Good Energy-The Connection Between Diet and Mental Health

Ask Doctor Gil with Gil Winkelman ND, MA: A conversation about integration of Heart, Body and Brain.

Good Energy is a new book out exploring the connection between health and diet. Why is it so amazing to believe there’s a connection? What we put into our bodies affects our overall health. In this podcast, I’ll discuss what Dr. Casey Means has to say about diet as it relates to blood sugar and how that can affect one’s mental health. The interesting things are the connections between cortisol levels (which affects blood glucose) and other factors unrelated to diet (which also affects blood sugar levels.) I’ll discuss my own experience wearing a continuous blood sugar monitor.

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Recently, I read a new book called Good Energy by a Doctor Casey Means who is from Portland, Oregon. She’s an MD who writes about the surprising connection between food and health. Which if you followed me and followed anything about naturopathic medicine, you would know that there’s no surprise about it. But let’s talk about what she has to say in the book because I actually think she makes some great points and it’s a very interesting topic. Today on Ask Dr Gil, we’re gonna talk a little bit about one aspect of the book, which has to do with blood sugar. So stay tuned.

Hello, and welcome to Ask Dr. Gil. I’m your host, Dr. Gil Winkleman. And today, I want to talk about one aspect of Dr. Means book, Good Energy, I actually think it was a really good read. And interestingly enough, I have a MD physician here that I see mostly to order blood work and that sort of thing. And he said, “yeah, that’s a good book. I ordered it. I I wanna take a look at it. I never learned anything about nutrition and medical school. “

And it’s kind of amazing when you think about it. I mean, I would argue that people know more about what gasoline to use in their car and what motor oil to use in their car as a rule in the United States than they do about what they should put in their body. And I want to talk about one aspect of the book because the book covers more stuff than I have topics and time to cover in in one podcast. And because she goes through a lot of different things. And I’ll I’ll give you a quick overview. So she talks about over nutrition, nutrient deficiency, microbiome issues.

In other words, how do you how does your gut flora work in the body? She talks about stress, exercise, the effects of medication and drugs on the mitochondria in particular, but on the body in general, sleep issues, light issues in terms of disrupting your circadian rhythms, not getting varying temperatures, which if you think about this for a minute, it’s about the ice baths and not necessarily to that extreme hot and cold therapy and environmental toxins as well. Now all of this is stuff that I talk about in my practice, not necessarily I haven’t covered everything in the podcast, but but I do want to talk about the metabolic syndrome aspects because I think that’s such a big part of American society in terms of the problems. And I’ll talk in the second half of the show about my experience wearing a glucose monitor, a continuous glucose monitor, which I tried as a result of reading this book. It was just an interesting exercise for me to kind of learn how my blood sugar goes up and down with certain things that I eat and drink and Some of the stuff wasn’t surprising and some of it was very surprising.

So we’ll get to that in a minute. But in terms of biomarkers, she talks about in the book. She talks about triglycerides and HDL and that and that they should be low, lower than one hundred, but almost equal. And this is something that you can easily get tested by your physician because it’s they’re both part of what’s called a lipid panel where they do total cholesterol. Now total cholesterol by itself is probably not very useful.

And, you know, obviously, if it’s super high or super low, that’s important to know. But generally, most physicians just look at, well, what’s your total cholesterol? Oh, it’s two hundred or two fifty. That’s high in their view, because now anything above one hundred and fifty is high. And really, you want to look at the HDL, which is the good cholesterol, and you want to make sure that that number is pretty high.

You know, approaching a hundred, although not necessarily that high, but around eighty or ninety and that your triglycerides are below that number. And so that gives us a good indication of how your body is handling fat in a sense. So and then the other numbers are the fasting glucose. You can also have fasting insulin, which is an important one, Generally, that is not ordered as standard blood work. But having that number can be helpful in terms of prediabetes.

Fasting glucose is important, though by itself, it doesn’t tell us as much as one number high fasting isn’t necessarily going to tell us as much as a hemoglobin A1C Then the other the other factors to keep in mind is making sure that your blood pressure is below one hundred and twenty over eighty, and that will stretch with age, just so you know. But you and when you take it you want to make sure that you’ve kind of rested for a minute, relaxed that your arm’s in the right position depending on if you’re using a wrist cuff or a shoulder or an upper arm cuff. And then the last one is your way of circumference. So she talks about these in terms of understanding aspects of blood sugar regulation. And It’s interesting because now the piece that I’m gonna talk about right now is still I don’t wanna say controversial, but there’s definitely evidence to support this, but it hasn’t become part of sort of mainstream scientific dogma, which is that Alzheimer and dementia may be what they’re calling now type three diabetes.

Meaning that the that the brain isn’t getting enough blood sugar and sugar into it because it’s been overloaded with sugar over a certain amount of time. And as a result of that, that’s what’s causing the destruction of the neural connections. And this is an interesting aspect of things because We, you know, some of these people that have Alzheimer’s or dementia had no issues in terms of looking at their blood sugar levels. They weren’t diabetic or so forth. And Obviously, diabetes type two and type one type one generally you’re born with.

Type two, we know this is an issue. We know this is causing problems in the body. It’s affecting people’s energy. It’s affecting people’s weight. It makes it difficult to function in the world without treatment because your body gets overwhelmed.

And and so that is clearly an issue, but this other one may be an issue that we don’t even realize because we don’t have tests for it yet by itself. So I want to, in the second half of the show, talk more about what to do to make your body healthier in terms of eating and blood sugar and so forth. So stay tuned and we’ll talk about this in the second half. Hello, and welcome back to Ask Dr. Gil.

I’m Dr. Gil Winkleman. And just as a reminder, if you like this episode or any other episode, please give us a thumbs up or a like or whatever platform you’re looking you’re listening to this on if you would give us a like on it. If you have comments, there you can make comments on the YouTube channel or on my website, and I will get notified about that. And if you just have questions and you just want to email me, you can send an email to info infoask doctor Gil dot com, a s k d r g I l dot com.

I also have a form on my website if you want to find out about scheduling and and working with me because that makes it easier. It’s nice because I’d asked for your time zone which makes things easier for me. To figure out timing. So, alright. So, we’ve been talking about Dr.

Means book, Good Energy. I really have enjoyed it and I do recommend it So the blood sugar aspects are really interesting. In terms of And I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I wore a glucose monitor, I did it for two weeks. It’s a continuous glucose monitor Generally, you need a diagnosis of diabetes to even order them. There’s a couple of companies now that are offering it to people without diagnosis.

It’s around one hundred dollars for the month. And you don’t necessarily need to do it continuously. In fact, I did it for two weeks and gave the other monitor. It comes with two monitors that last about fourteen days. So I gave one to my daughter just so that she could check it out and try it.

She was interested. And and mostly because I I got the information that I wanted. And it was really interesting because when I did it, I was actually traveling. And so I was on vacation and not really trying to eat well necessarily. And what was surprising was that the food so it was eating out a lot more than I normally do, And so the things that I expected to spike my glucose often didn’t and the things that I didn’t expect did, so let me give you a couple of of examples and then I’ll kind of pair this with what Dr.

Means talks about in the book. So one of the things that was interesting is she talks about eating low glycemic foods first. And meaning, you have protein first than complex carbs, than simple carbs. And part of that is is that your body has something to absorb the sugar with in in in a sense. It’s not so much absorbing, but in terms of absorbing the spike of the sugar.

So give you an example. So I went for Mexican food at this it’s a high end Mexican place and ordered a what’s called the skinny margarita, so it’s a low sugar margarita, and had chips and guac. And was expecting my blood sugar to spike and actually it dropped. And my theory on this is that the the alcohol helped reduce my stress. Which then lowered by cortisol, which then allowed for less spiking of glucose.

And part of the reason that I say this is I noticed this happened whenever I had alcohol. Now, I do not necessarily say you should be drinking alcohol, but it may explain some of the research that suggests that one drink a day may be useful for overall health. And this research comes from research on blue zones. And I may do a podcast about that. At some point, the blue zones are the areas in the world where there are the highest number of people living over a hundred.

And there’s six there’s now six. Singapore interestingly just joined this as a blue zone. And they, as a government, decided to make a concerted effort to increase longevity, and we’re able to pull that off. That is a whole other topic, but was very interesting. And it wasn’t just longevity, it’s quality of life.

So with blue zone briefly alcohol is consumed by all but one of the areas in moderate amounts. So moderate is less than two glasses of wine or two drinks per day. It’s usually wine in all of these areas, not hard alcohol and not beer. So and and wine definitely has nutrients in it that are good for our bodies. It may be part of the connection between diet and mental health.

I mean, respiratory, or trauma, and so forth, And one could argue that you can get that from other sources and and that can help. And also you can have other ways of relaxing yourself to lower your cortisol. So that’s why the research on the alcohol may be a little mushy, but it was interesting because this is not like these areas. They’re not like super health focused per se. It’s not like they’re you know, only eating certain things and and so forth.

But that’s another topic we can talk about. So I would say though that what was interesting and and so the alcohol aspect on my trip was very consistent when I got back. I was I was exercising and I noticed my blood sugar spiked during that time. So which would also track with cortisol levels because as cortisol goes up, An exercise member we talked about fight flight in the Polyvago theory podcast. With fight or flight, you’re raising cortisol, so you can act.

So you want more blood blood sugar, to be higher. And so but you don’t want that happening when you’re eating necessarily or even after you’re eating because you wanna you wanna keep keep things steady. Part of the issue with the body is that it’s not that your blood sugar goes up after you eat. That isn’t necessarily the issue. The issue is is that it goes up either too quickly and or too high, and or it takes a long time for it to come down.

And the reason is is that as the blood sugar stays high for longer periods, the pancreas has to pump out more insulin which then creates stress on the pancreas over time, and it wears out, which is why people get type two diabetes. So that’s one of the aspects of it. And what I found was, is that my glucose would generally come back down pretty quickly. The the the two exceptions would be having too much dessert. So eating more than say three bites of ice cream, in my case, was interesting.

And and I think about doctor Dean Ornish’s DASH diet, and he talks about having one spoonful of hugging does. And this is a guy who his fash diet is developed for heart conditions. So it’s kind of interesting. And when you when I thought about that, I thought about that when I I had a a bite of ice cream and it was it was like yeah, I I understand why people want more because of that dopamine aspect in terms of the sugar. And I also saw, wow, if I only had one bite or two bites, my blood sugar actually didn’t go up that much.

But once I went beyond that, then that’s what I would see the spikes. The other the other aspect of things is the liquid sugar. And there was something I had that was an energy type drink, but I don’t remember what it was. And I noticed, oh, I remember now. I had a it was a different Mexican place, a Hamica.

It’s like a Hibiscus Lemonade type thing. And I saw my blood sugar go as that was the highest it went during the two weeks. And it was really interesting because it’s like, oh, this is where things get really off in in people’s bodies. And soda, if you think about soda, you think about sugar and energy drinks, any of those things can definitely create spikes up and downs in the body in terms of blood sugar, and that’s really putting a lot of stress on your pancreas. So if you get one thing from this episode, that is if you eat drink sugary drinks to stop and that would include straight kombucha even though it’s, you know, it’s only seventy calories per bottle, there still can be fourteen grams of sugar in there.

And if you’re if you’re drinking, if you like drinking kombucha, either switch to a brand with less sugar or dilute it greatly and don’t drink as much, you know, drink one bottle over the course of three or four days type thing. Because it’s way too much sugar for our systems. So now the other things that we’re interesting in terms of of eating and so forth is that she talks about and I think is helpful is tightening your eating window. In other words, having the bulk of your calories between, say, eleven AM and six PM. And it’s interesting because I was in New York and most people don’t eat dinner until, like, seven or eight there because they’re at work and doing stuff.

But it definitely helps to to have a narrower window. And the reason I say those hours, although those hours aren’t necessarily magical, is because the the Later you eat, you want three hours between the time you finish eating and the time you go to bed. To allow the body to settle down, to allow digestion to happen, and it just helps your sleep be better. So if you’re trying to change your, you know, get eight hours of sleep and follow the sun to a certain degree, that’s why you need to stop eating by six or or in some cases seven. You know, one of the things that’s interesting is is that in Hawaii, Generally, people do go to bed with sun down and get up, at sunrise, at least the people I know, and part of that is is they’re did not sun down, but a few hours after sun down.

It it has to do with the culture. Like, people are active, they use they use the day to do things, either exercise work, and so forth. And and it’s less of a nights place than say New York City. Where people are up at all hours of the night. And it really is the city that never sleeps.

And and there’s always something happening, but that isn’t necessarily good for your system. So Okay. So a couple of other things to think about in terms of eating. Adding fiber is really important because it slows digestion, vinegar, cinnamon, chromium, those can change glucose responses so that you don’t have as much spiking of of the glucose. And the other thing that’s really important is a light exercise after eating.

And Generally, it’s it’s a slow walk. So taking a walk after you eat and I and I was able to observe this for myself was that when I took a little walk And no more than thirty minutes, but ten to thirty minutes after a meal, that helped lower my blood sugar as well. And you don’t want to overdo it. Like, you want your body to be in the rest digest mode, And so it’s not a workout. It’s more of a stroll.

That’s kind of the approach that you want to take. So there’s a lot more in this topic that we could talk about, and I may add some other stuff because she talks about mitochondrial issues, she talks about sleep, stress management. The mitochondria is an interesting topic, and I may do a separate podcast about that. But I do have a course related to mitochondria and mental health. And it covers a lot of different aspects of mental health, including methylation, which vitamins to take diet and the role of testing.

And if you want more information about that, you can check out my website, w w w dot askdoctor Gil dot com. And I have a link to it at the top in the courses. Finally, if you enjoyed this, please feel free to make a comment or like it on YouTube or Apple’s podcast, or Spotify, wherever you’re listening to this. And I look forward to connecting in the next episode, so take care.

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