Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. For the final time this season, welcome back friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton. So far in the first season of Perform, we've talked about everything from muscle to the immune system, to liver and lungs, metabolism, genetics, sleep, blood work. And so I thought we have to end this thing on what I hate giving credit to, because I'm a muscle guy, but probably deserves it. And that's the brain. There are obviously many factors that go into getting your brain to perform at its best. But today I want to focus specifically on what you can do from a nutrition perspective to reduce your risk of as well as recover faster from brain injuries, concussions, and TBIs. I think it's worth reminding you, though, that if it's good for preventing and returning faster from a brain injury, it's probably safe to assume it's also good for brain performance as well as long-term health. Now, I'm particularly passionate about this subject, having dealt with it a lot personally. I've had a concussion or two myself, and I've spent much of my career working with athletes prone or at high risk of developing similar injuries. This includes football players, wrestlers, fighters, boxers, and so forth. That said, those are not the only people at risk of a brain injury. In fact, those things are quite common and not only in athletes. So I'm really excited about this topic because brain injuries are really common. They can be completely debilitating. And there's actually a lot of evidence that nutrition and supplementation can have a big effect in, again, both reducing your risk of getting one as well as coming back faster once they've happened. And so I really want to make sure everyone knows what their options are from a supplementation as well as whole food perspective on getting back and returning as fast as possible and minimizing the symptoms of brain injuries. Now, as I was saying, traumatic brain injuries or what we'll refer to as TBIs are really common. In fact, a lot of people in the field refer to them as the invisible disease because they don't come with a physical appearance. There's no cut, there's no bruise, or joint sticking the wrong way, bone poking out of the skin. And so these things can happen and you don't necessarily know that an injury occurred. Other problems include the fact that the symptoms that are associated with a TBI or a concussion are really similar to those generally associated with aging. So you talk about memory recall issues, mood, sleep, and other things that people don't necessarily know are because of an injury. And they may think it's just due to normal aging. In fact, we'll get into this a lot as the episode progresses. But a lot of the research on brain health with aging, Alzheimer's, dementia, and other related topics, come from the same data sets that we work on for TBI's and concussions and the inverse. So there's a huge overlap or Venn diagram between the types of research, the study design, the actual papers themselves, the interventions, the models, whether we're talking about data from humans or animals and rats and ferrets and things like that. There's a large overlap between these two bases. They're different, of course, and we'll try to highlight those. But these are some of the reasons why I want to get in today's episode, even if you're not an athlete, because many of you are still at risk of getting a TBI. In fact, the vast majority of concussions and TBI's do not come from sports. They come from accidental slips and falls and other problems like that. In addition, they're still going to tell us a lot of indirect information about overall healthy brain aging. So the goal here will be to reduce our risk, of course, but if it does occur, to minimize the symptoms and return back to a healthy brain as fast as possible. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors, because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium, but has no sugar. electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I've been harping on for years, but you can't do that by only drinking water. In fact, many of you will probably remember that I featured Element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020, which is obviously long before this podcast even existed. So I've been a fan of Element for a long time. In fact, astute listeners will also realize these hydration videos were the genesis of the Galpin hydration equation, named not by me, but by the legendary neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman. I featured Element in these videos because their blend of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium really is different than any other electrolyte on the market and has great scientific support. I personally use the citrus and watermelon flavors a ton to pre-hydrate before heading out on a full day of training or a long hike or a hunt, since I know I'll be losing a bunch of fluids and won't have many opportunities to take things with me. Element has also just released a new line of canned sparkling element, which I am all about. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinklmnt.com.