Dr. Martin discusses the relationship between insulin and the brain in today’s episode. The hippocampus is what’s responsible for memory and it turns out that eating ketones is what it thrives on. This is important in preventing Alzheimer’s.
Join Dr. Martin as he explains why eggs, meat and cheese will feed your brain properly.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
Announcer: You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.
Dr. Martin: Well, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to another live today. I hope you're having a great day. Hope the day thus far has been a blessing to you. Okay, this afternoon I just want to talk to you a little bit about insulin and the brain, insulin in the brain, and one of the biggest fears that we have, especially in this day and age, one of the biggest fears is losing our memory, losing our capacity, Alzheimer's. It's a scourge on society, isn't it? I want to talk a little bit about that today, and we're going to talk about the brain a little bit, but I want to talk specifically, okay, I'm going to show it to you right here. Now you see that for those on podcast, I can't see what I'm doing. I've got a cross section of the brain here and I'm showing the hippocampus now.
Okay, see, that right there sort of sends its way around the brain there. Anyway, guys got the picture. It's an important part of the brain, isn't it? Okay, so there's three things in the hippocampus that happen there. The more they study, what do you got to remember about the brain? Hippocampus, memory, hypothalamus hormones, your body temperature and your metabolism and all that hypothalamus and hippocampus memory. Now, I love illustrations and that's the way I learn in my little peanut brain here. There's three things compartments in the hippocampus, and I probably have brought this to you before and I don't remember. Hey, I do a lot of podcasts, okay? No, we've talked about the brain so much. We really have, but there's three compartments in the hippocampus, okay? You've got a librarian, okay? You have a librarian inside there, okay? That librarian sorts things, sorts your memories.
It's like going through a filing cabinet looking for a file. You actually have a librarian in there working in your memory center, and you've got a safety deposit box where all your memories in the hippocampus are put in there. And then of course you need a librarian to go through that safety deposit box and to file away things and to be able to pull out things that you need. And again, these are just illustrations. The other compartment in the brain, you have a GPS in there and the GPS finds your way around the safety deposit box and sort of finds your way around all your memories that you have and everything that's stored in there. I mean, you can imagine the amount of storage. I mean a computer can't store like your brain, and the problem that we have when we develop Alzheimer's dementia, dementia, by the way, is the overarching degenerative disease.
Alzheimer's just happens to be part of it, and it's about 55%, I think 50 to 55% of all the problems with dementia because you can have Parkinson's, dementia, small vessel dementia. There's different forms of it, but Alzheimer's is the one that is the most prevalent in society and it's the number one killer in the United Kingdom. When I read that five years ago I think or more, and I just about fell over on my chair when I read that, what? Alzheimer's will kill you. Yeah, Alzheimer's will kill you. Okay? Now we're going to talk about how to preserve that, how to preserve the GPS, the safety deposit box, and to make sure your librarian is working, that your librarian isn't on a siesta and especially a permanent one. You want to be able to sort things, okay, so we're going to talk about that. What is the biggest problem?
There are a couple, but let's talk about some big problems to that area of the brain, the hippocampus. The number one problem is insulin. Okay? It's insulin and your brain has lots and lots of batteries up there, okay? Lots of mitochondria and insulin is what regulates where your fuel is going, so that's really important in the brain. Okay? Now, that part of your brain, all of your brain, but let's stick to the hippocampus. That part of your brain works better on what fuel. A little quiz this afternoon. I want you thinking along with me, what fuel is best for your hippocampus to make sure that your memories, not only that they're stored there, you need that librarian to pick out the files and the GPS to get around there, okay? Sandra is saying EMC, you're right, Sandra, but what fuel? What fuel is the best for the brain?
EMC is exactly right because that's what you're eating. Rocket fuel. I love you guys because you're also stinking smart. Kathy has got the answer that I wanted. Ketones, okay? You get that by eating eggs, meat and cheese. When you eat eggs, meat and cheese and you're not eating carbs or very little, your body will burn fat. That's called ketosis. Your memory, your hippocampus. What fuel does it like? Ketones? Ketones. Glucose on the other hand, and really your brain will thrive with ketones, but remember, ketones will be the prevalent fuel. If only you are laying off the sugars, the glucose, the crappy carbohydrate, otherwise you will not burn ketones. It's as simple as that. I think I mentioned it yesterday. A man might get away with 50 grams of protein. That's not a lot guys, and a woman less than that. If she wants to burn fat as fuel, one of the best things that can happen in your brain is if you're burning fat.
Now, remember, 60% of your brain is fat, okay? Thus, I give you a compliment when I call you fat head, Hey, fat head, okay? 60% of your brain is fat, and by the way, it's DHA fat. Your body's made up of it. Your brain is made up of DHA fat, okay? And that part of your brain, especially your hippocampus, thrives on ketones, not glucose. Okay? So I use this illustration, okay? If you eat steak and your body needed some glucose, it'll take a piece of steak and make it into glucose. Did you know that? At the end of the day, your body doesn't need carbohydrates to make a sugar. It doesn't. The preferred source of fuel for your brain are ketones. And when you think of it, it's really only in the last a hundred years where people used to be mostly into ketosis all day long.
Today, the average person, okay, the average person in our society, they're using insulin 24 hours a day for a lot of people. Let's say you eat at eight o'clock. If you had bacon and eggs, you need insulin, but not much. Let's say you decided to get duped and you had cereal. Oh, Dr. Martin, I need my oatmeal. Okay, now your blood sugar's going to go crazy. It's going to spike higher than a chocolate bar, okay? And you're going to use a mountain load of insulin and insulin's got two jobs. Again, repetition, repetition, repetition. Insulin has two jobs. One, it takes sugar out of the bloodstream. So if you eat oatmeal, well, Dr. Martin, I didn't put any sugar in my oatmeal. No, but it's going to be sugar in five seconds anyway.
Quaker oats lied. It ain't good for you. You ain't a horse. Anyway, back to insulin. Insulin's got two jobs to do. It has to take sugar out of the bloodstream. Sugar cannot park in the bloodstream. Thus my illustration, the traffic cop, you're parking in the wrong spot. Sugar. Sugar, you can't stay there. You're in a no parking zone. Sugar is not allowed to park in the bloodstream. So insulin's is to say, sugar, come here, out, out, out, out, out. The second job that insulin does, it must store sugar, it'll store it, okay? And it's stores, it sugar is stored as fat, and insulin has an unlimited capacity to turn sugar into fat. You want to get fat, make insulin work. It loves fat. It does because it loves storing sugar into fat cells. It'll do it in muscle first, it'll do it in your liver, and when there's no more room in the liver, it'll make as many fat cells as needed, including fat cells in your liver and fat cells around your heart and fat cells around your pancreas and fat cells around your hips and fat cells around your bowels and fat cells everywhere.
That's why insulin is a growth hormone. You get that? So two things. One, sugar out, out, out, out, can't stay. Two, I'm going to park. You can't park in the blood, but I can park you elsewhere. I'll start at the muscle. Oh, you don't have a lot of muscle, not a lot of space there. Okay, come here, I'll put you in the liver. Oh, there's no more room in the liver. Okay, let's make fat cells and now I'm going to make as many fats. The other day we went to a food festival, international food festival. Man. Oh man, there was thousands of people there. You couldn't get a parking spot, but guess what they did? They made extra parking spots, and if you followed the signs, they said, extra parking over here. That's what insulin does, my friend. That's how insulin operates. So insulin goes, okay, I'm going to park you.
Okay, why am I talking like this? Let's get back to the brain insulin when you eat, and then way, way after, depending on what you're eating, if you have a piece of steak, an egg, bacon and eggs, cheese, insulin is on a holiday. It's sitting there going, I got nothing to do. I don't have to take sugar out of the bloodstream because they didn't eat sugar. Therefore, I'm on the sidelines. I don't even have to make fat cells. I don't have to park the sugar. There's no sugar in the bloodstream. Well, there's a little bit, but you get what's happening here. You see in the brain, in the brain, insulin's got a big, big job to do. Big, big job to do because your brain is headquarters. It's only 2% of your body weight. Even though I called you fat head, I did it as a compliment.
It's not that big. You ever see a baby compared to the rest of their body size? A baby's got a brain like a head like that, right? But then at a certain age, the head don't grow no more. You know what happens in Alzheimer's? Okay? It's the opposite of what happens in the rest of your, you see, insulin does not park fat in the brain. It does the opposite insulin, it makes fat cells grow, it makes fatty liver, it makes fatty heart, it makes fatty kidneys, it makes fatty liver fatty, pancreas, fatty, you name it, fatty except the brain. You know what it does in the brain? Shrinks the brain. The brain starves when you feed it sugar because the mitochondria take that right away, up, up, and then it's a short lasting field, doesn't last long, and the brain gets messed up. Okay, guys, listen, you want to know how effective the reset is?
I develop the reset for insulin, but when you lower insulin and you lower insulin resistance, not only your hippocampus, the memory center is better. The brain fog lifts, your librarian goes back to work. The GPS inside of the hippocampus works again, and your memory box grows. And the other thing that happens because it's next door neighbor is the hypothalamus. And when you don't eat sugar and you let your brain burn ketones, you know what happens? The hypothalamus less inflammation there, hypothalamus controls through the pituitary gland. It controls your thyroid. It controls your leptin. It controls your ghrelin. It controls all those hormones. It controls your estrogen and your progesterone. Ladies, all of that, your adrenals improve simply by changing fuels because your brain adores ketones and not glucose. Your body was not meant to burn on glucose. It was meant to burn on ketones and especially your brain. Now, the other thing up in that brain, okay, so you have, you've got that hippocampus and you've got three compartments memory. You got a librarian up there and a GPS. One of the biggest things is your self-cleaning oven in the brain. They're called your glymphatic system and comprised of glial cells, G-L-I-A-L gl, your self-cleaning oven, self-cleaning ovens. One third, okay, listen to this one. Third, your mitochondria release. What A TP energy, okay? It's the currency of your body. The currency of energy, okay? Is a TP.
You need one third of that, A TP, just just for your glial cells, your repair. See what happens in Alzheimer's, brain shrinkage, okay? Everything else gets fat in your body except the brain. The brain shrinks insulin. When you have insulin resistance at the blood brain barrier doesn't even allow insulin to do its job. It can't take the sugar out, so the brain shrinks. Why do you think they called Alzheimer's in 2005? Type three diabetes. It's diabetes of the brain. Insulin's not working properly. It can't take the glucose out of the brain. It can't park it. The brain shrinks. Glial cells don't work properly, so you don't get the self-cleaning oven working properly. And by the way, the other thing we could talk, we talked about this a lot, is that the self-cleaning oven does not work if you don't sleep either. You need to sleep.
That's another issue. That's why, guys, when I wrote the book, two hormones that want You dead, serial killers, two hormones, I want You dead. I combined insulin and cortisol together all the time. They work together. It's crazy how they work together. You can develop insulin resistance without even eating bad. If you're really stressed out for a long period of time, you'll develop insulin resistance. Cortisol is a killer, man. It can save your life if someone scares the living life out of you, and you need to run away from a situation, but it's not meant to last a long time. Guys, your brain thrives on ketones eggs. Do it for two days. Two days. Let's say 48 hours. You eat nothing but eggs, meat and cheese. You know what? You're already now you're burning ketones. Your body will burn its fat. It'll throw the fat on the fire to burn it. Isn't that beautiful? Your brain goes, hallelujah. Hallelujah. You're giving me the right fuel. Your hippocampus. The librarian is excited. I'm back to work. It sounds so simple, but it's beautiful. And isn't it amazing that here we are in 2024 and they still don't teach this in medical school?
Imagine having medical schools and they don't think nutrition is important, and your brain relies on what you're eating. I talked to you the other day about all these psychiatric issues and depression and anxiety and how your brain operates on energy, and they're starting to look at it, but all they want to do is medicate SSRIs till they come out your ears, and it's been really a colossal failure. It hasn't been. They're looking for love in all the wrong places. They should start with food. I'm not saying food is everything, but it's the main thing. It's the main thing for your neurotransmitters, the energy, the wiring in your brain. Here we are today, and everybody and their dog is worried about losing their memory, and nobody's talking about food and memory and changing fuels. Your brain wants rocket fuel. The best food in the world, and I'm not kidding you, and I'm doubling down on it, is eggs, meat, and cheese.
Why protein, fat, no carbs, plant protein. It's all right, guys. Everybody thinks I'm against the plant kingdom. I'm not. I just don't want you to live on it. You can have them, but plant proteins, people tell me, Dr. Martin, I take pea protein. You know what? There's carbohydrates in there. I'm not saying it's no good. I'm just telling you animal protein, there's no carbs. Ketones burning the right fuel. I got excited again, I promised myself before I started that I wouldn't, but I did.
Okay, guys. Okay. You know what? Tomorrow is question and answer. Friday, have you sent in your questions yet? Okay, now you can share this, guys, you can share this. You know what makes our podcast so successful is you guys, because you share, and the more you share, the more Facebook shares, and when it comes to your smartphone, you listen to those podcasts. Give us a nice five star review because that helps too. Okay? Do you want your librarian back at work? Yeah. Do you want that memory box to keep your memories? And do you want that GPS up in the hippocampus? You do. Okay, well, you know what to do. Burn the right fuel. That's what you do. Okay, guys, we love you. We'll talk to you soon.
Announcer: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!