Transcription
I recently stumbled on a Joe Rogan clip that immediately caught my eye. As a nutritionist and someone who deals with vitamins every day, it's called "Is Mental Illness Mostly a Vitamin Deficiency?" It's part of an interview with biologist Gary Breer, where both talk about the role nutrients play in mental illness. Since that is a big part of what I talk about on this channel, it's something I had to react to. There's really a lot of good insight in this clip, but also some that I disagree with. Let's get into it so you know what I'm talking about.
Okay, so here's the clip, and it's not actually taken from the official Joe Rogan Channel, but one of those clip channels where they just take parts of his interviews.
"Just for 30 days, don't even stop eating white bread, white flour, white pasta, white rice, or grains if that's what you eat. I don't eat any of those things, but if that's what you eat, don't stop eating them. Just switch to the organic, non-fortified, non-enriched version and watch what happens to your mood, your focus, your concentration, your short-term recall, the depth of your sleep, and your waking mind at night. But the vast majority of wheat and rice and things that you do buy will have been enriched with folic acid. All of it in the United States is, unless it's organic."
Wow, okay, so the title of the video already gives you a very good idea of what they're talking about here: how nutrients and vitamins impact our mental health and how the deficiency of them can lead to mental illness. Now, in this clip, they're actually talking about food fortification of folic acid, or vitamin B9. Let me give you some background on folic acid and the folate family so you better understand what they're talking about.
Basically, the folates are part of the vitamin B family, which are all water-soluble and important for things like protein utilization, the development of babies, and also the creation and reading of your DNA. A few decades ago, it was discovered that folate deficiency in the mother leads to birth defects in the child. So, in the late '90s, the FDA made it obligatory for food companies to enrich their products with folic acid. That's what they're really talking about here: the enrichment of things like bread, flour, cornmeal, rice, pasta, and other grain products.
So, if someone's buying a sandwich and you're getting it on regular bread, you're just getting folic acid. If you're getting a bowl of pasta, you're getting folic acid. If you're getting a bowl of rice that's not organic, you're getting folic acid. And your body's like, "What the is this?" Your body's like, "What the?" Just pay attention to your mood after you eat high amounts of some of those things.
Oh, believe me, I'm very aware. It's my number one weakness. Yeah, my number one weakness is bread and pasta. If I do go off the rails with a diet, like I have a cheat day, that's what I cheat with.
Okay, so try next time you go off the rails eating non-fortified, non-enriched pasta or white bread. Well, I have absolutely noticed that when I've gone to Italy. So here, Gary is explaining how in the U.S., many products have to be enriched. I believe it's around 140 micrograms of folic acid per 100 grams of flour, but don't quote me on that. So if you eat a lot of grain products, you're really getting a lot of folic acid, and we will talk in a second about why this can be a problem.
Now, food enrichment is a lot more common in the U.S. than it is in Europe, where I live. The idea is that food processing strips a lot of nutrients that later have to be added back into the product to make up for them. To be honest, it's a terrible practice that leads to all kinds of unwanted consequences. Joe then talks about how he better tolerates the grain products in Italy. Like I said before, this can be due to the differences in food fortification. It's a lot more common of a practice in the U.S. than it is in Europe, but it can also be other things, like the gluten content in the grains in the U.S. versus Italy, or it can also be the difference in pesticide use. It's more common to use pesticides year-round in the U.S., and in Europe, it tends to be more seasonal.
This happens to pregnant women too, right? You know, postpartum depression, which for the record can begin before the pregnancy is over. Sometimes they get slaughtered online for saying, "Oh, you're talking about postpartum depression before the pregnancy ends." Yes, the diagnosis of postpartum depression happens very often before the pregnancy is carried to term. So, 44% of women have this gene mutation. What's the first thing their OBGYN tells them to do when they get pregnant? Take high doses of folic acid. Well, 44% of them can't process this folic acid. So what happens? Why do they tell them to take high doses of folic acid? Because they're told that folic acid prevents neural tube defects, which is patently false. Folic acid doesn't prevent anything; methyl folate prevents.
Here, they're talking about a few things. Like I said before, the reason for the food enrichment is that researchers found that folate deficiency leads to birth defects in babies. Now, the problem is that folate is really an umbrella term for many different nutrients, and in food enrichment, they basically always use synthetic folic acid. Folic acid cannot be put directly to use in the body; it has to be converted into the bioactive methyl folate before it can be used. Now, this conversion from folic acid to methyl folate depends on an enzyme that is methylation-dependent called MTHFR. People with an MTHFR gene mutation have a hard time converting folic acid to methyl folate. So when they take high amounts of folic acid, oftentimes their body cannot convert all of it, and it just sits in their body and can do damage. Too much of a good thing is also bad.
Are they told to take it in supplemental form? Are they told to take it in the form of foods that are sprayed with folic acid? They're told to take it in supplemental form. If you look at the majority of cheap prenatal vitamins, right? The good ones, like Thorne, Pure Encapsulation, some of these big brands, they will have methylated versions of vitamins, right? They'll take the folic acid out because what happens if you're pregnant and you have this gene mutation, MTHFR? Number one, you have a skyrocketing incidence of miscarriage, but then because you don't have the methylfolate that your body needs for the adhesion of the egg into the uterine wall. But now she's pregnant, and she starts to take a prenatal vitamin with 1,400-1,600% of the daily allowance of folic acid. She starts to go nuts, right? Develops postpartum depression. Eventually, the pregnancy ends, she stops taking the prenatal vitamin, and the symptoms go away, but she still blames it on the pregnancy, not on the vitamin.
Yeah, so here he just explains what I mentioned before. Many doctors are still not aware of the difference between folic acid, the inactive form, and methyl folate, the bioactive form. He also talks about prenatal vitamins, which are usually terribly formulated. I'm not a big fan of multivitamins in general; I talk about this in a different video. But when it comes to prenatal vitamins, besides the folic acid problem, you also often have too much copper and too much iron. He mentions the folic acid overload as the cause of postpartum depression. In my experience, it's usually copper overload instead because when estrogen levels rise during the pregnancy, so do copper levels. After the pregnancy, when your body is not able to eliminate that copper anymore, then you will really run into problems since copper converts dopamine into adrenaline. That's when you get things like feeling tired but wired or anxious all the time because you're really suffering from low dopamine coupled with high adrenaline.
Whoa, the truth is I have yet to see a peer-reviewed published clinical study linking pregnancy hormones to postpartum depression. Now, is there a benefit to taking methyl folate? Huge benefit to taking methyl folate. And how do you get methyl folate? So you buy methyl folate; you get the methylated form of that nutrient. This is why I say if you look at five particular genes—MTHFR, MTRR, MTR, AHCY, and COMT—dude, if you find that you have one of those gene mutations and you supplement for their deficiency, magic things will happen in your body.
Okay, here they really get into the topic of methylation. It sounds very complicated at first, but when you look at the essence of methylation, it's really just the addition or subtraction of a methyl group. Methyl groups are small molecules that can be attached to other molecules, which can be neurotransmitters, hormones, or even your DNA. Attaching methyl groups to them changes their function; it can make them more potent or change them into an entirely different molecule. For example, many people don't know that melatonin is actually made from serotonin, and to convert serotonin into melatonin, you need an enzyme that is methylation-dependent. So when you have low serotonin levels or you lack the sufficient amount of methyl groups for the conversion, then you will also suffer from low melatonin. That's why you often have sleep problems in people who have low serotonin and depression.
So really, what you have to understand is that methylation is not just important for the conversion of folic acid into methyl folate, but for many other processes in your body. Gary lists a few genes that are important for methylation, and I will just give you the explanations for each gene. If you're interested, you can screenshot it now. Of the genes, the most important ones are probably MTHFR, which activates folate, and COMT, which eliminates catecholamines, which are the neurotransmitters responsible for your stress response.
Now, one more thing I would like to add at this point is that I personally believe genetic testing is overrated. Most people overly focus on specific gene mutations and then try to figure out what nutrients they need to take to make up for that mutation. But really, what you should be looking at is the net effect of all these genes together, so whether you're an undermethylator or overmethylator, because that will tell you whether you need to adjust your diet and supplement regimen to provide for more methyl groups or if you're an overmethylator and need to bring that methyl level down.
You know, we all know people that are suffering from anxiety. If we haven't suffered from anxiety ourselves, chances are we know somebody who has. And if you really break down what anxiety is, right? A fear of the future. We have to understand that it doesn't require the presence of a fear for us to feel fear. Right? So you could drive home tonight and pull into your driveway. When you get out of your car, somebody's standing in front of you with a knife, right? So that's a real fear. Your pupils are going to dilate, your heart rate's going to increase, your extremities are going to flood with blood, you're going to start to have a fight-or-flight response, mainly because an area of your brain has dumped catecholamines—fight-or-flight neurotransmitters—into your brain. Boom! Now you start to have a fight-or-flight response.
But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo in bed, and you could just start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. Yeah, okay? And the chances of a shark getting out of the ocean and coming up a 30-floor elevator, right, are zero. But you can have the exact same reaction. So how is it that I can have the same reaction to the presence of a real fear as an entirely perceived fear? Because it doesn't require the presence of a fear for these excess catecholamines to leak into the brain.
And this is why the majority of anxiety that we have seen in our practices, that my clinical team treats, is coming from our physiology. It's not coming from our outside environment. I really like this part because Gary gives very good examples of how biochemistry affects your mental health. For example, anxiety, in many cases, you have some sort of stressor. It can be external or internal, like a fear, for example, and you often can't really influence that trigger; it just happens to be there. But what you can influence is how your body processes the trigger.
So, for example, we can decrease the rate at which fight-or-flight neurotransmitters, or catecholamines, are produced in the body. We can downregulate that, and we can also increase how fast these catecholamines are processed and eliminated from the body. So it's really not the fear itself, the trigger itself, that we're trying to target here. That's more the role of therapy. But instead, how you react to that fear and that stressor, how your body responds to overall stress.
In fact, if you ask most people that suffer from anxiety three questions, if you say, "Have you had it on and off your entire lifetime?" they'll say yes. There's your first sign: it's a genetic deficiency. And then you say, "Well, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it?" They'll say most of the time, "I can't." There's your second sign that it's not coming from their outside environment. And then the third question is, "If you've ever tried anti-anxiety medications, have they worked?" The majority of the time, they'll say no; it just makes me feel like a zombie. That is very indicative that this is a nutrient deficiency and not a mental condition.
So this is where I kind of disagree with him. He says that most people cannot pinpoint the trigger for their anxiety, and therefore it has to do with their genes and not the environment. Now, my experience is that genes exacerbate a stressful environment, so both are really tied into each other. Let me give you an example: women in southern Italy have a way higher than global average incidence of the MTHFR gene mutation. If it were just the mutation that caused the birth defects and the illness, we would see way higher rates of that in southern Italy. We don't, though. So there has to be an environmental factor that plays into this: the low-stress environment, the strong family bonds, and also probably the Mediterranean diet compensate for the gene mutation.
Put that same person in a high-stress environment, give them a bad diet, and also make them sit at home alone all the time, and they will go crazy. So it's always your genetic makeup and your environment together. Now, he also talks about side effects from anxiety medication. I'm not sure exactly what type of medication he refers to, but if he's talking about SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, then your reaction to it will depend on your methylation status.
Under-methylators, with generally low serotonin levels and low neurotransmitter levels, usually react positively to them, and over-methylators, who tend to already have high amounts of serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline, react negatively to it because you're further increasing that high load of neurotransmitters.
So do you encourage people to take methyl folate as a supplement?
Absolutely, I encourage them. I think every—the dose that they should take, well, it's weight-dependent, but you know, methyl folate about 800 micrograms a day is usually sufficient.
Is that something you take with food?
You can take it with or without food. It's a water-soluble vitamin, so unlike vitamins A, D, E, and K, which are actually fat-soluble that you need to take with food for them to be absorbed, you can actually take those even on an empty stomach as long as you're not taking it with a bunch of other vitamins that cause you to be nauseous because it changes your stomach pH.
I think every single person should be at a minimum on a methylated multivitamin.
Yeah, I completely disagree with that, and most practitioners who focus on methylation get this wrong. I talk about it in much more detail in a different video, but basically, in my experience, the best methylation protocol is the Walsh protocol. What they found was that under-methylators logically react positively to methyl donors—all methyl donors, like TMG, SAMe, or choline, for example—but they would not react positively to methyl folate.
Usually, they will feel good at first and see improvement, but after 2 to 3 months, they would often crash. Not everyone, but a significant number of people. They couldn't figure out why because on paper, methyl folate is one of the most potent methyl donors, and they could really only change their approach once they understood the duality of methyl folate.
Because it's not just a methyl donor; it's actually also a methyl reducer at the same time. It donates its methyl group outside the cell, but inside the cell, at the level of the DNA, it takes away methyl groups. You see, all folates, including methyl folate, turn on neurotransmitter reuptake genes, so more serotonin and dopamine are reabsorbed by nerve cells.
So you really have two competing effects here: the methyl donation from the methyl group that is attached to the folate and the methyl reduction of the folate itself. What that means is that you have to be very careful when supplementing folates, including methyl folate. It's a very powerful nutrient, but in both directions, the deficiency isn't good, but too much of it isn't good either. I believe 800 micrograms is way too much. You want to start with maybe half of that or even less and then see how you react to it.
Like I said before, many under-methylators see big improvements at first, so they think, "Oh, this is an amazing nutrient," but then after a while, they can crash, usually after the 2 to 3 month mark. So again, I don't want to tell you to take it, but be careful with it.
The basic raw materials that your body needs to perform the process of methylation, because methylation is how we create neurotransmitters, right? I mean, we make serotonin from taking tryptophan, an amino acid, and methylating it into serotonin. We make dopamine from phenylalanine and tyrosine. If you can't make these conversions, you have certain deficiencies.
And yes, you can have deficiencies in neurotransmitters, which will lead to the expression of a mood disorder. You don't have a mental illness; you just have a lack of mental fitness. And this is why I think it's crazy that we're so quick to say that we have pathology and disease or dysfunction, and then we go to chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals.
And I'm not anti-pharmaceutical, but what I'm saying is before we diagnose somebody with a mental illness or an autoimmune disorder or with an allergy or a sensitivity or irritable bowel syndrome or any number of other conditions, we should ask ourselves, "What raw material could be missing from their body that could be causing this to happen?"
Yes, I completely agree with him here. The essence of methylation and nutrition in general is to give your body the raw materials it needs to perform optimally. This also brings me to the end of the video. I really like this video because it brings to a wider audience things that really need to be heard. All neurotransmitters, hormones, and enzymes are made from nutrients that we get through our diet. These things include vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids.
Now, a lot of chronic conditions, like mental illness, chronic fatigue, immune disorders, or allergies, can be improved or sometimes even cured when you understand the biochemistry behind them. Now, of course, you never want to do this alone; always do it together with your doctor. Have them clear everything and have them also track your progress.
What I'm trying to say is that the knowledge is out there. The problem is getting to it. A lot of practitioners specialize only in one thing—might be hormones or even methylation—but then they lose the big picture. In my experience, experts don't like talking to each other. They think, "Well, I'm an expert in that one area; I don't need information from other areas." But really, the cross-section of these fields—so the cross-section of, let's say, medicine and mental health nutrition—is where value is created, where most people are helped.
In an information economy where you're constantly bombarded with new information, making these connections between different fields is the most important thing, in my opinion. It's what this channel is all about. If you're interested in learning more about methylation and other concepts that I found helpful, check out my videos on it. I will link them in the description.
And again, great video! I really like what they're talking about here. More people need to hear it. I hope you also liked it, and I see you in the next video.