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Melanie Cole (Host):  Well, it's not just your waistline that suffers if you're not eating well. Your brain is one of the first organs in your body to feel the effects of poor food choices. My guest today is Jamie Carlson. She's a registered dietitian/nutritionist at Allina Health Woodbury Clinic. Welcome to the show, Jamie. People don't think about brain food but we've heard about brain food for years. How does what we eat affect our brain function?

Jamie Carlson (Guest): Yes, that's a great question. Thanks for having me today. When we think about food and our brain, you're right, we don't always make that connection. What we have to understand is something that really impacts our brain is our blood sugar. Sometimes we think of blood sugar as only what we talk about with diabetics, right? But every single cell in your body uses blood sugar. So, imagine if you're blood sugar spikes, and this will happen if you’ve eaten something really sugary, maybe obviously sugary things like a soda or a donut, but also there are a lot of other things that spike our blood sugar that don't sound sugary, like a bagel, pasta, breads. These will all spike our blood sugar and, actually, they overload our cells with sugar. What that means to your brain is that, over time, when we do this day after day, if we're eating a bagel for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch; we're having cereal late at night for a snack, this constant influx of sugar creates inflammation in the body. The brain cells are part of those cells that get inflamed. This creates an issue because we've all heard of those “feel good hormones”. Sometimes we call them neurotransmitters. When our blood sugar spikes, we can't use those quite as well and so that creates us to not have those kind of calm, well-being moods that we once had. So, that spike and inflammation inflames our brain, also--not just our body. Not only a spike in sugar can do that but if we have a low blood sugar. So, say, you run out of the house, you haven't eaten all day, you get to lunch, you just grab a candy bar because that's all that you have time for. When we get those high blood sugars, they're going to fall really fast and those low blood sugars also hurt our brain. So, like I said, if you've gone too long without eating, a lot of people have now describe this as feeling as "hangry", right? You may be so irritable and anxious and those low blood sugars is that your brain is essentially mad; it's irritated because we had a high blood sugar at one point for your brain and now we don't have any sugar for your brain.

Melanie: So, people hear about inflammation these days and its relationship to heart disease and stress and cortisol and gut health and immune function and all of these things, Jamie.

Jamie:  Yes.

Melanie:  So, tell us how that affects brain function, as well.

Jamie: Yes, a lot of times we don't think of that inflammation as always something that's impacting your brain and certainly, we don't always find that impact, or that connection, between our gut health. What's going on in our intestines affects not only your brain's daily functions, but also can determine your risk of neurological conditions that might come on later in the future. So, when we're thinking about this, something we have to think about is gut bacteria. That's something that's becoming more popular. It's also called your good bacteria, your microbiome, and this is the bacteria in our gut. It plays such a critical role in so many systems in the body. It supports your immune function; it supports decreasing inflammation; it helps actually make neurotransmitters, that bacteria. I think that's a cool one--it makes neurotransmitters. It helps us make vitamins and absorb nutrients. So, this gut bacteria is really critical in how it impacts the brain. So, a few things I always tell people are that we really need to think about supporting our gut health when we think about supporting our brain in preventing things, like dementia and ADHD, maybe, in children. My three tips for that is one, to eat probiotics or foods with probiotics in it. Probiotics are live bacteria we need. Like I said, these are what live in that digestive tract. Although we tend to take supplements of them, you can find them in a lot of foods. Anything that says "live cultures" is a place where we'd find it. So, we might see that in yogurt; we might see that in something called kefir. Kombucha is a fermented tea that contains this. Then, we have some other more unique ones like kimchi and sauerkraut. That's where we can find some bacteria, too.  These probiotics help support the gut lining and it helps keep inflammation low in the gut and we want to have low inflammation in our gut because if we've got high inflammation there, we're going to have that in our brain, as well. So, one is to eat probiotic rich foods. The second is to—and I already touched on this--reducing those carbohydrates. Those high blood sugars, like I already said, not only inflame the brain, they also create an imbalance to our gut bacteria. They feed all our bad bacteria and they don't support enough of our good bacteria. So, we'll want to reduce those carbohydrates.  The third thing we want to do is to drink filtered water and that's not always something we talk about, either. A lot of the water we consume now is treated with chemicals like chlorine. Chlorine is something that will actually come into the body and it can kill off that good bacteria that's going to keep our inflammation low and help us make neurotransmitters in the gut. So, those three things are really important. To support your gut actually helps support your brain.

Melanie: I would just like you to clear something up, Jamie, when you talk about carbohydrates, because we need those for brain and spinal cord function.

Jamie:  Yes.

Melanie:  People, we hear, are on these high protein diets and they think carbohydrates are the enemy, but you're not talking about a carrot or a tomato, are you?

Jamie:  No.

Melanie:  Or, a piece of fruit?  So, clarify that for the listeners.

Jamie: Carbohydrates, like you said, could be a fruit; it could be a vegetable. Where we tend to overindulge in is our processed carbs like our breads, our cereals, our granola bars, bagels; a lot of these things we find in processed forms, right? So, these are where we see really, really high amounts of refined sugar and all of this turns into blood sugar and spikes that inflammation in the body.

Melanie: So, now what about the good fats? Avocado and Omega-3's and our oily fishes? How do they help our brain?

Jamie: Yes, fats. This is my favorite nutrient for two reasons for the brain. The first reason is that fat stabilizes your blood sugar. So, when you eat about 2-3 tablespoons of a fat, that keeps the blood sugar stable for about 4 hours. We've already established that that's really good for a healthy brain. But ,our brain is actually made up of 60% fat and it's made up of the fats we eat--mostly those Omega-3 fatty acids; like you said, the ones we find in fatty fish like salmon but also nuts and oils. So, these fats are required to support that brain tissue. The phrase "you are what you eat" is so true because these fats actually make up and become the cells in your brain. If we're not giving our body these great Omega-3 fatty acids that are really anti-inflammatory, we're going to have more inflammation in the brain, then.

Melanie: So, in just the last few minutes, incorporate some foods that are really good for our brain, into our daily life. Give people tips and how we can just get those foods in every day.

Jamie: For sure. Right. It does no good if we just know this information and can't actually do it. So, we have to be able to practice this on a daily basis. So, in the morning, this might look like you wake up and you take some healthy fat. So, you could do some butter or some coconut oil; these are great fats to cook with high heat. So, I might stir fry some veggies in there like kale and peppers, maybe a little bit of hash browns and then I'll fry up 2 or 3 eggs. Then, on the side, I might do some full fats like plain yogurt. This would be one that contains those live cultures. So, I'm getting my fats, I'm getting protein, I'm stabilizing my blood sugar but I'm also putting that good bacteria into my gut, also. For lunch or dinner, I might make a big salad with lots of veggies. Salmon is sometimes hard to find fresh, so I might do some wild-caught canned salmon and do a dressing that has an olive oil base or maybe an avocado on it. And, we can even do this when we go to eat. If we go out and we want to get burgers with friends, we have a burger, but then we skip out on the bun. That's where we get a lot of those processed carbohydrates. Instead, we ask for a fried egg on top of our burger and maybe top it with and avocado; if you're adventurous, maybe a bit of sauerkraut. That's a good way to get some good bacteria in.

Melanie: Oh! You're rockin' my world, here. What about snacks? People really don't know what to snack on to help our brains.

Jamie: Yes. So, snacking is another thing, right? If we snack on carbohydrates, those processed ones, that's going throw off our blood sugar, too. So, our snacks need to be something that are also focused on blood sugar stabilization.  I keep coming back to the idea that I said that fats keep your blood sugar stable for four hours, so snacking on fats is a great way. So, like some raw or dry-roasted nuts like almonds. I like to just cut up a half avocado, add a little salt to it, and eat that for a snack. So, really trying to skip out on doing a lot of the kind of sugary, processed snacks, like some granola and protein bars that we grab. Those can have almost 25 grams of sugar in just one bar. So, making sure to grab for those fats instead of grabbing for some of those other convenient processed foods.

Melanie: Just give us your best advice in the last minute, here, for eating well for our brain health.

Jamie: My favorite recommendation is to think about your blood sugar. Balancing out your blood sugar is not only going to support the brain health, it's going to reduce your risk of diabetes, managing our weight, keeping inflammation low in the body and the trick to help out our brains is keeping inflammation low. So, we do that by making sure we reduce a lot of those processed carbohydrates. Try to eat the real ones; more vegetables in the diet, adding in lots of healthy fats, not being scared to do that. Great things like avocados and coconut oil and lots of different good fats out there now. And, making sure we get protein in, too. We didn't talk about that much this session but protein is really great for stabilizing your blood sugar, also. And all of that is going to keep the inflammation low in the body so that we're not creating inflammation in our brain.

Melanie: Thank you. What great information. You are excellent and so well-spoken. You're listening to The WELLCast with Allina Health. And for more information, you can go to Allinahealth.org. That's Allinahealth.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.