These are the key takeaways from Dr. Andrew Huberman’s Huberman Lab Podcast Episode 11 titled How Foods And Nutrients Control our Moods.
Emotions: Aligning Mind & Body
Emotions are central to our entire experience of life. Whether we are happy, sad, depressed or angry is our life experience. Very few people understand how emotions arise in our brain and body. Emotions capture the brain-body relationship. Emotions involves biological and chemical events within our body. There is no real agreement as to what’s a good or bad emotion.
Things that are happening in our body influence how our brain functions and the chemicals that are released.
Foundation of the discussion about emotion is the push-pull of attraction to things or aversion from things. From the deep circuits of the brain to the higher order.
Primitive Expressions and Actions
Things that we are attracted to and avoid are innate or hardwired. When we taste bitter compounds, we tend to avoid them because they are associated with poison. When we taste sweet or savory things, we tend to lean towards them and not avoid them. There are circuits in the brain for aversion and attraction towards things and these are governed by the body.
The Vagus Nerve: Truth, Fiction, Function
Vagus nerve is the nerve pathway that many have heard of, oversold for the wrong reasons and undersold for its real power. It is one way in which our brain and body is connected and regulates our emotional states. Vagus is involved in calming us down. Vagus nerve is the 10th cranial nerve which means that the neurons, the control center of each of those neurons in the vagus lives near the neck and a branch goes into the brain and the other goes into the periphery (stomach, intestines, heart, lungs and immune system).
Polyvagal Theory
Polyvagal theory – poly means many, acknowledges that the vagus has a lot of different branches. (Stephen Porges)
When dorsal vagus is too active, we tend to be too keyed up. When the pathway is hypoactive or underactive, we tend to be in a freeze or flaccid state, inactive or lethargic. Another problem is when people start to diagnose psychological and physical manifestations through the vagus.
Vagus Senses Many Things, & Moves Our Organs
Sugar Sensing Without Perception of Sweetness
Most people find sweet foods attractive, or they might want them. When you eat something sweet, within your stomach, you have cells, neurons that sense the presence of sugar foods independent of their taste and signal to the brain. So those sensors/neurons send information up the vagus to your brain, then goes through a series of stations and then you release dopamine, a molecule that makes you want more of what you ingested.
We have sensors within our body that make you crave sugar independent of the sweet taste. We have circuits in our body that are driving us towards certain behaviors and making us feel good even though we can’t perceive them.
Eating-Induced Anxiety
All of your moods and feelings on well-being are anchored on this continuum of alertness versus calmness. Deep in the brain, there is an area of the hypothalamus called the lateral hypothalamus. It controls feeding but inhibits feeding. There’s another area in the brain called the locus coeruleus, which sits back further in the brain stem and releases norepinephrine and it makes us feel alert.
As we approach food, locus coeruleus is releasing all these molecules that make us feel more anxious and alert, sometimes it makes us feel excitement, that’s to do with how we feel about food. Whether we are happy with our relationship to food or are we trying to restrict our relationship to food.
We Eat Until Our Brain Perceives “Amino Acid Threshold”
We generally will eat until our gut tells our brain that we have adequate amounts of amino acids. They are important because they are the building blocks of muscle and other things in our body that need repair. But what most people don’t realize is that amino acids are what the neurochemicals in the brain are made from. Dopamine is the molecule released within the brain that makes us feel good.
Reward Prediction Error: Buildup, Letdown and Wanting More
Dopamine release is caused by surprise, excitement and events that you’re looking forward to that turn out well. It is inhibited by events you’re looking forward to that don’t work out which is called Reward Prediction Error.
Essentially if you expect something to be terrific, it places a higher expectation at the chemical level. Your expectation and the actual event releases dopamine. And if the event related dopamine does not exceed the expectation or at least match it, there’s a much higher tendency that you won’t pursue that thing again. So, dopamine is not just the molecule of reward or having, it is also the molecule of desire wanting.
The Molecule Of More, Book by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long – Learn more about dopamine, reward prediction error and how dopamine regulates various aspects of your emotional and motivational life in this book.
L-Tyrosine, Dopamine, Motivation, Mood, & Movement
There’s a misconception that most of the serotonin and dopamine are in our gut. Therefore, our mood is in our gut, but that’s not the way it works. Dopamine is synthesized from the amino acids that you eat, however the dopamine neurons that give rise to these feelings of good, desire and motivation reside in the brain. It’s the neurons within your brain that drive the pursuit and decision making.
Supplementing L-Tyrosine, Drugs of Abuse, Wellbutrin
Dr. Huberman sometimes take l-tyrosine in capsule form and it does increase mood, motivation, alertness and effort. But it’s best to consult doctor for usage and dose. People with pre-existing hyper-dopaminergic conditions like mania should not take l-tyrosine. The other thing about taking l-tyrosine is to note that there is a crash, and a brain fog after the next day or so.
There are other drugs that will increase l-tyrosine and dopamine as well but those are severe enough that they generally tend to have addictive properties. The likes of methamphetamine and cocaine are terrible because they really ramp up the dopamine system so much that people really can’t achieve dopamine release through any other mechanisms. But food and the ingestion of l-tyrosine has a profound effect on our levels of dopamine, it takes a while but that really will impact the level of mood.
Wellbutrin was developed because a lot of the other antidepressants tend to make people feel lethargic or had side effect profiles that people didn’t like. Wellbutrin activates dopamine and epinephrine which is a substrate of dopamine which are both involved in motivation, alertness and effort. However, the side effect profile tends to be the things that are associated with elevated mood and alertness.
Serotonin: Gut, Brain, Satiety and Prozac
Serotonin is a neuromodulator that creates a bias in which neural circuits, which are neurons in the brain and body, are going to be active and others to be inactive. Serotonin when elevated tends to make us feel comfortable and blissed out wherever we are and that contrasts with dopamine and epinephrine which mainly put us in pursuit of things.
First, more than 90% of the serotonin that we make is in our gut, but most of the serotonin that impacts our mood and mental state is in the neurons of the brain in an area called the raphe nucleus of the brain, and those are the neurons that control whether we feel satiated, happy and calm.
During the late 80s and early 90s there was this explosion in the number of prescription drugs that were released like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and other ones that are so called SSRI, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. Those drugs work by preventing the reuptake of serotonin into neurons after it’s been released which leads to more serotonin overall. Those drugs were and can be very useful for certain people to feel better in cases of depression and some other clinical disorders. But their side effect profile has effects like a blunting affect. It can make people feel flat and can reduce appetite for food or sex, depending on the dose.
Eating to Promote Dopamine (Daytime) & Serotonin (Night Time)
For lunch, high protein, moderate fat, zero or low carb meal are suggested to stay alert. Because those foods tend to favor dopamine, acetylcholine, epinephrine production and alertness. For dinner, ingesting foods that promote serotonin release is advised because they contain tryptophan and helps with having a good night’s sleep.
Supplementing Serotonin: Sleep, & Caution About Sleep Disruptions
Some people also take 5-htp supplements. 5-htp supplements increases serotonin but can create problems in endogenous or self-made production of serotonin. Serotonin release tends to be in the later part of the night and so by taking it early in the night it can disrupt the pattern and the depth of sleep. Some people are interested in taking serotonin to get the blissed-out effects. You can also achieve that with foods that are carbohydrate rich.
Mucuna Pruriens: The Dopamine Bean with a Serotonin Outer Shell
There’s another category of supplements that are for modulating these chemicals in the body. Mucuna pruriens is a velvet bean that grows from vines and is very itchy to touch due to serotonin on its surface. Inside the bean is L-dopa. Mucuna pruriens is not just something that promotes dopamine release because it is chemically L-dopa, the precursor to dopamine. It contains some other molecules as well and low levels of other psychoactives.
Emotional Context and Book Recommendation: “How Emotions Are Made”
Huberman’s book recommendation, if you want to read more about emotions and how the context and cultural things impact our emotions, Lisa Feldman Barrett, her first book is How Emotions Are Made. In this book you will read the psychology of emotions and some of the subjectivity of emotions.
Exercise: Powerful Mood Enhancer, But Lacks Specificity
One of the problems with the discussion around mood and exercise or mood and meditation is that it’s subjective. There is no measure of exercise in order to get your dopamine up but we can say if you ingest more l-tyrosine there’s a high probability that you’re going to make more dopamine.
The things we can do is to regulate dosages, amounts and timing. Everyone must play with these things and figure out what’s right for them in terms of feeding and its safety. Exercise is still very important but when it comes to this gut-brain, body-brain relationship, what we eat really matters in terms of the neurochemicals that we make.
Omega-3: Omega-6 Ratios, Fish Oil and Alleviating Depression
In an experiment done in animals, they found that there’s a model of learned helplessness in animals. They put mice in a jar they let them swim, and they’ll swim to try and save their life. Then eventually they give up and learn helplessness. They adjusted the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio to make the omega-3s higher and that led to less learned helplessness. These animals would then swim longer.
Fish Oil as Antidepressant
There is a study that involved people who were clinically depressed (major depression, which is severe maladaptive state that inhibits job, relationships, appetite, and all sorts of negative health effects) and they did a comparison of 1000 mg/day of EPA, which is one of the elements that contains high levels of omega-3s, compare that to 20 mg of fluoxetine, which is Prozac. In this study of 60 individuals, they found that they were equally effective in reducing depressive symptoms. A food-based compound that you can’t make on your own was as effective as 20 mg of fluoxetine over the course of eight weeks. The combination of a thousand mg of EPA and fluoxetine had a synergistic effect in lowering depressive symptoms.
EPAs May Improve Mood via Heart Rate Variability: Gut-Heart-Brain
Shifting that omega-3 to omega-6 ratio did a couple things. First, increasing the amount of EPA lowered the inflammation markers and then allowed antidepressants to have their effect even at low doses. It worked by increasing heart rate variability. The vagus includes connections from the heart signaling about sensory information and the brain then adjusts heart rate by heart rate variability. So, there’s a way that one can use the ingestion of more of these EPAs either through food or supplementation to increase heart rate variability. Which would thereby reduce symptoms of depression and make low levels of antidepressants that wouldn’t otherwise work, work. This study bridges the brain-body axis, incorporates nutrition and micronutrients in the brain and it points that our body is working as a whole system. It’s reacting to things that are happening in the body, gut, heart rate, heart rate variability and that the things we ingest can have a profound effect on them.
Alternatives to Fish Oil to Obtain Sufficient Omega-3/EPAs
There’s krill oil. Krill is an organism, it’s a little tiny thing that whales eat a lot of. There are other sources like hemp, chia and flax seeds. It is possible to get omega-3s from meats if the animals have grazed on grasses that contain a lot of omega-3s.
L-Carnitine for Mood, Sperm and Ovary Quality, Autism, Fibromyalgia, Migraine
L-Carnitine was being touted as a bit of a weight loss agent in the early 90s, but l-carnitine also has some impressive effects on depression. L-carnitine is most prevalent in meat, beef in particular. Acetyl-l-carnitine is essentially what’s made from l-carnitine but it’s acetylated. It’s acetylated into a form that can cross the blood-brain barrier.
The blood-brain barrier or BBB is a barrier around the brain. You have this barrier because the brain has this feature that the neurons don’t recreate themselves after injury unlike other organs of the body. This blood-brain barrier is created to make sure that large molecules don’t get across the brain because it can be damaging to those tissues. You also have a very rigid or stringent barrier around other organs which are the gonads. So, the ovaries, testes and the brain are the organs of the body that nature has gone out of its way to protect. Blood-brain barrier for the brain and for the testes and the ovaries, the blood-gonadal barrier.
Gut-Microbiome: Myths, Truths & the Tubes Within Us
We have a lot of these little microorganisms living in our gut. The microbiota that live in us vary along the length of our digestive tract. We are a series of tubes, and our brain is one of them. Similarly, our digestive tract and our airways are essentially one big tube. It starts with our mouth, our nose and we have all these other tubes that go down through our throat and into our stomach. And then into our various intestines and then the tube ends out the other end. And inside of that tube is a mucosal lining, it’s these little microvilli like velvety ends of cells that can move things along the mucosa. The conditions of that mucosal lining set the rate of our digestion and the quality of our digestion and our immune system.
First rule, the microbiome isn’t good or bad. Some of these little bugs that live in us make us feel worse. They lower our immunity and affect us in negative ways. But some of them make us feel better by changing the conditions of our gut environment. In addition to that, they do impact the neurotransmitters and the neurons that live in the gut and that signal up to the brain to impact things like dopamine and serotonin.
Probiotics, Brain Fog, Autism, Fermentation
You get probiotics from athletic greens and fermented foods. The ingestion of fermented foods is one of the best ways to support healthy levels of gut microbiota without exceeding the threshold that would cause things like brain fog.
Second is that it is true that healthy gut microbiota have been shown to improve symptoms of certain psychiatric illnesses as well as certain conditions like features along the autism spectrum. Those effects are due to the conditions in which the neurons that sends nutrients convey information to the brain and increase levels of serotonin and/or dopamine. Gut microbiome provides a foundation for healthy gut and healthy gut-brain axis. People report that when they start eating small bits of fermented foods that their overall mood gets better.
Artificial Sweeteners & the Gut Microbiome: NOT All Bad; It Depends!
There are some things that you do that damages your gut microbiome.
That study was about saccharin. Saccharin is not the most typical artificial sweetener. The ones widely used are aspartame, NutraSweet or sucralose, stevia, and monk fruits. The negative effects of these artificial sweeteners on the gut microbiome were restricted to saccharin.
The negative effects of saccharin on the microbiome could be blocked or eliminated by giving antibiotics. What happens is artificial sweeteners, in particular saccharin, disrupt the microbiome and make the mucosal lining more favorable to bacteria and microbiota that are not good for the organism.
Ketogenic, Vegan, & Processed Food Effects, Individual Differences
People have switched from a standard, vegetarian or vegan to a keto diet and experience positive effects. When one shifts to the ketogenic diet, there is a shift in the gut microbiome and some people end up feeling better or worse. Likewise, some people go from ingesting animal products including meat, or they’re vegetarian and they go to vegan, experience positive shifts in mood and affect. We know that the transition to a more plant-based diet and the enrichment of fiber that’s present in those diets also creates dramatic shifts in the gut microbiome.
Ingestion of processed foods regardless of whether they come from animal sources or non-animal sources tend to create activity within the body and this surely has roots in the nervous system that lead to over consumption of calories and weight gain.
The point of all this is to find what’s right for you. Some people’s microbiome and the mucosal lining of their throat, gut and nose are improved by diets that are heavily meat based and don’t have many plants. Other people do much better on a plant-based diet without meat products or animal products. It’s highly individual and has roots in genetic makeup and in what people were raised on. The nervous system is set up by your genes or genetic program, but your nervous system adapts early in life to your conditions. The reason you have a nervous system is to move your body appropriately towards things that are good for you and away from things that are not.
Fasting-Based Depletion of Our Microbiome
When we fast, we digest certain components within our digestive tract. It depletes a good amount of the gut microbiome. The longer periods of fasting that go for multiple days are known to deplete the gut microbiome in major ways. But when it’s replenished in a level that exceeds its previous level. When they don’t feel so good, that may be related to the depletion of the microbiome that occurs during long fast. That depletion of the microbiome is significant because it means when you return to eating, you’re actually not in the same position to digest and assimilate those foods. Those foods are not in the same position to impact your brain and body the same way they were prior to the fast. This is why people suggest a gradual transition back to consuming nutrients after a fast.
How Mindset Effects Our Responses to Foods: Amazing (Ghrelin) Effects!
Ghrelin is a peptide that increases with hunger. The longer you haven’t eaten, the more ghrelin goes up. If you’re one of these people that eats every three hours regularly, ghrelin gets a little pulse as you get to that 2 hour and 50 minute mark.
This is not just the placebo effect; this is an incredible set of findings that illustrate the extent to which whether we believe a food is going to be good for us or not. These belief effects are not about lying to yourself. In these experiments as you’ll notice, the subjects didn’t have prior knowledge about ghrelin or about the effects of their daily routine on weight loss and blood pressure. So, in order for them to work, you have to be naive to the information. You can’t simply lie to yourself and tell yourself what you want to believe.
How Mindset Controls Our Metabolism
What’s also important is that the mind and the body are in this fascinating interplay. The things that we put inside this tube that runs from our mouth to our rectum basically is impacting all these cells, neurons, microbiota, mucosal lining, heart, and lungs. All that information is feeding up to the brain to impact how we feel. But also, how we feel is impacting how our body reacts at levels of very core physiology that you couldn’t just tell yourself that this was going to work but what you believe about certain substances, foods and nutrients does have a profound effect on the magnitude of their impact and sometimes even the quality and direction of that impact.
