Meat & Intelligence - 002

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, 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. Is it possible to boost your intelligence? And can certain foods actually make us smarter? Are stay tuned for some compelling insights. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of Three Airbn 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 With us in the studio today, we have Jenifer Skues, the health psychologist, and Dr. John Clark. Welcome, Jenifer. And welcome, John. Lovely to have you with us today for this subject. It's an interesting one. SPEAKER C Oh, it sure is. SPEAKER B Meat and intelligence. There must be some kind of a connection going on here. Would you like to tell us about that, John? SPEAKER C And maybe people are wondering, well, which meat can I eat to be smarter? SPEAKER A I'd like to know that. SPEAKER C I've often thought about this. Some of the people building their bodies will try to eat the muscles off of a cow. Well, what would you eat in order to have a brighter brain? Brain of a monkey. I mean, it's like we're supposed to be the highest intelligence. So what else would you eat? SPEAKER A You run out of food. SPEAKER C Now, I had a lady came to a seminar I was doing. She was interested in health, but she didn't really stay awake during all the meetings. And at one point, I was giving a talk on the brain and the health of the brain that had to do with Daniel's diet in the Bible. Now, in the Bible, there's this gentleman by the name of Daniel who ends up eating a very good diet, and his academics excel. He becomes, according to the tests, ten times wiser than all the other wise people in Babylon. SPEAKER A Wow. SPEAKER C And you might be interested to see what he wrote, because he wrote things that are still showing what's happening today in our political scene in the book of Daniel and the Bible. But during this presentation, I shared with them that there were certain things that would affect your brain, and so you wouldn't be able to think well, and as I was talking about that, I was talking about oxygen on the brain. And she, in her mind, said, somebody with low oxygen on the brain, that's me. SPEAKER A She identified. SPEAKER C She identified with that. SPEAKER B So she was obviously awake at this point to be able to hear that your attention. SPEAKER C She got the message, and so she decided, I'm going to go on Daniel's diet. SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER C She didn't tell me this, and it was an area where I lived, so I was around, and six weeks later, she came up to me and she says, oh, Dr. Clark. And I said, oh, hi. How can I help you? And she says, Well, I'm not here to try to get some help from you. I just want to tell you what's been going on. I said, well, tell me what's been going on. And she said, Well, I've had this issue where I fall asleep during meetings. SPEAKER B And not very I hadn't noticed. SPEAKER A It's a common phenomenon when you run groups. SPEAKER C It sure is. And she said, I decided six weeks ago to follow Daniel's diet and in six weeks I've lost 30 pounds. And as much as that's great, and I want to continue that. That isn't the real reason why I did it. She said, the real reason I did it was so I would stay awake. She says, thank you for giving me back my brain. Now, when you guys are up front talking, I'm wide awake and I learn and I get something out of it. SPEAKER B Oh, that's really fantastic. So why do you think maybe before I ask you that, why you think what she did helped her? Maybe we'll just ask Jenny. Jenny, can there be other things that give us brain fog? Other besides diet? SPEAKER A There are a lot of things that can interfere with the functioning of the brain. Certainly there's a lot of foods, you'd know, sugar, which we've sort of talked a bit about, is one, oils is another one. But when it comes to stress and trauma, that can certainly interfere with brain function and actually impair our intelligence. And that particularly people who've had a lot of trauma at a very young age. And that's even pre to even conception, to birth up to two years of age. It can really inhibit the ability for the brain to function. And another one, particularly for children, is if a child is told by a teacher or an adult that they don't have a brain in their head, they're stupid. They won't amount to much. They take it literally, they will stop using their intelligence. All right? SPEAKER B So there's that impact on the brain. And this is what we want to do in this program. As you obviously know, it's not all just about the physical and the foods and so on that are physical. SPEAKER A It's multifaceted. SPEAKER B That's right. We are mental, physical, spiritual, social, all of that all blended into our being, all of who we are. And they all have a role to play. And it's really great to have both of you here so that we can look at it from these different angles. Because it's not just that not one department. SPEAKER A Your intelligence is the director of everything. So how we use our intelligence is important. It's only one third of the brain that frontal, prefrontal cortex, left and right brain, that is the intelligence center. And as you know, once that is damaged beyond repair and you're in that vegetable state, they take you off life support if you're on that. So this is where when we're talking about intelligence and what was happening for her, it was that part of the brain that was shutting down or not coping. SPEAKER B All right, so perhaps you can go back to you now, John, and you can explain a little bit more about why it is that she was having difficulty staying awake, and then six weeks later, after changing what she ate, she wasn't having that difficulty apart from losing some weight. That's a good incentive, isn't it? SPEAKER C That's right. And it might be nice to explain a little bit about Daniel's diet. This gentleman is put into Babylon rather forcefully. He's captured, and he's a prisoner. SPEAKER B I call that forceful. SPEAKER C Forceful. And they put him on the prison diet. Well, it wasn't the prison diet. It's actually the king's food. Boy, you imagine what a king would eat. SPEAKER B You think of king, that'd be the best. SPEAKER C Oh, anything he wanted. I mean, rich foods. And particularly, as pointed out, the meats that he ate and the wine which he drank. SPEAKER A Well, wine is another one that affects brain function and our intelligence. SPEAKER B I think we probably all know that anyone who's ever seen someone who's had something to drink realizes it has a. SPEAKER A Very big noticeable effect, impacts the conscience and the will shuts it down, so you can't make a good decision, which is so important. And that's where Daniel, he didn't drink wine, so it didn't shut his intelligence down. SPEAKER C He was able to make good decisions. And as far as the meat goes, studies have shown if somebody eats what's called biblically clean meats, if you go to Leviticus, there's a list of meats that the Bible says are clean. Studies show that if people eat that kind of meat, it does slow the brain down. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER C But if they eat the meats on the list that are considered unclean, we're talking pork is a classic one, or seafood that's not fish with fins and scales, then it slows the brain down seven times more than what is considered to clean meats. SPEAKER A That is amazing. SPEAKER B I didn't know that. SPEAKER C Yeah, very interesting research. And they've traced it to arachidonic acid and guanine in meat. That contributes to the poor mental performance when somebody's eating flesh foods. SPEAKER B And so are they more abundant in the foods that you're suggesting? The unclean, as they're described in the Bible, so they've got seven times as much, is that right? No, that's the meat. The effect is seven times as much. But they must have more of those two things. Is that what you're saying? SPEAKER C Apparently. SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER A If you have a look at meat today, it's not just what you're talking about with that particular problem. Meat has got a lot of diseases. The way it's prepared or the way that it's grown, like the types of farms, like you look at chickens and that so it's more than just that. Now, the quality of meat is lacking. Even if it's a clean meat that will impact it's. SPEAKER C Very true. And the hormones they give the cattle I was talking to a cattleman, he says, well, we don't want cows all year dropping calves at any old time. So we give them a bunch of hormones so they all calve at the same time. And we give the calves hormones so they grow much mean. I don't know about here in Australia, but in America it's all pharmaceutically driven. SPEAKER A They found it impacts children's development, particularly. They're developing earlier hormonally because of all the hormones in meats, you see. So you can see and that affects the brain then. SPEAKER C Oh, yeah. SPEAKER B Interesting. In the Bible, it says sometimes to do this or not do that, and no explanation whatsoever. But we're now finding out. The science is really catching up with that. And the reasons are just profound. And it's a shame we have to find things out the hard way, isn't it? And not just take our health being impacted, take the word of the one who actually created us and says, look, do this and don't do that. And we think, I can't see the problem. And then when we do, it's really quite an unpleasant outcome. Often like the fats you were talking about the other day. SPEAKER C Yes, and that would be another factor here with meat, is animal products generally have more fat, and the fat is usually a thicker, harder fat, often thick and hard at room temperature. And so somebody eating more meat will have more fat in the blood. The more fat in the blood, the less oxygen. The less oxygen, the less ability to think and to reason. Here's this lady who has switched from eating meat and high fat diet to eating a diet like Daniel, which was vegetables and water, is what he asks for, and she reaps the benefit that she's like. Thank you for giving my brain back. SPEAKER B Yeah. When you say vegetables and water, it would have been like fruits and vegetables and all the plant foods, it would be broader than just vegetables, wouldn't it? SPEAKER C I would think so. And we would say from the rest of the Bible that the diet that sir recommended, you'd have your beans and your grains and your nuts and your seeds and your vegetables and your fruit and plant based diet. SPEAKER B That's right. Beautiful. And there's a lot of support for that out there. A huge amount of support for a plant based diet. So it's a shame that it's taken us so long to catch up with that ancient wisdom, isn't it? SPEAKER A One of the things you mentioned, John, was about oxygen, and that's an interesting one, because if we don't have oxygen in the brain, the brain can decay, die, the tissues will die. But they found now that in our atmosphere that we actually have a lot lower oxygen. So that means we're not breathing in as much. And we're saying about people have about 20% less oxygen in their system than they used to. And that's some of the recent studies that I've heard about. So that would contribute. So really, when we look at diet and health, we want foods that are going to really boost the brain and allow oxygen to function or put it into the cells, which is another reason when you look at that mind body connection is very powerful. SPEAKER B That's not a good thought, to think that we've got 20% less oxygen yeah. SPEAKER A Than we used to. So we really need to try and get out in fresh air and do breathing and take foods that are going to lift us up and help that factor. SPEAKER B We probably don't know even how good. SPEAKER A We could feel, not until you do it. SPEAKER B You realize care with how we were yesterday to today and so on, but we'd probably be amazed if we had that extra oxygen. SPEAKER A I had a client who she had sleep apnea. And sleep apnea means you stop breathing at night for a period of time and it lowers the oxygen levels in the brain. And she was waking up where she got disoriented, she couldn't function, she couldn't remember things, her memory was really bad, and she was in the clinic where I was working, and she ended up going and getting one of those machines, an APAC machine, that helps the oxygen levels at night. And the difference was remarkable. She was told that if she didn't do that, her brain would literally die because her oxygen levels were so low in the morning, it would cause impermanent, like dementia type states. So that's how powerful with our brain and intelligence that something like that is. SPEAKER C And this sort of goes both ways. We think about the diet improving the brain, but you can use your brain to improve your right. That's right. And so better choices on foods make a difference. I was at a place out in Colorado where one of the gentlemen there had a problem with snoring, which is usually the same problem, might be headed toward the sleep apnea. He changed his diet to one like Daniel's Diet, and within six weeks, he was no longer snoring. His wife said his snore went away. He slept better. SPEAKER A Okay, well, research shows it takes about six years off your life if you snore. So there you go. That's a lot, isn't it? SPEAKER B That's scary. SPEAKER A It is, isn't it? So if you're out there snoring, you need to all of these do things. SPEAKER B That we diet or treat you get a grip on, and that can make such a difference to it's not even just the length of our lives, it's the quality of our lives absolutely. Between now and then because it's going to come to all of us. But quality of life is huge. That's what you were talking about with this lady who's falling asleep and had the brain fog and everything, and then you mentioned this other person. So yeah, that's really important that's right here, right now, six weeks to be able to get rid of the Snoring. Great. SPEAKER C And another aspect to this, I mean, it got rid of Snores. Studies show if somebody will switch to a total vegetarian diet, especially one that would help you lose weight, which it usually does, which helps, it actually clears up psychotic symptoms. I'm sure you found that in your profession. SPEAKER A One of the things I do, and I've done some training in nutritional medicine for mental health, and that's one of the prime moves. One is sugar. And I get parents coming to me with their kids who are just running amok at home and can't focus, and their room is a mess. First thing I do is get them to change their diet. And often that is the thing that helps their behavior. So it's no longer that ADHD hyperactivity. They actually can settle and focus. SPEAKER B You talked about psychotic. That sounds terrible to think that the way we're eating and living and so on can do that. That's not just falling asleep. That's a bit more serious. SPEAKER A Well, this is where the brain is very deranged with psychosis, and it can't rationally work, it can't function properly. SPEAKER B And the contributing things to that are sugar and what else? SPEAKER A We well, more you were talking about foods. And we've got to remember a lot of people are eating foods that probably have lots of additives and things that affect the brain. And that's a contributing factor. It's the types of foods, which is what John's talking about, but it's also what's in the foods, the sprays, all these things. So this is why looking at quality of food is vital. So trying to get organics and getting things that aren't sprayed or at least cleaning them properly, if you can't afford. SPEAKER C That and you think about this, our topic is meat and intelligence. What if I ate the food the cow ate? How many pounds of food does it take to make him produce one pound of meat? Well, it's like 16 pounds of grain, probably many more pounds of grass to produce one pound of meat. But you know, you eat that meat. Suppose, for example, the cow was eating nice greens that had vitamin C. Guess what? None of that vitamin C comes through the meat. I tell people if they're going to choose meat as part of their diet, they have to be very careful or they're not going to get their nutrition. It's nutritionally poor. You want nutritionally dense foods, and that's going to be your fresh fruits, your fresh vegetables, your nuts and seeds, your beans, your grains. It's not going to be what the cow ate to produce a little bit of protein. SPEAKER A And when you look at the size of the land you use for the cow, if you put in a grain crop, the density is far greater than a cow on that piece of land. SPEAKER B That's right. And it's becoming a really big issue. SPEAKER A It is. SPEAKER B Population explosion. That's another whole area that might talk about on another day. But it is a huge issue, really worse than we probably even realize. But that was a good point that you made, John, about not getting some of the nutrients that the cow, for example, got. And another one is phytochemicals. There's thousands of them. And phyto means plant. They only come in plant foods now. They just don't don't appear in any animal foods. So it really is better to go to the primary source of the nutrition because the cow does all right on the vegetarian diet, doesn't it? SPEAKER A I was going to say intelligence does depend on nutrition. If we don't have the nutrients, the brain can't function. Our intelligence is impaired. And they've done a lot of studies, even here in our country and other countries, on children and intelligence. And they find when you have children who are on a junk food diet, their intelligence doesn't develop because we're talking about what we call IQ intelligent quotation, which is how we mentally function to process in time and space and do mathematics and things like that. And that can be impaired, where their intelligence that they inherit is actually not fulfilled. So we can do a lot of damage. Trauma will damage that as well. But the good news is the brain is what we call neuroplastic. It grows and changes and the cells and the neurons can actually grow new pathways, which makes a huge difference. So we can develop intelligence to our maximum inherited capacity. SPEAKER B And there's another kind of intelligence too. Do you want to have a little word? SPEAKER A There is. When we talk about intelligence, and this is something that is being more noticed now we have to look at our emotions and what we call emotional quotient. We've got the intelligence quotient and we've got an emotional quotient. The intelligence quotient is inherited, but your emotional quotient is learned. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A So if you are born into a family where there's trauma or some sort of problem and stress, then emotionally you're not developing even from conception to birth in a healthy way? No, because the baby's brain, up until two, the brain functions on survival and emotion. It doesn't have the IQ factor, and that develops from about two on. But if there's damage and that child is programming that damage emotionally, then it impairs the ability to use their IQ from two on and they go into either control or chaos. So that means intelligence is impaired. And emotions people are not coping emotionally. They have fear, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders, and it all goes back to that early childhood development in the environment and how their emotions develop. SPEAKER B All right? And look, we all want to be more intelligent. We do in terms of our IQ in not impairing that and clouding it. And we all want that emotional intelligence too. So what a tremendous thing that we know the kinds of foods which are going to help us to actually function better and make better choices, which will help us to function better. And so it goes around, I might. SPEAKER C Say, on this business of meat and intelligence. Somebody eating largely a meat diet is increasing the amount of protein in their diet, at least to a certain extent, but not getting much complex carbohydrates, which means that the body is going to be shifted from running the brain on glucose to running it on ketones, a breakdown of protein. And that is not the brain's favorite food for functioning at its highest level. SPEAKER A What it can do is inflame the brain and that causes irritability. So when you're looking at emotions and people particularly, they're eating a lot of meat and not really getting other nutrients, the literature I've looked at suggests that it can cause anger, aggression. People who are big meat eaters can be more aggressive than people that aren't. So that's, again, the emotional quotient, isn't it? Because if aggression is not a healthy thing, it's not an intelligent no, no, that's right. SPEAKER B I think it's tremendous, Jenny, that you're a health psychologist, because you've got a feel for both of these things and when people come to you with problems, you can also help them to make good food choices. They do the whole pack with what's going on in their emotions, in their mind. So what a lovely combination it is. It works very well, both of those. SPEAKER A I get good results because people are doing the whole package, not just trying to think their way out of they're actually fine tuning the intelligence and the system by doing things like that. And certainly meat is one that we need to really reconsider our options. SPEAKER B Tremendous connection between the mind and the body and the body, totally. And I don't think we half appreciate that, and even though we might even know it, we can forget that. But it's a really important thing to know. SPEAKER A Yeah. This is why it's so important to educate people. A lot of what I do, and the same with you, John, I'm sure, is to educate, give people intelligent choices and help them to understand, because when they understand how the brain works and what's impacting it like meat, then they're going to make better choices. SPEAKER B Yes. I don't know how this is actually sounding to some of the people tuning in, especially people who I mean, I grew up eating meat and if I'd had my way, which I did not, I would have eaten meat and left the vegetables. They were not my preferred thing, but fortunately I had good parents who made me eat my vegetables. In my teens, I became a vegetarian. Not a healthy one, though, but over time I've progressed from there. And I understand the kinds of things that you've been talking about here and it's just made such a difference because I actually, honestly, apart from the OD time we all have times when we're not on top. But honestly, I have more energy now than when I was in my teens. SPEAKER A I was not you actually get younger when you give up meat. Not older, because I was brought up like you the meat and three veg principle and changed my diet. And the more I refine it and improve on it and learn and that's why I find I like listening to John because he teaches me a lot. The better my brain works, I don't get the tiredness. I sleep much better. It cures a lot of mental. SPEAKER B A lot of things happen. A lot of things that sleep better. Sleep is a huge thing. It's really huge because if you don't get enough sleep, you don't function. So all these things come together. They do. And I was just thinking back to Daniel and the situation that he was in, and it was a terrible situation, have to be called trauma. But he drew on his spiritual resources and that was a really big thing. And I would just say to people tuning in, if you haven't done that and you don't even know how, be aware that there's a God who loves you so much that he would rather die than live without you. And that's a fact because that's what happened. And if you're not sure even how to plug into the source of life itself, so to speak, just talk to Him like you would to a friend about anything. Anything. Because everything that matters to you matters to God, the good, the bad and the ugly. So you can talk to Him about anything. It might be a new thing, but I think that's such an important thing. And that got Daniel and his three friends through life threatening situations. They had to face that. And it's something that I don't think some people even perhaps understand or utilize. And it's such a big thing that will impact on us just as much, if not more, than the physical aspect of food and exercise and so on. And the thinking aspect, it's another strand that we need to think about. SPEAKER A Well, their brains were sharp, weren't they? And they used their intelligence to make an intelligent decision not to go with the meat. SPEAKER B Yes, they did. SPEAKER A Feast. SPEAKER B They did. SPEAKER C Maybe you're thinking, oh, if I eat vegetables, where am I going to get my strength? Of course we're talking about meat intelligence here. But I'll tell you a story out of a gentleman whose job it was to load semi trailers with wood for wood heaters. And he was filling these trailers, and he'd be so worn out at the end of day. He was in his 20s. He thought he'd get strong, but he was just always worn out. So tired. He'd come home and go to bed and go to sleep and not spend time with the family. He came to some of our meetings, decided, okay, we need to eat more vegetables. Told his wife, let's eat more vegetables. Within about six weeks, he was feeling strong. He wasn't coming home all tired out, he was getting stronger, he wasn't all worn out. At the end of the day, vegetables give you much more strength than meat. SPEAKER A Well, they're more dense in nutrients. It makes sense, doesn't it? SPEAKER B And they've got the carbs, which is the energy source that our body really needs to function on. And when you'll find this in any of the recommendations, I think in the various countries, plant foods dominate. It's not what we do, but that's the recommendation. And if we were closer to the recommendations, even of our countries, we would do better. We did not do well in Australia. We are so far from the recommendations. SPEAKER A A lot of countries are like that. It's often the cultures that live more simply that actually have better diets because they live off the land, they grow their own foods, they don't eat as much. And often they found that particularly meat. But they often found that people that come from those countries can come to a Western diet, start to deteriorate, and get a lot of the diseases we do. That's quite well documented in that's, right. SPEAKER B In the migrant studies. It shows again and again, doesn't it, when people move to an area where they're eating more like Western people or developed countries, do they pay dearly for that? So it's a little bit like a recurring theme, isn't it? It doesn't seem to matter what we're looking at, what problems we're looking at. This seems to be the kind of lifestyle that's going to make us better in so many different ways. So that's been really good. And thank you for those stories. Thank you for the information. And Jenny, you had the other aspects too, that were going to help us have a clear brain so that we can function better and so that we can make better choices so that we'll have a clear brain. So that's our program for today. And if you'd like a fact sheet of the program, or you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just visit our website, threeABN australia.org Au, and click on the Watch button and John or Jenifer are happy to answer your questions. So if you have questions that we haven't covered or you have a health concern, just email them at [email protected] , and join us next time on Healthy Living.