00:00:52.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:18.000Well, I got an advanced copy of your book, and we've got a chance to get to know each other, albeit only in the last couple of weeks.
00:01:26.000And I think you're onto something here that could change the world because a lot of people talk about mental health.
00:01:31.000But if I understand the approach that you argue in this book, you talk about, well, first, let's talk about brain health.
00:01:36.000And you've been doing this for quite some time.
00:01:38.000You've done hundreds of thousands of brain scans.
00:01:42.000And this book is written in a really digestible way.
00:01:44.000It's called Change Your Brain Every Day.
00:01:46.000I want everybody in my audience to pick up a copy.
00:01:49.000And it's written in a way where every single day there's a little piece of wisdom, everything from how to deal with unwanted intrusive thoughts or automatic negative thoughts to what is a healthy brain look like and all that.
00:02:03.000So, doctor, before we get into the specifics of the book, introduce your general philosophy.
00:02:07.000What is brain health and how does that contrast with people labeling it as mental health?
00:02:12.000So about 32 years ago, I started looking at the brain with a brain imaging study called SPECT.
00:02:18.000And SPECT looks at blood flow and activity.
00:02:24.000And very early on, I learned that most psychiatric problems are not mental health issues at all, but rather they are brain health issues that steal people's minds.
00:02:50.000I have to tell you, when I told my dad in 1979 I wanted to be a psychiatrist, he asked me why I didn't want to be a real doctor, why I wanted to be a nut doctor and hang out with nuts all day long.
00:03:03.000Now, my dad would not get Father of the Year award, but he reflected what society thinks about people who struggle with their mind.
00:03:14.000Nobody wants a mental health issue, but everybody wants a better brain.
00:03:23.000And I have argued for decades: well, what if mental health was really brain health?
00:03:32.000Plus, it's your brain, the physical functioning of your brain that creates your mind.
00:03:38.000So if your brain's not healthy, you have post-COVID, you have a head trauma, you have Lyme disease, you have mold in your home.
00:03:46.000If your brain's not healthy, it's really hard for you to think right.
00:03:53.000What it's such a rational way to put it.
00:03:56.000And having read a couple books in the genre and also having so many listeners that email us and they say, Charlie, I'm dealing with depression or anxiety.
00:04:06.000Your first question is, why is the profession that's focused on the mind or the brain not even looking at the organ that they're trying to improve?
00:04:16.000I mean, you say that, look, if you have a heart issue, you're going to try to figure out what's going on there, kidney, liver.
00:04:21.000But, doctor, what percentage of people in psychiatry actually look at the physical brain before they go about treating it?
00:06:44.000But having really carefully read your book, doctor, the way that you go about it is you say, well, let's exhaust every possible natural option, healthy living.
00:06:53.000We're going to talk about all this, by the way, throughout this hour, dieting, supplementation.
00:06:58.000And, you know, talk about medication should not be the first option, in your personal opinion, correct?
00:07:04.000Well, when I was in medical school, I was taught, as all doctors are, first do no harm, use the least toxic, most effective treatment.
00:07:17.000And head to head against antidepressants, exercise, omega-3 fatty acids, learning how to not believe every stupid thing you think have been found to be equally effective.
00:07:28.000So why wouldn't we start with that while at the same time making sure your thyroid's not low?
00:11:01.000Explain that because you don't hear that every day.
00:11:05.000Well, and I had no clue about this connection until I think it was 2009.
00:11:12.000There was an article from the University of Pittsburgh that showed as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down, which should just scare the fat off anyone.
00:11:33.000I have a group of normal scans, and we didn't use weight as an exclusion criteria.
00:11:41.000So we looked at overweight versus healthy weight, significantly lower blood flow in people who are overweight.
00:11:49.000And then I published a study on 33,000 scans, one of the world's largest imaging studies.
00:11:56.000And we demonstrated as your weight goes up, the function of your brain goes down almost in a linear pattern in virtually every area of the brain.
00:12:11.000And in the book, I talk about bright minds.
00:12:14.000So if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind.
00:12:23.000And the acronym is bright minds, blood flow, retirement and aging, inflammation, and so on.
00:12:29.000Well, if you have the D, which stands for diabetes, high blood sugar, and/or overweight, you now have seven of the 11 risk factors because the fat on your belly produces inflammatory cytokines.
00:13:36.000I mean, I've got to say, probably on 20 or 30 of the days of pages, you're basically saying, Look, if you care about your brain, you have to care about your diet and care about your waistline.
00:13:46.000And you do it in a really loving, but also factual way.
00:13:50.000Doctor, tell us about one of the friends you talk about in this book where you met with a friend who was overweight and you loved him enough to say, Hey, you probably need to lose some weight if you want to get your life right.
00:14:00.000And he did, and he lived a better life.
00:14:03.000Oh, it's just such an emotional story for me.
00:15:50.000You have to wonder how many people that go in and they get these very aggressive pharmaceuticals, how supplementation, we'll talk about supplements in a second after the break, and just losing some weight could at least improve some of their symptoms.
00:16:06.000Buy his book, Change Your Brain Every Day.
00:16:08.000If you have a child, if you have a grandchild that says, I'm dealing with depression or anxiety and all this, this book is a great starting point.
00:16:17.000So, Dr. Ahmed, while we're on the theme of talking about things that people don't want to hear, there's two topics that sometimes my target demographic college kids don't like it when I talk about the negatives of drinking and marijuana.
00:20:34.000And it's unfortunately one of the tragedies of this, and I spoke out, I speak out against this, and people don't like it when I say that I don't think it's a good thing that we're commercializing the widespread use of marijuana, is that we're almost making it just normal and mainstream for a 13 or 14-year-old.
00:20:52.000What does that do to a developing brain in particular, though, doctor?
00:20:55.000I mean, you talk about the alcohol effects.
00:20:57.000I mean, you have THC-laced, very heavy THC-laced marijuana for a 15-year-old.
00:21:03.000I mean, no wonder why they're 21 and they're depressed.
00:23:06.000Honestly, God bless you for speaking out on this because too many people dance around this when it's so obvious it's not good.
00:23:13.000One that was very hard for me, though, doctor, and I have reduced my intake and I have seen positives is some caffeine is okay, but caffeine does limit blood flow to the brain.
00:24:06.000It kills cells in the hippocampus, the major memory center in the brain.
00:24:11.000So if you have 100 milligrams a day, it's not a big deal.
00:24:15.000But one Venti Starbucks is 330 milligram of caffeine, which is an addiction dose.
00:24:24.000I fully acknowledge marijuana drinking, not even close to, you know, that's not my, the caffeine thing is where I have to be most improved player.
00:24:32.000So doctor, however, you say something also fascinating in the book.
00:24:36.000You say the goal should not be to get rid of anxiety, the don't worry, be happy people, that some anxiety is actually good.
00:25:20.000I see a cute girl, but I have enough anxiety to know my wife will kill me.
00:25:27.000So some anxiety just helps you make good decisions.
00:25:32.000And so we don't want, there's actually this great study out of Stanford, started in 1921.
00:25:40.000They looked at 1,541 10-year-old children, and then they followed them for up to 90 years, looking at what goes with health, success, and longevity.
00:25:53.000And the don't worry, be happy people, the low anxiety people died the earliest.
00:25:59.000The number one hallmark of success, health, and longevity was conscientiousness.
00:26:07.000That if you said you were going to show up and you show up consistently, predictably, you do what you say, you're going to do, you live longer than everyone else.
00:26:19.000And the don't worry, be happy, who cares if the rent is late, the landlord can litigate, that doesn't work out really well, actually.
00:26:25.000It actually probably makes you more likely to, you know, make a pretty, pretty terrible error.
00:26:34.000Another one I have marked here, doctor, and I don't want to focus too much on the kind of things you're not supposed to talk about, but I can't help but ask you about this because we get questions about this from young ladies.
00:26:43.000You talk about how the pill could actually be making young women depressed.
00:27:29.000And, you know, I hate prescribing an antidepressant to deal with the side effects of another virus.
00:27:36.000Yeah, the reason I ask, though, doctor, and because sometimes the way that these things are communicated to young people, no side effects, perfectly safe, perfectly fine.
00:28:12.000So, Amon, like the last word in a prayer, clinics.com.
00:28:16.000We have 11 of them all around the United States.
00:28:19.000And if you've struggled and not gotten the help you need, somebody should look at your brain.
00:28:27.000And we have more experience than anyone in the world.
00:28:33.000Just can you just kind of pepper off a couple of the things?
00:28:35.000How else can people improve their brain?
00:28:37.000Obviously, by the book, but omega-3 supplementation, understanding inflammation, healthy diet, exercise, not doing marijuana, not doing alcohol.
00:28:45.000But I love this, also embracing the attitude of a brain warrior.
00:28:49.000What am I doing today to improve my brain health?
00:28:53.000Well, you're in a war for the health of your brain.
00:28:56.000Everywhere you go, someone's trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early.
00:29:02.000Everywhere you go, people are trying to put an addictive gadget in your hand that steals the dopamine, the pleasure centers in your brain.
00:29:13.000Negative news that you and I both know the news is no longer the news.
00:29:17.000It's new meant to scare you so they can have your attention to sell you copper underwear.
00:29:25.000We live in a society that perpetuates mental health problems and we're seeing it.
00:29:33.000It's just horrifying, especially in teenage girls.
00:29:39.000The level of anxiety, depression, suicide is at epidemic levels.
00:29:45.000So being a brain warrior, you're armed, you're prepared, you're aware to win this most important fight for your life.
00:29:56.000In closing here, Doctor, as much as you're comfortable with, we have an audience that is very faithful and dedicated Christians.
00:30:05.000You helped write a forward to a book with Rick Warren.
00:30:07.000Can you talk about just some of your faith and how you incorporate it in the work that you do?
00:30:13.000You know, I always think of myself and my patients in four big circles.
00:30:18.000It's what's the biology, so the physical function of your brain that we've been talking about.
00:30:24.000What's the psychology or how you think?
00:30:28.000What's the social circle, the situation you find yourself in?
00:30:33.000And the spiritual circle, which is ultimately, why do you care?
00:30:38.000What is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose?
00:30:41.000It's your relationship with God, with the planet, with the past, and with the future.
00:30:53.000Believing God has always been part of my life.
00:30:57.000And when I was a young soldier in West Germany many years ago, I got involved with a group called Teen Challenge, a Christian group that deals with drug addicts that deepened my own faith.
00:31:13.000I went to medical school at Oral Roberts University.
00:31:16.000So I learned medicine in the context of my faith.
00:31:21.000And people go, oh, how can you be a neuroscientist and believe in God?
00:31:26.000It's like, well, how can you be a neuroscientist and not believe God?
00:31:30.000To think all of this happens by random chance, that's stupidity, right?
00:31:36.000If you just know the second law of physics, where things go from order to disorder, you know, random evolution just virtually makes no sense to me.
00:31:50.000Creative design, that makes a lot more sense to me.
00:31:56.000Plus, you know, I know through the things I've done and my personal relationship with Jesus, it's the only way I've been able to accomplish the cool things I've been able to do to help people.
00:32:08.000Do you find in your patients, younger ones in particular, if they get that spiritual bucket filled, do you find that they start to heal in other areas of their life?
00:32:20.000In fact, there's really good research that demonstrates if you have a close relationship with God, that if you get depressed, you heal faster, that you also tend to live longer and your baseline level of happiness is higher.
00:32:40.000And yet, it seems as if our culture, that's the one thing they don't always want to talk about.
00:32:45.000The book is Change Your Brain Every Day, one minute remaining.
00:32:47.000Any closing thoughts, doctor, that we didn't cover or points that you wanted to make?
00:32:52.000Brain and mental health are daily practices.
00:32:56.000So just like spiritual health, just like physical health, you want a sharp mind.
00:33:15.000It all comes down to this one simple question.
00:33:18.000It's really a theme throughout the book.
00:33:21.000Whenever you go to make a decision, just ask yourself, is this good for your brain or bad for it?
00:33:27.000And if you can answer that with information and love, all of this is about love, love of yourself, love of family, love of the reason God puts you on the planet.
00:33:38.000You just start making better decisions.