Brain Fog and Inflammation
Dr. Kuykendall’s: Hi, this is Dr. Kuykendall’s here and today’s talk is gonna be on brain fog and inflammation. So brain fog is one of the number one signs of inflammation in your brain. Again there are many different contributing causes to the inflammation which we’ll go over in a second, but if you’re feeling like you’re having a hard time reaching for numbers or names or speaking smoothly or fluently, or trying to find your keys or just trying to remember facts–brain fog. That’s telling us that there’s inflammation in the brain and really important to know that about half of all cells in the brain are actually immune cells. So 50 percent of these brains cells are known as micro glial cells, and you can see 50 percent. So that’s quite the large amount of cells in the brain that are actually immune-based and when these cells get turned on, they have a real hard time dampening that immune response. So when that cell get turned on, it gets faster and faster and faster and faster creating more neural damage. And we’re gonna talk some of the ways these cells actually get activated, because we wanna do our best to dampen how these cells gets turned on.
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What are Excitoxins?
So first thing is there’s a branch of certain food compounds known as excitotoxins and this is kind of controversial, again a lot of the research out about excitotoxins are industry sponsors. So there’s obviously a bias regarding, you know, we don’t wanna produce negative studies that are gonna take something off the market. But aspartame, we also have MSG and other compounds. Little known fact: When MSG is below 100 percent, they don’t have to call it MSG. They call it something else like autolyzed yeast extract or something else, flavoring or spices. So you can get exposed to a lot MSG and not even know it. But aspartame is still in that same family and it’s known as an excitotoxin. And literally what excitotoxins are doing, they are activating these micro glial cells. They are exciting and stimulating these micro glial cells, and these micro glial cells create reactive oxygen–reactive oxygen species, i.e. free radicals that continue to create damage to the brain and they actually happen to affect the area in the brain known as the hippocampus. And the hippocampus is an area that affects learning and memory. So this is really, really important. We wanna do our best to eliminate excitotoxins in our food. There’s a couple of articles in the scientific literature by Dr. John Olney. Russell Blaylock also references more on his books regarding the excitotoxic activity of it. Also aspartame if you look at the compound, it’s an amino acid called phenylalanine, also aspartic acid and then we have about 10 percent methyl alcohol. So ethyl alcohol is the one we drink to get a buzz and the methyl alcohol actually is very toxic. So there is 10 percent of that forming in that can add to that excitotoxic activation.
How Gluten Causes Inflammation
Next is gluten. Gluten is one of the biggest stimulators of a leaky gut and we unzip the tight junctions in our gut. We unzip it and food can start going through the bloodstream or through the gastric epithelium into the bloodstream that can heighten our immune cells. And that heightened immune cells basically can affect the astrocytes. The astrocytes you can think of as–as they line the brain. They’re like the blood brain barrier and they line brain. And when we basically activate those astrocytes, we start allowing gluten and the inflammatory molecules to make its way past the blood brain barrier and create more inflammation of the brain. So we have this whole gluten, leaky gut mechanism that then breaks down our blood brain barrier and allows more inflammation in the brain. So we really wanna cut out various glutens and also there’s infections, too, that we’ll talk about in a second.
