In this episode, I’m speaking with my friend and brilliant functional doctor, Dr. Datis Kharrazian, on the most evidence-based and practical ways to support your brain.
This is a re-release of a MUST-LISTEN episode if you have any cognitive concerns, such as a history of brain injury or fatigue, or if you’re concerned with keeping your brain healthy as you age. Dr. Kharrazian draws on his decades of clinical experience to share his top tips for brain health and life-long optimization. We cover a LOT of ground with tons of great takeaways you’ll want to hear!
This podcast was originally published in February 2021
Table of Contents
In this podcast, Dr. Kharrazian and I discuss:
- The 2 different forms of fatigue and easy ways you can tell the type of fatigue you’re experiencing
- How systemic inflammation from an issue as seemingly unrelated as inflammatory bowel disease can lead to neurodegeneration and fatigue
- Amazing ways that your neurodevelopment influences your brain health today…and can make you susceptible to certain brain conditions when you’re exposed to stress
- Why the brain’s immune system, characterized by glial cells, is completely different from the immune system in the rest of your body
- The 2 types of cells in the brain and very practical ways to support each to influence brain health
- The 5 most common causes of brain-related fatigue, including the number 1 question Dr. Kharrazian asks his patients
- How different forms of exercise can be therapeutic for different parts and functions of the brain!
- The real role of the now popularized amino acid therapy in influencing neurotransmitters and brain health
- Dr. Kharrazian’s top nutraceuticals and how they can be used to calm and heal the brain
- Is a ketogenic diet a good idea for people who are dealing with brain-related fatigue?
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Transcript
Ari: Hey there, this is Ari, and welcome back to The Energy Blueprint podcast. In this episode, we are talking to my friend and renowned and leading functional medicine practitioner, Dr. Datis Kharrazian, who has almost got a mythical status in the functional medicine realm for how much pioneering work he has done in this field, especially when it comes to brain health. In this interview/presentation, he is going to be presenting a lot of his absolute best tips and strategies for improving your brain health. Welcome, Dr. Kharrazian.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes, always a pleasure, Ari. Thanks
Brain energy levels
Ari: To start us off, let’s talk about your big-picture paradigm of the role of the brain in energy levels. There’s lots of different mechanisms and paradigms that are out there. There’s people talking about limbic system dysfunction. There’s people talking about childhood trauma. There’s the polyvagal theory with Stephen Porges and sympathetic versus parasympathetic.
There’s people talking about more of the psychological angle of negative beliefs and thought patterns. There’s glial excitotoxicities. There’s toxins in the glymphatic system. There’s neurotransmitters. There’s all these different layers of mechanisms and things that we could talk about as far as the role of the brain in how it impacts energy levels and mood, which overlap. What’s your big-picture paradigm of the role of the brain in relationship to energy levels?
Dr. Kharrazian: All the things you talk about, like dysautonomia, neuroinflammation, and synaptic activity, and neurodegeneration, they’re all part of it. Fundamentally, as a clinician, one of the things that I think most people see is that a patient comes in and one of their chief complaints is their fatigue. One of the quickest things to do as a clinician is to go, “Is this brain-based fatigue, or is this metabolic fatigue?” There’s a difference between the two.
Brain-based fatigue is a type of fatigue that shows up when a person uses their brain. When someone says, “Hey, when I drive, I just need to take a nap. When I start reading, I can’t get through a chapter.” That’s brain-based fatigue and that’s different than metabolic fatigue. Metabolic fatigue, they’re just tired for no reason throughout the day. Some people have both. I think there’s a lot of people that really have brain fatigue, and they get treated for adrenal dysfunctions and all these metabolic things. Really, ultimately, what they really need to do is get their brain healthier.
That’s one of the key immediate things I would like to, when you look at the big picture, first of all, what are you dealing with? Brain fatigue is a red flag of something going wrong with how the brain’s metabolism is working. Then all the things you brought up then have to be dissected out to see what’s the cause of it.
Is the brain central in CFS?
Ari: Got it. Is there any overlap between these two things? For example, there are certain people out there who are in the chronic fatigue syndrome niche, and they’ve promoted a theory of that the brain is very central to chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s specifically stress and trauma that rewires the brain, the limbic system especially, in a way that promotes very physical fatigue. I guess you might call it metabolic fatigue, in addition to maybe brain-related symptoms. What do you see as the overlap there?
Dr. Kharrazian: Definitely a vicious cycle back and forth between the two. For sure, metabolic fatigue is going to cause brain fatigue. The key thing about the brain is that the brain is one of the tissues in the body that’s called [unintelligible 00:08:47] tissue. It doesn’t go through cell division any further. Once you’re born, the amount of neurons you have in your brain, that’s it. Those neurons can either connect with each other and develop plasticity, but the total quantity of neurons you get is what you’re born with.
That’s different than other tissues in the body. Your liver’s always regenerating, your gut, regenerating, your kidneys are regenerating, all your organs are constantly regenerating, but your brain, the amount of neurons you have are what you have. When you have a chronic inflammatory metabolic disease, like inflammatory bowel syndrome or something, there’s going to be a toll it takes on the brain because systemic inflammation is going to cause brain inflammation and promote neurodegenerative mechanisms.
Then what people sometimes forget is the reason they’re not feeling better or recovering out of their chronic fatigue is because their brain’s in trouble. Now, when the brain’s in trouble, depending on the region of the brain, if the frontal motor areas are a problem, then using your arms and exercising is going to be fatiguing for you. If your autonomic centers, the basic ganglia that control your limbic system are a problem, then you have dysautonomia and abnormal heart rates. Anything that raises your blood pressure is going to cause you to be fatigued. It all depends if your occipital lobe’s involved, watching TV with quick flashes of screens.
One of the things, once we see someone that does have brain-related fatigue, there’s a couple of questions you ask. What areas of the brain are involved? Then what are the mechanisms causing it? You can have someone that fatigues when it’s really bright and they don’t have their sunglasses and the brain’s cooked. That’s a different area of the brain than someone who fatigues when they read versus someone who fatigues if they’re in a windy road. The ones in the vestibular system, those in the occipital lobe, the ones involved with autonomic centers for people with constriction and dilation.
Literally, you can listen to a patient, listen to their symptoms, and get fine-tuned. Usually, patients say, “Oh, it’s so weird, but when I do this is really what I notice the symptom, but that’s specific to regions of the brain.
The root causes of brain fatigue
Ari: Interesting. How separate are these different manifestations as far as the causes? For context, we could look at obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, dysregulated blood lipids, metabolic syndrome. All of these things are largely different manifestations of a lot of the same root causes at the nutrition and lifestyle level. How much of that same type of thing is going on with these different regions of brain dysfunction that you’re describing? Is it the same set of root causes or is it totally different root causes depending on how it manifests?
Dr. Kharrazian: Right. That’s a good question. The first thing is all the things you mentioned, all those metabolic conditions, all those inflammatory conditions, all promote neurodegeneration, well-established in clinical research. The question is then why do certain areas show up and other areas show up? That goes back to some fundamental concepts of actually your personal neurodevelopment.
Each of us have different regions of the brain, which have greater connectivity, greater plasticity in other areas. For example, let’s say you were a kid and you grew up and you try to play sports and you were bad at it and you were uncoordinated, but you were just developing, you were a kid. People started making fun of you and then you never played sports and you always avoided sports forever. Then your vestibular motor system is not going to develop so you have maybe a less efficient system. Maybe then you excelled at math or it could be the opposite. Maybe you were terrible at math so you avoided all math and then focused on sports your whole life growing up.
During that neurodevelopment state, you have different areas of your brain that have greater plasticity than others. Now when you have that as a baseline, everyone has different degrees of greater function and greater connectivity in certain regions based on how they exercise or use their brains. Now, when you overlap an inflammatory metabolic condition on top of that, let’s say like diabetes, well the areas are, you’re going to have neurodegeneration, neuroinflammation throughout the brain, but the areas that show up first are the areas that have less plasticity.
Ari: Interesting.
Dr. Kharrazian: If you were the person who didn’t have a very developed motor-coordinated muscular system because you never played sports, well you might end up with your neurodegeneration first showing up with vertigo, dizziness, and instability. Someone else, maybe it’s the other one who didn’t do math, they’re going to show up and not remember phone numbers and remember lists.
Everyone’s brain is different. Everyone’s brain has different levels of connectivity or plasticity in certain areas. Then when you put a metabolic condition on top of it, the clinical presentations always show up in the first with the least amount of connectivity. That’s why it’s different from one person to the next.
How nutrition and lifestyle play into brain fatigue
Ari: Very, very interesting. As far as how nutrition and lifestyle plays into this are there sort of well-defined, more typical root causes at the nutrition and lifestyle level of these conditions? To what degree do you see nutrition and lifestyle as factoring into these brain-related symptoms that you’re describing?
Dr. Kharrazian: The critical. I think one of the key things is to, first of all, as a person suffering from a chronic condition or fatigue issue or a clinician trying to figure out patients, to realize what role the brain plays and then what are the mechanisms. Obviously, inflammation is a key mechanism, but inflammation in the brain is totally different in the rest of the body. In the brain, we have primarily neuroglial cells, microglial cells, and they don’t have an off switch.
In our systemic immune system, we have suppressor cells that can shut down the immune system. We don’t have two suppressor cells in our brain, we don’t have two regulatory cells in the brain, and we have these neuroglia cells in the brain. Then the other key feature of these neuroglia cells, the immune cells of the brain, is that they can get into a physiological state called neuroglial priming, where they don’t shut off.
As a matter of fact, things like traumatic brain injury that severely impacting an area of the brain turns on these glial cells, and then they stay on and they have a heightened state of an inflammatory reaction, and they’re triggered by inflammation throughout the body. You could have also someone who has like head injury, and then their neuroglial cells are already primed with head injury from 10 years ago in a car accident, and now they’re stating to get early diabetes, and now they’re really getting severe degeneration and symptoms there. Inflammation is a role with just the general concept of diet, lifestyle, impacts brain function. In addition to plasticity in different regions, we all have different areas of primed glial cells, maybe from past injuries, maybe from past assaults to the brain, maybe someone’s hypoxic, CO2 poisoning, who knows. Then when you add all those up, yes, the underlying cause of all these things is inflammation, but everyone has a different level of glial priming and a different degree of plasticity, so the expressions of it is all different but underlying it you have to treat the inflammation.
The interesting thing is that when people have primed glial cells, there’s only certain things that can make a difference for that from a nutritional perspective. For example, if they take flavonoids, they can actually cross the blood-brain barrier. If you don’t take it, some people, for example, have a really nice response to curcumin or resveratrol, but not respond to acai extract or pomegranate extract, because let’s say resveratrol can cross the blood-brain barrier. Some of the reasons why people go, “Oh, my depression or my energy change,” could be because of the ability of that natural nutraceutical to cross the blood-brain barrier and then actually turn on the glial cells.
That’s where it gets really exciting when you think about inflammation, that the immune system and the brain is different than the rest of the body. Then in order to even get those cells from a nutraceutical point of view, there’s only so many things that can cross the blood-brain barrier.
Will nutraceuticals be enough to restore brain function?
Ari: Interesting. I want to come back to the nutraceutical aspect of things and phytochemicals that do that effectively. Is there a point at which all of these different mechanisms converge into some of the same pathways? What I mean is, you mentioned a number of different potential causes of how the brain could start to dysfunction, everything from toxic exposure, heavy metals, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or something like that, to head injury, to, I’m sure, just poor diet, to being sedentary, to– I’m sure there’s probably 10 other things that you could list off.
Do they converge through this inflammatory pathway and the glial overexcitement? Is it possible to say there is a general pattern of excessive inflammation and glial excitotoxicity that results from almost all of these different causes? That may manifest differently for different people depending on their genetics, their unique causes, their personality development, as you described, different plasticity differences. Do they converge at some of the same biochemical mechanisms at some point?
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes. I think for the most part, like you said, inflammation is where everything merges that then triggers all these different cascading events downstream. The other unique thing about the brain is when you look at the brain, there’s two types of cells in the brain. There’s neurons and then there’s glial cells. Glial cells are immune and neurons are what branch into each other and have electrical activity.
Inflammation will definitely turn on these glial cells in the brain that can promote a neurodegenerative process. Some people have different degrees of prime glial cells, but then something unrelated to inflammation is just activity of the brain. Neurons make mitochondria within them for their ATP production only after they’re stimulated. They’re called mitochondrial biogenesis in neurons or even in muscles throughout the body, and the brain specifically take place from activation. Your brain actually literally unrelated to inflammation, that’s a common area because the brain is unique, but it needs stimulation also. You need to reduce inflammation, but it needs activation.
When you start using different regions of the brain, it degenerates. As a matter of fact, these neuroglial cells that are involved with inflammation, their normal job is to get rid of dead cells and debris in the brain. When neurons stop firing, they just start chewing them up.
Ari: Oh, wow. Okay. It becomes a neurodegenerative process in areas of the brain that are not as active as they should be.
Dr. Kharrazian: Right. We tend to focus on certain things we’re good at and like to do. As we get older, those start to show up, especially if you have an underlying metabolic inflammatory disease, which adds this fuel to the fire. What’s very unique about the brain is, of course, inflammation is an emergency area, but one of the most overlooked areas is activation and stimulation.
Ari: You’re speaking my language now because hormesis is my favorite subject and transient metabolic stress and how that affects mitochondria. To some extent, what you’re talking about here, I’m sure there’s a hormetic element, but there’s also just like challenging areas of your brain that you may not– making conscious efforts to, for example, do math or do crossword puzzles or do things that you wouldn’t normally do. Is that accurate?
Dr. Kharrazian: It’s accurate. It goes to the point, let’s say, for example, someone is tired all the time, they’re fatigued and they’re exhausted and they know when they drive in a windy road that really fatigues them. That’s all vestibular. That’s the vestibular system trying to figure out where you are in space in relation to the environment. For them, they’re going to have to do vestibular rehabilitation to get their brain function back. They can take all the nutraceuticals in the world. It’s not going to make those neurons develop mitochondria and develop plasticity, only activation will.
Inflammation will promote it. If you reduce inflammation, it can slow down the process, but it’s not going to make neurons connect and it’s not going to make neurons have mitochondria. The person that’s good at math is bad at math and now every time they try to do calculations or math or timeline, they get really tired and get fatigued. They’re going to have to start doing math, staying in very basic level 101 brain rehabilitation. Whatever they can’t do is what they do.
Ari: Ah. Is what they should do.
Dr. Kharrazian: Is it clear?
Ari: In other words, yes.
Dr. Kharrazian: Balance is bad, you do balance. You can’t do finger-to-nose because you keep missing your nose, you do finger-to-nose.
Ari: Got it. Yes. Fascinating. I never thought about it quite like that. Okay. Seems like there’s two elements here and I’m sure this is still oversimplifying, but one element is this personalized element that depends on individual assessment and identification of which parts or systems of the brain are not adequately stimulated or under-activated and don’t have adequate degrees of neuroplasticity and are prone to this sort of neurodegenerative process that you’ve described.
Then the other aspect of it is, maybe more universal recommendations as far as nutrition and lifestyle that we know decreases inflammation in the brain and supports optimal brain function and brain cell health.
A self-assessment for brain fatigue
Ari: Okay. Given that we’re doing this interview and we have tens of thousands, hopefully, a couple hundred thousand people listening to this, who unfortunately don’t, in this moment, have the luxury of sitting across from you in your office where they can get a personalized assessment. My first question– I want to dig into the universal stuff and recommendations, nutrition, lifestyle stuff, but are there any aspects of assessments that someone could do at home on their own?
Obviously. there’s no substitution for seeing someone like you in person, but is there any way that someone could sort of self-assess and identify, “Hey, these parts of my brain maybe are underactive?”
Dr. Kharrazian: There is. Let me give you a general answer. I wrote a book called Why Isn’t My Brain Working? At the beginning of each chapter, I wrote the symptoms of different mechanisms of dysfunction that affect the brain. We have lack of brain function from a blood sugar issue or from a neuroinflammation issue or from a blood-brain permeability issue or from a gut-brain access issue. There’s different symptoms that present each one. My attempt to try to share more of a specific application to it was to write a book and break it down by chapter with symptoms in each chapter for each section. That was one way to do it.
Ari: I actually have that book in the cabinet right behind me. I should’ve got it out, but it’s a phenomenal book and it’s filled with all my notes and highlights all over the place.
Dr. Kharrazian: Oh. That was an attempt for me to try to teach people that when you look at your brain, there’s so many different things that can go wrong and so many different mechanisms. Here’s how you can fine-tune which ones may be involved with you and here’s the research of how you can change these things.
Then once I wrote my brain book, I had a lot of people contact us say, “It’s a great book. I read it, but I have so much brain dysfunction. I can’t even get through it. It’s hard to understand.” Then I made a video program called Save Your Brain, a online program that’s at Dr. K. News, but it really goes into a step-by-step approach. I teach people how to do their own physical neurological exam and look at symptoms and figure out which exercises to do.
For the most part, you think of it front to back of the brain. If you have a hard time with math, then get a math app and start doing multiplication tables and games that, I don’t know, elementary school people are learning to do or that can really help you. If you have a really hard time with directions and people’s faces and shapes, then do games like Tetris where you’re looking at shapes and trying to fit them into different spots.
If you close your eyes and put your feet together and see if you sway or how your balance is or stand on one foot and close your eyes, if your balance is off, you got to do some balance exercises. Those are general. The most common things is just, left, right brain and balance. You can get to the very fine-tuned areas of each region of the brain if you had a chance to do an exam, but those are the general guidelines. For the most part, if you’re highly active and doing multi-task exercise where you’re hitting a tennis ball, running, timing, planning, those are fantastic ways to keep your brain healthy from aging, whether it’s tennis or ping pong or basketball, those are, those are important to do.
Then cognitive things like you should, you should try to learn a language. You should try to keep your brain active and stimulated. Definitely just watching TV passively is not good for the brain. Those types of activities make a big difference, be an athlete, be a scholar, keep your brain healthy, keep your inflammation down, and then that’s the way to preserve your brain.
The most common causes for brain related fatigue
Ari: Excellent. I want to dig into nutrition and lifestyle aspects here. I know in your book, you talk a lot about a lot of things. It’s a gigantic book. I think it– what is it? 600 pages or something.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes. Something like that.
Ari: Yes.
Dr. Kharrazian: A lot of references in the back.
Ari: [chuckles] Blood sugar regulation is a big, issue as far as, brain-related issues, stress, sleep, circulation is something that you talk about, the brain-gut access. I’m sure all of these are pretty common, but if you were to say, “Hey, here are the three most common causes of why someone would have brain-related fatigue or the five most common causes of why someone would have brain-related fatigue as far as nutrition and lifestyle factors,” what would be that list for you?
Dr. Kharrazian: Okay. Gosh, that’s a tough question. Okay. Number one, for sure. In the current US population is going to be blood sugar stability. That could include being pre-diabetic, diabetic, or being hypoglycemic with blood sugar levels drop. Blood sugar rollercoaster rides are going to devastate the brain. One of the things that when your blood sugar levels– when a person eats too much carbohydrates or too much sugar, or if they’re pre-diabetic, they put out more insulin and insulin just churns on these neuroglial cells in the brain, causes significant inflammation and really promotes the neurodegenerative process and just daily function of the brain and uncouples mitochondria bioenergetics to be efficient. You really can’t use the brain, this disregulates.
People that get low blood sugar, they’re the ones when the blood sugar is low, the brain doesn’t have fuel. Even when their blood sugar levels drop, there’s an insulin surge as an attempt for the body to get glucose into the cells, whatever it can, and those create the inflammatory cascade. Number one is blood sugar. For me, I would say that the first thing that I ask my patients to determine if they have a blood sugar issue is how do you feel after you eat? The normal response would be, “I just don’t feel like I’m hungry.” If there’s any symptom change of energy, then I know there’s a blood sugar problem.
Hypoglycemics will typically say, “Oh, I feel I can function again. I feel better. I can think again. I’m not angry anymore.” That’s a sign that they’re dealing with a low blood sugar rollercoaster ride. Those that eat a meal and need to take a nap and crave sugar or need to immediately have a coffee, those are insulin resistance people, those getting us in surgeries, they tend to be on the diabetic, pre-diabetic side.
The normal response is you should actually be hungry, have an appetite, eat, no longer be hungry, but no change in energy and function. That’s number one. Number two, the key thing that really promotes a neurodegenerative response, since you’re making me come up with five, [unintelligible 00:28:22].
Ari: laughs] I’m sure you can come up with 20 if you think hard enough.
Dr. Kharrazian: It’s harder to pick which one’s the top one. I’d say the second one is going to be activation of the brain. If a person doesn’t activate the brain, it’s going to neurodegenerate. By activation of the brain, let’s just stick to cognitive aspects. You really should be challenging your brain. Some people play Sudoku, some people do word puzzles. That is fantastic. You really need to do activation of– do things to activate your brain.
If they’rewatching your summit, then they’re stimulating the brain by learning. If they’re reading a book or they’re focused on some topic to explore and learn, those are critical for it. A lot of people just have neurodegenerative changes because they don’t use their brain anymore.
Ari: It’s interesting that as you’re saying that I realized this is something that I’ve neglected in my thinking about these subjects, for example, in the context of neurodegenerative disease, I tend to just really think more in the context of nutrition and lifestyle factors and stress and disrupted circadian rhythm and sleep and, poor diet and poor gut health and so on.
The stimulation aspect, it’s interesting to hear you describe it as number two as being so, so important. I’m just curious if you were to– this is a really tough question. I’m sure you can’t accurately answer, but just your hunch about what percentage of the overall neurological disease problem you perceive to be related to just a population that just doesn’t use their brain very much and challenge themselves to learn and to stimulate these different parts of the brain.
Dr. Kharrazian: Oh, I think it’s a large percentage of the population, especially once people are not in a position to challenge their brains anymore. We first go to school, we learn a language, we get thrown in PE, maybe not anymore, turn to music and that’s very stimulating for the brain. Once we get older, we lose those things and we get focused on doing the same task every day and the same focus every day. Then if you’re not stimulating your brain, your brain will degenerate. The areas of your brain you’re not using will have less mitochondria in them and they have less plasticity in them. They’ll have fatigue sooner when you start to use them.
It was like someone that maybe their midlife career, they go back in school. The first week of going back to school, they’re sleeping 10 hours a day because their brain’s so tired because they’re not used to reading and studying and everything. What they’re actually doing is saving the brain. Lack of activation, I think is common, especially as we get older.
Now some people are in a profession where they’re using their brain all the time and that’s actually very good for them. It keeps them healthy. When you look at patients that come in, you see that a 75-year-old, 90-year-old, that’s still highly functional. They were constantly using the brain and they were constantly doing things, and we see people retire and all of a sudden everything goes downhill. They’re not using the brain anymore. You have to use your brain. You have to challenge your brain to stay healthy.
Even there’s all these apps today and online programs, people go in and learn to challenge some of the puzzles and games. They do that 20, 30 minutes a day. That’s really a good idea.
Ari: Excellent. Fascinating stuff. Okay. Blood sugar dysregulation and brain stimulation, number one and two, where would you go from here?
Dr. Kharrazian: The third one has to be physical activity. It’s another common one that people just don’t do. It really impacts the brain function. Physical exercise is one of the few things that causes neuronal branching. Neuronal branching, and especially with runners, there’s been some phenomenal research that shows that runners in particular, the most studied, when they run, their neurons branch so aggressively and they release things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which allows these neurons to connect.
That runner’s high creates this opioid response and that sets the stage on for major neuron branching and growth and calms down the inflammatory response. I’d say getting an exercise “high” feeling turns on all the biochemistry to really protect the brain.
Ari: This is kind of a weird thing on one hand. It’s counterintuitive, but I think everybody’s seen over the last 5 years, 10 years, there’s been a number of articles in the media about, exercise improves brain health and combats depression and combats neurological disease, things like that. I think a lot of us have heard that exercise is good for our brain and we accept that.
On the other hand, it’s a weird and counterintuitive thing in my view, because it’s like, and my background’s in exercise, so I’m used to thinking of like exercise is good for your muscles and we can study all the ways that muscles adapt in terms of strength and endurance and muscle fiber type and mitochondrial biogenesis in the muscles and muscle hypertrophy and yada, yada, yada. It’s like, okay, well, why does doing bicep curls and strengthening your bicep muscles, just as an example, or doing squats or going for a run, why would that from an evolutionary perspective, boost our brain health?
Dr. Kharrazian: Well, I’m not sure from an evolutionary perspective, but for sure, just doing bicep curls is immediately going to raise things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor to allow connectivity. You’re going to boost your antioxidant production throughout your body, including the brain. You’re going to increase circulation and blood flow because when you do a bicep curl, you’re actually activating your homunculus distribution of your motor and premotor areas and somatosensory cortex to fire and integrate for you to do the activation. It’s very stimulating to the brain.
It’s not something in the brain is just sitting around watching YouTube videos and watching TV and eating inflammatory food. On the list of the most common things that cause neurodegeneration and make the brain preserve itself as we get older, is just not getting physical activity. The brain gets activated, if you– any physical activity, whether it’s a bicep curl or you’re running, you’re playing basketball is integrating different regions of your brain after exercise and during exercise, lots of increased circulation and blood flow to the brain, which keeps your neurons healthy.
Ari: Fascinating.
Dr. Kharrazian: It’s critical.
Ari: To what degree do you think that it’s important just to do exercise and get a workout or versus using your body to learn a physical skill? One of the activities that I do is rock climbing and rock climbing is this very unique mix of, yes, it absolutely can be a workout, can be very intense at times, but a lot of times it’s this act, this art of you’re using your body, like you’re playing a chess game, you’re using your body to figure out how to solve problems in physical space and how to manipulate your body movements to be stable in a particular position to get to that next position up the wall.
Dr. Kharrazian: Exactly.
Ari: To what degree are the benefits from the sort of like working out, getting a workout versus moving your body, learning how to move your body in new different ways and coordinating that?
Dr. Kharrazian: That’s a great question. For example, if you’re learning how to mountain climb or rock climb, you’re activating a lot of fine motor coordination activities, your balance, your shift in weight. That is a tremendous stimulus to your brain. If someone’s in shape, they may fatigue their brain before they fatigue their body when they first learn how to rock climb. They get done and they’re like, “I’m so tired,” but it’s not their body that needs recovery, it’s their brain. They need to just close their eyes and shut down. That is helping connectivity in that specific region of motor planning, coordination, body shifting.
That’s one thing. The type of activities you do can fatigue your brain when you’re doing exercise but also very therapeutic for your brain. If someone had some frontal lobe degeneration or dysfunction, rock climbing would be very difficult for them because they can’t get that motor planning that’s very much involved with that type of activity. Running would be a lot easier because they just do the same thing over again. Sequence, it’s not as cognitive of a task, but it’s also not as therapeutic.
One part of it is the specific types of activities you do will activate different regions versus others. If you’re constantly doing exercise on a BOSU ball or a unstable platform, that’s more vestibular. Just doing dumbbell curls in the same motion is not going to have as much stimulation in your coordination-integrated path as your brain. That’s one thing. The other thing is your heart rate. When I look at brain research, they have a direct relationship between the intensity of the exercise and changing the neurochemistry of the brain. What they find is bursts of high intensity do have a different impact on the biochemistry of the brain.
One part of it is the chemistry of it and one part is the connectivity of it. The actions you do are going to impact the connectivity and plasticity of it. Then how high your heart rate gets during the activity will change the biochemistry. Higher heart rate equals more blood flow, more circulation, more growth factors, more brain-derived neurotrophic factor. That’s related to how high your heart rate is. Then the more coordinated your activities are, the more connectivity you get in those areas of the brain.
When we work with patients that have brain injuries, sometimes we have to pick exercises. If you gave a patient that had a brain injury in their vestibular system, the balance centers of the cerebellum, some exercises on a BOSU ball with the bicep curl, they’d be tired and exhausted maybe before the muscles were tired because the brain was [unintelligible 00:37:56].
Ari: Wow.
Dr. Kharrazian: They may not make that connection. They go, “Oh my God, I’m so tired, I’m so out of shape.” They think they’re physically out of shape, but it’s the brain that’s out of shape. Listen, when the brain fatigues, your muscles don’t work anymore, nothing works. That’s the brain fatigue because your brain is in fact controlling everything. It’s all integrating.
Ari: This is fascinating stuff. I’m loving this conversation. One other thing I think is worth mentioning here, we’re obviously focused very much on the fatigue energy aspect of things, but would you say it’s accurate to say that basically all of the same constellation of issues are also the major causes of neurological disease more broadly?
Dr. Kharrazian: Absolutely. These are all risk factors and mechanisms that promote neurodegenerative disease, yes. For sure.
Ari: I want to make that connection for people listening in so that they understand these are really the same factors. If you want to avoid dementia and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases and keep your brain healthy as you get older, it comes back to these same things. I’m curious if you would agree with this, optimizing your brain for energy is very much the same thing as optimizing your brain for disease prevention and having good brain health well into old age.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes, you can even say it’s identical.
Ari: Okay.
Dr. Kharrazian: They overlap.
Ari: Got it. We’ve got blood sugar dysregulation, we’ve got brain stimulation, and we’ve got exercise.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes. Fourth on the list is going to be sleep. Your brain cannot function in sleep-deprived states. Your brain cannot branch, it can’t develop plasticity, it can’t get rid of debris when it’s in a sleep-deprived state. Studies that clearly show when people don’t get enough sleep, and they monitor over time, there’s difference in brain volume sizes that promotes atrophy of the brain.
We think, “Well, I can rough through it. I can have the alarm wake me up, and I can get through it, and then I can take the stimulant to keep me going,” but that actually changes your brain to a point where it can’t develop connectivity and plasticity and it can’t get rid of these debris. We all get debris in our brain from dead cells that are dying off, whether it’s beta-amyloid or alpha-synuclein or whatever the aggregate protein is, but they build up in our brain. Our body has to clear those out. It can’t do that in a sleep-deprived state.
One of the biggest factors, as you talk about top five, is just sleep. When we’re working with a patient, recovering from a brain injury or working with a patient that has a neurodegenerative disease and they’re trying to get into a lifestyle, first thing we tell them is, “You have to get to the point and figure this out.” You wake up without an alarm clock, or your body just has enough rest, and then it gets up. Whether you have to start going to bed at eight o’clock to make sure you figure out how to have enough time to do it, but you have to get to the point where you’re not stimulated up to have the brain we need to help it recover and to rehabilitate or so forth. Sleep is a major one.
I think this is a major problem also for kids, neurodevelopmental issues, and so forth. They’re just getting not enough sleep. They’re so stimulated and wired, and they get up and they have to be forced out of bed. That is a major, major mechanism for causing inefficient brain, and also, like you said, being a factor for neurodegeneration.
Ari: This is a bit of a digression, but you mentioned the kid thing, and I just remember seeing an article maybe a year ago or something like that where they were talking about changing school start times from whatever, 8:00 AM to 9 AM. or 9.30 AM or something like that, because they’re finding so many kids are sleep-deprived, and their brains are not functioning early in the morning. They’re forcing themselves to wake up with an alarm clock, they’re tired, they’re not getting enough sleep, and then they’re going to school.
In my view, this is really not getting at the root cause of the problem, and this is a bit of a digression, but the root cause of the problem, as I see it, is we live in a modern world that is phase-shifting our circadian rhythm to more of a night owl rhythm. Kids are staying up too late due to artificial light, and they’re going to bed too late, and then they’re being forced to wake up too early. I just don’t know how much extending school start times actually fixes anything because now kids are just going to say, “Oh, I can stay up even later now,” and ultimately, I think in the long run, making things even worse, potentially.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes, hopefully, you’re right. It’s this constant stimulation that’s keeping them up at night. Whatever the cause is, that has to be addressed. For some people that has neurodegeneration, as they get older, we can’t get their brain healthy until we stop their frequent nighttime urination. For someone else, they’re stimulating and playing on their iPad all night, and all that light is we have to give them blue-light filter and put time limits and get them to read an actual book or do things to fall asleep.
For some people, it’s their blood sugar. They get hypoglycemic throughout the day, and then they don’t eat enough protein, and they wake up in the middle of the night with a hypoglycemic spike, and wake up from the withdraw and rush to try to break down some protein in the body for sugar. Sleep is a major one. If you don’t get sleep, your brain has no chance. It can’t function well, and it’s going to neurodegenerate faster.
Ari: We’ve got sleep. We’ve got exercise. We’ve got brain stimulation. We’ve got blood sugar dysregulation. Is there anything else worth mentioning here?
Dr. Kharrazian: Number five, I want to make number five inflammation. [unintelligible] talking a lot about inflammation. Inflammation is critical, but everyone has some degree of inflammation, and it’s a common point area. By the way, lack of sleep, lack of physical activity, blood sugar issues, all will increase your inflammatory alone. Again, like you’re saying, it does converge. I wanted to make that number five because I wanted to highlight the other ones.
Ultimately these five that you have do converge, and those things all create the inflammatory cascade also. That being said, sometimes people can get a bit confused and go, “Okay, so I’m taking my anti-inflammatory nutritional protocol, so I should be okay.” or, “I eat well. I don’t eat junk, I don’t eat fast food, so I should be okay.” No, if you’re not sleeping, you’re not getting enough cognitive stimulation, you’re still hypoglycemic, your blood sugar is spiking in between your salads or whatever, you’re going to have neurodegenerative changes and inefficient brains.
For me, being a healthcare practitioner, alternative medicine, I see a lot of alternative healthcare practitioners as patients too. They are eating well, and they are– they’re eating well, but they’re still hypoglycemic. They’re eating well and hypoglycemic, but they still don’t get enough rest. They’re not stimulating their brains. They’re just so caught up in their work and not doing other activities to keep themselves excited about whatever they need to. Maybe they need to learn art or something. I wanted to highlight those more than just inflammation. However, they all do converge with inflammation.
Ari: Very interesting. I know that there’s– I’m sure it’s not an exaggeration to say 30 hours at least that you could talk about all the mechanisms of how our brain dysfunction and how to fix it. This is necessarily a very short summary and oversimplification in some instances. Two other things that I’m curious to get your thoughts on. One is the role of the vagus nerve and the Stephen Porges model of the polyvagal theory and also neurotransmitters.
There are some people out there who are very brain-focused, who, in my view, reduce everything almost down to neurotransmitter imbalance and then use specific amino acid supplements, whether it’s L-theanine or tryptophan or whatever to optimize neurotransmitter balance. That’s their whole model, which I think is very, very myopic compared to the model that you’re presenting here. What are your thoughts on neurotransmitters and the polyvagal theory, the role of the vagus nerve in all of this?
Dr. Kharrazian: Let’s start with neurotransmitters first. For sure, there’s nutraceuticals that impact neurotransmitter activity in the brain. Precursor amino acids can raise certain neurotransmitters. Different botanicals can bind to different receptors for different neurotransmitters in the brain. There’s something to be said there, but there are also very superficial band-aid-type mechanisms. If someone, for example, took some kind of valerian root or hops or passion flower to sleep, that doesn’t last. There’s a point where the brain adapts, doesn’t work anymore.
Someone took L-theanine to help them to raise their GABA levels, they’re going to maybe for the first two weeks feel something and then it stops when there’s [unintelligible 00:46:46]. My experience is, yes, those nutraceuticals can be helpful, but they’re really short-term and they’re not really addressing the main issue. Then we know there’s no accurate way to really measure neurotransmitters in the brain. The levels of neurotransmitters in the brain are different in different regions at different times. Urinary neurotransmitter testing, not valid. There’s no reflection between which region of the brain has different neurotransmitter activities. It’s hard to measure, but it is some people’s model.
In my book, I do talk about symptoms related to common neurotransmitter imbalances, but it’s like, we always put it at the last and say, this is the last place you go. Start with blood sugar or you start with these factors and get rid of all of the smoke screen and see if there’s any neurotransmitter imbalances left. Then maybe you can boost them that way.
Ari: Because ultimately most neurotransmitter imbalances, even if they are present, are largely related to these same root causes you’ve already mentioned.
Dr. Kharrazian: Absolutely. Sometimes like, for example, if I want to focus and concentrate and improve recall and I’m working on a cognitive project, I may take some catecholamine or acetylcholine support during that project to let me focus. When you drink coffee, you’re getting catecholamines elevated. That’s a neurotransmitter stimulant, for example. Things like huperzine help raise the acetylcholine levels. I know when I take it, when I’m trying to do long-term cognitive tasks, it helps me have greater endurance.
They’re useful to some degree, but if you overlook them like methods when it causes neurotransmitter imbalances, that’s, I think, where things fall apart. I’m not sure what the polyvagal theory is, so.
Ari: Oh, really? Yes, Stephen Porges has been out there for, geez, I think maybe 10 or 20 years at this point. The last time I interviewed you, there was a similar thing like this where I mentioned somebody’s work and you were like, “Huh, never heard of it.” It’s so funny to me because it just speaks to the fact that you’re so immersed in the research that you just oftentimes don’t even pay any attention to what’s going on in the popular internet health world.
Dr. Kharrazian: No, I do not know what’s going on. What is the theory?
Ari: I don’t want to not do it justice and oversimplify, but basically it’s conceptualizing a dorsal vagal response and a ventral vagal response. Basically, it’s a model that says, “Hey, it’s more sophisticated than–” it’s more complex than just fight or flight, sympathetic mode, stress mode versus rest and digest parasympathetic mode.
The vagus nerve is just more complex than that. We have this ventral vagus and dorsal vagus response. There’s also this more of a freeze response. He relates this to fatigue and depression and apathy and things like that. Ventral vagus response is more– it’s largely about safety. Safety is a big thing in this model where basically to be in a ventral vagal state means your brain and your nervous system senses that it’s in a safe environment. It’s not in a stressed, dangerous environment. I’m oversimplifying and not describing it well, but I would say that’s the gist of it.
Dr. Kharrazian: Obviously, autonomics is always more complicated than just sympathetic versus parasympathetic. I think we’re learning more about it. I can’t criticize it or comment on it because I just don’t have any experience on it, but I would just generally say autonomics, I think the only way I can answer autonomics from my world and just from my background and my bias and my exposures is we have patients that do have dysautonomias and we have patients that do have dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system that need to get those systems organized and balanced to have any chance of getting function.
Typically, we’ll see with dysautonomias, like we’ll put a heart rate monitor on them and their heart rate is all over the place. Most people you put a heart rate monitor on them and you just leave it there for a minute or two, you get a resting heart rate and it’s pretty stable. For some people it goes all over the place, goes from 60 to 110 to 70 to 80 and it’s just sitting there to like, wow, that’s dysautonomia.
We’ll look at their pupils and they’re– normally people have resting, people actually have a little bit of activity, but they’re just all over the place from one to the other. We’ll see vascular changes, blood flow changes. They’re typically very sensitive to light or sound. For me, my only way to try to answer your question about vagus is I work with patients with dysautonomia and–
Ari: You do use and talk about vagus nerve stimulation as playing a role in brain.
Dr. Kharrazian: For me, I’m not as complex between dissecting ventral versus dorsal. I don’t know if in a real physical exam you can do that, but we can look at vagal function, nucleus, and mucous function, we can look at blood flow, we can listen to their gut, we can listen to their heart, we can listen for bowel sounds. We can look at their palate when they say ah, their palate moves and see if they have a normal gag reflex.
Then if we don’t, we can activate those centers by gargling or things like that. I talk about that in my book, but also the autonomic centers. I remember this one time I was like, I think I thought I learned autonomics wrong for the brain and I think it was updated. I spent three weeks [unintelligible 00:52:08] all these papers and I had to do a lecture an hour and a half on brain autonomics. I spent a long time reviewing everything I could find on it. I’m like, “Oh my God, it is so complex.” There isn’t one region of the brain that’s just autonomic function.
The vagal nuclei is the postsynaptic output. There’s the vagus and there’s all these things that are presynaptic to the vagus. All different areas in the limbic system, the nucleus accumbens, all the different areas in the temporal and parietal lobe that are involved with somatosensory integration and autonomics, they all end up branching here.
Even a vagal dysfunction could be caused by other areas. You can have someone that gets a parietal lobe injury from whatever, a sport, a car accident. Then from that point on, their heart rate’s never the same, they can’t digest food anymore, their bowel movements are off, their heart rate and anxiety all the time. Their vagus could be off ventral or dorsally, but it’s that presynaptic input to that region that may be a factor. I’m limited to brain injuries and vagal points of view from that perspective, but it is a role with many people, though, for sure.
Ari: Got it. We have a short amount of time left. I want to make sure we get into your top tips, like practical tips. You’ve mentioned and alluded to a number of practical tips already, but we’ve got, again, just to recap, we have blood sugar dysregulation, brain stimulation, exercise, sleep, and I’m forgetting the last one. What does that say about my brain function?
Dr. Kharrazian: The last one was just inflammation as a general.
Ari: There we go, inflammation. Exercise, I think we’ll leave alone, sleep we’ll leave alone. As far as maybe blood sugar dysregulation, I think mental stimulation you’ve already covered pretty well as well. Maybe blood sugar dysregulation, if you have a few tips on how people can avoid that, and then I want to get into inflammation and phytonutrients and some of the supplements that you perceive to– or supplements and or nutrition lifestyle changes that can combat the brain inflammation and some of these mechanisms that are going on that destroy brain cells.
Dr. Kharrazian: Right. With brain inflammation, blood sugar issues related to that question, there’s always a scale. For some people, all they need to do is stabilize their blood sugar, they’re hypoglycemic, they need to not skip meals and keep their blood sugar stable, and they need to avoid those drops where they lose function. That’s basic one-on-one.
Then you go to a deeper level and then you have people that are not pre-diabetic. For those, they have to get their insulin and blood sugar under control, whether it’s physical exercise and eating less carbohydrate-rich glycemic foods. That’s the basic. Then you get people that have brain inflammation and they’re doing everything right, whether it’s a traumatic brain injury or a neuronal autoimmunity. Now, there’s been a lot of good literature on in states of ketosis actually dampening microglial cells and helping MS. There’s two clinical trials with MS published where it shows it actually helps neuron branching.
We’re finding some patients, it’s not just getting their insulin down or getting the blood sugar down. They actually have to go into a state of ketosis to actually calm down their brain inflammation, get the blood sugar under control. That’s another level. There’s definitely people that have to go into that degree of dietary change to calm down their brain inflammation to control their blood sugar.
Ari: Real quick to that point, is that something that you perceive as like, “Hey, you need to be on a keto diet forever, permanently, indefinitely from that point on,” or is it something that’s more of a temporary solution?
Dr. Kharrazian: It depends. If someone has seizure activities, sometimes that’s the only way we can get their seizures under control. As soon as they deviate from ketogenic diet, it happens. We don’t have to– by theory, it’s obvious. Some people throughout the recovery of their brain injury, they have to do it.
For most people, they get into ketosis, they get tired of it. They take a break from it. They see how they function. Some people, they’re just like, “It’s not worth it,” and then need to stay on it. They’ll know when it’s their own right time where they can function without it. We just observe-
Ari: Got it.
Dr. Kharrazian: -and see how they function and go from there. There’s no general rule as far as how I do it. Then the next level up is, they have to do– the other key thing with blood sugar regulation, how it impacts brain is intermittent fasting. Even though that’s pretty popular, one of the interesting things about intermittent fasting is when you have those prime glial cells that stay on and turn to an inflammatory state and you have debris in the brain, you have to promote a physiological state called autophagy, where you get rid of debris and get rid of these prime glial cells. The only thing that’s really been shown to be effective doing that is intermittent fasting.
When it comes to blood sugar issues, there’s a spectrum, whether it’s just not missing meals or controlling your insulin or getting into ketosis or doing intermittent fasting, or for some people they’re intermittent fasting with ketosis, depending on how severe their blood sugar dysfunction is and how much it’s impacting their brain inflammation. It’s a scale. I don’t know if I answered your question, but that was [crosstalk]–
Ari: Absolutely. It’s also a distinction between prolonged fasting and the daily feeding and fasting window. My understanding is that if you have an adequate fasting window each night on a daily basis, that that in itself would likely take care of the autophagy and brains aspect of things.
Dr. Kharrazian: A common, most popular one, I think is the 18:6, 6-hour feeding window, 18-hour fasting. That has tremendous benefits for brain inflammation, helping with autophagy and so forth.
Ari: Got it. As you said, then there’s this other potential, especially if someone goes to such a narrow feeding window. Now you have potential for maybe hypoglycemic episodes if you’re not eating enough during the day. People who are maybe in poor metabolic health, especially if they try to go straight to a six-hour feeding window, they might experience hypoglycemia for a lot of the day and that’s going to be problematic as well. Do you perceive overall metabolic health and metabolic flexibility as being a big factor here as well?
Dr. Kharrazian: For sure. Actually, one of the things I do in my own practice is if I need to get a patient to a fasting state to deal with a brain injury or neurodegeneration to promote autophagy, for many of them, I’ll actually make sure they can get into ketosis first, and then once they get into ketosis, they get adapted to using ketones as an efficient energy source that might take them four to six weeks. Once they get adapted to being in a ketogenic state, they’ll just notice themselves fasting longer. Once they, the body can actually work in that state, they can function.
To take a hypoglycemic to intermittent fasting, it’s going to cause serious problems. Their brain function is going to go down dramatically.
Ari: Do it slowly. You wouldn’t tell somebody who’s sedentary, “Go run a marathon.” You’d say, “Go start with a five-minute walk and build up from there slowly.”
Dr. Kharrazian: They can do a 14-hour fast to 15 to 16 to 17, and as long as they’re not really losing function doing that.
Ari: Got it. Last question. What would be your top phytonutrients and supplements for optimizing brain function and decreasing brain inflammation and glial overactivation? I’m sure that in itself is something you could address for a few hours, but just to list off some of your top supplements and herbs and phytochemicals.
Dr. Kharrazian: My number one supplement is short-chain fatty acids. There is an explosion of research on short-chain fatty acids, which is like butyrate, propionate acetate, predominantly butyrate, which most people use for the gut, but there’s enormous amount of information showing that it calms down brain inflammation and turns down neuroinflammation. It’s really the gut-brain access, but there’s now been some clinical trials and studies with butyrate and MS and it’s mind-blowing.
Ari: We would normally produce large amounts of butyrate from bacteria in our gut, from some of the foods we eat from digestion of fibers, but especially maybe in people with dysbiosis, they may not be producing adequate butyrate. You’re talking about using butyrate as a supplement.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes. You can use butyrate– you can get your own butyrate levels up by eating a high-fiber meal or just taking fiber supplements, but you can also take exogenous butyrate. For people that have a lot of serious inflammation we’ll definitely want them to do both. Exogenous butyrate is a game changer for some people.
Myself, I take exogenous short-chain fatty acids every morning, just because once you read all the papers, you can’t like ignore it. That’s one of the main things that just blocks down brain inflammation, which is not a common one that people think about. My second favorite is actually vinpocetine, which is a botanical that increases endothelial nitric oxide and downregulates a cytokine-inducible nitric oxide. It helps get blood flow to the brain, but also dampens brain inflammation.
Vinpocetine is a game changer too for a lot of people, especially if they have cold hands, cold feet, poor circulation. I think those are the top two. Then, when you look at the rest, it’s going to be the typical list, fish oils, resveratrol, turmeric, cumin, pomegranate, polyphenols, that’s the typical list. Those are for sure all therapeutic.
Ari: Are there any particular phytochemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier especially well? I know you mentioned that.
Dr. Kharrazian: The most research is on turmeric and resveratrol that cross the blood-brain barrier.
Ari: Is there any form of turmeric that you prefer, like longvida or meriva or theracurmin or something like that?
Dr. Kharrazian: The only thing that I’ve seen, there’s no clear distinction between those that I’ve seen with the blood-brain barrier that make a big difference. I don’t have any preference. As far as oral, you get an orally absorbed first. There’s two papers now published that show liposomal liquid has four to eight times more absorption to use the liposomal liquid curcumin because powdered curcumin is very hard to absorb. It’s the only thing I could add to that.
Ari: Dr. Kharrazian, this has been phenomenal, brilliant as always. This is actually just– I just love talking to you and geeking out with you. I love being able to throw all kinds of questions at you and hear how you respond. So much amazing stuff here. I think these top five things are just critical. I think the mental stimulation aspect of things is a game changer even just for my own understanding. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with all of our listeners. If somebody is interested in following your work, where’s the best place to do that or reach out to work with you or wherever you want to send them?
Dr. Kharrazian: Sure. Drknews D-R-K-N-E-W-S.com. Dr. Knews is where we have all our articles and information.
Ari: Beautiful. Thank you so much, my friend. Great connecting with you as always.
Dr. Kharrazian: Yes, pleasure talking to you, as always.
Ari: Hey there, this is Ari again. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, if you found it valuable, please share it with your friends, share it with your family, help me get the word out there. Also, if you’re on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button and hit that little bell to get notifications every time we release a new video or new episode of the podcast. If you’re listening to this, make sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or on your favorite podcast app. Thanks so much for supporting my work at The Energy Blueprint. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will see you in the next–
Show Notes
00:00 Intro
00:50 – Guest Intro Dr. Datis Kharrazian
01:34 – Brain energy levels
03:39 – Is the brain central in CFS?
06:22 – The root causes of brain fatigue
09:05 – How nutrition and lifestyle play into brain fatigue
12:10 – Will nutraceuticals be enough to restore brain function?
17:30 – A self-assessment for brain fatigue
21:09 – The most common causes for brain related fatigue
Links
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