Creating a Revolution in Brain Health

Daniel Amen, MD, is a physician, adult and child psychiatrist, and number one New York Times bestselling author. He is known for his work in brain health and mental wellness, and is the founder of Amen Clinics, which has the world’s largest database of brain SPECT scans. He also founded BrainMD, a nutraceutical company, and Amen University, which trains professionals in his methods. Dr. Amen has produced 19 national public television shows and his online videos have been viewed over a billion times. He is the author of numerous books, including Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and The End of Mental Illness. 

Sheldon Baker is an InnoVision contributing editor. His freelance editorial content can also be found in several lifestyle publications, and as CEO of Baker Dillon Group LLC, he has created numerous brand marketing communications and public relations campaigns for health and wellness organizations. Contact him at Sheldon@NutraInk.com.

Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal (IMCJ): When people hear brain health, they don’t often think psychiatry. But from what is known about your programs, you’re focused on a healthy brain, meaning supporting it with good nutrition and lifestyle issues like sleep and exercise. Just how does a healthy brain impact chronic health issues?

Daniel Amen, MD: Your brain is involved in everything you do and everything you are. When it works right, you make better decisions and that makes a huge positive difference on chronic health conditions, whether it’s diabetes, sleep apnea, or Lyme disease. A lack of good decisions makes all of the chronic illnesses worse. I think America spends nearly 90% of its healthcare dollars on chronic preventable illnesses. If we’re going to prevent them, we have to improve our decision-making skills.

I think brain health is the most important first step for us to take.

IMCJ: You recently wrote that brain health is the missing link in America’s health care. What can be done to fix that?

Dr. Amen: I am working with the White House on creating a national brain health revolution. I think we have to elevate it to a place of importance, and I want to create a persistent national campaign. And it starts by asking one question. I horrified myself when I realized I could summarize all of my work in one tiny habit. The one question you need to ask yourself every day is: “Is what I am doing right now good for my brain or bad for it?” If you can answer that question with information and love of yourself, and love of your family, for the reason you’re on earth, you just start making better decisions. You then begin to see the world through this lens.

There are a lot of bad things coming at us quickly and we have to become more discerning about the food we eat and the news we ingest. And now we have to be careful with AI. I was on a podcast called the Diary of a CEO where we talked about that. There’s a new study from MIT that basically says, the more you use AI the less engaged your brain is. I think it’s going to become a risk factor for dementia.

IMCJ: I hear what you say about the changes that we need to make. You were at a White House MAHA meeting and discussion. Did you learn anything as a result of that meeting?

Dr. Amen: I think the most important thing I learned is that there are a lot of smart people who have power and who are working on issues many of us have known for a long time that are extremely troubling. Joe Pizzorno’s book, The Toxin Solution, was really informative for me when I wrote my book, Memory Rescue. He asked me to review his, and the big idea I have is if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your mind, and we know what they are.

My acronym for them is BRIGHT MINDS. B is for blood flow. R is retirement and aging. I is inflammation, and T is toxins. I think Joe just did such a great job in a simple way helping people understand these toxins, including forever chemicals that are damaging our brains and bodies.

What I loved about the MAHA meeting and the movement is it’s completely aligned with the work I’ve been doing for the last 35 years since I started looking at the brain. We’re investigating the root causes of chronic conditions and mental health problems rather than simply masking the symptoms.

IMCJ: Let’s move to another topic, and that’s what has happened to our children. Increased cases of autism, ADHD and childhood obesity. What has changed to cause these issues to soar?

Dr. Amen: Take the dopamine destroyers—social media screens, cell phones, and iPads—and combine that with toxic food. People didn’t go out to eat as much when we were growing up. I don’t know if it was the same in your family, but we never went out to eat. Virtually every meal was cooked by my mom and she supervised what we consumed. She wasn’t always the best chef, but my dad owned a chain of grocery stores, so we had access to lots of good food. She was intentional on feeding us right. Today, I think people go out to eat on average three or four times a week, and most restaurants cook with seed oils, which aren’t good for you, and the choices are not nearly as healthy.

One other issue that not many people talk about is aspartame. It was introduced in the ’70s and it’s in about 5000 products. There’s a new study out on mice where they gave mice aspartame, and it made them very anxious, so they gave them valium to calm them down. Now, if you’re a psychiatrist, you have people taking what they think is free—since aspartame has no calories—and you have to give them a benzo to make them normal. That seems like a very bad idea.

But what was the most troubling about this study is that the babies of the mice were also anxious, and the grandbabies of the mice were anxious too.

That’s just one thing. We could also go back to the mid-80s when Reye’s syndrome and aspirin got connected. Then all of a sudden the use of Tylenol exploded. And it wasn’t too long after that the incidence of autism exploded as well. So, is it possible that things we thought were innocuous were, in fact, Trojan horses?

IMCJ: I grew up in a home where my mother and my grandmother did all the cooking, so we always ate at home.

Dr. Amen: And so, you got so much less of red dye number 40.

IMCJ: Exactly right.

Dr. Amen: And you had meals together. Today, people don’t have meals together, or if they do, they all have a cell phone in their hand.

IMCJ: We see it all the time, especially at restaurants.

Dr. Amen: Yes, their heads are in their phones rather than connecting with the people in their group.

IMCJ: So, autism and ADHD may never go away.

Dr. Amen: They were always here. I’m a board certified child psychiatrist. Half the people I see—and I’ve been doing this for 45 years—have children who have had one or the other. ADHD was first written about in the early 1900s. It’s in every version of the DSM—even the first one when it was called minimal brain dysfunction. And it’s real and there’s a genetic component. But the dramatic rise, I think, has to do with environmental interactions with those genes.

Autism, on the other hand, was not common when I first started. It was like one in 10,000 kids. And now, here in California, it’s like one in 34. That’s just insane.

IMCJ: Increased issues of Alzheimer’s and dementia, how they are related to other health matters? Who is more susceptible to these conditions based on lifestyle?

Dr. Amen: I think the people who are susceptible have one or two copies of the APOE4 gene. And there are other genes associated with it as well. But if you have a concussion and you have one of the E4 genes, that dramatically increases your risk.

So, I argue, if you’re thinking about letting your child play a contact sport, you should check to see if they have one or two copies of the APOE4 gene first. And if you have that gene, you want to be exercising a lot, because that helps to ameliorate the consequences of it.

Just think, if you live to 85, or beyond, you have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with dementia. I don’t know about you, but I’m not okay with that. If I live 14 more years, I have a one in two chance of losing my mind, and I’m like no, no, no, that can’t happen.

In 2005 I wrote a book called Preventing Alzheimer’s, and I got no end of grief for it, because people said you can’t prevent it. They said it’s chronic, progressive and untreatable. I said it isn’t that. You can avert it by preventing all the risk factors that accelerate it. So that’s where I first got the seeds of my BRIGHT MINDS model.

Last year in the Lancet, there was an article that said, “50% of Alzheimer’s disease is preventable.” I’m really excited about the fact that you’re not stuck with the genes you’re born with or the brain you have. You can make it better, and I can prove it.

IMCJ: You’ve been involved in numerous brain health studies. What stands out?

Dr. Amen: I did the big National Foodball League (NFL) study when they were lying about the impact of traumatic brain injuries in football. I’ve scanned and treated 400 NFL players, cool people like former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw. They had high levels of damage, so stop lying about it. It’s a brain-damaging sport. But the good news is that 80% of players get better when we put them on a brain rehabilitation program. So, don’t tell me you cannot change your brain, because when you do, you change your life.

IMCJ: What would such a rehab program consist of?

Dr. Amen: It was so simple. A multiple vitamin, a high dose of high-quality fish oil, and our Brain & Body Power, supplement that works in six different ways. It’s basically supplements plus my BRIGHT MINDS model. Love your brain, avoid things that hurt it, and do the things that help it.

IMCJ: There are prescription drugs that have been said to cause dementia. Can you comment on that?

Dr. Amen: It’s actually quite horrifying. There was a new study out on SSRIs, a common type of antidepressants, showing that they increased risk of dementia. There’s also a heightened risk with benzos, which are commonly prescribed for anxiety. Antihistamines that also block acetylcholine increase the risk of dementia. I’m very worried about statins as well. I have a lot of patients who, when they go on statins, their memory is impaired, and they’re more likely to get depressed.

IMCJ: You mentioned supplements that you gave to the NFL players? Are there other supplements that you recommend especially for seniors who don’t play pro football?

Dr. Amen: I think everyone should take a multiple vitamin and omega-3 fatty acids. I did a study and low levels of omega-3 fatty acids are associated with low activity in the hippocampus, the major memory structure in the brain.

Everybody should know their vitamin D level and optimize it. There’s a difference between what’s in the “normal” range versus what’s in the optimal range. I don’t know about you, but I never wanted to be in the bottom of any of my classes. I always wanted to be at the top.

Now you don’t want to go overboard with supplements, but when it comes to vitamin D, normal is between 30 and 100. People who have a level over 40 have half the risk of cancer than those who are under 20. I keep my level around 60, 70, or 80 and you can do it with supplements. Of course you can also do it with more sunshine.

IMCJ: I imagine you were always at the top of your class and were number one in everything you’ve done. As for what you’ve accomplished, is there more to the NFL studies you conducted?

Dr. Amen: Sure, let me push on the NFL study a little more. There is public lore that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also referred to as CTE, which is football dementia, also happens in soccer and rugby players, as well as MMA fighters and boxers. Such dementia is said to be chronic, progressive, and untreatable. That hurts because people say they don’t want to know. The fact is, you do want to know what’s going on with your brain, and you want to be engaged as soon as possible to reverse it.

I have 11 clinics around the US where we do brain imaging. We think that it’s insane that psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who virtually never look at the organ they treat—the brain—but that will change. Frankly, I fully expected it to change before now. Once you start looking, you realize the brain is an organ just like your heart. If we’re going to ever end mental illness, we have to develop a similar way of thinking where we know the brain’s risk factors and go after them as soon as possible.

All other medical specialists look at the organ they treat, psychiatrists should too. One of the things I’m advocating for is we have to look at the brain—especially for complex cases and treatment-resistant cases.

IMCJ: Thank you for sharing and what’s the best way for IMCJ readers to contact you?

Dr. Amen: They can go to amenclinics.com to learn about our work, or they can follow me on Tik Tok, of all places, as well as Instagram and Facebook. We are quite active on social media because our goal is to end the concept of mental illness by creating a revolution in brain health. With the MAHA movement we have the ability to create the first brain healthy nation.

We can do it by spending a lot of time thinking about how to create the world’s first brain healthy nation. Bhutan, a country in South Asia, wanted to become one of the happiest countries on earth. They made it a national priority, and I think it’s made the Gross National Happiness Index. They’ve done so well, I think we should do that with brain health, because when your brain’s healthier, you’re happier.