Cholesterol & Mental Performance - 013

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. We all know that high cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease, but what effect does high estrol have on mental performance? The answer may surprise you. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of three ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person body, mind, and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B On the program today, we have Dr. John Clark and Jenifer Skues, health psychologists. Welcome to the program. We're looking forward to what you have to say about this intriguing subject. So high cholesterol just isn't a problem for our heart. It's also affecting our mental performance. Would you like to just fill us in on that a bit? SPEAKER C You know, when we have high cholesterol, our blood gets thicker. When our blood gets thicker, it's harder to pump around our body. When it's thicker with cholesterol, it has less of an oxygen carrying capacity. And so your brain suffers for lower oxygen. SPEAKER B That's the pathway. SPEAKER C So we had an interesting gentleman that came to us for help. He was a nestetist, somebody who works in a hospital and puts people to sleep for surgery. He had just finished his schooling. He was way in debt, and he needed to pass his exam for certification. Before he could start work, he went and took the test for the first time and failed. He was worried. He was stressed out. He studied very hard for six weeks and took the test again. Again, he failed. And that's when he thought, well, I better talk to Dr. Clark and see if there isn't something I need to do to improve my mental performance. Well, this was a difficult thing. He's on the line. If he doesn't pass the test the next time, he can't take the test for a long time. He can't work, and yet his debts will be coming due more stress. Well, so I sat down with him, and first I took a history on what he was eating. Some of the things that he was eating included foods that would make his cholesterol go high. I also looked at what he was doing in his lifestyle, how much water he was drinking, how much rest he was getting when he was going to bed, definitely what other foods he was eating. And we looked at his type of exercise. Then we set him up with a program that was designed to help his mental performance, particularly eating foods that would be designed to keep his cholesterol low, foods that would feed the brain like walnuts, different foods like beans that feed the brain like lima beans. We gave him a lot of good foods that would keep his inflammation down in his body so he wouldn't have high inflammation. And then we looked at how much water he was drinking. We improved his water intake. So he was drinking three liters of water per day. We also had him doing exercise that would boost the neurotropic factors to help his brain learn and grow, and we'll talk about more things that we did for him. But in the course of time, he took his test again. Now he had his entire church praying for him because this was D Day. You missed this one. He's got a wife and two kids, and none of them worked and had any income. He was living with friends, and so he needed to get his income started. Well, he went to take his test for this third time. He actually called some of his classmates and told them, the Lord's going to help me do it. This time I'm going to pass. Well, he went to go take his test, and it was a computerized test, and you take about 100 questions of the test, and if you're missing a lot of them, it'll keep throwing more questions at you. If you're getting them right, it'll stop at 100. Well, it stopped at 100. And he went to look and see what his score was, and they gave him a score right away. He had made 100% on his test. SPEAKER B Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. So you took a multifaceted approach to that. There was the diet and the very particular diet for his needs, and then the exercise and the water and prayer. So he had a lot of things going for him. Because when I think of the mental, physical, spiritual, social, you've mentioned three of those areas where he was getting specific and significant help in that period of time. The foods, the water, the exercise in the physical part, and then the spiritual part. So that was fantastic. And I'm sure he was very relieved. And I talk about the stress. Jenny, this is very much in your department, isn't it? SPEAKER A As you're talking, I'm thinking, well, he must have been incredibly stressed. And I know stress reduces your capacity for mental performance, but at the same time, that last test would have been probably the most stressful, because if he didn't get it this time, he was out. Three strikes and you're out. So it wasn't just stress that was a problem. It had to be when you look at the cholesterol factor, had to be a big player for him in that. SPEAKER C Definitely. And when people eat good food, they're more able to handle stress. They're less likely to overreact to stress. And when they're exercising so that they're physiologically in good shape, their body physiology doesn't respond so dramatically to stress. The heart rate doesn't go so high, for example. Their breathing doesn't get so erratic. SPEAKER A It buffers the stress, which is wonderful, because, see, the thing is with the cholesterol and the oxygen factor would have been a problem and the brain can grow and change. And his brain wasn't because it couldn't. It was just sort of stuck in neutral, I guess you could say. SPEAKER C That's right. People with their diets make it so that their brain gets stuck where it is and they can't learn, they can't grow, they can't develop, they don't handle, don't come up with new ways of dealing with stress. SPEAKER A That's right. And that's where I find when I'm working with people, if they have that problem, I can't help them. It doesn't matter what I do, they're not going to change. And this is another reason I went into looking at the mind body connection and treating the whole system, because I found just trying to treat the stress factor wasn't enough. And people got more stressed because they're going, but I'm doing all these things, it's not making any difference or I can't do it because I'm still stressed. So we can see how important that holistic approach is. SPEAKER B So what you're saying is by shifting the focus to the physical things that they could do as well, it took their mind off and the diet they were focusing on the thing that was. SPEAKER A Really and looking at brain food and the nutrients in the brain is very important. Yes. And getting that whole thing going again, because I can't help a starving brain make a change, or a brain that is clogged to make a change. And that's sort of some of what we've been talking about here. Because the brain can't grow. SPEAKER B No, that's terrific that you're able to come at it from both of those angles all in the one session. SPEAKER A You definitely get better results when you get the person to make changes all round and not just do one thing. And that's what you were doing. So, again, this is something we all need to be aware of. It's a holistic program and we need to treat every part of our system. SPEAKER B That's right. Mental, physical, spiritual and social. John, you were talking about exercise. How much actually did you recommend that he would do in this instance? SPEAKER C Now, this is a gentleman that of course is fairly young, in his early 30s. He has no expectations that he's going to have a heart attack immediately. And one of the things you want to do if you want the brain to particularly be able to learn new things, is to have what we call BDNF brain derived neurotropic factor. And in order to get that to increase in the bloodstream, you need some fairly vigorous aerobic exercise. And so we sent him he actually lived on a hill, so I told him, jog to the bottom of the hill and back at least once, if not twice a day. SPEAKER B We also had that wasn't Everest or anything like that, was it? How far would that have been, roughly? SPEAKER C I'm guessing that the elevation change over the top of his hill to the bottom of the hill would be about 100 to 120 meters. SPEAKER B All right. SPEAKER A It's a good run up and down a hill. SPEAKER C Yes. And so the vigorous exercise of running down and up would be enough to boost the BDNF, so that was part of it. And then also, I had him on a program of studying. I did spend some time with him going over study techniques and what to focus on for his tests and so forth, which really is irrelevant to health. But in between times when he's doing his studying, I told him, never study for more than 30 minutes without taking a break and at least a walk. And where he lived, I said, well, you could walk down to that shed and over to that trailer and then back again. So never sit there for more than 30 minutes. It's interesting. When I was in college, I got a job as a night watchman, and I had several circuits I should walk in order to complete my job. And so I looked over the campus that I was on that was supposed to cover all these buildings, and I divided them up, and I laid out my program. So 20 minutes I'd be walking, and then I'd stop, and I'd study for 20 minutes, and then 20 minutes I'd be walking. And my brain was always fresh to study. SPEAKER B Okay, this 30 minutes, what's the reason for cutting off at 30 minutes of studying? SPEAKER C Your attention span isn't hardly longer than 20 minutes, and your mental performance starts dropping at about 20 minutes, and it's definitely dropped pretty low at 30 minutes if you don't take a change of activity. And you're much better off taking a break than just trying to keep going. And so this is very important for picking back up the brain mental performance in between times. SPEAKER B Yeah. So that was the aerobic part of his exercise. Was he doing more than that, that run down the hill and back? SPEAKER C Well, he would then walk every 30 minutes so that he never got tired. The run was not every time he got no, it wasn't every 20 minutes. He'd be a marathoner. SPEAKER A All right. SPEAKER B I'm sorry. You did say that. So every 30 minutes, he was to do some kind of yes. SPEAKER C Some kind of exercise that would have. SPEAKER B Added up to a fair amount during the day. SPEAKER C That's correct. Yes. And he was very diligent about following his program. SPEAKER A Good on him. See, the BDNF factor is huge because it's about growing the brain. And BDNF is it's called fertilizer for the brain. I know that's a good term to put it's like fertilizer grows the brain. And what it does we have trillions of neurons, trillions and trillions of them in the brain, and they make up pathways where we put information along those pathways. And the more we act on a pathway, the bigger that information. Pathway gets and I actually call them, they become freeways. Now, if you've got an unhealthy one, it's not good, and we want a healthy one. But the BDNF factor grows the memory to help create the pathways, and it stimulates neuronal growth. So that means it helps the cells to grow and multiply, and it also helps the cells or the neurons to connect. It's called synapses, and the synapses that connect to make the pathways. So if you're going to put in and recall information, you need good pathways and a good memory bank to be able to put the new ones in. And that's exactly what this man was doing. He was growing his brain. But in doing that, there's a part of the brain, it's like a storehouse for memory, and it's called the hippocampus, and it's just below the or at the bottom of the brain area. And there's two areas we store memory. One is called the amygdala, which is our emotional memory, and the other is the hippocampus. And they're right next to one another. And what they do is they can change size, they can grow. SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER A To the point where they found that sometimes there are people who have Alzheimer's who don't lose their memory as such. And when they've done an autopsy, they found they had a very big hippocampus and they had been highly active in their life, like this man had, and they had actually grown the hippocampus to the point where when the Alzheimer's set in, they had so many memory cells ready to use that they didn't lose them all. SPEAKER B Isn't that interesting? SPEAKER A It's a very powerful thing. So we all want to grow the brain, and this is exactly what we do. SPEAKER B Yes. Do you think there's enough room in there? SPEAKER A You're going to get a big head. SPEAKER B But that's fantastic because they didn't always think that that could happen. It's not that long ago, is it? No. SPEAKER A They used to think that the brain, once we were born, the brain had all these cells, trillions of cells, and as we got older, they'd die and we'd lose brain capacity. But that's not true. We can grow the brain. SPEAKER B Wonderful. Wonderful to think that we can actually do that. SPEAKER C And yes, this is an important thing to remember because I had one family bring to me, the husband and father, and he was getting Alzheimer's. I mean, he didn't believe he was getting Alzheimer's. They don't. But his wife and his kids are like, yeah, he forgets, he changes. He's got this going on and that. And so again, I sat down with him, took a history of what he was eating, and it was a lot of high cholesterol foods, foods with cholesterol and foods that would drive up his cholesterol. SPEAKER A Right. SPEAKER C And we did a similar thing where we took him off all of those things, especially free oils, which decreased the amount of oxygen on the brain. And again, we put him on the walnuts and flax and coconut and brain foods. But the added thing we had for him we had him doing some hydrotherapy on his head, but we also had him exercising the mental part of his brain. We had him work on memorizing and the best thing he could memorize was Bible passages. And so I'd have him pick his Bible passages and memorize them every work on it, every day. And then the other thing that really helps the brain is exercising it in studying, in comparing similar things. We call it the associations. And so we had him studying the Bible where he would look at one passage and compare it with another. For example, maybe he would go to where Jesus says come unto me all ye that labor and I will give you rest. Okay, rest. Well, he's then supposed to associate with other things in the Bible where it talks about rest. Oh, and then there's the Sabbath day, that is for rest. And then there's Hebrews where it says there's a rest that remains to people of God. And then, well then there's the opposite. In Revelation it says the wicked have no rest. Anyway, the idea is to keep comparing different similar thoughts throughout the Bible so he could increase the mental performance. Well, I was giving a talk on Alzheimer's a couple of years later and I thought, I wonder what happened to that guy. I got to call him before my. SPEAKER A Talk so I know have a living example basically. SPEAKER C Hopefully he's done some as an example and sure enough, his wife said, you know, when he's on that program he's back to normal. He has no deficits, but if he goes down to the fast food joint and eats some kind of cholesterol containing food, he's in trouble really. SPEAKER B So in other words, he could come back to normal and then switch backwards and forwards. SPEAKER C Are you saying that yes, to a certain degree. SPEAKER B Oh goodness me. SPEAKER A It is a use it or lose it principle with the brain, if we don't use the brain, the cells start to die and drop out. We lose those pathways. The interesting thing is we never totally lose a pathway or put us a belief or an attitude or a memory. It's actually housed in the outer area of the brain, around the outer core of the brain and they are like dormant memories. So for someone, for example, who has a habit that they wanted to change might be reading or what we do or it might be people who smoke or drink or whatever and they stop. They can find further down the track. They absent mindedly do it because that habit is still there. But if you feed it, it will grow. But if you go, well hang on, I don't do that anymore, you'll find that it will start to dissipate and the cells are actually dropping out and that memory goes into that dormant space. But it can be activated. So he would have had lots of memories there, and what he's doing is activating them instead of letting them dissipate. Yes. SPEAKER B Now, John, what about the medications that control cholesterol? Would that give people a good mental performance if they controlled their cholesterol that way? SPEAKER C You'd think so, wouldn't you? You get the cholesterol down. We know that cholesterol, as we've discussed here, causes mental performance issues, but in reality, they've discovered that the cholesterol pills actually decrease mental performance. So I often ask the question, well, if you had high cholesterol and your brain function was suffering, would you know any difference if you started taking a pill that also caused brain function problems, and even though it lowered your cholesterol? I have a friend who had high cholesterol. She decided, I've struggled with this all my life. I think I should go ahead and go on the medication, because the studies show that if your cholesterol is high, you've got problems. It's better if it's low. So they started taking that medication, and one day we went driving down the freeway, and all of a sudden, they realized they'd missed their exit two exits back. And then we went driving up another way, and they totally forgot where they were. And this wasn't like them. And I'm like, what's going on? Well, they're taking this statin drug that lowers cholesterol, but these statin drugs are not without their side effects. So you think you're doing yourself a great deal of good, but in reality, they also lower your immune system. We talked about the immune system in another program. They depress your immune system so much that they have been used in transplanting organs as immunosuppressor to good effect. SPEAKER B Oh, my goodness. SPEAKER A That's powerful. SPEAKER B And we're not told that. I mean, people take things trustingly, don't they, and don't realize all of that. I know they do print out big sheets of side effects, but that's really bad. Just going back to your first story, tell us a bit more about why you selected some of the foods that you did for that young man who needed to pass his exam. SPEAKER C Yes, one of the things we wanted to do is make sure his brain had good oxygenation, which means good blood flow. So, like, for breakfast, we'd have him eating lots of good fresh fruit, particularly things like pineapple and grapefruit, both of which improved blood flow. We would also make sure he was getting the essential fatty acids, both omega three and some of the others. And that's why we gave him, like, walnuts. We had him eating certain things like flax, and then there are certain foods that boost neurotransmitters and so beans, such as lima beans and soybeans, which improve certain things like serotonin and dopamine and things like that. And so we made sure that his food was such as would feed his brain and it wouldn't clog his brain. And then another factor here is we made sure he stayed on schedule. This is a huge thing we haven't really gotten into, but people who eat at the same time every day, like if they're going to eat breakfast at seven, they always eat at seven come weekend or weekday. They have lower cholesterols, they have better digestion, they eat less food, they have less diabetes. There's a lot of important things for the brain about staying on schedule. Your brain runs on a schedule? Your brain has circadian rhythms. SPEAKER A Well, it's hard for people to stay on schedule. And I find when I'm working with people and I try and get them to do a schedule, they really struggle. And it's hard for them to stay on track unless they're a very disciplined person. So that's something that is a real challenge for most people, too. And by eating on schedule, what times are we talking about here to get someone to religiously do this? SPEAKER C Basically, I tell people to figure out in their schedule what are the Immovable appointments, and then establish a schedule for their eating around that that they can keep seven days a week. It doesn't matter. There's certain optimal times, but that doesn't necessarily mean everybody can do it. But if your breakfast is 830, always at 830 come weekend or weekday, same is true of going to bed and getting up. We had him established on a very strict schedule always go to bed. And for people wanting their brain to function better, getting hours before midnight are extremely important for your melatonin. SPEAKER A Absolutely. SPEAKER C And the melatonin is its own. Well, it's your body's anti inflammatory hormone. SPEAKER A It also sets that clock for them to get a good sleep and to let the whole body clock do the right cycle. I know that with people I work with insomnia. If they don't do that, the melatonin cycle is going to malfunction and then they'll have insomnia. SPEAKER C And insomnia will definitely knock out your mental performance the next day. SPEAKER B Yes, it's a whole range of things, isn't it? SPEAKER C Another thing we were doing in his program was having him drink lots of water. And people don't realize when they're behind on water that by the time you are thirsty, you're already 30% down. And now you think about a jug of water or a tank of water. When the water starts to decrease in the tank, where does the water go down? The level drops. Well, where's the top of your water level? In your body, your brain. So people who are dehydrated, their brains shrink and their mental performance suffers. SPEAKER A It does. SPEAKER C And they end up not being able to think. And so a well hydrated brain is key to keeping the neural functions going. Also, it's true that when you drink plenty of water and you're not dehydrated, you can raise your blood volume by 6%, and therefore you're diluting out things in your bloodstream by 6%, including cholesterol. So you have a relative drop in cholesterol due to being well hydrated. SPEAKER B Yes. John, what are the foods that contain cholesterol? Because obviously, if we're trying to eliminate cholesterol, we need to be very clear the source of cholesterol in foods. SPEAKER C And we're going to do a whole topic here on cholesterol and lowering it. But you might be surprised to find out that it's not just the foods you eat with cholesterol which are a problem. It takes a liver to make cholesterol. So if your food had a liver or a mother or whatever, then you know it has cholesterol. A chicken has cholesterol, an avocado doesn't have a mother, doesn't have a liver, so it doesn't have cholesterol. But it's also true that anything you eat that's high in fat, whether it has cholesterol or not, will raise your cholesterol. Also, any animal protein, even people working out in the gym trying to get extra protein by drinking these high protein shakes that are largely some part of the milk protein, like casein or whey, the milk protein, even in the absence of fat or cholesterol, will tell your liver to produce more cholesterol. And you'll have a high cholesterol. And so any animal protein, be it white meat, be it red meat, whatever, will raise your cholesterol, even if they've done something to lower the actual cholesterol content of that meat, being told seafood. SPEAKER A Is high in cholesterol, your crustrations. And that's a very popular food for a lot of people. Prawns and crayfish. SPEAKER C True. SPEAKER A Yeah. So this is where people have to make massive changes if they really want to watch their cholesterol levels and improve on that. SPEAKER B Yes. So the plant foods comes back to plant foods again, doesn't it? Whole plant foods are the ones to aim at. SPEAKER C And when you eat cholesterol, unlike when your liver makes cholesterol, it's very hard to keep that cholesterol that's coming through your mouth from coming in contact with air and getting oxidized. Yes, oxidized cholesterol then increases brain inflammation. And when the brain is inflamed, you end up with more functional deficits, and especially with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and all the. SPEAKER A Other neuro major contributor to mental illness. With depression, anxiety disorders, it's all brain inflammation. And again, there's that problem with medication because some of these medications, like your antidepressants can inflame the brain, which is really counteracting what the brain needs to deal with the depression. It's the same sort of principle. SPEAKER C So another thing we had him doing is we had him breaking his day up, and we might talk a little more about that. People who get into a rut and spend a lot of time on one thing become less and less efficient, then they start thinking, I'm not very good at this, and then they start getting depressed. SPEAKER A That's right. That's when they come and see me. Then we have to look at what is depression and when it's something to do with what they're eating and their lifestyle. If that doesn't change, the medication does not do the job so they have to change what you're talking about. SPEAKER C Yeah. Then it might be so simple as they need to take a break more often. SPEAKER B Yes, that's a tremendously simple thing to do. And it's refreshing, isn't it? It's refreshing to take a break. Although for some people I know it's not. They like to just stay at things something endlessly. And that's just a personality thing. Well, thank you so much, both of you, for your input today. And that's our program for today. If you'd like a fact sheet of the program or you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just visit our website, 3abnaustralia.org.au and click the watch button. And John and Jenifer are happy to answer your questions personally. Just email them at [email protected] Join us next time on Healthy living.