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Transcript
- 08:57 The neurotransmitters and their function
- 17:03 What causes neurotransmitter deficiency?
- 21:00 How stress affects our entire body
- 26:38 How a neurotransmitter deficiency contributes to depression
- 29:43 SSRI – Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor
- 35:57 Are there alternatives to antidepressants?
- 43:17 GABA and anxiety
- 57:13 Serotonin. How much does our gut produce?
- 59:10 How to reduce stress
- 60:56 Foods that we should avoid to optimize neurotransmitters
- 67:32 Supplementing neurotransmitters
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Liveto110 podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and I’m a certified holistic health and nutrition coach. And we’re broadcasting live today from Malibu California. This afternoon I’m interviewing Beverly Meyer of Ondietandhealth.com on how to optimize your feel good neurotransmitters like to serotonin, dopamine and others. And she’s a fellow podcaster as well; she’s got a fantastic podcast. What is it called, Beverly?
Beverly Meyer: Hi. Yes. It’s Primal Diet Modern Health.
Wendy Myers: Yes that’s what I’m trying to think of. Damn thyroid. But today we’re going to be talking about how to optimize your neurotransmitters and I thought this show is really important because one in 10 people are on antidepressant medications. And I personally suffered from depression for years without any clue how it could be remedied. And the only option that you’re given at your doctor’s is antidepressant medication. I tried that and it didn’t really work. I had a few months where I felt a little bit better but the effect seemed to wear off. And that’s exactly correct; antidepressants tend to deplete neurotransmitters after a few months causing the effects to diminish just as I experienced. And you know many people have depression when their lives are going just fine. It’s not circumstances that are causing their depression, this was my case too.
I have realized that diet plays a huge role in depression and you must eat animal protein to optimize your neurotransmitters, it’s what the neurotransmitters are made of. Some people like me eat it at every meal to provide the basic building blocks to serotonin and dopamine, but when I had the bright idea to go vegan a few years ago, it plunged me into depression and anxiety which I never had in my life up until that point. I even occasionally went into rages, of course which I had never experienced before. It was not like my personality at all and it was just proof because I was deficient in neurotransmitters because I wasn’t eating any animal protein at all. And needless to say I am not a candidate for the vegan diet.
But you also cannot, like I was doing, eat a ton of wheat flour and sugar. But that’s all I ate all day long. I used to have a horrible diet; I was addicted to sugar and grains and this totally threw my body on a non-stop rollercoaster blood sugar ride and I recently discovered to my surprise that sugar makes me really, really irritable. I always had heard that sugar affects your mood, but I was just eating it all day long, so I really never made the connection. And when I’ve done the sugar detox and gotten off the sugar and then had some, my mood took a major nosedive. So believe me your diet is contributing to your bad moods too, but we’re going to get into all this stuff during the show.
But before we get started, I have to do a little disclaimer. Please keep in mind, this show is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition. The Live to 110 podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment my guest or I suggest on this show.
And if you like what you hear in today’s show, please give the Live to 110 podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. This will help people around the world to find the show easier and get my word out on health and I would really appreciate it so much. And please go check out my site myersdetox.com™. I am attempting to the best of my abilities to achieve the optimum health that I could possibly achieve. And I’m not talking about just the absence of symptoms or disease; I want to experience soaring energy and optimum health. So come and join me on my journey on my site. I have a weekly blog post, I’ve got the podcast obviously, I’ve got videos on there and a free webinar – all there to help you achieve your health goals. So let’s get on with the show.
When our neurotransmitters get out of balance they cause all kinds of mental and physical problems, most notably depression and anxiety. And our guest Beverly Meyer is going to tell you all about how you can optimize production of these neurotransmitters and how to take control of your mind and your life.
Wendy Myers: Good afternoon Beverly. How are you?
Beverly Meyer: I’m very well. Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Well, first why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Beverly Meyer: I am a clinical nutritionist and really I call myself a holistic nutritionist. I’m in my early 60s but I’ve been a client of natural health since my late teens. So I’ve been at this as a client for a very long time – as a very dedicated client with a lot of health problems working with a huge variety of practitioners all over United States even Canada and some in Europe and Mexico. So I have a big background as a patient. But my education was all in business; economics and finance and I’m a natural entrepreneur. So I’ve had many businesses in my life and managed to burn myself out several times and at some point back in about 10, 12 years ago I really just ran myself into the ground and had to take a year off to recoup and that’s when I really started to learn about the effect of the neurotransmitters. So I now have a natural health clinic. I’ve been doing that since 1985 in San Antonio. So I’m a good patient but I’m also a pretty good practitioner and like you are mentioning my blog is Ondietandhealth.com and my podcast are – I have over 60 podcasts and they’re at Primal Diet Modern Health and you can get that on iTunes or on my website. And so that’s my focus – first of all food first, that’s at primal diet. Let’s get the bodies eating the way we evolved to eat. We’re not humming birds, we’re not wolves, we’re not crickets, we’re humans and that’s my DVD that I filmed on this called The Diet for Human Beings. So that’s available on Amazon and on my website too. So there’s a little short answer for who I am – patient and practitioner.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I really love your podcast. I’ve been a fan for a long time. I just eat them up. I’m sad that you’re going to be pausing for a little bit ‘cause you mentioned you are writing a book.
Beverly Meyer: Well actually, I kind of managed to overwork myself again with the podcast thing and the blogging and the Facebook and all this stuff as well as the clinic and I own a very large natural health center here in San Antonio and that all needs to get managed – the building and the tenants too. And so now what I’m doing is I’ve backed off seeing my clients for the summer and not working on the book at all. So I’m really taking a lot more really medical time for myself to really dig in to some deeper levels of my emotional, mental, physical problems – how they’re all tied up, knotted up together and as I tell my clients I say, “Look I’m in this practice for me and anything I learn that seems like it’d be helpful to you, I’m going to pass it on.” And I think it’s a pretty common approach with most natural health practitioners is that we’re working on our health issues and it’s just very inspiring to pass it on to other people. So now I’m not working on the book, but I am working on myself. So working on that again now.
Wendy Myers: Good for you. Good for you because you’re taking care of yourself. And one thing that I as a practitioner myself, I was really blown away when I learned about how we can increase our neurotransmitters naturally because our whole lives most people are only exposed to medical facets of health or the western medical allopathic paradigm of health. So we only know about, “Hey if we’re depressed, you take an antidepressant.”
Wendy Myers: Let’s go into the basics, like what are the 4 main neurotransmitters and what do they do?
Beverly Meyer: Let me ask myself a different question first, and that is what is a neurotransmitter?
Wendy Myers: OK yeah. That is much better.
Beverly Meyer: Because we all use that term but none of us really know what it is. So the brain is made up of neurons which are interconnected brain cells – they’re like rest stops on a freeway, you know you’ve got the road and then you’ve got the place and things are shooting back and forth. And so the messages that tell the body what to do – everything, breathe now, urinate now, filter that toxin in the kidney now, swallow. All these messages travel along these interconnected brain cells and then at the end of each neuron, there’s a gap to the next one – that’s the synapse. And so to get the message across the gaps, I’m carrying the message but I have to jump this gorge. To jump over I could carry the message across. So to do that, the neuron releases a neurotransmitter – it’s a transmitting vehicle for the message. So it’s a neuro…transmitter – to shoot that message across the synapse, across the gap. And that gets the message across. Hopefully there’s somebody on the other side receiving that is functional and that’s a little more complicated area of neurotransmitters – is do you have a neurotransmitter? Is it able to jump across the synapse? And is there somebody there on the other side to catch it? So the message gets across and the sending neuron then reuptake, it takes back up that raft or that boat – that transmitter and it takes it back up to recycle and reuse it again. So if a neurotransmitter is lacking, a message can’t be sent and that is the bottom line for so much of what is going on mentally and emotionally and all of us is that simply the messages – calm down, sleep, digest this food, go kill that bacteria, breathe more deeply, relax that pain that spasm in your shoulder. If there’s something wrong in the neurotransmitter system, the message can’t be sent. So that’s an introduction to neurotransmitters.
So ask the question again and then I’ll try again to answer that.
Wendy Myers: Yes. So what are these 4 main neurotransmitters, the ones that do most of the work in our body?
Beverly Meyer: One of my favourite books and the one that pulled me out of a really bad place is called The Edge Effect by Dr. Eric Braverman and then sets him Julia Ross has written The Mood Cure and the Diet Cure and she has some good information but differ slightly on how she approaches on neurotransmitters. But the book I use, it’s only $12.95 and you can buy it on Amazon for less than that. I recommend it to everyone; The Edge Effect, but what Dr. Braverman talks about is that there are 4 main neurotransmitters and I sometimes refer to them as the 4 tires on your car. You want them all the same size, you want them all news, you want them all pointing the right way and balanced, but another analogy is they’re like 4 horses in a 4-horse team pulling your wagon. And if you’re assembling 4 horses to pull your stage coach – pull your wagon, you want to pick 4 horses that are similar in size, similar in strength, similar in stamina – they don’t have bad feet, they’re not dying of asthma, so you want 4 well matched horses to pull your body, to pull that stage coach. And there are 2 of them are excitatory which I call the go-gos and 2 are inhibitory and I call those the slow-slows. So dopamine and acetylcholine are the go-gos and gaba and serotonin are the slow-slows. I want to give a definition of what each of those 4 do very briefly. For those of you that have never listened to me before, I give a lot of information, so it’s really good to get a piece of paper and a pencil because you got to learn a lot things and I talk fast, so you got to write these things down.
All right. So dopamine – it’s one of the exitatories, it’s a go-go. Dopamine is responsible for the voltage in your brain, literally the voltage – the power of your brain and therefore your whole metabolism. So dopamine – power, voltage, metabolism, energy. So that’s why I call it a go-go.
Acetylcholine – is the speed of the brain. So you could have tons of voltage. You got all the power in the world, but it’s like you signed up for the slowest Internet in the world but you’ve got a 4 million dollar computer. So if you don’t have any speed, all that power is useless. And some of the other way too, you can have all the speed, but if you don’t have the voltage, think you’re going to get up of wax. So there’s your speed and there’s your power and then you have to balance everything in nature, right? Yin and yang, light and dark, fast and slow, up and down, run, sleep. So we need the inhibitory neurotransmitters equally and that’s gaba and serotonin.
Serotonin – is really interesting, it has to do with symmetry in the brain, like left brain right brain firing. If you got the power and the voltage but it’s all happening on the left brain, that’s not good. So serotonin is responsible for symmetry and synchrony – synchronicity in the body. And it has a quality of playfulness or satisfaction. When your brain is balanced, you’re satisfied; you don’t need more food, you don’t need more sex, you don’t need more sleep, you don’t need to gamble some more, you’re more playful, you’re more satisfied – the brain is balanced.
And then the last one which is my favorite neurotransmitter because this is the one I found out that was literally killing me was the absence of this and that’s gaba.
Gaba – governs rhythm and stability in the body. So rhythm and stability. So maybe everything else is going great with your lungs for example with its neurotransmitters and the dopamine and serotonin – everything’s getting messages and it’s all healthy tissue. But if your gaba is off and maybe it’ll affect your lungs by – you breath too fast, you breathe too slow, you have asthma or you can’t swallow. Each of these neurotransmitters governs dozens of issues, but that’s another way to think about. Gaba is stability and rhythm, like your menstrual cycle is always off and your sleep cycle is you can’t sleep right and you’re mentally or physically just not stable. You fly into anger or rage, your blood sugar’s not managed, you get hot, you get cold. So that was a very long introduction to what is a neurotransmitter, so I’ll turn it back over to you for a minute there Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Why do people today is suffering from neurotransmitter deficiency? Is it stress, there’s obviously numerous factors involved?
Beverly Meyer: All right. So number one we set at the beginning that first of all you have to have sufficient neurotransmitters – A. B – you have to have them all in balance. C – you have to have the message being fired across the synapse which takes a variety of vitamins and minerals and other amino acids and enzymes, you have to have receivers on the other side to receive these messages and there we get into things like mercury and toxins and vitamin and nutrient deficiencies. So the problem is all on those areas. We’re basically worn out – the bottom line is we’re stressed out, worn out, depleted because we’re living a life that our bodies never evolved for. We didn’t evolve to work this hard, to worry this much, to be in and dated with radio and microwave and EMF frequencies 24 hours a day, to be worrying about global war – you know everything. And so I think the main thing is we tend to exhaust our neurotransmitters if we can make them properly in the first place; which means we’re eating a nutrient dense diet. Like you talked about being vegetarian, you’re not going to have the proteins; you’re not going to have the essential fatty soluble vitamins like A, D, and K which play a big role in some of these transmission stuff. So you’ve got to not deplete them, you have to make them and you have to be able to use them.
Wendy Myers: Can you make them from vegetarian proteins and plants?
Beverly Meyer: I can’t give you definitive answer on that. A protein is a protein, is a protein. If you have a unit of tyrosine or you have a unit of phenylalanine or you have a unit of tryptophan, they’re all basically just proteins. So theoretically, you should be able to get that from a protein from whatever that protein comes. The problem is, is that in the vegetarian family, the balance of proteins are skewed, there are many that are just missing, there’s not enough of them which of course we know meat has more protein than rice, for example. Then again these critical co-factors; the vitamins, the minerals, the fats, omega 3s, vitamin D – all these things are critical not only to putting together of the neurotransmitter, but also in firing it and receiving it and then putting it into action. So for clients that don’t eat a lot of animal protein, we carry a pumpkin seed protein powder, it’s from Omega Nutrition. They have wonderful pumpkin seed butter and pumpkin seed oil and they have this pumpkin protein powder. So it’s not pumpkin seeds, it’s a protein powder extracted from pumpkin seeds. And that is a nice protein source would people need and extra for whatever reason.
Wendy Myers: OK. And in our fast phased society, most people are in a constant state of stress and anxiety and it’s obviously stated that depletes neurotransmitters. People they work too much and they sleep too little. How are neurotransmitters and the adrenals in the brain and therefore the entire body affected by the stress?
Beverly Meyer: Let’s back up a second. Let’s for example take any wild animal; like a shark. So that shark evolved over a long period of time to be that particular shape, have a particular diet, have particular social habits, so everything about that was kind of basically established a really long time ago. Sharks have not just changed much in a really long time. Now if you take that shark and put it in a concrete pond at Sea World or something and then you feed it with factory farmed famine or something that we know instinctively that shark is not going to be a healthy shark. It doesn’t have the open water, it’s missing a lot of elements in its food, it doesn’t have its own social world – whatever that is to a shark, it’s in close proximity to other creatures including humans that it’s not particularly interested in. So we’re the same way, we evolved in a very distinct pattern of lots of free time, walking occasionally, sprinting when we were running that wounded rabbit or running from a predator or a person hunting us or coming after us. But mostly we had our food and we had our shelter and we hung around and we’ve had fire for a million years and it’s kind of find rabbit, kill rabbit, cook rabbit, eat rabbit, sleep, make love, do some remedies to the shelter and then get up and do it again – go find another rabbit except this time maybe it’s an elk or whatever. So that’s how are brains are wired – occasionally you can be terrified and have to run like heck, but the rest of the time, you’re either relaxing or doing some kind of steady work, assuming you’re not in an ice age we’re you’re really struggling for food all the time, I’m not talking about that, so anyway that’s a different story. So we’re not wired to be on deadlines and have crisis and thoughts and worries and planning a to-do list and taxes to file and all that stuff – we’re not just wired for it and therefore it’s all a stress to us. So what might be “not a problem” in your mind, it is a problem to your nervous system. It’s reading that’s constantly buzzing telephone or just that 30 minute drive to work where you are taking your life in your hands behind the wheel of a car and your nervous system is activated hopefully being aware of what’s going on to keep you focused. So it’s not just a stress we can think about, like a relationship or money or keep the air conditioning at 66 in my office and I’m freezing all the time – all of these is cumulative to your body, it’s mental, it’s physical, it’s emotional and it just wears us out.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and that’s why adrenal fatigue it’s epidemic in our society – the gland that produces our adrenaline and ten other hormones. Our bodies just can’t handle it.
Beverly Meyer: That’s right and cortisol is a hugely important hormone for us. It gives us stamina, it gives us muscle, it gives us strength and we really need that cortisol. We don’t want the large part of the adrenal is the part that makes cortisol, the smaller part of the adrenal is the part that makes adrenaline. And that is exactly what I’m talking about – is that balance between work and live and eat and make love and hunt and rest and act and oh my gosh run like heck – it’s a big crisis. And that’s literally how the adrenal’s about. It’s mostly for cortisol and only a little for that emergency adrenaline and then we’re living on this cortisol, cortisol, cortisol all the time and then it just gets exhausted, it’s not ready for it. And I’ve run hundreds of saliva hormone test and it’s extremely rare as in like never that I see high cortisol on people and yet in all of the health magazines that’s all you ever hear about – it’s the dangers of high cortisol. But I guess by the time anyone sees me for any reason and I ran a saliva hormone profile, their adrenals are already maybe still normal or mostly they’re starting to be fatigued or are fatigued, I rarely see them in a high cortisol state.
Wendy Myers: Yeah I have the same thing. I do hair mineral analysis and just in all my study, they’re finding very few people that don’t have some sort adrenal fatigue or some level of it, it’s just epidemic in our society, in our fast paced society.
Wendy Myers: Can you explain how a deficiency of neurotransmitters contribute to depression?
Beverly Meyer: Well you have the word called depression, but we could talk for 3 hours about what that word means both culturally – maybe it means something to a Muslim or a wealthy merchant in India or a fisherman in China. So depression is a cultural world, it’s a catch word and for many people the number one thing that depression is, is really fatigue. It’s just plain worn out fatigue with too much worry and “I’m tired but there’s so much more I have to think and worry about” and we kind of label that depressed. And remember we talked about dopamine – dopamine is the neurotransmitter that works with voltage in the body and metabolism and power. So if your brain is literally tired, you’re not producing, using and receiving your dopamine, your brain is tired and believe me if you’re brain is tired, everything is tired. It’s just the voltage on everything slows down. If the adrenals are tired, everything is tired. If you gut is sick like all of our guts are from gluten and sugars, we know of course that’s where the most of the neurotransmitters are made is in the intestine.
So depression though is just a big word, it can also mean sick. You know people with chronic low grade viruses, chronic low grade bacterias, chronic Candida, and then of course hormone’s out of balance – so we’re these amazingly complicated systems and things can kind of fall apart in a number of places. Anyway the word depression it has a multi answers, but we do know that when dopamine goes down and when serotonin goes down, then we know that we can have something that we might call clinical depression even for someone who’s not exhausted and worrying or in marginalized health. Not that I’ve ever met anybody like that because we’re all really over worked especially as you get older and you’re 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and the children and all these stuff that gets very cumulative – it’s not such an issue generally and your teens 20s and 30s when you just haven’t done too much for too long, although there are huge exceptions to that statement. So again, things are depleted and we worry and we don’t feel well and we’re depressed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I mean 1 in 10 people are on antidepressant medications called SSRI’s – it’s serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors. Can you explain how these work and if there are better alternatives?
Beverly Meyer: Yes. The SRRI – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, what it does is they don’t contain serotonin. What they do is, and actually we don’t know exactly how they work all right. It’s one of those things like, “Well it seem to do this and we don’t know why, but it seem to do it and it seems healthy to people, so let’s sell it and then off we go.” And then the different prescription serotonins – they’re actually a little different from each other – Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, they each work a little differently, but nobody ultimately is really sure how they work. But my sense of that is, is that they inhibit the reuptake of that serotonin so that it hangs out a little bit longer in the gap. Remember that synapse – the gap? So the reuptake inhibitor lets it just hang out a little bit longer in the gap getting that last bit of a message across the gap. So they somehow make things happen differently in the synapse. They don’t supply extra serotonin and they don’t improve the reception of the serotonin, but they do improve the transmission of the serotonin or other – there are aloes reuptake inhibitors, not just serotonins but it just keeps them sparkling in the gap a little bit longer. So you get a little bit more bang for your buck that way.
Wendy Myers: And aren’t they eventually depleting because they are constantly in the synapse and the synapse and the synapse and eventually you deplete the serotonin so they stop working?
Beverly Meyer: I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that, because again we’re not really sure what we’re doing with them and how they’re working. And it may be they’re not depleting the serotonin, it could be that you’re just not making enough serotonin for a variety of reasons. But they could be messing with the feedback loop, the brain say, “No, no really I have enough. You don’t need to make more.” So I really don’t know the answer to that question and I doubt there’s probably anyone that actually that does know the answer to that question. And it’s very, very difficult to measure neurotransmitters. There are several companies doing tests for them; blood and urine and this and that and the other and frankly they’re all just a little bit questionable to me because in many cases you’re looking for – it’s like a smoking gun, if you see a gun and there’s a little trace of gun powder going at the end of it, you’re pretty sure that it just fired a bullet. You’re not 100% sure but you’re pretty sure, so the test that we have for neurotransmitters, they’ll say, “Well, we found a little of this substance there and so we think there was a neurotransmitter there earlier today.” That’s why I like the book The Edge Effect so much. First of all, it has test in there that are fun to do; just little quizzes and things to draw and remember from this page, the next and questions of “Have you noticed that you really just don’t want to be around other people?” “You’re really becoming more of a loner lately?” Or “have you noticed suddenly reflux that you’ve been starting that heartburn lately and you don’t know why?” Or there’s a lot of questions to go through and answer and to me that’s the best way to get an idea of which category you might be somewhat deficient in. So you didn’t asked me that question, but the whole concept of neurotransmitter testing is a little awkward yet still I’m just getting ready to send off my test with the amazing new lab that I have not known about -Sabre Sciences. So I’m going to try there urinary neurotransmitter and see if it makes any sense to me. But I think really working with this book is the best way for many people to get a sense.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. When was that written?
Beverly Meyer: Oh gosh, maybe 10 years ago or even longer. And then the Julia Ross and her book, The Brain Cure The Mood Cure after hand she references him and I think she kind of took a lot of his ideas and then redid them in an excellent way that made the books best seller. So they’re also very good, but she doesn’t talk about acetylcholine, she gets often to endorphins. So it kind of blows my 4 horse theories a little bit. So how to repair all the systems is how are you going to repair anything – the first thing you have to do is turn it off and stop. If there’s water flooding out of your toilet, the first thing you have to do is turn the water valve off and stop the water from flooding out of the toilet then you’re going to be able to figure out why the toilet is backed up. And this is something that we’re so – of course this is what modern medicine really is based on is treating the symptom, not the cause and that’s why I call my podcast “Primal Diet Modern Health” because I’m exploring not only how we’re designed to eat and live and digest and work and all of this, but what really modern healthcare is all about – how to get to the cause of things, not just cover up the problem. Now I’ve forgotten the question. Where was I going with this one?
Wendy Myers: No, it’s about maybe explaining how the antidepressants work and are there alternatives to them?
Beverly Meyer: Well yes. But first you have to stop the depletion of the neurotransmitter; the best way to have money in your pocket at the end of the day is to not spend it all day. So the first thing we have to do to improve our neurotransmitter warehouse or supplies is stop using them up and that means if we have to start paying more attention to what is going on with our mind and how our mind runs us and how we’ve made so many choices in the world that we’re just like little crazy robot people running around doing things, we need to step back and reprioritize and do some hard thinking about our life and there’s just no way around it. I have to just beg my clients and finally myself I’m like, “OK Beverly you need to stop and take a break, you’ve got to do some reprioritizing, you’ve got to get handled some of these deep emotional issues, some of them of course is very strongly lingering from childhood, these parental issues that drive us to over produce and over perform and never be satisfied with our self and call ourselves, “Oh that was stupid.” What a second where did that come from? All these things we have to take a look at these deep driving forces in us that make us get addicted to Twitter and hold down 3 jobs when really we don’t have to.
Number one is got to get your life under control and stop using up your neurotransmitters so fast. You’ll sleep better, you worry less, your immune system will work much better and your brain won’t atrophy. So then if you are going to meanwhile some support to your neurotransmitters, the thing that I would supply are things that are going to help calm you down and so that you can stop having such a racing mind. And because if your mind is racing, your body interprets that that something is chasing it with a very sharp stick or big teeth. It’s just like they say, if you go to watch a violent movie, your body does not know the difference between that movie prop and that guy being shot and bleeding and a real murder happening in front of you and so when we’re worrying our brain constantly, “Oh oh, what if, what if, what if…” – it keeps than brain in that fight or flight using up our emergency reverse.
Wendy Myers: I know. I had to stop scary movies and stressful movies and television shows because now that I’m in touch with my adrenal glands and when they start producing adrenaline or cortisol and stressing me out, I realize that the films like that – they do stressing you out; watching the news – they use up your hormones.
Beverly Meyer: Yeah and then you dream about yourself in that movie scenario that night – it’s your brain still trying to process, “Gosh that guy was coming after her with a big gun and she’s bleeding everywhere.” And then you wake up in the middle of the night and you were dreaming about it, it’s like your brain is still trying to process that that stress is gone now and it can relax and go to sleep.
So yes, of course for serotonin that Tryptophan is possibly a 5HTP – 5 Hydroxytryptophan that these will help the body restore its serotonin supplies. But it can be more complicated than that because they require B6 and a lot of us because of our because of our bad diets and our sick guts aren’t making much B6 in our guts anymore or processing in our livers, but there are amino acids that you can take. Tryptophan, 5 Hydroxytryptophan, Tyrosine for the dopamine, Phenylalanine for the dopamine, but I prefer to go with people is first let’s get your gut healthier because that’s where the action’s happening in the neurotransmitters. And the whole source of the body – mind connection is this interaction between your gut and that big 13 pound fatty brain on the top of your head. There’s a big thing going on here between your brain and your head and the brain and your intestine. And the sicker our intestines are, the sicker our brain and therefore everything is. So we’ve got to get that gluten out of there and the sugars out of there – get those nutrient dense foods in there so the we can stock on vitamins and minerals and proteins and the body will happily make these neurotransmitters and things itself. But let me go back to gaba for a moment.
So gaba again, it’s a neurotransmitter for stability and it’s notoriously depleted when we are anxious and obsessed, when we can fly up and like, “I was fine a minute ago and then I was yelling at that poor yard guy. What is the matter with me?” Or rhythms and cycles of all kind; irritable bowel is a big one; my bowel is fine for a week and then the last 2 days, diarrhea – What is that all about? Well that’s a stress response from the bowel. And Braverman’s book will help you look at some of the other symptoms for that. But with gaba, rather than take the amino acid, gaba which I think doesn’t work very well for many people. I prefer an extract from Passion Flower, and Passion Flower is a wild weed – a flowering weed, it grows ion census here in Texas beside the highway. It’s a beautiful flower and it contains really a high quality natural gaba analog that doesn’t require much of any processing. It’s almost like prescription gaba but it’s very low in strength and it’s very safe to use; kids, teenagers, old people, everybody can use Passion Flower. And it’s our number 1 supplement in my clinic and it’s on my website On Diet and Health, I have one tiny little store with only 10 items in it. I have thousands of supplements in my clinic, but I have a store with only 10 items and Passion Flower is number 1. If you go to my website and click on supplements, that’s the particular flower we use. It’s a little different than what you find in the store, it’s in a glycerine base which makes it sweet, so you can just squirt it in your mouth at the middle of the night or while you’re driving down the road and you don’t have that strong alcohol herbal base that you have to have water to chase it with.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and isn’t Passion Flower that works on gaba, don’t you have anxiety if you have a deficiency of gaba?
Beverly Meyer: Anxiety is one of the big symptoms of a gaba problem and also obsessive thinking. And I’ve really had a big major mental breakdown here about 10 years ago. I lost my dad, my stepmother, my godchild, a fiancé – didn’t die but he was lost, a cat, I was going to menopause. It was just a mess, all of them at the same time.
Wendy Myers: Oh my gosh, that was not your year.
Beverly Meyer: Yeah, I literally was crazy and I was sane enough to know that I was crazy but I couldn’t figure out – I couldn’t get my hormones balanced, I couldn’t sleep, you know it was just other chaos. But until I saw Dr. Braverman and anyway he worked with me on my gaba issue and my gaba issue was so bad, I actually needed antiepileptic drugs. So drugs do have their place and sometimes a little bit of Paxil, a little bit of Zoloft, a little bit of that can really help you, but the thing is most in my experience – most doctors even “natupaths” and natural health doctors, they will tend to overdose people. “Oh here’s some bio identical progesterone, use this much.” “Oh here’s this, use that much.” But even so with things like natural progesterone and much less something like Paxil, I tell my clients, “Look this maybe the way to go, but I want you to start at a quarter of the dose they suggest.” You can always go up but we don’t want to just slam something into the body, it’s going to cause a ripple effect that may not be what you wanted and tiny doses are all that are needed. So there’s several of us in my clinic that are on very low doses of Paxil or Lexapro for example and basically a quarter of what our doctors would suggest and they know it, they know what they’re on. Like I say you can always go up.
OK. So there’s just a little bit with that, but yes gaba has many symptoms but obsessive thinking – it’s not like you see in the cartoon or the movie like you have to check the doorknob 24 times, although that definitely is a sign, but it’s also just that constant rumbling chatter in your head, “OK I have to do this and that” or “Did I already do that? I can’t remember, but I should have done it better, well OK I’ll do that. OK in 5 minutes I’m going to that and blah, blah, blah.” It’s just that obsessive compulsive thinking, the inability to still your mind.
Wendy Myers: Is that also rumination, where people are going over and over negative thoughts constantly that contribute to depression?
Beverly Meyer: Yes exactly. Well that’s not depression, that’s obsessive compulsive thinking. There’s an easy experiment for that and that is we all know people who do meditate and can meditate and are good meditators, but for many of us the only we way we can still our mind is by being in some form of body centered work, like yoga or Pilates where we’re so focused on that right arm, that right shoulder, that right muscle that we can take our mind from our mind and put it into the body. But to be able to just sit down in a chair and attempt to mediate, if your mind is just one giant scramble of repetitive thinking, yes that’s gaba and it’s also serotonin is in that ball part too. It’s also inhibitory; it’s helping to stop these over firing signals.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and isn’t it Xanax the medication that works on gaba?
Beverly Meyer: That’s one of them; Klonopin, Xanax, Valium, Herion, Marijuana, alcohol – they all work on gaba. And that’s one of the things in Dr. Braverman’s book that he gives a little score for each of this 4 neurotransmitters and on a scale of 1 to 10, if you’re approximately at a 5, you might be experiencing, PMS, TMJ – Gosh people with TMJ that suffers so much, I’m telling you it’s a gaba problem, gaba and serotonin. TMJ, anxiety, PMS – that very often is related to serotonin. And then as you get further than the list of more and more depleted in gaba, you get tantrums and rages, reflux, pain, unremitting pain and then finally down into alcohol, heroin, and marijuana – they’re the only way that you can survive and it gave me great compassion for addicts of anything from marijuana to heroin and alcohol that it’s literally keeping them alive and until somebody could probably diagnose them, but mostly they’re going to just be put on serotonin which won’t help with the gaba.
Wendy Myers: Yeah and I think whenever I’ve known someone that’s been addicted to alcohol, marijuana or what have you – that it’s really just their body crying out for balance.
Beverly Meyer: That’s right. And here’s an interesting one; and that is ADD and I’m a huge believer, but ADD is a gaba deficiency, just the opposite of the way it’s treated medically, because medically they put you on speed basically. They say you can’t stay focus on your homework, well let’s just put you on speed, because if you’re running from a tiger, you are very focused; your pupils are dilated, your heart is pumping, you’re not thinking about your broken arm, you’re just thinking about running, climbing a tree, getting away from that tiger. So adrenalin and speed will definitely focus you, but the problem is that there’s too much speed and voltage that’s spinning around up there, what you really need to be able to do for me in most cases is slow down, get the obsessive random fast chaos out of there and i.e. the Passion Flower and you become, “I see, yeah wow I’ve got 3 more chapters tonight, I’d better get with it.” That’s why we just love Passion Flower in my clinic so much. I just find it so many helpful for so many reasons and ways and it’s very safe, at the worse, you’re going to fall asleep and sleep well and take a long nap, but it’s not going to kill you and it’s not going to addict you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’ve read something really interesting in your site about how if you supplement with gaba, if you can, you can get it at any health food store and that works well, but if it does work well that there’s an indication of leaky brain and exactly how people can have leaky gut. Can you explain this?
Beverly Meyer: Yes. We have 3 blood barriers in the body, the lining of the intestine, the lining of the lung, and the lining of the brain – these are like the Great Wall of China, nothing’s going to get through, over or around this baby unless we – the guards at the gut, the lung, and the brain say, “You may pass and enter my brain directly.” Unfortunately MSG, NutraSweet, and mercury can cross the blood brain barrier directly; this is why they call MSG and NutraSweet a neurotoxins because they are toxins and they can cross the blood brain barrier. So they literally excite the brain to death and poison it just like the mercury. So if we have this leaky brain which I don’t even want to begin with trying to figure out where that comes from, we know that we can guess that leaky gut comes from the contact of the food and the lectins and the allergens and the yeast and the antibiotics and all the stuff that we’re eating. But I can’t give you a definitive answer on how the lung barrier and the brain barrier are compromised. But gaba as its own particular molecular structure is not supposed to have access to the brain, it’s not one that can just jump in and out of there, it has to be changed in a certain way before it gets an invitation to cross over. So when people buy just plain gaba in the drug store, if it works for you, that’s actually – here’s my understanding and I could be way long on this. But if it actually works for you, it calms you down – that can be a sign that you have leaky brain and that it really shouldn’t work for you. ‘Cause I’ve had other people say, “I just took it and took it and took it.” It took me a long time to figure this out, people are saying, “This stuff doesn’t work.” And other people are like, “Are you crazy? It works great.” And as I did more research on it, I did find some references to that that things like Xanax, alcohol, and Passion Flower can cross the blood brain barrier where gaba itself cannot unless it’s synthetically modified.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I have to get myself about 10 bottles of that Passion Flower ‘cause it sounded really good right about now.
Beverly Meyer: Well for people ordering it off my website, we like it. Yes you can buy anything on Amazon, but hey support your local podcaster. But we tell people learn how to use it, it says on the bottle 10 to 60 drops 1 to 4 times a day. So it’s telling you, “Gosh it’s got a pretty big range of dose.” We tell people just maybe right now as you’re leaving your appointment, kind of do a reality check; How do I feel? Is my pulse rate saying am I hyper, am I tired, am I mad? And then take exactly 10 drops and then in about 20 minutes, do another reality check; How am I feeling now? And then next day, tomorrow takes exactly 15 drops, and then next day 20 drops and so on. So that you know, “Oh my God somebody hit the dog; I’ve got to take the dog to the vet.” You know that you may need a 40 drop dose immediately and you may need another 40 drop dose in half an hour and that you’re confident what your dose range is because you’ve already tinkered with it, after all we’re our own best science experiment, so that’s the way to dose really, a lot of things but that’s the definitely the way to dose Passion Flower.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love how this natural medicine works really quickly because when you take antidepressants, you’re told that it takes 3 weeks to work. People, a lot of them need relief right now. So it’s just a fantastic product for that.
Beverly Meyer: St. John’s Wort, back to your question about serotonin. St. John’s Wort of course can work extremely well for helping replete serotonin and so I shouldn’t have left that out right here we are an hour of whatever into the show, it should have been right at the beginning. St John’s Wort, especially if you buy good quality St. John’s Wort, not something that’s on the back shelf at Walgreen’s or something, but St. John’s Wort can also take a couple of weeks to get those synapses up and the serotonin replete, but St. John’s Wort can work quite well. But if you’re already on a full dose SSRI, do not take St. John’s Wort also and I’m going to repeat that, if you’re already on a medically dosed Paxil, Prozac whatever, do not take St. John’s Wort or Tryptophan or 5HTP also. Don’t do them both and that’s a whole other story, but if you’re not on things and you want to play with something; play with some 5HTP. By the way all amino acids; Tryptophan, Glysine, Taurine, 5HTP, Phenylalanine, Tyrosine (Did I say that?), all the ones that help these neurotransmitters all need to be taken away from food and that’s another common mistake. A protein taken with food – your body just like, “Oh well they just had an extra bite of steak.” But if you take that dose of Tyrosine or 5HTP on an empty stomach, then it can work as a therapy as a single amino acid building block to do what you wanted to do. So don’t take your Tyrosine or 5HTP with food, it had to be on empty stomach. And 5HTP and Tryptophan must have B6 with them or they don’t work and some people have to take a little B6 with them if they’re taking it on a rising and at bed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you want to take these expensive supplements and then have all the proteins in your food competing, ‘cause they all compete. There’s only so much that can cross at one time.
Wendy Myers: So, doesn’t the gut produce serotonin? Exactly how much does the gut produce and how can we optimize its production?
Beverly Meyer: I don’t think anybody has the exact answer to that and I’m sure it varies widely from person to person. But basically our intestine is our neurotransmitter factory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Candace Pert, but Candace pert – she has an amazing work, one of which is Your Body is Your Subconscious Mind and she talks about the molecules of emotion, she was featured in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know” and her book and I love to listen to her “Your Body is Your Subconscious Mind” in the car along with Eckhart Tolle and I learn so much from her. You know every cell in your body has receptors for hundreds of different things; peptides, dipeptides, hormones, neurotransmitters – it’s not broken down into this doorway and that doorway, it’s a big party in there and so things work everywhere, but the bulk of the neurotransmitters are produced in the gut and obviously having a really healthy gut and when we’re under stress, our guts are going to get sick and damaged. So again we’re back to – it’s not just our food, it is our lifestyle that’s going to make the difference at every step of this process.
Wendy Myers: I have another question. Can you take the Passion Flower while you’re on SSRIs?
Beverly Meyer: Absolutely because it’s playing with gaba, not so much with serotonin.
Wendy Myers: OK good, just want to clarify that. Just so the listeners know.
Wendy Myers: And what are some of the steps that someone can go through to take control of their life and their mind, like what supplements and diets reducing stress?
Beverly Meyer: Well the diet for human being is of course as the key – eating the way your body evolved to eat – with plenty of proteins, plenty of saturated fats, plenty of vegetables, some fruits and staying off the starches and the grains and the sugars and the colors and the junk. We all pretty much know that the body – we’re not grazers like horses, we don’t burn cellulose and consume it and turn up into food, we’re hunters and we’re built for protein and for saturated fat and for the mushrooms and herbs and flowers and seeds and weeds and eggs and plants and tubers and things that we gather along the way while we’re foraging on our way to the hunt. So we have to take care of our gut, we have to sleep and we have to do this priority work to back off – start saying no, no is a really important word; “No I cannot be your best friend.” Or “No I cannot take you on that trip to Arizona.” Or whatever, to be able to say no and keep your priorities firmly in your mind, “No honey, this is not the time to have another child.” And you know these are hard decisions you have to make, but you have to do it because if your brain is fearful, your neurotransmitters and your hormones are going to be used up rapidly.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Are there any foods that one should avoid to optimize transmitters? I know you mentioned gluten earlier.
Beverly Meyer: Absolutely gluten because we all make antibodies to gluten. There’s a lab called Cyrex Labs which not many people know about but it’s one of my absolute all time favorite labs and they have the only decent gluten test in the world. And it’s not just the 2 antibodies that are the officially recognized celiac disease antibodies, it’s way more than that because there are hundreds of elements in any food. I mean something as simple as a tomato and you look at a detailed research report on all the ingredients for lack of a better word, in a tomato, my gosh it goes on for pages and pages and pages and pages. Same thing with wheat, there’s a lot of stuff in there that your body might be attacking in addition to only the 2 things that celiac disease recognizes as the problem. So I urge people to run Cyrex Labs to full gluten antibody test and you’ll know whether you’re a little bit intolerant or a lot intolerant. And for me being gluten free for many, many years, when I first ran the test I slunk the test miserably and was shocked and I finally figured out that it was the tiny, tiny exposure to the dust coming off the horse feed when I would scoop the horse feed out – I have a pony and a donkey, when I’d scoop that feed out into their buckets, that tiny bit of dust that would go poof in the air and it’s like horse kibble if you will, so it’s not like dusty stuff. But it was enough little tiny molecules in the air that I would breathe in through that leaky lung barrier and my immune system would attack it. So we have to get really gluten free and that means skin and hair care products too as well as foods. And as far as foods to avoid – yeah sugars and grains and I don’t think people personally do well on dairy other than ghee, I could eat buckets of ghee, clarified butter, but that’s the only dairy I can tolerate and Cyrex has test for that too. But yeah, you got to eat like human being. Get my DVD, it’s a great DVD it will help people understand how to eat this way and why and how to explain it to their friends and family without you sounding like a crazy person saying, “I don’t know, I’m trying to eat like a hunter.” And people will laugh at you, and if you’re not going to read the book, get the DVD or any of the books, get the DVD and then you can pass it on and share it or watch it with your boyfriend or your parents.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I’m learning telling people to eat like a caveman as a bit of a hard cell, like people just don’t relate to it.
Beverly Meyer: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: But it works, our bodies are just like the caveman even though we’re in modern times.
Beverly Meyer: I’m just going to say, except for the fact that we’re in and dated with the electromagnetic fields that are coming off our cell phones, our computers, Wi-Fi, TV’s, microwaves, cell phone towers, the cars, the hair dryers. Our bodies obviously never evolved with that and they’re terribly damaging to us and you know people say, “Oh you can’t get away from it.” Well I don’t have a cell phone and I don’t have Wi-Fi in my house and I don’t have Wi-Fi in my office building. I own the office building and all my tenants, when they want to come in, I say that’s great but you can’t have Wi-Fi and you know people think that’s ridiculous. Well it’s not, I don’t want to subject myself to being in that field and I’m doing the podcast next week on earthing and as we speak I’m sitting here with my foot on an earthing mat and I have one in my bed and earthing sheet. And earthing is a tremendous, tremendous way to help your body handle stresses of all kinds and it’s extremely easy. It’s a rubber pad and the little prong on it plugs in to one of the three holes on your grounded electrical outlet, it’s the ground on your electrical outlet, not the ones with the power, it’s the third one. Anyway I highly recommend them, you can get them on Mercola website or on Earthing.com and they’ll help all kinds of problems.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I was really fortunate when I was pregnant with my child; I was living on the beach at that time and every single day, I’d go walking on the beach and it was really a wonderful pregnancy because of that because I was detoxing all these bad electrical fields and it’s hard to explain, but there’s so many healthy things for your body.
Beverly Meyer: Well even just getting your bare feet on grass or on natural rocks or as long as they’re not sealed and coated like a concrete pad or whatever, but putting your feet in dirt, in grass, on rocks and you’ll be grounded and if everything’s really dry, it helps to just have a little moisture on your feet, you know a little spray bottle or something or wet grass – the water of course helps to conduct, the earth is a big electrical field and our bodies are starved for electrical balance ‘cause we’re so massively thrown to the other extreme, we’re so surrounded with electricity and earth is the balance to that. So when you’re outside, get at least a finger or something trouncing earth or grass and get yourself grounded as frequently and as much as you can.
Wendy Myers: Yeah that’s fantastic advice that I consciously try to do every single day as to ground my body properly.
Wendy Myers: So can you tell the listeners what your opinion is on supplementing neurotransmitters? ‘Cause we had talked a little bit about 5HTPs the precursor for serotonin and tyrosine which is the precursor to dopamine. What are your thoughts on supplementing with these? You know that’s what’s typically recommended by Julia Ross The Mood Cure like if you’re low on serotonin, just take the 5HTP or other neurotransmitters what are your thoughts on that?
Beverly Meyer: Well because food first – food first is my motto and you have to do the working that your diet right first and get your life under control first and your toxins under control. A supplement is a supplement, it’s not a cure. It’s a supplement – it’s something you add once you’ve done all the other things, it’s like waxing your car once you’ve gassed it up and washed it and repaired the bad brakes and if you wash it, that’s a supplement. So even though I’m a clinician and I sell thousands of dollars in supplements and all this stuff, my supplement use with clients has reduced about at least 60% since I’ve been strongly encouraging gluten-free diet, typical diet for human beings. People’s need for supplement just plummets when they stop eating the bad things and start eating the good things. So first of all, do the work, secondly read The Edge Effect and do all the test in there, third get the Mood Cure and you can check all those up from the library too and then if you think, “Wow it’s gaba.” Then just get on my website get my Passion Flower or get some 5HTP from whole foods, but anytime you supplement, you do one thing at a time, you just don’t start taking handfuls of stuff and you don’t know which one’s giving you diarrhea and which one’s making you have a headache and which one’s actually healthy.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Isn’t it true that if you take one for instance take 5HTP to increase your serotonin, that you can throw your neurotransmitters out of balance?
Beverly Meyer: Well sure. It’s like anything else. If that wasn’t the problem and you start supplementing it, then you’re not helping, you’re adding another horse to the team that maybe you didn’t need it. Maybe you just needed to fix the one that was falling behind the team ‘cause you forgot to feed it for 3 days. So that’s what modern healthcare is all about – it’s trying to get to the cause and in actual deficiency of tyrosine is not that common if you’re eating proteins and fats and reasonably digesting your food. So the actual neurotransmitters and cells are often not in short supply. It’s the fact that you’re using them up too fast or the co-factors aren’t there. So again, you’ve got to work it all and do things in stages and be your own best guinea pig.
Wendy Myers: Well thank you so much Beverly. That was so informative and I know it’s going to help so many people kind of rethink their program or their protocol they’re using to try to treat their depression or anxiety. Thank you so much for being on the show, I just love your podcast and I’ve been a fan for quite some time. So everyone, go listen to her amazing podcast and subscribe, leave for a great review and you’re going to learn a vast array of topics on how to improve your health and nutrition and I’ve learned so much for myself.
Also click on Beverly’s website at Ondieandhealth.com. She’s got a great blog with lots of articles on the site about neurotransmitters and gaba and all kinds information about nutrition and there’s links to all her site and social media and everything that we’ve talked about today will be on the show notes. So thank you so much Beverly.
Beverly Meyer: Well you’re welcome. And for people also to just sign up for my newsletter there. They’ll get a free e-book on how to cook a whole bunch of food at one time, so you’re not feeling like you’re cooking all the time. So just sign up for my weekly newsletter and you’ll get a nice little free e-book and then you’ll get my weekly blog post in a newsletter or two and get on my Facebook page ‘cause there’s completely different information happening over there. So there’s a lot to learn and just always start with food first and with getting better sleep. Those are the 2 priorities – it’s food and sleep and don’t forget to get your bedroom as pitch black as you can. You’re going to way, way your whole serotonin tree of hormones and neurotransmitters if you’re sleeping in the dark and that’s something that people can do without taking a supplement – it’s sleeping in the dark, get all your electrical red lights and clocks and things with lights on them out of the bedroom and black out all your curtains and don’t look at any night lights in the night. Keep your eyes closed if you have to go to the bathroom, you can find the bathroom without opening your eyes. And those 2 things – better sleep, better food, you’ll go a long way. That and some Passion Flower, you’ll be amazed how much better you can feel and that will give you the strength and the energy and the hope to get on to the next piece of the puzzle because there’s always more to learn, it’s always more nature path out there with great information to share with you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Thank you so much. It’s a sound advice absolutely.
Beverly Meyer: You’re welcome. My pleasure.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for being on the show Beverly. That was fantastic.
Beverly Meyer: Thank you so much for having me on. I always enjoy sharing the knowledge and inspiring people that you could do a lot of these work yourself.
Wendy Myers: Absolutely, absolutely. We empower people to take control of their health.
Beverly Meyer: All right. Thank you so much Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Thank you Beverly. And thank you all of the listeners out there for tuning in to the Live to 110 podcast. Please remember to leave a review on iTunes, if you enjoy what you heard today and help me spread the word on health. And remember the best time to work on your health is while you still have it.
