When it comes to brain issues, most people aren’t focused on the key chemicals that drive brain function—monoamine neurotransmitters. These are the chemicals that allow neurons to communicate with each other. Scientists have identified over 100 different neurotransmitters, but the most important brain chemicals are termed monoamine neurotransmitters. This group includes serotonin, dopamine, histamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. There is general awareness of these chemicals in the general public and medical profession, but that’s about as far as it goes. If you happened to develop feelings of depression, your physician would likely conclude that you have low levels of serotonin, and they would likely prescribe a Prozac like medication to boost your serotonin. If your child was diagnosed with ADHD, their physician might prescribe Adderall to boost dopamine and norepinephrine.
There’s only one problem with this common perception of brain function—it doesn’t reflect the reality that most people are experiencing in today’s world. Let me explain. Since the dawn of mankind, there have been certain uncommon brain disorders sprinkled throughout the population. These conditions included major depression, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, autism, and PTSD, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These conditions appear to be based on certain environmental and hereditary factors, although the exact cause is unknown. These disorders are also characterized by disruption of normal neurotransmitter function, especially the monoamine neurotransmitters. That’s why they are often treated with drugs that enhance these neurotransmitters. They primarily do so by magnifying the effects of the neurotransmitters, often by acting as reuptake inhibitors. Unlike what most people think, these drugs do not increase neurotransmitter levels.
To understand this process, we need to review how neurotransmitters act in the brain. These chemical messengers are stored in vesicles at the end of neuron axons, the long arms of a nerve cell reaching out to the dendrite of an adjoining cell. When the neuron is stimulated, some of the neurotransmitter is released from the vesicle and secreted into the synapse, the space between cells. The neurotransmitter then hooks up with a receptor on the next neuron, and this stimulates an electric signal in that cell. Because these chemicals are hard to make, Mother Nature devised a way to recycle them. The left-over neurotransmitters are reabsorbed back into the original neuron through a re-uptake system. Drugs like Prozac don’t increase serotonin levels, but rather magnify low levels by blocking the reuptake system, leaving serotonin in the synaptic space for a longer period. These drugs work quite well for traditional brain disorders where there is likely some type of neurotransmitter dysfunction rather than low levels of neurotransmitters. Science has yet to determine all the details of this dysfunction.
Things began to go south over the past 40-50 years when we started to see an apparent rapid increase in many common brain disorders. Many of these people seemed to have multiple disorders all at once, accumulating multiple simultaneous diagnoses. The medical profession responded by treating these folks with multiple brain drugs. At the same time, obesity, insulin resistance, and type 2 diabetes seemed to be thrown into the mix. The standard treatments no longer seemed to work very well, leaving us with a horrendous public health disaster. The medical and scientific communities have stood by helplessly on the sidelines as this disaster unfolded.
Today I’m going to solve this mystery for you by detailing the truth nature of our current medical mess. If you travel back 50-60 years to the onset of this tsunami of disease and poor mental health, you will also notice a major change in our diet at that time. We have had some processed food in our diet for centuries, but decades ago our diet was suddenly overwhelmed by highly processed food containing three toxic ingredients: excessive fructose especially from sucrose, high glycemic carbohydrates like white flour, white rice, corn, and potatoes, and excessive omega 6 fatty acids mainly from vegetable oils. This Twinkie-like food rapidly took over our entire modern diet, with severe adverse health consequences.
The main thrust of these adverse effects has been totally missed by the medical and scientific communities. They focused on calories and weight gain, while I was focusing on the brain. At the beginning of the obesity epidemic, I decided to measure the body composition of every patient at every visit. The experts kept insisting that we should use body mass index (BMI) to diagnose obesity, but BMI is strictly a size measure, which tells you zilch about the amount of fat present in a body. I also had a strong interest in neuroscience, so I paid close attention to my patient’s brain dysfunction symptoms. Over time I noticed an interesting correlation between 22 brain dysfunction symptoms and changes in body composition. It seemed to me that when it comes to fat storage, the brain rather than calories calls the shots calories.
My next clue came when I started working with several individuals who developed tests to measure monoamine neurotransmitter levels in urine. Nobody was quite sure how to interpret these tests, but I started giving them to some of my patients, including those who were undergoing glucose tolerance tests for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. The test involves giving patients a glucose load, and then measuring serum glucose every hour for 3-5 hours. I immediately noticed that after being subjected to a glucose load, these patient’s urine would rapidly fill up with monoamine neurotransmitters. Because these chemicals are hard to make, it made no sense that Mother Nature would pee them away! I also noted that these same patients usually developed up to 22 symptoms reflecting low levels of these monoamine neurotransmitters. I concluded that I was witnessing a new pathological disease process where highly refined food was causing brain dysfunction by dumping out these essential chemical messengers. I decided to call this disease Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. For more details about this disease, please refer to my book “Brain Drain”.
Based on my understanding of the pathology of CARB syndrome, it because obvious to me what the core treatment for this disorder should be—rebuilding depleted levels of monoamine neurotransmitters. Richard and Judith Wurtman from MIT had already explored this issue when they promoted the idea that providing amino acid precursors of neurotransmitters could restore normal levels of these chemicals and thus relieve symptoms reflecting neurotransmitter depletion. Decades ago I began to experiment using precursors like L-tyrosine, DL-phenylalanine and 5-htp to rebuild neurotransmitter levels in patients who fit the CARB syndrome model. I used improvements in my patient’s symptoms and body composition as guides. Over many years I came up with a formula that seems to be very effective. It combined these three precursors along with certain co-factors and L-glutamine, an amino acid that’s known to knock down the pesky cravings for sweet and starchy food that seems to drive CARB syndrome pathology. I decided to name this supplement CARB-22, and for years many individuals have found it to be very helpful at reversing the CARB syndrome disease process. If have found that it not only helps to reverse CARB syndrome, but it also helps to prevent the disease in people who don’t already have it. That’s a critical benefit in a world where it’s almost impossible to avoid loads of highly processed food.
In summary, I recommend that you avoid the foods that drain your brain and focus on topping off your brain chemistry by providing neurotransmitter precursors regardless of your health status. If you are taking any type of brain drug, you should discuss these issues with your physician before taking precursors. That can be a challenge because many physicians are unfamiliar with using precursors in clinical practice. If you decide to take CARB-22 when you are already taking a neurotransmitter enhancing brain drug, keeping the dose of CARB-22 low (2-4 capsules daily) should mitigate any possibly negative side effects. These precursors will also help you to eliminate highly processed food, resulting in enhanced metabolic health, better brain function, and improved body composition—a truly powerful triad of benefits!
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