The UltraMind Solution (67 page)

As part of this woman’s gut cleanup, I gave her a new treatment pioneered by Dr. Mark Pimentel, of the University of California at the Los Angeles School of Medicine.
¹¹
A nonabsorbed antibiotic called Xifaxin clears out abnormal bacteria in the small bowel. I expected her bloating and even some of her inflammatory symptoms to clear up by fixing her gut. But I was surprised by what she told me after she took the antibiotic.

Overnight her OCD disappeared; after years of unsuccessful treatment with psychotherapy and psychiatric medications, she was suddenly able to clean her entire house and pick up everything off the floor. The lights in her brain had come on for the first time in ten years.

A high level of ammonia in her blood caused her OCD. Ammonia is a neurotoxin that excites and damages brain cells and the mitochondria (the site of energy production in all cells—see chapter 11 for more information). Bacteria in the gut produces ammonia, and when the liver can’t detoxify it, or there is just too much, it causes brain damage.

Every physician knows this because since the 1960s doctors have been treating a condition known as “hepatic encephalopathy,”
¹²
a form of temporary insanity common in patients with liver failure. The brain dysfunction results from too much ammonia and is cured by clearing out the ammonia-producing bacteria in the gut with antibiotics. So this idea shouldn’t seem strange to most doctors.

But it occurs in many patients—not just those with liver failure.

When we rechecked her ammonia level after treatment, it had returned to normal. After a few months, the bacteria came back, and so did her OCD symptoms, and once again treating the bacteria cured her OCD. The link was clear.

And this is just one of many ways abnormal gut bacteria can affect your thoughts and cognitive function.

In fact, Pimentel talks about seeing common symptoms like brain fog and fatigue in patients with irritable bowel syndrome that clear up when the toxic bacteria are cleaned up using the treatment he created. A bloated
belly leads to a bloated brain. The symptoms can vary from OCD to depression to anxiety to autism or even psychosis.

So what else do we know about how bugs down below affect command central up on top?

Bad Bugs Below and Above:
Intestinal Bugs and Your Brain

Beside ammonia, there are also many odd, toxic molecules that are produced by the five hundred species of bugs that make their home in your intestinal tract, populating the surface of your gut, which is a hundred square meters in surface area, but only one cell thick.

These good bugs are very busy living in a symbiotic manner with you. You give them a place to live in your gut, and they reciprocate by helping you digest your food, make necessary vitamins (like vitamin K and biotin), detoxify poisons, produce energy for your intestinal cells (butyrate), regulate cholesterol metabolism, and keep normal pH balance.

They also compete for real estate with bad bugs—parasites, yeast, and toxin-producing bacteria. These bad bugs take over because you took too many antibiotics or don’t eat enough plant foods with lots of fiber (which the good bugs love to eat) and eat too much sugar (which the bad bugs love even more). Then the whole ecosystem is disrupted, leading to a bigger set of disruptions that alter your mood and brain function.

Let me tell you another story.

One spring afternoon, a beautiful little six-year-old girl walked into my office with her mother and sister. On the surface she seemed quite normal, but then the story of her tragic life unfolded.

This first-grade student was extraordinarily aggressive with her sister and her peers—kicking, pinching, and hitting them. She threatened to kill herself regularly.

She cut her mother and sister out of family pictures. She was anxious, negative, and hopeless. Temper tantrums, mood swings, and attention seeking were regular patterns of behavior.

She was also diagnosed with OCD and “perfectionism.”

She didn’t make friends at school, and her mother was called daily about her disruptive behavior in class.

Genetics might have set her up for problems. One cousin was bipolar and another cousin had Asperger’s, a mild form of autism.

She had all the regular childhood immunizations, including diphtheria, pertussis,
tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, hemophilous, varicella, and hepatitis B. She was a very colicky baby, had frequent diaper and vaginal yeast infections as a child, with vaginal and rectal itching (which gives you a pretty strong idea that yeast is hanging around), and had very sensitive skin.

And she loved sugar and refined pastries and carbs.

While I see children all across the spectrum of mood and behavior problems, hers were particularly extreme. So I began my medical detective work.

She had no digestive complaints, but I have learned that even if a child or adult doesn’t complain about their gut, mischief can still be brewing. The bacteria and yeast literally ferment the sugary, starchy foods in the diet, producing “autointoxication” with alcohol—a by-product of this process.
¹³
Violent, aggressive behavior so commonly seen in drunks can occur from alcohol produced by yeasts in the gut. I wondered if this little girl had a little auto-brewery in her belly.

On my detective hunt I found she was low in magnesium, which can make you pretty irritable, and was deficient in zinc, so important to helping your digestive enzymes break down your food. That may have contributed to why she had those little toxic opiumlike peptides from gluten running around her brain (we will talk more about these in a moment).

She also had delayed food allergies (IgG) to wheat, rye, oats, and barley (all gluten-containing grains).

And, of course, she had low levels of DHA—the brain-balancing omega-3 fat
.

She also had the typical problems with her methylation train—evidence of severe B
₆
, B
₁₂
, and folate deficiency—and major problems with the sulfation train, with low levels of glutathione, the body’s main detoxifier. (We will talk more about the sulfation train and glutathione in chapter 10.)

And she had a lot of trouble making enough energy in her cells (see chapter 11 on energy).

These problems occur in patterns, because they are all connected. It is not usually one thing. It is almost always everything. But the gut is often at the center of the problem—even if there are no digestive symptoms.

The most incredible finding in this young girl’s case was the sky-high indicators of overgrowth of bacteria and yeast in her gut. I had never seen levels this high in anyone.

Just getting her on a gluten-and dairy-free, whole foods, organic diet; some cod liver oil; magnesium; methylation helpers like B
₆
, B
₁₂
,
and folate; a multivitamin; and some probiotics improved her condition.
¹⁴

But when I gave her an antibiotic to clear out the bad bugs in her gut,
¹⁵
followed by an antifungal, she transformed into a well-behaved little girl.

Her aggressiveness, negativity, and hopelessness were gone. Her mother said she
used to be punished ten times a day and got into trouble at school every day. All that stopped when we cleared up the bad bugs in her gut and helped her get her flora and gut ecosystem back in balance.

She was suffering from “autointoxication,” which leads to crazy behavior. This process of a bug producing toxins that actually modulate brain chemistry is just one way the gut can affect the brain. There are many more.

Many studies have shown abnormal, toxin-producing flora in children with developmental problems like these.
¹⁶
Normal kids have normal flora.

While I have been using children with ADHD, behavioral problems, and autism as examples throughout this book, these principles apply to everyone with mood, behavioral, or memory problems.

Of course, behavioral and psychotherapeutic approaches are also necessary to help manage emotions, beliefs, attitudes, thinking patterns, and poor behavior, but it is much easier to work on yourself if your brain is not in chaos, if signals and communication systems in your brain are not incoherent and unsynchronized by toxins, allergens, infections, nutritional deficiencies, and stress.

An integrated, comprehensive approach to regain balance is always necessary and often remarkably effective.
¹⁷
Treating the gut is almost always one piece of that puzzle.

Changing diet and tuning up biochemistry with nutrients have profound effects on brain and behavior. In one study
¹⁸
207 patients with severe, violent behavior disorders were treated with a comprehensive metabolic and biochemical systems approach. They were tested, and their problems with metals, methylation, blood sugar, nutrient deficiencies, and gut problems were all corrected.

Seventy-six percent of the group actually followed the program. More than 90 percent of the participants significantly reduced violent behavior, and 54 percent had total elimination of their severe behavior problems.

This study should be headline news. But you don’t hear about it, because it is not a new drug or procedure but a simple diet and nutrient-based approach.
¹⁹

These simple treatments help restore normal metabolism and biochemistry. Things can go quite awry in the brain when digestion doesn’t work. One possibility is toxic chemicals that are sometimes created when bad bugs get into your gut, as discussed above.

Besides diet, new research about peptides—little toxic proteins from partially digested food—give us another clue as to what can go wrong with the communication between your gut and your brain.

Peptides and Your Brain

Two sisters, nine and seven years old, came into my practice struggling with behavior problems in school, short attention spans, outbursts, tantrums, and multiple medical diagnoses, including bipolar disease and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Their doctors prescribed the usual cocktail of stimulants and antidepressants.

Both had many digestive problems, including food allergies, yeast, and odd bacteria.

But what was most striking in their case were the high levels of peptides (little proteins) that were produced by lack of adequate digestion of gluten (from wheat) and casein (from dairy).
²⁰
The proteins are called gluteomorphins and caseomorphins, because they affect the morphine or opium receptors in the brain.

Gluteomorphins and caseomorphins are absorbed from the gut and find their way to the brain, causing much mischief, manifesting as mood and behavior problems. In the case above, I found out about this problem through a urine analysis. Peptides can be measured in the urine, because after they are absorbed into the body they must be excreted. These funny molecules cause their mischief in one of two ways.

First, they look “foreign,” so the body’s immune system reacts, leading to overall inflammation, which can show up as autoimmunity, autism, ADHD, depression, or psychosis as you learned in chapter 8.

Second, peptides leak into the body and brain. Because they are “opium-” or “morphinelike” in nature, these peptides mess up brain function just as heroin or a psychedelic drug would.

One of the reasons these peptides are created has to do with digestive enzymes.

Many people with weak digestion have low levels of or poorly functioning digestive enzymes. Some of these cases are genetically determined. Toxins such as mercury, which can come from silver dental amalgams or large predatory fish like tuna, inactivate these digestive enzymes. In other instances, the digestive enzymes are not activated because of low stomach acid, poor pancreatic function, or zinc deficiency (zinc is often needed to turn on these enzymes).

One important link between digestive enzymes and peptides is the failure of a particular enzyme called DPP-IV.
^21
;
22
This enzyme is important in breaking down foods, particularly gluten and casein. When it malfunctions, these noxious peptides are often created in the gut and end up in the brain.

That is why using special digestive enzymes as part of treatment is so
important in helping recovery from autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, including inflammation of the brain!

For the two little girls above, I connected the dots. When I cleaned up their guts by improving their diet, got rid of food allergens like gluten and casein, and gave them digestive enzymes, not only did their mood and behavior normalize, but those odd little peptides also disappeared from their urine.
^23
;
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Clearing up the gut imbalances, and removing casein and gluten, stopped the production of these mood-and brain-altering peptides. This returned their mood and behavior to normal. Remember, everything is connected to everything else in the body.

And it isn’t just little kids who have autism and behavioral problems who suffer from these peptides. They have also been linked to depression
²⁵
and schizophrenia.

The critical point to understand is that the total load of insults to your system disrupts normal things from happening in the body—things like digesting the food you eat, distinguishing friendly molecules from foreign ones at the interface between you and the outside world (like the one in the gut), and the activation of the gut immune and gut nervous systems.

This has broad implications for every type of chronic illness, as well as the mood, attention, behavior, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease we see exploding in our culture.