 The best ways to improve energy and brain fog. I hear it in my practice all the time. Many of my patients come to me with feelings of low energy and fatigue. Dr. Gundry, I just don't have energy anymore. Well, most people will tell you that low energy is a normal part of aging, but I'm here to tell you it is not. Now the number one cause of low energy is inflammation. Leaky gut, in my opinion, and many others, is the leading cause of inflammation. Inflammation causes a myriad of factors, among which is insulin resistance. Well over 80% of my patients, when I first see them, have an elevated insulin level and are insulin resistant. Shockingly, 50% of normal weight individuals are metabolically inflexible, insulin resistant. 88% of overweight individuals are metabolically inflexible, and 99.5% of individuals who are obese, and that's 40% of Americans, are metabolically inflexible and insulin resistant. Now, many of these patients come to me after being seen by physicians or naturopaths and are told they have adrenal fatigue. None of these people have adrenal fatigue. What they have is leaky gut and inflammation leading to insulin resistance. So, what are the things that I recommend? First and foremost, you've got to take care of your gut health to get your energy levels back. Multiple reasons for this. Increasingly, we're beginning to understand that there is a gut-brain connection. Years ago, we knew that there were nerves in the gut that communicated to the brain, and that's where the word gut-brain connection came from. In fact, there are more nerve cells, more neurons surrounding in your gut than are in your entire spinal cord, and that's why many people call your gut the second brain. But more importantly, with each year, we are beginning to learn that there is a third component to the gut-brain connection, and that is the microbiome gut-brain connection. And many of the things that we attributed to the neurons in the gut talking to the brain, we now realize it's the microbiome talking to the brain and the microbiome being part and parcel of inflammation or quelling information in the gut and the brain specifically. So, if we reduce the inflammation in the gut, we automatically reduce the inflammation in the brain. I just saw an attorney from the East Coast who's been a patient of mine now for, I guess, about six months. And this gentleman, high-profile attorney, smart guy, had some definite brain issues that were surprising to him and made a trek out to Palm Springs to see me. And we found that, no surprise, he absolutely had leaky gut, but what shocked him was that he had leaky brain. And so, things that were happening in his gut were actually affecting his brain. And the exciting thing is, we just saw him back for his six-month visit. And in three months, not only has his leaky gut dramatically improved, but the markers for his leaky brain have also dramatically improved. And the fact is, he's noticed the difference, which is the most important thing. So, how do we do this? Well, you've got to get your gut bacteria back on track. How do you do that? You consume probiotics, which are friendly bacteria. And you've got to make sure that you get probiotics that actually will survive passing through gastric acid and colonize your gut. The second thing you have to realize is that most of the probiotics that we consume, either in a capsule or in a product, are visitors to our gut. And they may stick around on vacation for a couple weeks, but they leave. So, you actually have to replenish them. Probably the most important thing to realize is that probiotics, friendly bacteria, have to have prebiotics, fiber, soluble fiber, to eat. And if you don't feed them what they need, you could take all the probiotics in the world and it won't do you any good. Recently, we've learned that the probiotics, eating prebiotics, make postbiotics. And these are both hormonal chemicals and gases that not only heal the gut wall, tell our immune system to relax, but more excitingly, actually go to the brain and protect neurons in the brain. Now, I can say this over and over again, you can take all the gut restoring supplements in the world, you can eat all the probiotics, all the prebiotics, but if you keep swallowing razor blades in lectin-containing foods, like whole grain foods, like corn, like non-pressure cooked beans, you're going to continually rip up the repair work that you're doing. And so many people are shocked that just getting these lectin-containing foods away from them is one of the biggest steps that they can take to stop the inflammation from their gut. It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the things you want to do is cut out sugar from your diet. Sugar feeds bad bacteria in your gut and bad bacteria stimulate inflammation in the white blood cells surrounding your gut. Second trick, restrict your eating window. This is actually one of the best ways that I've found and others have found to make yourself metabolically flexible, as opposed to insulin-resistant. Intermittent fasting or eating window restriction, time-controlled eating, is initially hard to do because most people who are insulin-resistant fall flat on their face when they stop eating. So the trick is approach this gradually and I go through this in my current book, Unlocking the Keto Code, that is if you eat breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning, next week we're going to have breakfast at 8 o'clock in the morning. We're just going to wait one hour. Take the weekend off. The following week we're going to have breakfast at 9 o'clock in the morning. We're going to do that during the week. We'll take the weekend off. So each week we'll add an hour to when we start our first meal and you'll be surprised in five weeks you'll be eating break fast at noon and that's one of the easiest best ways to reduce insulin resistance and get metabolically flexible. Third thing, sleep. Here's the deal with energy and brain fog. Sleep is essential to actually have your brain go through a cleaning cycle. We now know that every night during deep sleep, which usually occurs early in the sleep cycle, our brain literally goes through a wash cycle where toxins and accumulated poisons are literally washed out of our brain. It's called the glymphatic system. Now you have to have a lot of blood flow to your brain to accomplish this. So the trick is if you eat near the time you go to bed, most of the blood flow from your heart is going down to your intestines to digest the food you eat and not as much blood flow is going to be available to go to your brain. So the simple rule is don't eat within three hours of the time you go to bed. That will also extend your eating window when you're not eating but it will give your brain a chance to get clean. The other thing that happens in the brain we now know during sleep is that the repair work is done to your mitochondria in your brain and the mitochondria are what makes the energy for your neurons to use. So unless you have a nightly repair downtime for your mitochondria to clean up and your brain to clean up you can do all these other tricks and you still may be exhausted and have brain fog. Now on top of that if this wasn't bad enough you'll need to be aware that there are seven deadly disruptors that I mentioned in almost all of my books such as blue light and herbicides like Roundup. If you can avoid these you'll actually notice a huge difference in not only your energy but also your overall health. If you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast you're definitely gonna want to see this one. What do I eat for energy? Well for my patients I actually want them to eat like a gorilla who lives in Italy.