gut. If these children are also feed the wrong food, their gut microbiome will not develop correctly. This establishes a dysfunctional gut microbiome that does not produce the substances needed for a healthy gut and a healthy enteric nervous system.

If the child continues to be deprived of nutrient dense food and human connection, their immune system will become hyperactive, leading to food allergies and a chronic state of stress. This vicious cycle of brain, gut, and gut microbiome disharmony continues into adulthood until it is defined as IBS.

Recommended Reading: Gluten, Candida, Leaky Gut Syndrome, and Autoimmune Diseases

The Gut, Brain, and Behavioral Disorders

The enteric nervous system, gut, gut microbiome, and brain disharmony play an essential role in the development of neurological/behavioral disorders like autism, ADHD, and various mood disorders. Antibiotics, environmental, infectious agents like vaccines, and other forms of neonatal stress create gut dysbiosis (imbalance in gut bacteria) and vagus nerve dysfunction. These two factors set the stage for neurological/behavioral disorders by stimulating an already hyperactive immune system and sympathetic nervous system that causes children to be extremely impulsive and in a state of persistent hyper-arousal. If these children are then fed a highly refined diet that keeps their blood sugar levels high, their symptoms will continue to get worse.

You may have actually experienced a small taste of what it’s like to have ADHD or autism the last time you ate processed foods filled with toxins. When you eat highly refined, toxin laden foods, your body must fire up its immune system and sympathetic nervous system to protect you from the threat. This will cause blood flow to be directed away from your prefrontal cortex while your blood sugar rises. When your blood sugar is high, it creates plaque build up in the brain and impairs blood vessel function, which reduces  your cognitive abilities. Combine that with the lack of activity in your prefrontal cortex, and you will feel impulsive and anxious and make illogical decisions.

When you add stress and poor food choices together, it creates a cascade of negative effects in the gut microbiome, gut, enteric nervous system, and the brain that lead to poor decision-making, a greater incidence of pain, more allergies, and more disease.

But don’t worry, even if your environment was filled with stress and poor food options from the womb to adulthood, even if you were diagnosed with ADHD, IBS, autism, depression, chronic pain, Parkinson’s disease, and/or Alzheimer’s disease, you can still restore the harmony between your gut, gut microbiome, enteric nervous system, and brain.

Synchronizing the Gut and Brain

One of the most effective ways to improve your health is by starting with what you put in your body. When you feed your body what it needs while eliminating the foods that cause issues, you will establish a healthy gut microbiome, heal your gut lining, and improve the function of your enteric nervous system. This will send the message to the brain that you are not under attack, the immune system will calm down, and your body will be able to rest and reverse disease.

Improving Brain Health with the Gut

Limit Your Consumption of FOD MAPs

FOD MAPs is an acronym that stands for:

  • Fermentable – meaning they are only broken down through fermentation
  • Oligosaccharides – made up of individual sugars joined together in a chain
  • Disaccharides – a double sugar molecule
  • Monosaccharides – a single sugar molecule
  • And Polyols – sugar alcohols

These are short-chain carbohydrates that tend to be poorly digested by those with digestive issues like IBS. This is because when the FOD MAPs make their way through the digestive tract, they draw water into the large intestine from surrounding areas, which leads to bloating. Simultaneously, the bacteria in the large intestine starts digesting the FOD MAPs and producing gas which builds up along with the water. The intestines expand, the message is sent to the brain, and it responds with more pain, discomfort, and stress.

Eating a low FOD MAP diet has showed promising effects in treating people with IBS and may transfer to others with a comprised digestive system. It is commonly suggested to limit the consumption of  FOD MAPs for 3-8 weeks to help balance the gut microbiome, heal the gut, and reduce symptoms. After that time, it is best to slowly re-introduce high FOD MAP foods into your diet to see which ones are safe to eat and which ones cause the most issues for you.

Recommended Reading: Detox Cheap and Easy Without Fasting - Recipes Included

Eliminate Foods that Cause Problems for You

Food sensitives and allergies are becoming more and more common and the link between stress, the immune system, and the gut is mostly to blame. When the body is in a stressed and inflamed state, your immune system and gut may react to previously harmless foods as if they are a threat to the body.

To reduce your food sensitives and allergic reactions, start by eliminating these common, allergy-causing foods from your diet:

  • Milk
  • Eggs
  • Peanuts
  • Tree Nuts
  • Soy
  • Grains with gluten in them (wheat, barley, rye, and oats)
  • Fish
  • Shellfish

When you eliminate some of these foods from your diet, you may notice that you have more energy and less stress. This is a sign that you may be sensitive or allergic to one or more of the foods that you eliminated. Keep in mind that almost any food can trigger an allergy. If a certain food item always makes you feel worse after eating it then it is safe to say that you should eliminate it from your diet.

Think of this approach as a temporary experiment designed to see what the ideal diet is for you. After a couple weeks of eliminating a specific food from your diet, try periodically reintroducing that food back in. You may find that you can eat eggs or almonds again, and they make you feel energized now!

Recommended Reading: Increase your IQ with the Right Foods, Herbs, Vitamins, and Exercises for Your Brain

Increase Your Fiber Intake

Fiber cannot be broken down by the body, so bacteria in the intestines feast on it. As a result, the bacteria produce butyrate. This short chain fatty acid helps to improve the function of the digestive tract and protect and enhance brain function.

Supplement with Probiotics

Probiotics have been found to reduce anxiety and depression. In studies done on mice, the amount of lactobacillus in their gut effected the amount of a metabolite in the blood called kynurenine, which has been shown to drive depression. Probiotics also help produce serotonin in the gut, which has protective effects against irritable bowel syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis.

Recommended Reading: Probiotics, Bacteria, and Our Health

Make Sure You Consume Enough Folate and Vitamin B12

Folate and Vitamin B12 are essential for brain health, nervous system function, and overall health. They also help to prevent depression and heart disease. On its own Vitamin B12 decreases the loss of brain volume with age, while increasing cognitive function.

Although these vitamins are produced by the gut microbiome, we are not sure how much is actually made and absorbed by the body. It’s best to make sure you are consuming animal products like pasture raised eggs for Vitamin B12 and plenty of organic dark leafy green vegetables for folate.

Increase Your Intake of Omega 3s and Decrease Omega 6s

The omega 3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA, are effective at reducing the symptoms of depression, and positive effects may carry over to other neurological disorders as well. This is partly due to the decrease in inflammation that is associated with diets that are lower in omega 6s and higher in omega 3s.

To decrease the amount of omega 6s in your diet, replace vegetable, seed, and soybean oils with highly saturated fats like coconut oil, butter, ghee, and tallow. If you need a liquid oil for salad dressing use avocado oil or olive oil.

Omega 3s are best when consumed as minimally cooked and processed as possible. Wild caught salmon, sardines, mackerel, and oysters are great sources of DHA and EPA.

Before You Eat, Improve Your Gut with Your Mind

Before you take the first bite of food from your brain and gut revitalizing meal, take a deep diaphragmatic breath. This will stimulate your vagus nerve and prepare your body to digest your food. Chew each bite thoroughly, enjoy every flavor, and take at-least one deep breath after every couple of bites.

Use your brain to improve your gut and your gut to improve your brain. If you apply this advice to your life, you will replace the vicious cycle of disease with a nutritious cycle of vitality.

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Vaccine Schedule – Why the FDA Ignored Mercury Issues For So Long

Regulatory agencies like the FDA and CDC agree with the classification on mercury as a neurotoxin. But it took until 1997 for the Food and Drug Administration, at the prompting of Congress, to finally tally up the total amount of mercury a six-month-old would be exposed to if the 1997 vaccine schedule was followed. The results of that calculation found that the average six-month-old had the potential to be injected with a total of 187.5 micrograms of mercury. In contrast, the FDA’s daily acceptable intake of mercury for an adult is 0.4 micrograms per kilogram of bodyweight. The FDA has known about the cumulative levels of mercury in childhood vaccines for over 20 years, and yet they still acknowledge that many childhood vaccines contain trace amounts (less than 1 microgram) of thimerosal, and certain inactivated influenza vaccines can contain up to 50 micrograms of thimerosal.

What You Do When You Realize Something Wrong

By any calculation, the level of mercury in childhood vaccines is too high. So why hasn’t it been removed from vaccines? New documents from FDA officials have discovered that the justification for the continued presence of thimerosal has less to do with safety and more to do with image. In an email from Dr. Peter Patriarca, Director, Division of Viral Products, Food and Drug to an official at the CDC, he discussed the impact of removing thimerosal from vaccines in a timely fashion, saying it would:

…raise questions about FDA being ‘asleep at the switch’ for decades by allowing a potentially hazardous compound to remain in many childhood vaccines, and not forcing manufacturers to exclude it from new products.

It will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use. We must keep in mind that the dose of ethylmercury was not generated by “rocket science.” Conversion of the percentage of thimerosal to actual micrograms of mercury involves ninth grade algebra. What took the FDA so long to do the calculations? Why didn’t the CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?”

Equally as distressing as the FDA’s decision to hide culpability is what they’re sacrificing in pursuit of that decision. A press release in 1999 maintained that there wasn’t evidence that vaccines containing thimerosal caused any harm. It also maintained there was no reason to measure mercury exposure in children who received those vaccines, effectively ensuring that that evidence would not materialize anytime soon. In additional justification, public documents released by the FDA measured mercury exposure as if children were only exposed to a small amount of mercury each day through vaccines.

This is in stark contrast to the reality of the situation, where mercury exposure spikes at four specific times: at birth and at well baby (oh the irony!) check-ups at 2, 4, and 6 months. Since that release in 1999, the FDA has made an effort to lower the levels of thimerosal in childhood vaccines. Many still contain trace amounts, though, and the flu vaccine, recommended annually starting at 6 months, seems to be exempt from these reduction efforts thus far.

When Safeguards Are Not Safe

Vaccines are often sold as the best thing you can do for your baby. Yet the people who regulate these vaccines are not inclined to look at them critically. It took Congress requiring a list of intentionally introduced mercury compounds before the organization that regulates them took stock of exactly how much mercury children receive through childhood vaccines. The FDA then presented the data on a six-month average, instead of the four one-time spikes that actually occur and specifically said that testing mercury exposure is not necessary. Why are the vaccines considered necessary when safety checks and studies are not?

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