 Most psychiatrists actually never talk about brain health, that the things you talk about, for example, the impact of diet on your microbiome, but that completely affects your brain health. How avoiding toxic chemicals in the products we put on our body, or the issue with concussions, having an undiagnosed brain injury is a major cause of suicide, anxiety, depression, ADHD, learning problems, and homelessness. But nobody's talking about it because most psychiatrists never look at the brain. So think about that. What other medical specialty never looks at the organ it treats. And that's insane because how do you know if this depression is because your brain works too hard or not hard enough? And giving everybody SSRIs which calm down the brain can really help some people and be a disaster for others. So how, okay, so you know I see this actually in my patients all the time. You know they've come to see their medical problems as personal failings rather than being caused by their environment or the foods they eat or even the drugs they've been prescribed. So how do you propose we reframe this issue between, quote, mental health and physical health of our brain? Well, I think the first thing we need to do is actually start looking at the organ we treat that making diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data, I mean somebody should be upset about this, and I've been upset about this for a long time, but cardiologists don't make diagnoses with no biological data, gastroenterologists don't, orthopedic doctors don't, nobody I know does that. So I think imaging just needs to become part of what we do because the brain is an organ you can look at both structurally and functionally. And so my colleagues will say well there's not enough science and I'm like seriously if you go to pubmed.com today and type in brain spect you'll get 14,600 abstracts it's like let's not say there's no science and it's like well it's not part of our training and it's not part of our tradition except the outcomes in psychiatry are no better than they were in the 1950s. In fact disability for mental health reasons has quadrupled since the 1980s. So obviously we're doing something wrong and so we need a new paradigm plus what I get excited about I don't know if you and I ever talked about the Daniel plan it's a program I did with Pastor Rick Warren and Mark Hyman. The first week 15,000 people signed up the first year they lost a quarter of a million pounds and then literally thousands of churches around the world have done the Daniel plan and part of the testimonials are not just weight loss it's they lost their anti-depressants they lost their anti-anxiety drugs they felt better their memories were better and it just highlights that when you get your brain right your mind follows but unfortunately most people suffer with mental health issues see psychologists and psychiatrists that virtually never talk to them about diet about exercise about supplementation about looking at do you have an infection in your brain I'm in a new docu series with Justin Bieber I've been Justin's doctor for a long time and he came out publicly that he had Lyme disease and that was part of what was driving his mental health challenges so is that a mental illness or is it a brain illness and in my mind it's clearly a brain health issue get your brain right your mind will follow. So when you say brains work too hard you talk about in the book about brain types and is explain what that means I mean doesn't everybody have the same brain? No as a matter of fact one of the big early lessons is that everybody's sort of different I mean we have healthy balanced brains we have spontaneous brains that really have sleepy frontal lobes and they're creative and restless and spontaneous but they're also impulsive and they can't concentrate and they're late and disorganized there's persistent brains where the front part works too hard often in many cardiothoracic surgeons or neurosurgeons they want things a certain way and if things don't go a certain way it gets them upset and you want your cardiothoracic surgeon to be that way they're not our ADD group at all a little bit of OCD and then our sensitive they're people who's limbic or emotional brains work too hard and our cautious brains people who tend to be anxious and what I learned is like if we just took obesity for example putting everybody on the same program sort of silly when you realize they're impulsive over-eaters they're compulsive over-eaters they're sad over-eaters they're anxious over-eaters putting everybody on the same program is sort of silly when a high protein low carbohydrate diet works really well for the spontaneous group the ADD group and it is a fricking nightmare for the persistent group because it's a focused diet and if you have OCD tendencies you will focus more on the things that upset you and I was on the Rachel Ray show and we were talking about this and she has that persistent brain type and she said I went on the Atkins diet and I was so mean I wondered why my husband didn't leave me and so get on the wrong diet you actually end up divorced so so you can actually with a spec scan tell a brain type or what other evaluation processes do you go through to make that determination so we have a free online assessment people can take brain health assessment calm brain health assessment calm and it'll tell you which of the 16 brain types you have because there are combinations of types as well and it's good for your husband to take it your children to take it someone you're dating to take it to see you know what vulnerabilities there may be in relationships and I talk about this in the book when I first met my wife I really liked her and but I didn't want to like her until I saw her brain and so about two weeks later I'm like you haven't been to the clinic don't you want to come to the clinic and I scanned her she was a good sport but you know she worked at Loma Linda on the neurosurgery ICU unit and you know we sort of bonded over the brain and it's just I think we should be putting the brain more central in our relationships because it's your brain that makes every decision you make and when your brain is healthy you make better decisions which means you're healthier you're wealthier you're more successful at whatever you do so what do you think about what can you tell our listeners about the link between their gut bacteria and their mental health they're intimately connected more so than we ever thought and when I was a resident nobody said boo about this but if your gut bacteria is unhealthy as a child it actually sets you up for lifelong anxiety disorders and so think of all the kids who had tubes in their ears because they had multiple ear infections often because they're sensitive to dairy that it damaged their microbiome think of all the kids who were born by c-section and their microbiome wasn't properly populated or were not breastfed and and I don't want to make anybody feel guilty it's like okay you know that may be a risk factor and so you then go and take care of that risk by repopulating the gut in a healthy way with fermented foods and probiotics but this idea of leaky gut syndrome increases inflammation which is a major cause of both depression and dementia and so in the end of mental illness I really take a functional medicine approach to brain health and and mental health and I have this mnemonic called bright minds to help you remember the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind and the first eye is inflammation often caused by an unhealthy gut