Harvard Psychiatrist on How Alcohol Negatively Changes Our Brain Forever

alcohol affects your brain alcohol affects your body being addicted to anything whether it's carbohydrates whether it's alcohol whether it's anything else affects your brain and affects your body and I've got a man here Dr Chris Palmer Harvard psychiatrist and researcher who really knows this area well so just kind of can you give a general overview of what happens in a very simple way to the brain in the case of addiction so in the case of addiction um you know we have these reward Pathways in our brain that are probably historically set up you know from an evolutionary stance to help us get food and have sex um those are the two things food helps us survive sex helps us reproduce those are essential for all living organisms and um but there are substances that also stimulate these reward Pathways and the substances can you know are highly addictive drugs alcohols one of them but tobacco cocaine heroin all of these things stimulate the reward Pathways in different ways but it stimulates them and if something is highly rewarding people want to do it more and more the challenge is that if these reward Pathways become disrupted or disregulated people can have trouble stopping it and uh and and that's what we call addiction I popped a link down below for House of macadamia if you want to try them out too they are where I get my macadamia nuts these days they're all grown in South Africa when you buy from them you're directly supporting the farmers as well so the farmers really do take a hit in South Africa so by going through House of macadamia a lot of it goes back to working through the farmers and helps support those Farmers but everything is harvested and packaged less than an hour from each other they harvest them and then they drive them less than an hour away package them everything is Super Fresh not going rancid which macadamia nuts don't really go that rancid anyway but the point is they have macadamia nut oil macadamia nut bars straight up macadamia nuts with all kinds of different flavors so really easy to add to your diet I just I recommend them if you're gonna get it you're going to spend a fortune at the grocery store macadamia nuts are not the cheapest nut but using that discount you can save a few bucks I'm getting some good macadamia nuts from House of macadamia plus with any purchase using that link a free 20 ounce bottle of cold pressed macadamia nut oil literally the only cold-pressed macadamia nut oil that I know of that's on the market and you're getting one completely free if you just use that link down below there's no catches it's just to get the word out there so do people have sort of predispositions to addiction people talk about oh I have an addictive personality I have this like uh oh I don't drink because I know I'm an addictive personality is there is there truth to that or is it something there where it's really just the actual dose makes the poison so to speak if someone's exposing themselves to it it can someone be more prone to it in the beginning at the very beginning stages it's both so I believe we could take I could take a lot of normal healthy non-predisposed people and turn them into addicts if I expose them to the right things and what I would do is I would highly stress them and I would give them addictive substances and primarily only addictive substances food and alcohol say like really addictive junk food and alcohol and I'm gonna stress the hell out of them and they're going to be tormented and then they're gonna get relief with these things if I do that to somebody for a whole year they're going to become an addict but they're but addiction runs in families we know that and so it does seem that some people right out of the womb they haven't done a thing and they are more likely to develop an addiction than other people now in the case of alcohol since alcohol is it's something that's just so accessible right and in a similar case food right it's a food addiction in my opinion is so dangerous because it's just something that we have to deal with we have to eat so we have to deal with this thing that we're potentially Addicted to You Know multiple times per day you know alcohol it's it's right there in front of us all the time sure we don't need it to survive but it's so readily accessible it's like alcohol and food it's just it's just so everywhere with something like alcohol is there a Metabolic Effect in terms of like if someone is metabolically unhealthy maybe they have high blood sugar maybe they're insulin resistant are they potentially more prone to being addicted is there a metabolic interplay there is a metabolic interplay and there are few actually metabolic interplays so the simplest one to start with is that when we drink alcohol any amount really it gets metabolized primarily in the liver and one of the things that it gets metabolized into is this molecule called acetate so research over the last 10 years this was actually shocking and kind of upended some of the Neuroscience field because they had no idea this was happening some of that acetate goes from the liver travels up to the brain and fuels brain cells so when people drink alcohol they are developing they end up with an alternative fuel source for brain cells now if somebody is metabolically compromised and they have insulin resistance going on in their brain alcohol can be highly rewarding because their brain isn't firing on all cylinders because of insulin resistance they drink alcohol that alcohol gets converted into acetate acetate can slide into those cells be used as fuel source and people feel better they'll actually say some and and this is what we hear from people who develop alcoholism I feel awake on alcohol I feel alive I feel better my anxiety goes away my depression goes away whereas metabolically healthy people will more often than not report it sedates me alcohol sedates me it calms me down I'm not as clear thinking so there's that dichotomy and we now have science to understand why that why actually both of those things may be true and then from the addiction side that's almost like a double whammy because then you're getting the the dopaminergic pathway from just the alcohol and the substance itself but also just this sort of well I think better I feel clear and almost like a like a visceral more physical like well I just function better with it and almost convincing yourself that well it's actually probably doing me good because I think so much clearer so I mean it's almost like you're just getting hit with two stones on this one it is and then the other whammy so you ask the big picture question does alcohol impact metabolism the other huge whammy unfortunately is that alcohol also gets converted into a molecule called acetaldehyde which is toxic to mitochondria in cells and that's its primary source of toxicity and so when people if people drink a massive amount and they die of alcohol poisoning what what what's actually happening is that acid aldehyde levels are rising and they are poisoning the mitochondria in their cells and that can cause death if you do it at a lesser level and just have a few drinks every day but you're chronically drinking or you binge drink a few times a week you know go out with the guys oh yeah party and end up having 10 drinks you're actually damaging the mitochondria in your cells and if you do that over time you're actually making the brain metabolic impairment worse so you're actually making brain metabolism worse over time and then that fuels your need for the acetate from the alcohol to fuel your brain cells and now you're screwed because yeah you're you're using the alcohol as a treatment to feel better and yet it's causing more and more harm and damage so interesting because you know when you hear the term a functional alcoholic or you like you almost you almost want to blame them and say it's a it's well you just have this distorted view of what's functional right but what I'm hearing is that it's not really distorted they're legitimately feeling functional because a they may have started with metabolic dysfunction but they've just created so much more metabolic dysfunction that practically the only way they feel semi-normal is by functioning with alcohol yes that's very scary that's the Trap and then I mean when you hear someone that you hear the terms thrown around like oh he pickled himself with alcohol and I used to think like oh when someone pickles themselves by you know like see the the the Crusty old guy that's just like kind of talking crazy because oh he pickled himself right you know I used to think oh the cirrhosis he just he pickled his organs it almost seems as though like no no pickled cellular function and that's why you have all this just multiple levels of deterioration that seemed to happen yes and because alcohol preferentially goes to the liver for detoxification and that detoxification is happening in the liver the liver is the organ most commonly affected but the brain is a close second interesting it's the liver and the brain that suffer the most and as a movement guy I can't help but think in this not necessarily your wheelhouse but it's all tied together I mean I just think like you know so many athletes particularly even like endurance athletes are notorious for you know they they drink a lot of calories they they really do and it's uh a lot of athletes in general just drink a lot of alcohol and I just think about the metabolic impairment that happens as a result of that that they may not even be aware of especially as they get into their 30s and their 40s like the amounts of performance that's potentially being left on the table I mean obviously there's more important things at play than just how fast someone can run a marathon or whatever there's obviously more life and death situations but I try to stress to people you know if you're if you're an athlete and you want Optimal Performance like you can make the argument all day long that it helps you relax it helps you sleep and helps you wind down but you know the evidence is very clear on slow wave sleep and how it impacts that which we don't need to go down that rabbit hole but it's what I'm hearing is that it just validates what I felt from a metabolic side in the body I mean like it just doesn't make sense like it feels like everything preferentially has to take a back seat to what the liver can deal with because the liver has to deal with that acetaldehyde so everything else just kind of hey you got to go in the back burner here for a minute while we deal with this and what does that leave you exposed to yeah I mean you know so for a long time we heard that having you know one or two drinks a day was good for your health that's now being called into question and you know there's a whole Camp of researchers saying actually the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that any amount of alcohol use is bad for the brain that is pretty clear um there are other researchers who say any amount of alcohol is bad for the entire human body there are some who say no maybe we can tolerate one or two drinks a day so there are some who are still in that camp alcohol does lower blood pressure it's a vasodilator and so if somebody's going around with high blood pressure lowering blood pressure can have benefits especially for your heart health and I think that may be where it starts to get confusing I think one of the other confusing things is that people who drink alcohol more often than not hopefully are drinking with other human beings they're not necessarily drinking alone and and so you get that confounding variable so you're talking about people who now have lots of friends and family and they're going out they're going out to dinners they're socializing socializing with other humans has a lot of health benefits it does there's no way around it and so when they look at these large studies of you know people who drink alcohol kind are sort of healthier they may be actually measuring the relationships and the social connections more than they are the actual use of alcohol wow that is unbelievable now where can diet come into play to sort of intervene here okay clearly there's some Pathways that we need to disrupt and there's a number of different habit forming techniques and things like that but I always try to talk about okay what are things that you can do metabolically sure you can tell you to go out and exercise but you know you are an expert in the world of how ketones interact with the brain and how ketones interact with mental illness and addiction how can diet affect and disrupt this addiction pathway so this is work done by actually none other than Nora volca who's the director of the National Institute of drug abuse so she's a world leading neuroscientist and addiction expert um and she is she and her research team are the ones who figured out this acetate kind of going up to the brain and fueling brain cells and um they've found that on average people with alcoholism or alcohol use disorder have actually brain glucose hypometabolism so in other words their brains aren't regions of their brain these reward Pathways in particular aren't getting enough fuel from glucose so she and her team of researchers actually set out to see if the ketogenic diet could replace acetate because you get acetone from a ketogenic diet but you also get beta hydroxybutyrate and everything else so they actually admitted a group of Alcoholics to a detox unit detox all of them with the same protocol half of them get a standard American diet half of them get a ketogenic diet and the ones who got the keto diet actually had fewer cravings for alcohol they had fewer withdrawal symptoms from alcohol their brain metabolism was improved their brain inflammation was decreased wow and how long a period of time was this that was a three-week clinical trial wow so that's that's not even long enough to really say oh it's it's repairing the metabolism per se because I was going to say okay that makes sense like if you're if you're able to fuel these dysfunctional mitochondria with beta-hydroxybutyrate or acetoacetate or acetone for ketones yeah okay sure maybe they're uh like kind of repairing the mitochondria a bit but three weeks isn't enough to totally repair the mitochondria so this is something it's not so this is and this is an area where exogenous ketones might actually play a role if if if if somebody really wants to cut back on drinking and is really struggling to do that like they make a decision I'm not going to drink but they go out with friends or family and they find themselves drinking again and then once they start they can't seem to yeah you know they have more than they anticipated um even if they don't consider themselves an alcoholic even if they don't think it's a problem if just for the health benefits just I want to run faster as a runner I want to perform better and I want to give up alcohol but gosh this is a lot harder than I thought it would be those are people that may really benefit from trying a low carb or keto diet and or might benefit from exogenous ketones so when your buddies are all having the beer you might actually go with a bottle of ketones pour it into a seltzer water or something and drink that and that may actually be enough of an alternative fuel source for your brain to help you stay away from the alcohol that is powerful yeah I mean it's and I'm sure it'd be difficult to get a study like that together but I would almost put money on it that if you were to look at those people that are metabolically dysfunctional that get a little bit of a high from alcohol and you were to take that same group or a similar group and give them ketones they would probably have a similar feeling of a high because they're those metabolically inadequate cells that are glucose intolerant not able to utilize glucose properly it's similar Pathways for a cell to use acetate as it probably is beta hydroxybutyrate I would imagine very similar Pathways if not the same I'm not you know a neural chemical expert but I would imagine it is because there's glucose Pathways and then that's pretty much it the rester yep acetate can slide in and beta hydroxybutyrate can slide in so uh and the mitochondria can use either as a fuel source that is so powerful so I mean that's a one particular because I don't I'm not a giant proponent of exogenous ketones I think they have their place and we've talked about it before as an athlete and things like that but you know I usually tell people like yeah don't believe all the hype about just if you're getting 600 grams of carbs in a day and taking in a bunch of exogenous ketones but this is actually a practical use case that might quite literally careful to say too much of a claim but save someone's life I mean it's one of these things where it's like if that is a switch that they make and it helps them feel good and they get off alcohol that is a huge huge hack for somebody to learn yeah and there are some researchers who are pursuing this but research studies take years to do and then the results take you know a year or so to get published so we're not going to see those results for at least a few years but um you know if you're really struggling to if somebody's really struggling to try to give up alcohol it's a pretty easy thing to try yeah and maybe it works or not and even if somebody says it's just a placebo effect Dr Palmer that's just a placebo great yeah if a placebo effect helps somebody stop drinking 100 what's wrong with that that's what I always say yes there's nothing wrong with the placebo effect if it's actually working yeah yeah and then I think you know longer term the metabolic changes that might occur with you know because you're always reinforcing these different dopaminergic signals you know like a lot of times uh I always say like you know addictions are for me they're oftentimes transferable what I mean by that is if I get addicted to scrolling my phone a whole lot or something like that I find that when I put my phone down I have a void to fill and I go to the fridge and I try to grab something out there right so it's like the same kind of thing like okay if you can start changing your metabolism so that you're not having these cravings for alcohol then a lot of times the cravings for sugar go away and vice versa it kind of all works in tandem yeah absolutely yeah absolutely so well Chris where can everyone find you man easiest place is brain energy.com uh you can follow me on social media from there you can learn more about my work there awesome well as always keep it locked in here on my channel and see you tomorrow

You May Also Like