Revitalize Your Brain With Ketogenic Benefits

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Well, thanks so much, Heather. Great to be on with you.

Heather Sandison, ND

Let’s dive straight into ketogenic diets and brain health. What’s the connection? Why would we suggest this to someone who’s struggling cognitively?

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Anybody who’s struggling cognitively, I always start thinking there’s probably inflammation in the brain. If you’re noticing brain fog, depression, anxiety, irritability, constant cravings, headaches, or any kind of neurological symptoms, we have to look at inflammation as the root cause. So if we’re going to reduce inflammation, one of the big things we have to look at is our diet and nutrition. A big factor in inflammation in our diet is blood sugar imbalances. See, our blood sugar needs to be at a very stable point regularly. So high blood sugar, which we call hypoglycemia is problematic because the sugar molecules will bind to proteins and create something called advanced glycation end products. These advanced glycation end products are like shrapnel going through our bloodstream. They drive up all the inflammatory activity in our bloodstream, and they damage the endothelial lining of the blood vessels. You think about somebody with uncontrolled diabetes. What happens? They end up with, typically, congestive heart failure or kidney disease because, again, the blood vessels are becoming severely damaged or they get neurological symptoms, such as peripheral neuropathy, optic neuritis, and dementia, which is common. Alzheimer’s, they called type 3 diabetes because, again, these advanced glycation end products damage all the neurons in our system and restrict blood flow to our brain. Of course, what happens with high blood sugar is that we end up with high insulin. Insulin is the hormone that tries to get the sugar down. It tries to bring the sugar out of the bloodstream and put it in the cells, where it can be used as energy. This is trying to save us from this glycation process or this rusting process taking place in the body. Also,  it’s helping us create cellular energy by getting the blood sugar in there, and insulin’s key is that we just can’t have too much insulin because then the cells stop responding well to it, and we end up with insulin resistance, which is at the heart, which is a hallmark of dementia and Alzheimer’s. Now, we don’t want to have low blood sugar as well, because then we get hypoglycemia. For certain body types, I’m like this. If I have a lot of processed sugar, I get a huge increase in insulin. then that insulin drives the blood sugar down low. then I end up with hypoglycemia. This is my life growing up; I’d have a big bowl like my mom for breakfast. She wouldn’t get the cereal I wanted, which was like Froot Loops or whatever. Whatever I saw on TV growing up, she would get what she thought was healthy, which was Cheerios, and we would have skim milk because we wanted to avoid the fat. This is the early nineties. We wanted to avoid the fat, and skim milk, and put a banana on there because it’s fruit. and then a glass of orange juice for vitamin C. It Sounds like an all-American breakfast right there. I would have that. then two hours later, I’d be falling asleep in my high school English class because my blood sugar would skyrocket, drop significantly, and I’d have this reactive hypoglycemia and the blood sugar drops too low. Then our brain cells don’t get the energy they need, and they start to die. We create something called neurologic cytotoxicity, where one nerve, one neuron, dies, and it spills out calcium and all these different electrolytes and contents. then that overexcites the neuron next to it. It’s like a domino effect. All these dominoes go off, and you get brain cell death. so that the fatigue that you get when you have hypoglycemia is neurons dying. You don’t have the energy, and you’re causing brain cell death. There’s research that shows that if you have a severe hypoglycemic reaction if you have one of those in your life, it means you passed out. You may have been somewhere. I was at church last year; we were in worship, and a girl fell. She passes out. It’s her; they give her orange juice and all that kind of stuff. It’s like people; this happens to people. What happened? This girl was very metabolically inflexible. She hadn’t eaten breakfast. She wasn’t taking good care of herself, probably on a high-processed food diet. so she or he is 10 a.m. and she passes out with such reactive hypoglycemia that right there that incident increases her risk of developing dementia later in life by 40% having one episode like that. So it’s problematic. So ketones are the bridge to helping us become very metabolically flexible. So when we teach our body to run off fatty acids and ketones, more ketones come in when we are taking periods between meals, and our body uses up glucose. We have glucose in our blood. We also have stored glucose in our liver and muscles. We’re using that, and the brain eats up a lot of that glucose. then we start burning a higher percentage of fatty acids for energy. Now, most of the cells in our body can use fatty acids for energy, but they’re too big to cross the blood-brain barrier. Our body has a system where it will take fatty acids and convert them into ketones, and these fatty acids could come from our diet or they could come from our body fat. taking our body fat and converting it into these smaller water-soluble molecules called ketones that get up across the blood-brain barrier, and the main ketone that we measure in the blood is called beta-hydroxybutyrate. so that gets into the brain. That key is that those ketones can be used as energy, which is key because if we don’t have enough glucose now, we have a backup energy source. So it’s great when our brain is using a percentage of ketones and a percentage of glucose, so it’s going to use some percentage of glucose. But it’s also great when we’re also able to use those ketones. Now, not only is it an energy source, but it’s also what we call an epigenetic modulator, and it sends messages to our overall physiology. One of the main messages it sends is to turn down inflammation. When people have these neurological symptoms, inflammation is elevated. I think about inflammation kind of like a fire in a fireplace. We want a small amount of inflammation, which is fine. In a sense, it primes us to kind of prevent pathogens from coming in and immune attacks, just like a fire in a fireplace is a beautiful thing in the house. The problem is that when the fire starts spreading onto the walls and we start burning down our walls, none of us want that. That’s what’s happening when we have chronic inflammation. ketones help say that the walls are burning up; let’s shut that down and pour water on it. Whatever we’re going to do, get that fire back in the fireplace, where it belongs, and where it’s doing us good. So that’s what’s happening. ketones tell the body, bring down, and in fact, there’s something called the inflammasomes. In the brain, they call it the neural inflammasome. Infiammazione is an inflammation-amplifying system. In the end, the flame zone gets activated. normally you might have, for example, a sprain in your ankle or inflammation in the ankle. Or you bang your finger. Yet localized inflammation. Localized inflammation makes sense. That area needs to get here. There’s tissue damage. We need some healing to take place. We want to protect against infection getting into their normal natural process. The problem is that when the inflammation in our body gets activated, it causes inflammation throughout the whole system. In particular,  we all have kind of, in a sense, a weak link or multiple weak links. So depending on our genetics, those weak links can be overexcited and overactivated. People with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and brain fog have a lot of these neurological symptoms; the brain is the weak link there. so that inflammation is just saying, Oh,  let’s turn up inflammation. It’s like a massive alarm going off, turning up inflammation in the system. ketones turn that off, and so now we turn that inflammasome off. It can be reactivated if needed, but it’s a life-saving mechanism because it helps protect against getting some sort of systemic infection like meningitis or pneumonia or something like that and killing us quickly. We need it, but we don’t want it turned on unless it’s necessary for the shortest amount of time. Ketones help modulate that inflammation. Also, they help to modulate what we call the glutamate-to-GABA ratio, so they help to balance. This is key because glutamate is the excitatory neurotransmitter in our brain. I think about glutamate; I think about the gas pedal. It helps us think sharply and quickly, helps us have great memory recall, and helps us thrive in a sense. We need glutamate; we want it to function well. I’m doing a talk to you right now. I want my glutamate to function as well, but I need the brakes as well. Just like you wouldn’t want to drive a high-speed car without brakes, Dangerous. GABA is the brake. so we need a good ratio. We want to be able to step on the gas when we need to and hit the brakes when we need to. What happens when people have neuroinflammation? They end up with too much glutamate and not enough GABA. It distorted this sort of ratio. When you have too much excitatory activity, not enough brakes, and not enough inhibitory, you end up with anxiety and irritability like domestic abuse, people just getting overly angry, or people getting upset about things that they shouldn’t necessarily get upset about. It’s a sign of this imbalance in neural inflammation. You have more cravings. You can overexcite brain cells, and then that can cause depression or manic periods, like when you’re all of a sudden full of energy and then all of a sudden you drop signifier gently. That’s a sign of a neuroinflammation-disordered glutamate-to-GABA ratio. All of these types of symptoms that we’re talking about—they can all be ketones—are like a super medicine in the sense that they help address those things. So when we get ketones elevated in our bloodstream, it’s because it tells the genes in our system, it tells all of our physiology, and it quiets down inflammation. Let’s balance out that glutamate-to-GABA ratio, and let’s also increase BDNF. I didn’t even mention that brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is like Miracle-Gro for the brain cells, helps with maintaining healthy neuronal cell membranes, healthy synapses, and synaptic density, which synapses are little gaps in between the neurons that help us be able to think sharply and quickly, react to stress, and have creative thoughts, so it increases BDNF as well. So one way that people have gotten into endocytosis, for example, throughout history, is by fasting. Then,  in every single spiritual approach, there is an element of fasting. People have said that their intuition is heightened, that they have spiritual breakthroughs and that they’re able to peer into God and hear from the Holy Spirit at a higher and deeper level. So if we were to look at it from a physiological perspective, we would say, Well, there’s this huge increase in the BDNF, and if there’s a reduction in neuroinflammation, there’s a balance in glutamate to GABA ratio that’s taking place here. So for that person, their brain is a greater antenna. There’s going to be a deeper and greater expression of thought and creativity that’s going to come from this individual. and that could be reflected in spiritual breakthroughs. powerful stuff that takes place when we get into a state of physiological ketosis.

Heather Sandison, ND

I love to chat about, excuse me, the risk of frailty here as we get into ketosis and as we consider fasting, especially for an older population. Whereas a single fall can mean a downhill downward spiral. So how do you balance the body composition changes that come with the ketogenic diet and fasting with the risk of losing too much weight?

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

This is good because a lot of people get introduced to a ketogenic diet or intermittent fasting because they want to lose weight. Now, fortunately, you’re talking to somebody who’s never tried to lose weight. I’ve never wanted to lose weight. Always been, just like you. I have a thinner body type, and I want to build muscle. So I’m lifting weights for six days a week because I love lifting weights and I love maintaining my muscle mass. So you can practice intermittent fasting and also maintain, if not gain, healthy muscle weight because ultimately when it comes to weight and frailty, we don’t want just bad weight. There are a lot of people out there who are skinny or fat. What that means is that you look at them with clothes on and they seem thin, but they have a high percentage of body fat. That extra body fat, particularly visceral fat that’s around their organs, is increasing the fat cells themselves and triggering releases of cytokines. They have different inflammatory compounds that are being released, driving up overall systemic inflammation throughout the system. We want a healthy weight. A healthy weight is going to be lean body tissue. You need a certain percentage of body fat, but beyond that, you want healthy bone tissue and healthy muscle tissue. Here’s what I recommend. I would recommend that everybody do a minimum 12-hour overnight fast. That means you finish your dinner at, let’s say, 7 p.m. You don’t eat anything with calories until let’s say, 7 a.m. the next morning. You might drink herbal tea or something like that; that’s fine. But you give yourself at least 12 hours. Ideally, what I like to see is a 14–16-hour fast, somewhere in that range, an intermittent fast where you’re again drinking non-caloric beverages, black coffee, herbal teas, things like that, fine water in general, and water with a lemon. All that’s fine doesn’t break your fast. But you’re reducing or not consuming calories during that fasting window, and you’re eating your meals and, let’s say, eating for six, eight, or ten hours. So a good place to start would be a 10-hour eating window. You eat three meals; let’s say 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., you eat three meals in each meal. I recommend getting at least 30 grams of protein. Getting enough protein is going to help maintain your lean body tissue. You have these branched-chain amino acids, leucine, valine, and isoleucine. Leucine is the most critical one when it comes to maintaining lean body tissue. You want to stimulate your lutein threshold to gain lean body mass. Doing so roughly two to three times a day is great. You need roughly the average individual, depending on your weight, to need somewhere between two and four grams of leucine. If you’re light, if you’re under 120 pounds, you might get away with 20 or 25 grams of protein, or 120 to, 170 pounds, or 30 grams of protein up over that. You might even need a little bit more. It depends on your lean body mass, though. You’ll probably be fine even 30 grams of protein, depending on how much strength training you’re doing. If you do the protein, then I recommend adding in some healthy fats, and these foods contain a lot of protein and healthy fats. If you want somewhere between 15 and, let’s say, 30 grams or so of healthy fat in the meal, some people do great. I can eat a high-fat, high-protein meal and feel great. Other people may have sluggish bile flow. Bile is a digestive juice produced by the liver and then stored in the gallbladder that’s needed to emulsify the fats, help break them down, and metabolize them. If you don’t have a good diet, which is not uncommon, you may struggle when you consume a higher-fat diet. Why do I recommend 15 to 30 grams? From my experience, most people can do fine with 15 grams, even if they don’t have a gallbladder. Even if they have real sluggish bile liver flow, you might start there, and then you might try to increase, finding where your threshold is and how much you can get away with with these fats as far as in a meal. You have to decide for yourself because it’s personalized nutrition. 

But something along those lines is healthy fat sources from grass-fed animal products. They can be coming from healthy extra virgin olive oil, avocados, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter. Even nuts and seeds can provide healthy fats. So, then you want a lot of color in your meals. I recommend high-phytonutrient-rich fruits and vegetables. One way to do that is to get a variety of colors. I like to have reds, purples, raga, purple onions, and red cabbage. Things like that. Reds, tomatoes, and red bell peppers. You’ve got to get a lot of colors in your meal, and you round it out with that. You prioritize the protein. You think, what’s my protein source? What do I need to do to get the 30 grams? What’s my fat source? Oftentimes, again, it could be the same as the protein source. Kind of figuring out where your fat source is. Then how do I just get as much color into my diet as possible? So if you do that with two to three meals a day, you’re going to feel very satiated when you hit that protein, hit the fat, or get the right amount of fat. You feel satiated, not hungry. You’re going to have cravings throughout the day. You feel a lot better now. If you were to eat a lot of processed sugar and eat a handful of cookies along with your meal, you might have more cravings. Stick with real foods as much as possible. That’s going to be key there. That’s going to help stabilize your blood sugar, reduce cravings, and make fasting significantly easier. 

The other thing is that between meals, you hydrate your body. Well, especially since we’re having this conversation right now in the winter. A lot of people know about hydrating. Well, as the weather gets cooler, try to make sure between meals you’re hydrating. I recommend not drinking a whole lot with your meal. Maybe enough to take a little bit of supplements or take supplements. But outside of that, let the fruits and vegetables be the hydration that you’re consuming. When you consume a lot of water with your meal, you can water down your stomach acid. You can delete your stomach acid and affect your digestion. But in between meals, let’s say starting like an hour after a meal, you want to be hydrating well. Staying hydrated, which is going to reduce cravings, is going to help you feel more mentally clear, and functioning well, you want things to move through your body like a river, not like a stagnant pond. Keep all your drainage pathways working well. Water is key to that. This is how you set up your meal and then prevent frailty, this is amazing not just for your brain but also for strength training. doing strength training regularly, I recommend three to four days a week of structured resistance training. Nowadays, most people live near a gym that has equipment that takes the load off. It’s not free weights. It’s not dangerous Nautilus-style equipment. There are trainers there that can give you even a free trial. They can show you how to do these things. But I recommend doing two upper-body days to two lower-body days a week, ideally, three to four days a week you might do, upper or lower, upper or full body, and even give yourself a day off—at least one day off for that particular muscle group. A good routine would be Monday. You do upper body exercises, and you’re doing push-pull exercises. What that means is something that you’re pushing, like an overhead press or a kind of push press-type exercise that’s going to work more of the front or anterior musculature. then a pull exercise. It could be like a row; for example, rows are phenomenal exercises. That’s going to work the posterior, or you’re back in a sense, So that’s going to work that musculature, and then Tuesday you’re doing legs and also your core, so you might do squats and deadlifts. I know that for an average person out there,  the average seventy-year-old woman who’s never done this training hears deadlifts, and she thinks that’s going to kill me. But it’s one of the best things for preserving and giving you longevity. I’m telling you, you can do these exercises. So our ancestors, if you go to any of the places outside of first-world countries, third-world countries, where people are older, they’re doing deadlifts every single day; they’re not doing structure deadlifts. They’re just doing it to pick things up regularly. So you’ve got these exercises that are so powerful for stimulating lean body mass and also your muscles. When they’re being stressed like this, they release something called male queens. These male canes go up into the brain and increase that body, and we talked about that. like Miracle-Gro for the brain, so powerful. I recommend squats, deadlifts, lunges, and things like that. Work with a trainer if you’re concerned. If anything, I just said they’re like, makes you fearful, or you think, or if your mind shuts down, I’m not doing that. Just get a trainer that’s there, have them show you a routine, and let them know that your number one priority is not getting injured. Number two is building lean body tissue, so now they’ll help kind of design something for you. when it’s so powerful.

Heather Sandison, ND

I seriously think of maybe a Pilates or a yoga class or even they’re like I went to a power fusion class at my yoga studio the other day, and there were some small weights, some like 2 pounds weights, that we used and that had an instructor. it was also the cost was a lot lower because it’s in a group setting. Do you have any thoughts about using something like that for strength training?

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Definitely. I mean, anything is better than nothing. Even using body weight, I think, is great. doing bodyweight is a great way to start. I just want you to do resistance training. That’s the key that’s going to help preserve your lean body mass. If you’re worried about losing too much weight, the number one thing you could be doing is resistance training. Number two is increasing protein levels. Then number three, prioritizing good sleep. Because sleep is where you heal and regenerate, when you sleep well, you’re going to produce the kind of hormones, human growth hormone, and testosterone that help with preserving and maintaining lean body tissue. So super key focus in on that, and then that’s a way that you can as you do this, you will notice, and we talked about the nutrition principles with getting the right protein and fat. A lot of people notice that they’re not all that hungry, and they may even go down to two meals a day and feel great with that in a condensed eating window. I just had a call with a lady, and when she’s in this demographic of over 70, she told me she’s eating two meals a day. Now, I had her eating three, and she’s like, I just don’t have hunger, not that hungry. She’s eating at 12:00 and 5:00. it’s great. So we know that her body’s getting into ketosis because that’s why she’s not hungry and only eating two meals a day. It’s a sign that she’s metabolically flexible. Her body’s good at burning fat for fuel. She told me her energy is significantly better in her brain, foot, and mental clarity, and so these are things that can be done. The key, again, is resistance training, dialing in those macronutrients, finding out, getting the right amount of protein and healthy fats, and getting a lot of those phytonutrient-rich vegetables. Then, as the cravings reduce and the overall appetite reduces, you can kind of condense that eating window a little bit more. You get even more benefits from the ketones.

Heather Sandison, ND

I’m curious what your thoughts are on exogenous ketones.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

I think exogenous ketones are another great tool. So you could do something like, for example, C8 MCT oil, which turns very quickly into ketones in your system. So a lot of time, especially as people are first starting, I’ll have them do a teaspoon of that with each meal, C8 MCT oil; that’s great. then you can also use exogenous ketones. There are ketone salts, and then there are also ketone esters. I just talked to a new company, Tecton, and they’ve got a great drink. That’s ketone esters increase your ketones don’t have salts. I mean, they designed it for people dealing with dementia. I have to give you an introduction to them. They designed it for people dealing with PTSD, so they get the ketones quickly into the brain. I think it can be a wonderful tool, especially if somebody is dealing with a lot of neural inflammation, just keeping the ketones elevated can be powerful. If somebody’s shrinking exogenous ketones. We want them, we want to get the body producing ketones, but we can also assist the body, and we can also bring down overall inflammation by using some tools, whether it’s C8 MCT oil, ketone salts, or ketone esters. I’m a huge advocate of those.

Heather Sandison, ND

When people are struggling to get into ketosis, maybe it’s their first time being in ketosis, and they’re trying hard to restrict carbohydrates. They’re testing their ketones, and they’re not getting over one meal. What do you suggest as ways to troubleshoot that?

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Focus on getting good sleep. Stress reduction is key. You can get a continuous blood glucose monitor where you can look at how your body responds to all the particular foods you’re consuming. I think that’s a good thing to do. Just see if there’s anything you’re consuming, or stress, or maybe the coffee you’re drinking in the morning, or whatever it is that just seems to cause a jump in your blood glucose. So the nice thing about a CGM is that you’re able to test rates. It’s right there in your arm; it doesn’t hurt to put it on, and you just check your phone with that. It’s got a yellow app where you can see if your blood sugar is 92 or my blood sugar is 98. You’re able to see how your body responds to the various inputs that you’re putting in. I think that’s a good idea. I’ve been using this MCT oil trick or C8-only MCT oil. Also, not all MCT oil works the same. All MCT oil will break down into ketones. However, some are a lot quicker than others, so the C8 is the quickest and also tends to be the easiest in the digestive system. Some people have a lower threshold for how much they can take before they get the symptom that people get if they consume too much too quickly is diarrhea. Disaster pants. so you want to avoid that. I recommend you start with about a half teaspoon with a meal and see how your body responds and does. Or you can do half a teaspoon. You could do it during the fasting window as well. It’s going to have minimal effect; technically, it breaks your fast, but it has minimal effect. If your goal is to get into ketosis, it’s not going to negatively impact it; it’s going to positively impact that element of fasting. So take a little bit at a time. Just kind of see how your body responds. If you feel fine with that, you go up to a teaspoon. A lot of people can do a tablespoon. I mean, I can do two tablespoons at a time and feel great. You could try the MCT oil or exogenous ketones. There are a lot of different exogenous ketones out there. Most of them are flavored with things like stevia and things like that. Sometimes, in some situations, that can trigger more cravings. Or if you’re doing it during the fasting window, So that’s kind of why I like the MCT oil. 

Heather Sandison, ND

That sounds amazing. Most of those are when I drink some of these, they taste like gasoline. And they taste so disgusting.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

No, these guys have a certain patent that they were able to create Ketone Ester that doesn’t have, like, the diesel fuel type flavor to it. They don’t have to flavor it with, like, a bunch of stevia and stuff. I think that’s a good strategy as well. Those things can be super helpful.

Heather Sandison, ND

I’m curious. We’ve been talking about keto, but I know that you have a wealth of knowledge about other things. Would you like to leave our audience with some ideas of biohacking strategies outside of ketosis to support brain health?

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

We talked about exercise, and there are certain things that you can do from an exercise perspective—certain types of movements that give you an even greater increase in BDNF. One of them is cross-crawl exercises. When I was a baby, I had four children, so when my children were crawling, most parents thought, the faster you can get them to walk, the smarter the child is or the more advanced they are. But the crawling process itself is increasing BDNF, particularly in their corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects that to hemispheres, and so they’re increasing a lot of synaptic density, which gives them greater and greater complexity of thought and whatnot. It’s thought to at least be able to do that. You can do that. we’re adults. We’re not learning how to walk, but you can do cross-crawl exercises where the right hand hits your left leg and the left hand hits your right leg. You could do balance exercises, for example. You could do it, depending on where you’re at with your physical condition, with exercises on one leg. If you’re doing something on one leg or, I do exercises, for example, I’ll do something like a bent-over reverse fly exercise where I am bent-over. I’m on one leg at a time, I have my eyes closed, and then I’ll alternate legs. I’m challenging my brain to adapt. These can be great exercises, and we call them neurobics. Neurobics can be simple things like combing your hair with your non-dominant hand, brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand, or more complex things. Like, like, I was just talking about doing something on one leg with your eyes closed. They can be all kinds of things like that. 

Even if you look at when a police officer pulls somebody over and tests them for a DUI, they’re testing a part of their brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum is sensitive to alcohol. The cerebellum is called the little brain, and in the cerebellum, all the connections from our frontal cortex and our sensory parietal cortex run through the cerebellum and down into all of our muscle systems and things like that. The cerebellum is constantly replaying and, in a sense, trying to perfect all of our various motions. Just doing all the different things that they would test you for if you had to do them.  If they were testing for a DUI like heel-to-toe walk. Going through a hallway, get your hands available just in case he bends over a little too much. But doing a head-to-toe walk, especially if you start with just the heel-to-toe walk, and then you can do it, heel-to-toe walk with your eyes closed, and this is going to ramp up BDNF are Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factors and nerve growth factors. It’s going to enhance cerebellum function. You can do finger-to-nose. Things like this are right here. People who have a lot of neurological inflammation struggle. They’ll start getting this right here. Especially if you notice that these movements can be a little more challenging. That means you want to train those movements. You want to train in a controlled setting. You want to overwhelm your system. But training those movements will increase and help to heal the parts of your brain that have been breaking down. Neurobic exercises again, non-dominant hand, if you’re driving, if you feel safe. Let’s say you drive the same way to church every week or the same way to your grocery store. Take a different route. It kind of challenges your brain to start too. This road is here.  Challenges your brain to start to adapt. It’s a stressor, and your body gets stronger and more resilient through it. Your neurons get stronger and more resilient. You develop more synaptic density and synaptic plasticity because of it. so it’s very powerful.

Heather Sandison, ND

That’s amazing.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Just interesting is that they studied Einstein’s brain at Stanford. They want to see this. He has more neurons than the average individual of his same brain size. They found that he didn’t. He had the same number of neurons, but he had almost twice as many synapses. These little gaps between the neurons and Einstein were said to have been like he would walk; he would pace down his hallway. Kind of like a hill to walk, he sometimes closes his eyes and visualizes things. When he was trying to think through something, he would pace back and forth and sometimes close his eyes. He was doing these kinds of exercises, and it would help him have greater cognitive spark and greater intellectual breakthroughs. I would say from a physiological perspective, it was this kind of approach of ramping up that cerebellum parietal frontal cortex and just getting more blood flow, more BDNF increases in those regions.

Heather Sandison, ND

I’ve had a couple of instructors or mentors talk about finding relationships between things. If you’re trying to remember something, if you’re trying to learn something in more depth to create those relationships between, say, if we’re talking about ketosis and dementia, what are all of the relationships? Then the physiologic relationships. What about the cooking? The recipes create all the relationships and kind of draw that mind map if you will, and that will help to solidify it in your brain. Essentially, what you’re doing is making those connections in your mind and your thought process, but physiologically, physically, and in your brain, those synapses are those connections between neurons. So it’s a great way to learn at whatever stage you are at, and this is so exciting and informative. Thank you so much, and thank you for your grace with all of your listeners with my laryngitis today and with you as well. David, it’s been such a pleasure having you. I want everyone to know where they can find out more about you.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Of course, drjockers.com is the best place. Of course, I’m on different social media sites, like Instagram and YouTube. I’ve got a great podcast, Dr. Jockers: Functional Nutrition Podcast. We’ve had you as a guest on that. So those would be the best places.

Heather Sandison, ND

Fantastic. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your insights.

David Jockers, DNM, DC, MS

Thank you, Heather, for having me on board, and excited about this summit.

Heather Sandison, ND

Thank you.