Transcription
Today we're going to talk about what would happen to your brain if you ate no sugar for 21 days. That's 3 weeks. And I've done a lot of videos on how sugar impacts the whole body. Today, we're just going to focus in on this brain. It's fascinating.
And this video, it was inspired by a research paper out of the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism. And this study revolved around doing the ketogenic diet for three weeks and what it does to the brain just in three weeks. It's mind-blowing. It increased the blood flow to your brain by 22%.
Now, you might at first say, "Well, 22% doesn't seem like a lot." But let's say you're an Olympic athlete and you're running around the track and someone just turned up the oxygen by 22%. Just think of the advantage of what 22% more oxygen could do in a race. We're talking about a significant boost in oxygen and nutrients to your brain. Even if you think when you exercise, if you were to restrict your oxygen by 22%. You would feel it. I mean, just think about if you go to sleep at night and someone turns down the blood flow and turns down the oxygen by 22%. Well, they actually call that sleep apnea. You're not going to sleep that great. You're going to wake up feeling tired.
Well, just by going on low carb, you can increase your blood flow significantly. And there's something else that's really cool. Your BDNF increases by 47%. What is BDNF? Brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This is a protein that tells your brain to grow, repair, and rewire itself, making more connections, growing new brain cells. They also consider it an anti-depressive molecule because it helps prevent depression and it helps boost your IQ. Three weeks, no sugar, almost 50% more brain-derived neurotrophic factor. This is like incredible. What would happen in a month or two months or 3 months or a year of doing low sugar?
At the end, I'll cover what would happen specifically at week one, two, and three. And then I'm going to give you some real simple tips of how to do it.
In order to talk about the benefits of coming off sugar, I first need to talk about what happens when you eat sugar specifically to your brain. And I think most people might know this right here. But I'll tell you one thing. Many people do not know this. In fact, I haven't even talked about all of this in any of my videos. So, this is interesting because it's kind of general knowledge that people know that when you sugar, you're going to create a blood sugar swing, right? And you're going to increase insulin. I think also people know uh when the blood sugar goes down, you're going to feel irritable because you're starving your brain of fuel. You're going to have brain fog. When I was living on sugar long ago, I was in a permanent brain fog. I didn't even know what it was like to actually think clearly and not be in the fog. And I was also highly irritable as well. And also your sleep is messed up. This is why when you wake up in the morning, you're not really awake. It takes you a long time to wake up. Anxiety. Your attention will be low. You'll have less focus. Your memory is not going to be as great. Uh I already mentioned the mood swings. Usually you're going to be hungry an hour and a half after you ate. How can you actually be hungry? You just ate an hour and a half ago. It's illogical. It's not real hunger. It's the blood sugar crashing, which is not a lack of fuel.
The problem is at the cellular level. Because when the brain becomes dependent on sugar, it starts to create a resistance to sugar. That's called insulin resistance. And so the more sugar you eat and the longer you do that, the less of that sugar will get into the cells. This is the brain or body trying to protect itself against this toxic sugar. When you take a diabetic for example, they're not getting a lot of sugar into the brain. And this is why they have a higher risk of dementia, memory problems. So a lot of these symptoms are merely the fuel not able to get into the cells. So literally the cells are starving for fuel despite all this food coming in. It just you have all this fuel available, but it's not actually being delivered inside the cell.
So, in other words, eating in sugar makes you hungry. It makes you crave sweets. I was so addicted to sugar, I had to have it every single night. Uh, a pint of Ben & Jerry's every single night. I wouldn't even think twice. And also, right when you eat sugar, right after that, your vision is kind of blurry. It's kind of wild.
Now, if you've never heard of the data that a B1 deficiency can be created by consuming too many carbs, you're going to want to stick around and really uh listen to what I'm going to talk about because this is super fascinating and it could explain a lot of your symptoms that you're having right now that you're not connecting the dots because a lot of these symptoms that I'm going to talk about are like all over the place. They don't sound like they're connected, but they are connected to a B1 deficiency.
What is B1? B1 is thiamine. It's one of the B vitamins in a whole complex of B vitamins. When you actually consume too many carbs, the demand for B1 goes straight up and vertical. You need a lot of B1 to be able to deal with all that carbohydrate. Let's say for example with a car, you put a lot of gasoline in there, right? You have the perfect ratio of gasoline to air, but the spark plug doesn't work, right? B1 is the spark plug. B1 allows the combustion of that fuel. If you flood too much fuel into the system without B1, then that fuel does not get burned correctly. You cannot make energy. So without B1, you can't make this, you can't make this, you can't make ATP, and you starve off the nervous system because those cells have a high metabolism and they are majorly dependent on B1 more than a lot of other cells. This is why out of all the tissues in your body, the nervous system in the brain are the first one to show up with a B1 deficiency because the large amount of sugar and carbs that people eat are depleting B1 and they don't know it.
So, I'm going to talk about all the bad effects that happen from this. So, then we can talk about all the good things that will happen if you don't consume sugar.
One of the biggest things that suffers with a B1 deficiency is the autonomic nervous system composed of the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. And that's like rest and digest. And this originates in the brain stem in the hypothalamus. That's where it's located. And without B1, these things are not going to work that well. So then what's going to happen to the rest of the body? because we're getting a problem in the brain, which is the origin of where this starts. Well, you're going to get dry eyes. Why? Because the tear ducts don't release tears anymore. So, you might have dry eyes and think it's maybe a vitamin A deficiency or you need to put something in your eyes. No, no, it's a B1 deficiency. Air hunger. I used to have this. I didn't know what it was, especially when I would go to sleep at night. I just I couldn't get enough air. It wasn't satisfying me. that relates to a B1 deficiency because I was eating too much sugar. Bladder problems. You're urinating but you can't get all the urine out. A lot of times men will think that's their prostate when in fact it's simply the autonomic nervous system problem occurring because of the B1. Same thing with women that have bladder problems. They have retention of urine and they think it's maybe structural from the uterus or this or that. Now, it's coming from this right here and this right here. So, that can also lead to urinary tract infections and just a bladder that cannot contract as well as it should. Heartbeat issues. Now, this could start from a palpitation to a skip beat to an actual arrhythmia problem and come from a B1 because B1 is all about the nervous system and the connection to different parts of the body. And we call those nerves the pacemakers of the body. Dizziness. Why? Because the autonomic nervous system controls the adaptation to stress. So when you stand up, the blood should be contracted and go up to your brain. If it doesn't, you're going to feel lightheaded, dizzy, and you can actually collapse. That condition, if it's severe enough, is called POTS. And that is a severe B1 deficiency because the autonomic nervous system is not working. Now, a lot of people have a mild problem of this. They don't realize it. They would just they kind of get up and they just they have to kind of stabilize themselves because they're getting dizzy. I used to have that. I didn't know what that was. That's not normal. That's a problem with this right here.
All right. Next one is low tolerance to stress. How many people do you know that have a very short fuse? You just say one little thing and it triggers them and then they blow up. They have no patience. If they're driving behind a slow driver, oh my gosh, that's crazy. if they ever get a situation where they're in a daycare center and they have to babysit like 23 kids that all have blood sugar problems, they can't tolerate that. In fact, I don't think anyone can tolerate that. But your tolerance for stress is dependent on the autonomic nervous system, which is dependent on this right here.
Next one is anxiety. What is anxiety? Anxiety is kind of where you're stuck in this worry. You're constantly thinking about problems more than you should. If someone that you know has a low tolerance to stress or has anxiety or nervous tension and you just gave them a little bit of B vitamin or maybe nutritional yeast that's loaded with B1, you would find within 3 to four minutes, they're just this overall calming effect. They're just going to be chilled out. They're going to feel so much better. I used to do that in practice all the time and people would be blown away. Uh, they didn't realize that was a vitamin deficiency. They thought that was part of their personality. It wasn't.
Okay, next one is uh insufficient or REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. And that usually happens at the second half of your sleep cycles. And so without this, you're not going to have enough of this. So you might have early morning insomnia where you you just can't get that full seven or eight hours for some reason. Uh, your voice is weaker, especially if you're like a singer or you use your voice in broadcasting and it's weaker. It could be part of the autonomic nervous system. Uh, dry skin because the oil glands, sebaceous glands are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So that's another one. Also the digestive system, constipation, bloating. Your pancreas cannot release the enzymes. So then you get more bloating, constipation. We get this incomplete digestion. Also we have poor bile output. So you can't digest all the fats because all the valves and the smooth muscle of the digestive system is controlled by the nerves. And so if you don't have enough of that nerve control, everything kind of becomes weak and and flaccid and and it doesn't work. And then we have blurred vision, which a lot of times people think, oh, my eyes are just getting bad because I'm getting older. It could be B1. And then also restless legs syndrome. I used to have this when I was doing the Ben & Jerry's and the pasta and all the other all the other stuff I was eating. But restless leg syndrome is terrible because it happens more at night nocturnal where there's all this energy in your legs and you have to go run to get it out. I mean, could you imagine how many different drugs you could be on separate drugs for separate problems or even supplements when all of these things are coming from one thing? this, but at the root of it, it's too much of that.
And what's even more bizarre about this whole thing is the RDAs for uh B1, 1.2 milligrams. That's insane. That's a joke. It's ridiculous. Those numbers are based on just preventing the crippling disease of Beriberi, which is a very severe disease that can affect the heart and especially the brain. We need so much more B1, especially with the amount of sugar and snacking that we're doing now just to maintain different organs. And so if our health care system is based on this, you know, outdated information, it's really hard to get people healthy because the nutritionists and the doctors are not going to connect the dots on just the amounts that you need to maintain a healthy body, let alone correct a uh deficiency or use sufficient therapeutic doses of thiamine to correct a problem. You can't use uh normal amounts, 1.2 milligrams, to correct any of these right here. it's not going to work.
So, what would happen if you didn't eat a lot of sugar, okay, and you had enough B1? Guess what? You would feel calm. You would feel focused. You would not have attention deficit disorder. You'd be able to focus in on something and actually complete projects. You would also feel low stress even if you had a lot of stress around you because you could tolerate the stress. The tolerance of stress really relates to your blood sugars. Those people that you know that have a a low tolerance to stress are usually eating way too many carbs.
If you're not consuming sugar in your diet, then your body switches over to ketones. You're not going to have this appetite. You're definitely not going to crave. You're also going to be sharp in your mind. You're going to actually have clarity. Your sleep is going to be great, which then means your energy is going to be great the next day. And you're going to be awake, which should be a new concept for a lot of people. This is where I am right here. This is where I used to be. During the day when I was awake, I actually was not awake. I had brain fog. I was actually half asleep. Now I'm fully awake when I'm awake. And then when I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping, which is a really cool thing. You'll be able to digest. You'll have low brain chatter. So, you're going to be more in control of your mind and your brain. You're definitely going to have more endurance. You're going to be running on ketones, which is a more efficient fuel, and your brain is going to run cleaner and more efficient.
The biggest lie out there, and I did a whole video on this, is that sugar or glucose is the primary fuel. No, it is not. Our body's primary fuel is ketones. And I'm going to prove it right now with just one little piece of data. You wouldn't even be here right now if glucose was the primary fuel because back in the day, let's just say the prehistoric or stone age time, how much glucose was available in the environment? Were we able to order pizza? Did we have snacks? Did we have a refrigerator? No. We were lucky if we ate once a day. In order for our brains to survive, we had to have some other fuel. And that was ketones. Ketones come from fat. And this is also why we store fat. So we can actually run on ketones between meals. It's a survival mechanism. Sugar or glucose was never the primary fuel because it wasn't available. Okay? So I think that's the best argument right there to prove that fact. And since that time, our body has not evolved to live on pure sugar.
When I say cut the sugar and when I say get into ketosis, I'm not even saying cut it down 100%. I'm only saying bring it down to under 50 grams per day, which is a lot easier than what people might think because you can still have carbs. You can have berries and you can get the carbs and vegetables and some of the fruits, but just you want to keep it below 50 g and you don't want to consume those carbohydrates in the form of sugar. You want something that is whole food that has the fiber that can be slowly absorbed in the body. And the other hidden thing to talk about is this right here. And this is corn starch. Okay? They produce a lot of hidden carbs in the form of either corn starch or modified food starch, maltodextrin or wheat flour. And all of that is industrial starch, which is really just added sugar. So, if we combine all the starch to the sugar, the amount of sugar that we're really eating is a massive amount. And so, we want to bring all that down below 50 g. That means you're not going to drink juice. You're not going to drink soda. You can drink water and tea and coffee. You want to have high quality animal meats and proteins and eggs and fish. You can do vegetables. You can do nuts. You can do cheese. You can do yogurt, unsweetened, kefir, you can do butter, avocado, olive oil.
And so what would happen once you start doing this is going to be like a little uh transition in the first few days where it might be a little bit difficult, but if you take electrolytes and B vitamins, it might only take uh two maybe 3 days to make the transition. So now you're officially in ketosis. You're going to find that your craving and hunger starts to go down. You'll start noticing some clarity in your mind. Your mood will start to come up. And that's really the first week. The second week is when your energy starts to go up. All of a sudden, like you have all this energy, your sleep is better. Your digestion is better. You're not going to be as bloated. You're going to also notice your skin is just like looking better. If you had inflammation anywhere in your body, that's going to be improved. And you're no longer going to have this up and down uh mood fluctuation. things are going to be really really kind of consistent and uh steady. Now, in the third week, all of the things that you experience are going to be enhanced, especially weight loss, especially your cognitive function and especially your mood. And if you had anxiety or depression, that's going to be lifted. Your appetite is going to go down. It's going to make it easier to go from one meal to the next.
So, you might be at the point now where you're like, "Wow, hm, this might be a good thing. This might be something I might want to do, but you need the details of how to do it. So, for that information, you need to watch this video right here on how to get started. So, click it now and check it out.