How to Clear Up Brain Fog & Feel Mentally Sharper - Dr. Rhonda Patrick

What happens when people get brain fog? What is brain fog? I know what it feels like, but what's going on? Yeah, so brain fog, or as I like to call it, a reduction in mental clarity. It's such a doctor way of... I've just heard too many people say brain fog, brain fog, and I got this, I was telling you, I got this new jerk reaction to the... You've got brain fog ick. I do. When people say brain fog, I'm like, oh no, what are they going to say? But yes, it is a thing. When you have a reduction in a mental clarity, it feels like this brain fog. I personally think it all comes down to food. I think it really comes down to food. I mean, when you're sick, you have brain fog, but we can talk about how it overlaps with that. So I think there's really two big... It all has to do with meals and eating. So the first thing I think that's highly involved in this reduction in mental clarity, or brain fog, as people like to call it, is what's called the postprandial glucose response. So that means blood glucose levels going up after a meal. And what happens is this, if you have a really high postprandial glucose response, you're eating a high glycemic index food, something that's definitely like a refined carbohydrate, for example, that'll really smash you. You're going to get this really sharp peak in glucose, and then like a drop, or a sugar crash, as people like to call it. And so it's really hard for your brain to be functioning properly with that postprandial glucose response. And that's partly why you'll hear a lot of anecdotes, and myself included, people that have tried a ketogenic diet, or I used to always like to do podcasts in a fasted state, because you're not getting that postprandial glucose response is one thing. It really sort of evens it out. Not everyone responds well to a ketogenic diet, and I certainly don't think it's easy to continue on forever. So there are other things. Obviously, avoiding refined carbohydrates is an easy no-brainer, right? There's nothing in there anyways. What do you need from there? Nothing. No micronutrients, no protein, right? Like you're not getting anything from that. So that would be one thing to avoid, because that'll make sure you're not going super, super high. But you can still have it from a meal. And some of the things that you can do to mitigate that, one would be exercise snacks. So this is like doing a really short burst of intense, like vigorous exercise, 80% max heart rate, for like one to three minutes. And you do it 30 minutes up to an hour either before or after a meal. So you kind of do it within this hour before or after a meal. And what happens is that vigorous intensity exercise, while you're shooting your heart rate up, and it's hard to do, you're increasing lactate, and it doesn't take much. It gets soaked up by the muscle. And this is then causing transporters, glucose transporters, to come up to the muscle and opening the gates basically. So that when you eat that meal, the glucose goes into your muscle. It's more anabolic. You want it to go there. And you're not getting that like huge rise and then drop with the post-prandial glucose response. So that would be the one thing, exercise snacks. Lots of studies out there, especially with people with type 2 diabetes, have a problem maintaining their blood glucose levels. The second thing would be food order, like the order you eat your macronutrients. On the plate? Kind of. So I would say about 10 minutes. It can be on the plate depending on how slow you eat. So if food order, there's been studies, again, largely in people with type 2 diabetes who have issues regulating their blood glucose. If you eat protein or fat 10 to 30 minutes before carbohydrates, it can very much blunt and slow the post-prandial glucose response. So if you have like, let's say you eat a can of sardines before you're going to go to a restaurant, you're going to eat out, you're presumably going to eat more terribly than you would if you're cooking at home, right? Or you do a little protein shake 20 minutes before you're going to go to a restaurant or whatever. Or before, like even just if you're going to do a podcast and you need mental clarity, you want to make sure that, let's say, just eat the protein and not have the carbohydrates, right? So what that does is it's, I mean, it's doing essentially like increasing insulin so that when you do have that glucose, it's going. But I mean, if you were going out for dinner, presumably something else you could do is try and have the starter be a steak tartare, tuna tartare, oysters, something like that. And just be like, can we just wait an extra 10 minutes on mains? Like however long you think that we need, just give us another 10. And then you've encapsulated it within the entire meal. I guess as long as everybody else is on board with that, otherwise someone's had a bunch of bread and they want the whatever main course to come out. That's like the worst thing is having the bread on the table first, right? Yeah, but it's so good. It is good, but like eat the steak tartare first and then go for the bread, right? You'll slow the glucose response. There's a place in Austin called Dean's Italian. It's just down the street from you. You should go, you should go. Dean's Italian, yeah. I'm looking for restaurant recommendations, please. I'll send you some. Send me some more, yeah. So Dean's, Three Forks, and there's somewhere else that I went the other evening that was phenomenal. But Dean's and Three Forks are the two steak restaurants I go to the most. But Dean's do this, they call it a bread crown. So it's like a, literally looks like a little crown that comes out kind of about that size. And there's a pot of whipped butter in the middle of this thing. And it's glazed on top. It's got like a salt glaze. This thing is like crack. It's so good. And it's just there. You arrive, you sit down, you've got the drinks or whatever. And then this thing arrives and you just can't, it's impossible to not eat. So yeah, almost getting, is there something that we can do with this like pre-appetizer appetizer to come after the appetizers around about 15 minutes, if that's okay? Because Dr. Rhonda said so. Yeah. So food order is something legitimately that's been studied, empirical data showing it does blunt the post-perennial glucose response. And so that is another thing that can really, I think, affect mental clarity or brain fog. So just like I said, like the protein or fat, like an avocado. Sometimes I'll have an avocado and that kind of just delays the emptying of your stomach into your intestines. And it kind of slows it even keel rather than real high spike and then lower. Presumably as well, prioritizing the foods during an eating window, even if you do the protein shake at home and then go out for dinner afterward, prioritizing that and skewing that toward protein is just going to cause you to eat less of the carbs. If there is dessert at the end, you're going to think, I'm like not as bothered because I've just put more in me that's been skewed and discriminated in the direction of what you should be prioritizing anyway. Absolutely. So you get more, satiety plays a role. I mean, if you're eating something before like protein, you're just not going to eat as much. You know, you're not going to eat as much. But that kind of leads into the second. That's not the only part of the meal or food or eating that I think plays a role in this reduction in mental clarity and brain fog. The other thing is the post-perennial inflammatory response. So eating a meal causes inflammation. It happens in everyone, every meal. There's no avoiding it. Like to some degree it happens. But you can minimize how much of an inflammatory response you're having. So people eating a very high sugar and high fat meal, those are the two real big movers of it. But even if you're just doing a ton of fat without like fiber or protein, fat is harsh on the gut. And so what ends up happening is your gut epithelial cells, there's like things holding them together, tight junctions. They open up and they let little pieces of bacteria. So our microbiome, I mean, we got trillions. Is it leaky gut? Is exactly what it is. It's intestinal permeability and it allows pieces of bacteria. Look how for every like bro science term I've got, you've got the specific term that comes out of medicine. Is it brain fog? It's a reduction in mental clarity. So is it leaky gut? The wall lining of the intestine has opened up to them. Yeah, intestinal permeability or leaky gut as it's called. That's what you're doing. So meals cause that to happen transiently. Some people have like a very big problem with leaky gut. But so transiently you're letting bacteria get into your bloodstream. And this is what happens is it's pieces of bacteria. They're called endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide, the same thing. But they're getting into your circulation because they're opening up, right? Getting from the gut, not supposed to be there, right? And your immune system gets activated. So your immune system's like, it knows those pieces of the bacterial membrane. It recognizes it. That's how it recognizes a bacterial pathogen. And so it gets activated. And what ends up happening there is one, your immune system's activated, okay? That requires a ton of energy. So energy is shunted away from your brain and it goes to the immune system because your body goes, triages it. It goes, I need to survive. There's a bacterial invader in my system right now. I'm gonna take all my energy and I'm gonna make sure that I get rid of this invader so I don't die, right? So that's the first thing that's happening in terms of energy's being diverted from the brain, from neurotransmission, from thinking everything, and it's going to the immune system to activate it, okay? And it doesn't happen for that long of a period, but it's happening after a meal. The second thing that's happening is that your immune system itself is creating cytokines that are activating other immune cells. That's how they talk to each other. And these things are, they're essentially, can be somnogenic. So they can make you sleepy. So when you're sick, what happens when you're sick? You have no energy, right? Because all the energy's going on your immune system. Cytokine response. And you're sleepy. So that's exactly what's happening after a meal. What's happening when you're sick, to a smaller degree, is happening after a meal, the post-prandial inflammatory response. And then the other thing that's happening is those cytokines also are crossing into your brain and disrupting neurotransmission, disrupting connections. We now know that the blood-brain barrier does not keep immune molecules out. They get in there and they're wreaking havoc. So that's another reason why you don't want to have a lot of inflammation. So then the question is, okay, what do I do, right? So that's the question. How do I not get such a big post-prandial inflammatory response? And it's also, again, why a lot of people, myself included, always feel more mentally clear when I'm fasted, right? But I'm like, oh, I don't want to lose a protein. I mean, the muscle mass, I need to get some food. The question is, what do you do? One, obviously avoid the sugar, high sugar, high fat. Okay, that's clear. Two, smaller meals have less of a post-prandial inflammatory response. So the bigger the meal, the bigger the response. Spike and then down. Yeah, but it's like, now we're talking, you're getting both. You're getting the glucose and you're getting the inflammatory response. That's another thing. So actually like smaller meals does help that. So like if you need mental clarity and stuff, like don't have a big meal. And the other thing that actually makes an effect on that is, believe it or not, we're going full circle, omega-3. Omega-3 has been shown in clinical studies to blunt the post-prandial inflammatory response. With the meal or at any point throughout the day? So that's why I take my omega-3s throughout the day with meals. And it's doing it, some degree both, some degree both. There's something systemic, but there's also something acute. Exactly. There's something systemic, the inflammation process, but there's something acute in the gut that it's also playing a role in preventing the lipopolysaccharide from getting into circulation. Is this dose dependent? If I have one gram with each meal, you say two grams of triglycerides, responsibly sourced, blah, blah, blah, from a Norwegian guy that's doing it like this with fish. Can I have one gram with each meal? Would that be sufficient? I think the studies, and I can't remember, I think it was like, they were lower dose, like 500 milligrams. I think it wasn't even that high. So I typically do the one gram with each meal. I think that's a safe. It's a nice way to remember to do it. So I like to do, the reason I like to have omega-3s throughout the day is for one, that reason, blunting the postprandial inflammatory response. Two, I want these specialized resolving molecules that they produce when you're metabolizing in my blood constant, resolving inflammation, just working. Very interesting. Yeah, so throughout my 20s, I said I was a club promoter, and I thought I had depression or acute depression that would come on every so often, like intermittently throughout the year. I think looking back, it was just low mood and burnout. I think that's what was going on. But the way that it would manifest for me is I wouldn't get out of bed. I wouldn't want to go to work and see people. And I was in charge of this company, so I could do whatever I wanted and no one could tell me otherwise. But one of the things that I would do is I would order pizza or like high sugar foods and sweets and stuff like that. And it would comfort eat, right? Like I'd comfort eat and that would be something I'd do. But I'd notice, especially if you have, you know, a big Domino's in front of you and you've got some sweet stuff to have after that, the sense that you get in your body, especially if you haven't been outside, if you've basically not moved because you're feeling a little bit miserable and the curtains are drawn and you've just laid in bed and the Uber driver or whatever's coming, you've taken the food off him, the inflammation, like the throbbing that you feel in your body, it's almost like your heartbeat feels like, or your blood pressure feels like it's gone up. And then almost all of the time after that, and I think this is very common for people that deal with low mood, if they do comfort eat like that, they'll then fall asleep. So shortly after that, and then that dysregulation of your sleep pattern also makes you feel even more like ----. And then you come out of this sleep, your emotions are all over the place. You've still got tons of like, either blood sugar rushing around you or you don't, or you've got digestive discomfort because you've just eaten all of this food. And yeah, just seeing that as like a little Petri dish, microcosm for what happens, the least amount of movement possible, like you've gone from bed to door, back to bed, and that's it. Nothing in terms of any kind of stimulation, already in low mood, and then you go to sleep, the most sedentary of all of the positions. Yeah, you can feel that inflammation, that cytokine response, and your thoughts, again, super, super muddy, which more so feeds back into that low mood. It's a vicious cycle, right? Exactly. No, and you mentioned, it's funny how you mentioned people get, when you get sleepy after a meal, it's like, that's the cytokines that are somnogenic. It's the post-inflammatory inflammatory response. And again, it happens with the bigger meal too. You'll notice like the bigger the meal, if you overeat, the sleepy you are, right? And so it's more of an inflammatory response. So now you can think about it as, oh, I'm not sleepy. It's, oh, I've got some inflammation going on after that meal. Interesting. In other news, this episode is brought to you by AG1. Nutrition doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to work. And that's why I've used AG1 every single day for over three years now. AG1 is literally the best in the world at providing you with a scientifically backed blend of ingredients that helps to fuel your body. You might've heard Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan and Peter Attea and Andrew Huberman and myself talk about this product. And that's because it is the best daily foundational nutrition supplement on the planet. AG1 is a comprehensive nutrition solution formulated to support whole body health. It's got 75 high quality vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients. 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