The 3rd Horsemen: Is Sugar Killing Your Brain?

There are four horsemen of the mental health apocalypse. We’ve spoken about brain fats and B vitamins. The third, which I want to talk about now, is sugar. Because while the brain fats and the B vitamins build your brain, it’s the sugar that fuels your brain. Your brain cells can run on two fuels, primarily glucose. That’s sugar or ketones. Now the big problem is the more sugar you eat, the more refined white, sugary, sweet ultrapro foods you eat, the more your body has to produce insulin. Insulin is the hormone that carries the sugar into your brain cells and the excess is taken into the liver and turned into fat. Now, the more sugar you eat, the more DAF you become to the effects of insulin. You become resistant to insulin. And then you cannot get the glucose into your brain. And by the way, all that extra glucose goes straight into fat. So the consequence is you start to feel tired, you have brain fog, you can’t concentrate, you can’t maintain your attention. This is the attention deficit of A DHD. And to make matters worse, you crave more sugar. ’cause your brain says, give me energy. I need energy. And meanwhile, all that sugar is turning into fat. So you get fatter, your brain gets tired, you crave sugar, which is what caused the problem in the first place. And that is why if you’re diabetic, you have double the risk of dementia, but you don’t need to wait for diabetes. Get in there quick. We already know in children with sugar problems, age 14 to 16, we see the same areas of the brain shrinking that we see in Alzheimer’s. We see the same cognitive deficits. The youngest age of a non-genetic Alzheimer’s diagnosis is age 19. By middle life, if your glucose is in the normal range, but high end of, you’ve increased your risk of Alzheimer’s by 15%. So how do you know if you’re eating too many carbs? How do you know if your glucose control is good enough? And the answer is the very task that your doctor will use to diagnose diabetes. It’s called hba one C or hemoglobin A1C. And it measures the percentage of your red blood cells that are sugar damaged. If it’s above 6.5%, you’ll be diagnosed with diabetes. 6% is pre-diabetes. But we already see brain shrinkage above 5.4%. So ask your body. You want to get your HB one C down to 5%, and that means eating whole foods that are naturally rich in fiber, which slows down the release of sugars. Have you ever eaten three oranges? Probably not. Have you ever drunk glass of orange juice? Of course, that’s three oranges worth of sugar. But without the fiber, nature never gives you sugar without the fiber. So eating whole foods and beans and nuts and seeds and unrefined the brown stuff, not the white stuff. And eating less carbs generally is fantastic. But I mentioned that there are two sources of fuel for the brain. One is glucose, the other are ketones. Now ketones are made from fat in your body, in your liver. So for example, if you fast and you have no glucose intake, do you die? No, you don’t. What happens is the liver makes ketones and your brain cells actually love ketones. And that is why you hear a lot now about ketogenic diets or fasting or intermittent fasting. Some people, for example, do what we call 18 six. They have dinner, for example, at six o’clock and, uh, brunch the next day at noon. So they have 18 hours without eating any carbohydrates. And when you don’t eat carbohydrates, your body starts to make ketones and your brain can run well on ketones. So, uh, one of our experts, uh, professor Steven Kna at Sherbrooke University in Canada, he’s done some fantastic experiments in people who have pre dementia, have that brain fog and that forgetfulness to fill the energy gap. The way he’s done this is there’s a certain type of fat, it’s called a medium chain triglyceride. And actually it’s the length of carbons. And there’s one particular ad called C eight eight carbons long. It’s found in coconut oil, but only 7% of coconut oil is C eight. So now what you can find in health food stores is C eight oil. And he gave people with pre dementia two tablespoons of this oil, which the liver turns into ketones, which then powers the brain starved of sugar because of insulin resistance. And he was able to watch in real time different areas of the brain light up and reenergize. And in fact, the people in the study produced 230% more energy from this food supply of ketones. So this was a quick fix to fill the energy gap and bring the brain back to life. So that’s the third horseman of the mental health apocalypse. Reduce your carbs, reduce sugar, eat real foods, whole foods, not refined ultrapro foods. And if you are filling an energy gap, and if you do have sugar problems, consider having some of this MCT oil or C eight oil, two tablespoons a day. You can add it into your coffee, you can have it on its own. It’s very simple. And that’s the way to eliminate the third horseman of the mental health apocalypse, and you’ll lose some weight in the process.