Today's Natural Cure: Feeding Your Brain

Original article at  mercola.com

Using Food as Medicine

Certain foods also raise serotonin, such as simple carbohydrates. This is another explanation for why you can become addicted to sugar, wheat, and pasta. According to Dr. Amen, carbohydrate foods such as sweet potato, brown rice, and oatmeal will also raise serotonin, but not in the same powerful way that will get you addicted, so clearly these are better options.

"A high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet is very good for impulsive people, because it helps them focus," Dr. Amen says. "But it's a disaster for our compulsive people, because they start to focus on the things that upset them."

Another dietary factor of great importance is probiotics, ideally in the form of traditionally fermented foods. According to Dr. Amen, as much as 95 percent of the serotonin in your body is produced in your gut, so strategies designed to optimize gut production of serotonin could certainly go a long way toward optimizing your mental health. I've become truly passionate about teaching people to massively increase the amount of fermented foods they're eating - specifically fermented vegetables, as these are some of the most palatable fermented foods for most people - to replenish the beneficial bacteria that produce serotonin.
Dr. Amen agrees:

"I've really been thinking a lot about gut health. Your gut is really the second brain. They're totally interconnected... If you have a leaky gut or an overgrowth of poor gut bacteria, you are not producing serotonin and the other neurotransmitters that you need to stay healthy.

In the last seven or eight years, my last couple of books have been about the connection between physical health and emotional health, and how people can use food as medicine.

If you look at the spices that have specific brain-optimization qualities –for example, saffron and your mood; cinnamon, it's a natural aphrodisiac that also helps to balance blood sugar and helps people focus; and oregano and rosemary that have been shown to boost blood flow to the brain – really what you eat is either helping your brain function better or it's hurting it."

How to Decelerate the Aging Process in Your Brain

Dr. Amen's book Use Your Brain to Change Your Age is based on his lectures over the last 15 years. In it, he discusses a study done with 8,000 people. What he found was that over time, the blood flow to your brain decreases.

"It's sort of like how your skin falls off your face as you age. The same process is happening in the brain. You can – with your behavior – accelerate the aging process, or you can decelerate it.

... We can actually prove you can improve your brain through the imaging work that we do. There's a whole chapter in the book about reclaiming your brain. Say you've been bad to your brain. You've been overweight. You've drank too much. You didn't exercise. You're one of our NFL players, and you've been hit in the head multiple times. If you adopt a brain-smart program... you can slow or even in many cases reverse the aging process in your brain."

He describes his brain-smart program as six words:

• Brain Envy:"You have to care about your brain, because it controls everything you do: how you think, feel, and act, and how you get along with other people," Dr. Amen says.
• Avoid Bad: "You need to avoid anything that hurts your brain – drugs obviously, brain injuries, obesity, but also sleep apnea. Anything that damages blood vessels damages the brain. Same for hypertension, cardiovascular disease, negative thinking, untreated depression, the standard American diet, and alcohol."
• Do Good: This includes optimizing your diet, getting physical and mental exercise, along with taking helpful supplements. It also includes learning to think in more positive ways.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Amen wrote a home study course for anxiety and depression. When they tested it on participants around the country, a significant percentage of them reported losing 20-30 pounds without trying.

"That got me very excited, because what I realized is with a better brain, you get a better body," he says. "Because ultimately, your health is driven by all of the decisions that you've made in your life, and those decisions come directly from the health of your brain."

More Information

You can learn more about the work at the Amen Clinics at www.amenclinics.com. The clinics performed brain SPECT imaging in the context of a full clinical evaluation. They also provide a wide variety of treatment options. The online community, The Amen Solution at Home was developed by Dr. Amen to be a sophisticated coaching program to help people optimize their brains and bodies.
It starts with a neuropsychological assessment tool, which, in about 35-minutes, will test your memory, reaction time, focus, level of stress, and mood. Based on how you score, it gives you personalized games to strengthen your weak areas. It also has brain healthy recipes, relaxation exercises, and teaches participants how to eliminate negative thinking patterns.

"It's one of the tools that our NFL players used," he says. "We're very excited, because as we saw their scores go up, the blood flow to their brain improved.

Working out your brain in a regular way is important... The important thing is to learn something that you don't know anything about. Because if I just kept learning about vitamin D, for example, that would be useful, but it's really not stretching my brain. So I learn about gardening, I learn about cooking, I learn a new language, I go to a new place, or learn a new way to move my body, which I think is incredibly important. But the orthodoxy in my profession is pretty rigid. And I'm saddened by it, because it needs to change. Now it became a mission for me."

While getting a SPECT scan can be expensive, it may save you tons of money in the long run. According to a recent study by Dr. Amen and his colleagues, getting a SPECT scan will change what your doctor does 79 percent of the time.

"He'll give you a different diagnosis or a different treatment plan based on what the scans add to the clinical evaluation," Dr. Amen explains.

"We have a new outcome study that we're publishing on 500 consecutive patients that came to the Amen Clinics who were complicated. After six months, 85 percent showed significant improvements in their quality of life. We are very excited about our work. And we have been teaching our colleagues about it for decades. We're not trying to be proprietary with it at all. There's a whole group in Vancouver that does it based on my work and a whole group in Toronto, Florida, Texas, and Chicago.

But it's horrifying what's happening overall in psychiatry. I would be very cautious about seeing a psychiatrist that is not gathering data on your brain before he or she puts you on multiple medications."

You can also pick up any of Dr. Amen's books, to learn more:

• Change Your Brain, Change Your Life
• Change Your Brain, Change Your Body
• Use Your Brain to Change Your Age
• Unleash the Power of the Female Brain is his latest book, which will be released in February 2013