Click to learn more! Brain problems are growing by leaps and bounds. You can probably name at least one person, if not yourself, who is currently struggling with brain fog, anxiety, or depression. The National Institute of Mental Health (1) estimates that close to 20% of American adults currently suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder and the U.S. 113 billion (2) every year for Glyco Care Blood Sugar Formulahealthy glucose levels mental health treatment. The use of antidepressants doubled from 1995 to 2005. They’re now the most prescribed drugs on the market. There’s been a twenty-fold increase in attention-deficit drug consumption over the past 30 years. And autism now affects 1 in 88 children. These figures don’t even factor in the cost of autoimmune brain problems like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and autism, which affect more people every year. As a society, we have to ask: why this increase in brain health problems? My job as a functional medicine practitioner is to clinically investigate and treat the underlying cause of chronic health problems.
Instead of just managing symptoms my whole goal is to actually heal the body from the inside out. One of the biggest components to the “brain fog” that many of us experience is how healthy our gut is functioning, especially because understanding the root issue is the first and most essential step in figuring out how to get rid of brain fog. Science often refers to your gut as your “second brain.” Your gut and brain are actually formed from the same fetal tissue when you were growing in your mother’s womb, and GlycoCaresblood sugar wellness continue their special bond throughout your whole life through what is known as the gut-brain axis. So, in order to heal the brain we need to look at the other end of this axis for clues. For anyone in the wellness world, leaky gut syndrome is not a foreign health problem. Leaky gut happens when your gut lining is damaged and can lead to a whole slew of digestive and other health issues.
Occludin and Zonulin are two proteins that govern gut permeability as well as the permeability of your blood-brain barrier. Elevated antibodies to these proteins can indicate that there has been damage to your gut and your brain. The gut-brain connection becomes all too real here by turning leaky gut into “leaky brain.” Pleasant sounding, huh? To make matters worse, with increased permeability comes increased inflammation in the gut. Inflammation is a necessary part of a healthy body to fight off infections or when you get a cut. However, chronic inflammation wreaks havoc on your health. So much so that a whole area of medical research known as “the cytokine model of cognitive function” is dedicated to researching how inflammation, specifically inflammation of the brain, is correlated with brain problems. This increased inflammation doesn’t help your Glyco Care Blood Sugar Formulahealthy glucose levels-brain barrier either. The microRNA-155 molecule is elevated (4) with high inflammation and ends up creating gaps in the blood-brain barrier that lets bacteria and other toxins slip through.
Your brain’s immune system has to work in overdrive to fight off these invaders and ends up creating a cascade of inflammation to your brain in order to try to protect it. This inflammatory oxidative stress in the hypothalamus of the brain is the underlying cause of brain fog and why you can’t figure out where you last left your keys. Thyroid hormone imbalances have been shown (5) to cause inflammatory-immune responses. Your thyroid works by receiving the proper messages from the brain through the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) axis, so if your hypothalamus is inflamed, it causes dysfunction in the brain-thyroid axis. The end result? A vicious cycle of inflammation. Just as you have the brain-thyroid axis, you also have the brain-adrenal (HPA) axis. Dysfunction in your adrenal-based circadian rhythm (6) can manifest as adrenal fatigue, when the stress hormone cortisol runs wild, depressing your immune system. As with thyroid issues brain fog can be both the cause and the effect of adrenal fatigue due to this particular brain-hormone connection.