It’s no mystery that we’re in the middle of a massive obesity epidemic, but when it comes to the “why” question, the experts always seem to come up short. Overconsuming calories is the usual explanation, and many folks with excessive body fat or obesity are consuming too many calories. But here’s the kicker: it’s also true that some people with excess body fat are undereating yet storing too much food as fat. This paradoxical situation raises a fascinating question–how could this be so?
Glucose is Driving the Bus
To understand this apparent contradiction, we first need to review how the human body decides to store excessive amounts of fat. The brain plays a critical role in fat storage in all mammals, including humans. How does the brain decide it’s time to store this extra fat? It uses glucose crashes. When humans consumed food throughout their evolutionary history, their bodies had various hormonal and regulatory measures to regulate blood glucose within a narrow range. That’s because glucose is the brain’s primary and preferred energy source. When food became scarce, blood glucose would eventually drop after stored glucose or glycogen was used up. This signaled the brain that it was time to look for more food and store more body fat. These fat stores were critical in allowing survival when food supplies disappeared for a period of time.
Modern humans also experience frequent glucose drops, but it’s not due to disappearing food supplies. Instead, it’s due to consuming ultra-processed food. This type of food causes significant glucose spikes, especially in those individuals with insulin resistance from consuming too much ultra-processed food. Our brain didn’t evolve to register glucose spikes because we didn’t consume ultra-processed food throughout our evolutionary history. These spikes are always followed by glucose crashes below normal, and the brain evolved to read these crashes—it’s time to search for more food and store fat because a famine is on the horizon. Your brain has no idea that your glucose crashes are caused by eating Twinkies rather than a threat of starvation! These crashes also trigger cravings for sweet and starchy foods, the quickest way to get more glucose. These cravings push you to consume more of the very food that is frying your brain! These repeated glucose crashes drive more fat storage and the constant consumption of ultra-processed food, resulting in significant excess fat storage or obesity.
The Vicious Craving Cycle
When individuals notice this excess body fat, they often go on a diet to restrict calories and lose weight. Even when they manage to eat less food, their cravings push them towards ultra-processed food, which is the primary driver of this fat storage. They lose lean body mass and store even more fat—not exactly where you want to go. The saga gets even worse. These repeated glucose spikes cause excess dumping of neurotransmitters from neurons in the brain, overwhelming the reuptake or recycling system that evolved to reuse these valuable chemicals. These excess neurotransmitters are taken up by the bloodstream and cleared by your kidneys. You end up peeing away your serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and other neurotransmitters. This depletion eventually causes a long list of up to 22 brain dysfunction symptoms that overlap with many traditional brain disorders, causing massive diagnostic and therapeutic confusion in the medical profession.
A New Disease Driving Obesity and Brain Symptoms
This sorry tale fits the pattern of a disease that the medical and scientific communities have overlooked, leading to our current epidemics of obesity and brain disorders. I could have named this disease “Twinkie Brain”, but I demurred and decided to name it Carbohydrate Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. The lead symptom of CARB syndrome is having intense cravings for sweet and starchy food, so to treat or reverse the disorder effectively, these cravings must be suppressed. The safest and most effective way to do so is to provide the amino acid precursors your brain needs to make more of the neurotransmitters that have been depleted. I have developed a supplement called CARB-22 that contains the precursors and co-factors your brain needs to restore normal levels of neurotransmitters. When this occurs, the symptoms of CARB syndrome quickly disappear, so it’s much easier not to consume the ultra-processed food that is frying your brain. If you go to your physician to address your obesity and brain symptoms, this is the likely outcome:
- You will be placed on a calorie-restricted diet and exercise plan.
- You likely will be treated with various psychiatric medications, which are ineffective at treating CARB syndrome and will likely cause even more fat storage!
The treatment for CARB syndrome is straightforward:
- Take CARB-22 to suppress your cravings and brain dysfunction symptoms.
- Eat a whole-food diet and avoid all ultra-processed food.
- Exercise with a combination of aerobic exercise and strength training.
- Limit intake of fructose and especially sucrose, as outlined by Richard Johnson.
- Take a high-quality omega-3 supplement to get your AA/EPA ratio between 1.5 and 3 as recommended by my friend Barry Sears. I take OmegaRx from Dr. Sears.
- Allulose should be used as a sweetener because it increases AMP-K activity and GLP-1 secretion, as recommended by Barry Sears and Richard Johnson.
I discuss this approach in more detail in my book “Brain Drain”. To monitor your progress, pay more attention to body shrinkage and how your clothes fit rather than relying on weight. Also, pay attention to the improvement and eventual disappearance of your brain dysfunction symptoms. After all, the problem is all in your head, so that’s where you need to focus your efforts to restore your health! If you follow this plan, you will once again attain optimal body composition and brain function. What could be better than that?
Edited by Andy Steinfeldt and Steven Wilson
