The 22 Symptoms of CARB Syndrome

Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome is a form of diet-induced brain dysfunction caused by long-term exposure to ultra-processed food. It is likely driving our current epidemics of obesity and metabolic disorders, as well as many common brain disorders. It is likely one of the most common diseases in modern societies, but, for various reasons, the concept has been overlooked by the medical and scientific communities. You need to understand this condition because it could be adversely affecting your health and the quality of life of those you care about. Diseases are defined by both symptoms and signs. Symptoms are subjective experiences that you feel or experience (such as pain, fatigue, or nausea) that others cannot directly see, touch, or measure. Signs are objective indicators that can be seen, heard, felt, or measured by others, such as healthcare providers or family members. This article will cover the symptoms of CARB syndrome; I will discuss the signs of the disorder in a separate article.

Like all other well-defined diseases, CARB syndrome is characterized by typical symptoms that tend to unfold in a predictable manner over time. People with normal brain function will usually have few or none of these symptoms, whereas those with CARB syndrome will have some or all of them. People with established brain disorders like major depressive disorder (MDD), ADHD, bipolar I, autism, and similar conditions will have some of these symptoms. How do you tell the difference between CARB syndrome and these classic disorders? No other brain disorder has all these symptoms occurring at the same time. Go through the list and see how many match your own situation. CARB syndrome is almost always accompanied by excess body fat and some degree of metabolic dysfunction — though the excess fat is frequently missed by weight and BMI alone, which is why body composition, not the scale, is the measurement that counts. The combination of many of these symptoms together with these objective signs is what makes the diagnosis. Because the medical profession has yet to accept the CARB syndrome disease model, you will need to make your own self-diagnosis of CARB syndrome if you want to have any hope of reversing this disease process. Now let’s move on to the symptoms of CARB syndrome.

1. Carbohydrate cravings. Carbohydrate cravings are the hallmark symptom of CARB syndrome, and you really can’t make a diagnosis of the disease without such cravings. These cravings are typically for both sweet foods loaded with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup and starchy foods, especially high-glycemic starches like white flour, white rice, and potatoes. Some people with CARB syndrome crave mainly sweet carbohydrates, whereas others crave mainly starchy foods. Many people crave both types of carbohydrates. Whether it’s potato chips or Oreos, it’s still a carb craving.

Whether you are consciously aware of these cravings or not, they will tend to drive your food choices. Look back and see what types of foods you “like”. If you tend to eat a lot of sweet or starchy foods, it’s likely that carbohydrate cravings are behind many of your food choices. Having a desire for something sweet after a meal is normal, but it disappears immediately after eating a bit of something sweet. The cravings associated with CARB syndrome often worsen after eating a sweet or starchy food.

2. Abnormal hunger drives. When your brain is working normally, you know when you are hungry and you know when you are full or satiated. Your hunger drives are finely tuned to your body’s nutritional needs. Much of this occurs at a subconscious level. When you develop CARB syndrome, your hunger drives become divorced from your body’s nutritional needs. You become hungry shortly after eating, and you don’t feel completely full after eating a reasonable amount of food. You start relying on your conscious brain to tell you when and how much food to eat. Unfortunately, your conscious brain didn’t evolve to make such eating choices, so you end up eating the wrong amount. Anorexics eat too little and people with visual obesity often eat too much, but in both cases the underlying disease CARB syndrome drives their abnormal hunger signals. Evolutionary hunger signals fly out the window, replaced by these dysfunctional signals.
3. Excessive physical and mental fatigue. One of the most common symptoms of CARB syndrome is excessive mental and physical fatigue. Your get up and go, got up and went. You wake up tired, and you end the day in a puddle of exhaustion. You don’t seem to have the mental energy to motivate yourself to do what you need to do, and even if you do muster the motivation to move, your exhausted body doesn’t seem to want to go along with the plan. Your well-meaning attempts to exercise regularly quickly go by the wayside, and the couch becomes your new best friend. With CARB syndrome, this physical and mental fatigue is always out of proportion to your age and general health.
4. Difficulty concentrating and focusing. One of your brain’s key functions is to concentrate and focus your thoughts in a way that allows you to effectively interact with your environment. When you lose the ability to concentrate and focus, it’s much more difficult to plan and carry out complex tasks. Your mind jumps from one random thought to another without obvious connections between the thoughts. This symptom is identical to the loss of concentration and focus experienced by people with classic ADHD—an identical symptom but a totally different disease. People with true ADHD do not have the other symptoms of CARB syndrome or the metabolic components of the disease.
5. Poor impulse control. One of your brain’s most important jobs is to control your impulses. As you move through your day, many of the things you think about saying or doing stay inside your head for good reason. If you expressed every thought that passes through your mind or acted on your emotions without thinking, you’d likely have few friends and your job prospects would be nil.

Although it’s normal for children and teenagers to sometimes have poor impulse control, it isn’t normal for adults. CARB syndrome moves you backward on the developmental scale when it comes to making sound and reasonable decisions and acting like an adult. You likely become isolated from family and friends, and staying meaningfully employed can be challenging.

6. Feelings of depression. If you have CARB syndrome, you will tend to have more down feelings than most people. Adverse everyday events are more likely to put you in a funk, and it’s much more difficult to maintain a sunny outlook on life. You tend to see the world through depression-tainted glasses.

People with classic major depression will always feel depressed, lose their appetite, and lose weight. People with CARB syndrome will sometimes feel depressed, have an increased appetite laced with carbohydrate cravings, and gain weight. The experts have failed to make this distinction, so they classify all people with CARB syndrome as having the so-called “atypical” form of major depression—a big mistake. In my clinical experience, what is labeled atypical depression is CARB syndrome—a diet-induced brain disease—filed under the wrong name.

7. Excessive anxiety. Normal anxiety is a feeling of unease or discomfort based on some perceived threat in the environment. When you think you see the shadow of a crouching tiger in the bushes, a little anxiety is just what the doctor ordered. When you experience anxiety with minimal or no environmental threat, we call it pathological anxiety. This is the kind of anxiety we deal with every day in our medical practices—patients with too much anxiety for no obvious reason. You get anxious when the dog sneezes, when you are placed in certain environments with no obvious threats, or for no particular reason at all. We call it free-floating anxiety. The anxiety associated with CARB syndrome isn’t normal because it isn’t a natural response to an environmental threat. This anxiety often appears for no reason, subjecting your body to the stressful “fight-or-flight” hormones that can trigger a full-blown panic attack. This clearly isn’t good for your mental or physical health, and will draw you into a medical environment that won’t know how to effectively treat you. Sedative medications like Valium tend to make CARB syndrome worse rather than better—when indicated, use low-dose medications that are approved by your physician.
8. Excessive mood swings. People with normal brain function have some degree of emotional stability. They only get upset when the situation merits it. They somehow know when to feel happy, sad, anxious, or angry. Their moods almost always match the situation. People with CARB syndrome often experience excessive mood swings, and they often emotionally overreact to everyday events. In a sense, their moods become disconnected from their environment. In women, these mood swings tend to occur in the days before their menstrual period because hormonal changes are a strong secondary trigger of CARB syndrome. With effective treatment, these PMS symptoms and other pathological anxiety tend to melt away.
9. Insomnia. Melatonin is your natural sleep hormone that cycles with the amount of daylight. Because melatonin is derived from serotonin, when you have low serotonin levels from CARB syndrome, your melatonin levels will also be low, and you won’t be able to sleep normally. You may have difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. You don’t spend enough time in critical REM sleep, so you wake up in the morning feeling tired. You may also wake up frequently during the night and have trouble falling asleep again. Common over-the-counter sleep aids like Benadryl also tend to make CARB syndrome worse because of their adverse effects on brain function.
10. Lack of proper sensory filtering. When your brain is working normally, it filters out most environmental signals coming from your sensory organs. You only see, hear, smell, and feel the touch of things relevant to your personal well-being, and the background static is filtered out. If your brain didn’t perform this important task, you would be quickly overwhelmed with masses of sensory data, leaving you swimming in a sea of mostly irrelevant information. It would be difficult to effectively function in this situation. You tend to lose this sensory filtering when you have CARB syndrome, leaving you feeling uncomfortable in highly stimulating environments. You have difficulty concentrating on matters at hand because you are distracted by all this irrelevant incoming data. Excessive visual and auditory stimulation leaves you feeling extremely uncomfortable. As the disease progresses, you become uncomfortable in your own skin and avoid being touched even by those you love. You want to lock yourself in a closet and stay there!
11. Low self-esteem. It takes a healthy brain to maintain a healthy level of self-esteem or self-worth. If you have normal levels of self-esteem, you tend to have positive feelings about yourself, and despite any personal shortcomings, you vow to work on improving them without tearing yourself down. You are an OK person, someone capable of loving and being loved because you find it easy to love yourself. When you develop CARB syndrome, this positive sense of self starts to slowly fade away. You develop negative feelings about yourself even when you have done nothing to deserve such feelings. When you have low self-esteem, it’s much more difficult to interact with others positively, leaving you even more socially isolated. This can even contribute to the tendency to do self-harm in some people.
12. Low self-image. Self-image is like self-esteem, but with subtle differences. Your self-image is what you experience when you look in the mirror, whereas self-esteem is a more internal sense. Your self-image is how you view your physical self. When your brain is working normally, you like what you see in the mirror, regardless of any physical flaws. When you develop CARB syndrome, you slowly start to lose this positive self-image, and when you look in the mirror, you never seem to like or accept what you see because you only see the flaws. Because you don’t like what you see in the mirror, you assume others see what you see—your flaws. This again pushes you to withdraw from social settings and other people, even those you care about.
13. Loss of cognitive function. Your brain’s capacity for cognition is its ability to think and perform more complex tasks based on abstract concepts. Using language, mathematics, and complex logical reasoning all depend on your brain’s ability to perform higher cognitive functions. In a sense, being able to perform such complex cognitive tasks is what makes us human. When you develop CARB syndrome, your ability to perform such complex tasks becomes somewhat impaired. This change tends to be very subtle and occurs very slowly, so it’s not always readily apparent to you or others, but over time this change becomes more noticeable. Early in the disease, you can often compensate by simply working harder. Later, as the disease progresses, even increased effort leaves you coming up short. Patients with type II diabetes have been shown to have “reversible cognitive dysfunction”. Because CARB syndrome is the first step down the road to diabetes, patients with this disease will also have some degree of cognitive dysfunction. As they say, when you get older, you want to take your brain with you, so preventing or reversing CARB syndrome will move you along in that direction.
14. Lack of empathy. To effectively empathize with others, you first need to put yourself in their shoes and see the world through their eyes. This process occurs naturally when your brain is functioning normally. People sense your empathy for their situation, which builds a bridge to closer, more meaningful relationships. Without empathy, human interaction tends to be more about differences and conflict rather than shared experiences. Empathy is the glue that binds our social fabric.

When you have CARB syndrome, your ability to see the world through the eyes of others is diminished. You become more self-centered and less concerned with others’ feelings and experiences, often leading to greater social isolation. In a sense, you can no longer “put yourself in their shoes”.

15. Chronic pain. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong in your immediate environment, something that is an immediate threat to your safety and well-being. The pain fibers that feed your brain are constantly sending low-level signals that your brain filters out, but when they want to alert you to real environmental dangers, they will get your immediate attention.

When you develop CARB syndrome, your brain slowly loses this filtering function, so some of these background pain signals start to get through. In a sense, you start feeling things that you aren’t supposed to feel. As the disease progresses, you may become a candidate for a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. If you do have a focus of genuine pain like a sore knee from an old injury, your brain will begin to magnify these pain signals, and you will feel the pain even more intensely. Pain becomes your new best friend. Life is a pain becomes your new motto!

16. Short-term memory problems. Retaining memories is what allows you to learn from your experiences. Initially, new memories are stored in short-term memory, and over time, important memories are cataloged in long-term memory. That’s why you still remember your first kiss or where you were when John Kennedy died or when the Twin Towers went down. When you develop CARB syndrome, memories don’t stick as easily in short-term memory, and they often fade before they reach long-term memory. You may have trouble remembering the names of people you know well, and you start to make more lists to jar your memory. Your “where did I leave my keys” becomes your new best friend. In contrast to true dementia, the memory problems associated with CARB syndrome tend to be mild and are completely reversible with treatment.
17. Internal restlessness and racing thoughts. When your brain is working as intended, it’s normal to experience a sense of natural calm when things are going well, because you are in tune with your surroundings and your thoughts reflect what is happening around you. In other words, you are fully integrated into your environment. This “in tune with nature” feeling is common and natural when you have a healthy brain.

When you develop CARB syndrome, this inner calm tends to slowly fade and is replaced with a feeling of internal restlessness where you feel the compulsion to keep moving. It becomes more difficult to sit still for any length of time, and you often resort to nervous habits like twirling your hair or tapping your leg. These “nervous habits” become almost second nature to you as the disease progresses. When you develop CARB syndrome, you race from thought to thought without logical connections between the thoughts, leaving you with a “scatter-brained” feeling.

18. Poor listening skills. You need a healthy brain to hear and process what others are saying to you and then respond appropriately. The ability to effectively listen requires a highly functioning brain. When you develop CARB syndrome, your ability to listen starts to diminish, and you don’t fully hear or comprehend what others are saying to you. You fail to effectively process communication from others, creating problems in interpersonal relationships. It also makes it more difficult for you to function in school and work environments, and you become more socially isolated.
19. Obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Obsessions are repetitive thoughts that at some point start to lose their value when they become too frequent or intrusive. Compulsions are repetitive behaviors that also become counter-productive if they become too frequent or intense. When you develop CARB syndrome, your ability to control obsessions and compulsions becomes impaired to the point where they interfere with your ability to function. You obsess over unimportant matters and repeat meaningless behaviors, leaving you little time for productive work. Your life becomes an endless cycle of thoughts and behaviors that are misaligned with your personality and goals.
20. Intestinal symptoms. Your second brain is called the enteric nervous system. It controls the movement of food and waste through your stomach and intestines. When you develop CARB syndrome, your enteric nervous system malfunctions because, like the brain between your ears, it is also adversely affected by magnified glucose spikes. You may experience bloating, abdominal cramps, excessive flatus and alternating diarrhea and constipation, qualifying you for a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
21. Loss of insight and self-awareness. Knowing where you are in the world and being aware of your own internal thoughts and behaviors are critical if you want to get along with others. When your brain is working normally, you carry a reasonably accurate picture of yourself. You know how you are coming across to other people, you notice when your thinking or your temper is off, and you can step back, look at yourself honestly, and correct course.

When you develop CARB syndrome, this self-monitoring slowly fails, and you are often the last person to know that anything has changed. The people who know you best see the irritability, the forgetfulness, and the fading motivation long before you do—and when they gently point it out, you may honestly believe they are wrong. In a sense, the disease hides itself from the person who has it. As the insight fades, it pushes you to behave in ways that are inconsistent with your core values, and you slowly lose contact with others and with the world around you, leading to emotional and physical isolation. It is also the main reason people with CARB syndrome rarely seek help on their own: you can’t fix a problem you can’t see.

22. Consciously thinking about food and eating. When your brain is working as intended, if you haven’t eaten for six to eight hours, it’s perfectly normal to consciously think about food and eating. Up until then, hunger drives tend to be subtle and subconscious. If you don’t respond to these subconscious cues to eat, your brain will ratchet things up a notch and push hunger into your conscious thoughts. When you develop CARB syndrome, your hunger drives become dissociated from your nutritional needs, and you start thinking about food and eating during or shortly after a meal, or at other inappropriate times. These intrusive thoughts about food and eating eventually take over your mind, leaving you little time to think about more pressing matters.

There you have it—the 22 symptoms of CARB syndrome. It’s important to remember that early in the course of the disease you might only have a few of these symptoms and they are often somewhat subtle. They tend to sneak up on you in a way that makes it difficult to recognize that anything has changed. As the disease progresses, more of these symptoms will slowly emerge, eventually impairing your ability to function in the world. The good news is that CARB syndrome is completely preventable and reversible with effective treatment. In other words, you can keep your brain or get it back if it’s in the toilet, but this won’t happen unless you take the appropriate steps.