0:00 if there was one food that can fix your brain what would that food be go ahead and put it in the comment section below now there are a lot of foods that can support the brain but out of those foods there are certain foods that are much better than others based on the nutrients in those foods so today i'm going to talk about the key nutrients that support your brain and then what foods would match that more than others now when i'm talking about the brain i want to mainly focus on cognitive improvements okay i'd like to emphasize improving attention your perception your memory your ability to learn reason plan problem solve make decisions and multitask there's a huge connection between
0:45 what you eat and how your brain operates and i think that even more than nutrients the fuel that you run your brain off is probably the most important thing is your brain running off primarily glucose or ketones we'll talk more about that there is a huge liability running your brain off primarily glucose and there's virtually no liabilities when you run your body off ketones in fact your brain will respond much better when you feed it ketones now the first nutrient i want to talk about is b1 thymine now what does it do well in relationship to the brain it's essential to act as a co-enzyme in the production
1:31 of energy and i'm talking about atp in your mitochondria which is the energy factory of your entire body but as far as your brain goes b1 is very very very important in fact without b1 your neurons your nerve cells that make up your brain cannot receive glucose in fact if you look at someone with dementia or alzheimer's what's really going on is their nerve cells are starving to death okay and so even if you're on the ketogenic diet a certain portion of your brain will still need glucose but that glucose can be made by your own body through a process called gluconeogenesis so you really don't need any additional glucose to feed your brain but you definitely
2:17 need b1 to be able to utilize that glucose or those cells will die so out of all the nutrients that your brain needs uh b1 is right up there at the very top if you want to look up more data on this i put some videos down below but you just need to look up something called barry berry and you'll you'll get the whole picture of what happens but if you're deficient in b1 related to the brain because there's a lot of other connecting problems that can occur your memory is going to suffer your ability to focus and have a tension on certain things will be very limited you'll feel agitated you'll be irritated depression is a very common symptom of the b1 deficiency so if you have depression i would highly recommend
3:03 taking b1 and i would also add in vitamin d3 those two together will most likely pull you out of that depression another symptom would be something called lactic acidosis because you're not able to metabolize glucose you get a lot of buildup of lactic acid and that can show up in restless leg syndrome and another interesting symptom of b1 deficiency is autonomic nervous system dysfunction so let's say for example you stand up and you get dizzy or you have a condition called pots where it's a very severe situation where you can't stand up or else you feel very very disoriented so v1 is essential for getting the fuel to your brain now there's also something called brain derived neurotrophic
3:50 factor and that is like miracle grow for your brain it allows the neurogenesis or the formation of new nerve cells and there's three things you can do to increase this compound and two of them go beyond just nutrition so one is vitamin d3 vitamin d3 is so so important for your brain and you primarily need to get that from sun you can also get it from fatty fish next salmon you can get it from cod liver oil and i even did a video on how to make your own vitamin d supplements using mushrooms sun dried i'll put that link down below but vitamin d is essential in helping you generate new nerve cells exercise is another really big factor because it supplies a lot of blood flow
4:36 to the brain and then of course you have fasting fasting hands down is probably one of the best ways to trigger this compound and it does a lot of wonderful things for the brain and i did a whole video on that i will put that video down below as well and then we have zinc i mean zinc is the most important trace mineral it's involved in more enzyme pathways than all of the other trace minerals combined but as far as the brain goes it's vitally important and where do you get zinc well zinc isn't red meat it's in fish like salmon it's in shellfish it's in sea kelp and it's in a lot of other foods but the primary reason why people are not getting enough zinc is not from the diet it's because they're eating something that's depleting zinc it's
5:22 usually cereals or grain products that are loaded with phytic acid and of course sugar and alcohol and other things will deplete your zinc all right the next nutrient that's really really important would be something called dha that is a type of omega-3 fatty acid and where do you think you find that fatty fish like salmon as you see i keep coming back to salmon which is a common thread through this video but dha is vitally important in supporting the membranes around the neurons and these membranes are made from fat primarily dha and so we need a lot of this unique fat to support the brain and of course on the flip side of that we don't need a lot of omega-6 fatty
6:07 acids to support the brain so the more omega-6 fatty acids you have as in corn oil soy oil canola cottonseed oil the less omega-3 fatty acids you're going to get and so i think a really big problem with a lot of people is they do not consume enough omega-3 fatty acids so salmon halibut tuna condiment oil sardines vital now the other big connection to someone's cognitive improvement has to do with their gut so i can't really talk about improving cognitive function without talking about your gut because there's a huge connection between your gut and your brain in fact a lot of the microorganisms in your gut make neurotransmitters and they also make b
6:54 vitamins okay as in vitamin b1 and the other b vitamins that are essential for cognitive function so when we're talking about gut health i'm talking about fermented foods okay sauerkraut would be one of them but there's also kefir and kimchi and and fermented vegetables and there's a lot of other fermented foods and from different cultures and of course the microbes also live off the fiber that's usually in these fermented foods so there are a lot of nutrients that support the brain but the most important one would be b1 okay and then you have d3 you have zinc and omega-3 fatty acids okay now to reverse engineer this we just need to know what foods are high in b1 okay or
7:41 what food is high in b1 vitamin d3 omega 3 fatty acids and zinc okay so the number one food that i think is best for improving your cognitive function is salmon because it's loaded with b1 it has vitamin d3 it has zinc it has omega-3 fatty acids and a lot of other nutrients that are good for the brain that i didn't mention but again i'm not talking about just having salmon you have to have a lot of different foods and you can get these nutrients from other foods but someone tends to have some really key nutrients to support your brain and of course i'm talking about wild caught salmon okay i'm not talking about farm-raised salmon and uh i highly
8:27 recommend consuming the skin on the salmon okay so you can you can bake it bake the skin and it's actually quite delicious now getting back to b1 there's some other key foods that are very important to supply b1 one would be nutritional yeast you can put on your salad you can cook with it you can just take it as a supplement but nutritional yeast not only has b1 but it has pretty much all the b vitamins now the reason i like nutritional yeast is because it is a natural source unless you're getting the fortified nutritional use which i don't recommend you need the unfortified nutritional yeast and if you want a good source for that i put that link down below then we get sunflower seeds they also have b1
9:14 now out of all the meats and in meats including beef and chicken have b1 but out of all the meats pork is at the top of the list now i'm not telling you to consume pork i'm just telling you that pork has more b1 than other meats now we talked about the nutrients for the brain now let's talk about the things that deplete nutrients in the brain specifically the one because it's not just a matter of getting b1 from the diet it's a matter of making sure that you don't deplete your b1 which is probably more the situation that people run into so i'm going to list off these items that will deplete b1 which affects your cognitive function number one alcohol especially if you're an alcoholic you're going to be very deficient in b1 and
10:00 that's going to affect your cognitive function all right number two is sugar okay refined sugar refined carbohydrate okay which is a common problem uh t because of the tannic acid blocks b1 from being absorbed so if you're a tea drinker you better make sure you're taking b1 um caffeine okay caffeine will definitely deplete b1 so if you're a coffee drinker and you drink a lot of coffee you might think it's enhancing your cognitive function well it may for about an hour but if you drink a lot of it you'll find your cognitive function decrease over time also your ability to your attention will decrease and your ability to learn if you're consuming too many things with
10:47 caffeine too much caffeine actually lessens the blood flow to your brain and then we get to the topic of stress okay stress really can do a number on your brain you can uh increase glucose which will affect the brain and it also just basically destroys the brain if someone's under chronic stress boy does that affect your cognitive function big time but having enough b1 will protect you against this extra stress so a high carb diet that turns into glucose that feeds your brain cells at least temporarily needs a lot of b1 and it depletes b1 so when you run out of b1 now you can't use that fuel and the nerves starve why because you don't have enough b1
11:32 to metabolize the glucose all right antibiotics can deplete b1 certain medications will deplete b1 like metformin diuretics and consuming chocolate okay so if you consume a lot of chocolate and i'm talking about the ketogenic version of chocolate you could end up with a b1 deficiency there's a really good paper that i was i read on this topic i'll share it down below but it talked about starving your brain by over feeding it okay too many carbohydrates it's very counterintuitive but that's what's happening versus fasting okay so if you think fasting is starving it's not in fact your brain loves fasting once you adapt to the
12:18 ketogenic diet your body starts to turn your fat into ketones and your brain loves it so the most important thing you can do for your brain is to switch to a healthy ketogenic diet with periodic fasting called intermittent fasting that's the most important thing the second most important thing is to consume foods high in b1 okay we've talked about that but parallel with that you want to avoid the things that will deplete b1 now i just got a picture of like a typical college student right he's not getting enough sleep he's using your brain a lot he's probably eating a lot of carbohydrates like donuts in the morning with their coffee maybe a cigarette and
13:04 maybe at night some alcohol going through a massive amount of stress talk about creating a b1 deficiency that would do it in fact that was my story and that's what this video is about my history of how i ended up with a very severe b1 deficiency so i have a lot of experience to tell you some of these side effects now i think the next best video to watch would be the one on doing fasting for your brain check it out i put it up right here
