The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, these days, we all seem to know someone who suffers from Alzheimer's or dementia, so listen, close this week as we discuss ways you can keep your brain in tip-top shape as you grow older, plus later we'll tell you what's going on around town and what's new at mother's market?

But first up, joining us today's nutritional consultant and certified natural health professional, Valery Hall, Valerie appears in front of thousands of people each year and speaks on a variety of topics, as well as giving many seminars at mother's market.

Welcome back, Valerie. How are you?

Came is awesome. To be back, I'm doing just wonderful. Thanks.

Well, it's great to have you here, and before we get to today's topic, please fill our audience on your background into your nutrition... Well, my goodness, I can't believe it's been 20 years already since I started studying nutrition, and I love to share all the things that I've learned because it's so helpful for people...

I've been able to help a lot of my friends and family and many people who have consulted with me over the years, and I love to do radio programs and consumer lectures, I'm in mother's market, often doing that. So it's just a real pleasure to be able to share that kind of knowledge that I've accumulated.

I love your passion. And we talk about that often. Never time you're on the show. And today we're talking about brain health, and so why are so many people with brain problems, why do we have bring problems as we get older, our portal brain is a very sensitive organ, and there are a bunch of things in our lifestyle and food supply that are really causing trouble, everything from processed foods, vitamin deficiencies, lack of using our brain, lack of brain exercise, if you will, that type of thing, all cause our brain just to kind of fall apart, and they're now finding that sugar is one of those things, so there's really quite a few things that might be driving the brain to not function at its optimal level, so... Yeah, sugar is a huge problem. I remember we talked about this before, and brain exercise too, you mentioned that, do you have any ideas about... You... They even have websites now with things to help keep your brain active, but even things like reading instead of watching TV is really good for your brain, give it activates different things, doing things like crossword puzzles, playing card games, where you're actually using your brain for things, and then if you really wanna go gung hall, you could do something like learn a new language or learn a foreign or a musical instrument, because then you're really creating new pathways through the brain.

I remember when I first started studying nutrition, I used to think that the brain was as it was when you were born, and it didn't change much, now they know they're call it neuroplasticity, where our brain is constantly evolving... Constantly making new connections. So at the end of this interview, our brains will be different than they were when we started, and thank you, because I don't wanna fill my brain up and I always wanna keep learning as a... Totes, yes.

What are the worst foods for our brains you just mentioned, so sugar and sugar in all of its forms, which include things like raw sugar, which tries to sound healthier, motegi Nectar, which is from the Agave cacti, it turns into blood sugar more slowly, but it still turns into huge amounts of blood sugar, it just takes two hours instead of one hour, they're calling many forms of dementia, diabetes type 3 now, so they're linking the high blood sugar levels and the high insulin levels that correspond to that to brain damage, and another food group that really raises our blood sugar a lot are the grain products, anything from flour and bread and cereal to potatoes and pasta and rice, all of those starchy kinds of foods turn into blood sugar very quickly, and so they end up behaving a lot like sugar in our bodies especially when they are processed, so processed flower, things like that, so that's another one that's really tough on our brain, there are some oils that are very difficult for the brain to... Particularly the hydrogenated oils, and years ago, when they told a saturated fat was gonna be bad for us and unsaturated fats were gonna be better, that's never been proven, that's a theory to this day, and it's an unproven theory because it's wrong.

So even the FDA is back down a little bit on their stance on cholesterol, but they're still vilify-ing saturated fat, and the reality is we were better off with lard than we were with margarine, and certainly things like corn oil and canola oil, which we were told we're gonna be healthier for us, absolutely are not, they're not building healthy sell membranes anywhere in our body, and that's especially important in the brain, so hydrogenated was of course, we all pretty much know that those are bad now, so anything that's partially hydrogenated or totally hydrogenated the brain is about 60% fat, so the quality of the oils that we eat has a huge impact on the cell membranes themselves and how well they can function as an alternative to some of those oils. What would you suggest? I like organic coconut oil is perhaps the very best thing you can do for your brain, it's fantastic for your memory, it's really good for so many different things, but I'm reading articles on that using that for children with learning disabilities, people with the elderly, memory decline and it's a great thing to help maintain a good, healthy brain as we go through life, a minimum of two tablespoons a day of coconut oil, and for some of these more serious brain problems, natural health educators are recommending up to nine tablespoons of coconut oil a day.

It's great mixed into a coffee or tea as like a creamer, it's also excellent, if you're gonna do a little oatmeal or something like that, you could spread it on whole grain crackers, you could try with it, bake with it. There's a wonderful website, coconut oil dot com, couldn't be easier, thousands of presses for coconut oil, and they have some that is the taste like coconut, and some that does not... That's neutral taste. So when I'm doing scrambled eggs, for example, I don't want them to taste the coconut is the neutral for that, but it's also, it's impossible to store... Wait with coconut oil, it contains something called medium chain triglycerides CTs, they call those, and you can only burn them as energy, you cannot store them as that on your body, so really good for helping to keep our weight balanced, great for our brain, feeds the thyroid and helps give us energy. So I'm a huge fan of coconut oil, I even like it topically on the skin, fantastic. To use coconut oil for so many different things in the kitchen and as a skin or hair treatment.

Wow.

Wow, that's great, thank you.

I'm glad I asked that question.

What food of food and lifestyle changes can we make to support our brain health, making our brain more active, choosing to do things where we're learning, where we're actually using our brain, very important. And exercise, they're finding is really important too, because then that helps a circulation to the brain, and while blood doesn't go into very much of the brain, it goes into a little bit of the brain stem and the rest of the brain is separated by the blood brain barrier, but we still need really good circulation to deliver oxygen and nutrients across that blood-brain barrier, so exercise, they're finding is a very important thing for the brain, food-wise, eating lots of vegetables, good quality oils. We talked about coconut oil as being one of those extra virgin olive oil is another really good oil, and organic grass-fed butter is excellent for us, so those are all gonna be good oils for the brain, and then make sure that you're getting adequate protein because we need proteins, and our dietary fats are what we manufacture neurotransmitters out of, and neurotransmitters are little chemical messengers that we use everywhere in the body, but especially in the brain, so in the brain, things just have to go along these different pathways, going from cell to sell our whole bodies about cellular communication, and that depends on the... What kind of chemicals are on the surface of those cells, hills and what the cells themselves are built out of, so Omega 3 essential fatty acids are one of the best oils for our brain as well, we can get those from fish, from flax seed, from Chios seed some of our different seeds and nuts have omega-3s in them, so those are gonna be excellent building blocks for the brain as well, and less of the process carbohydrates, we wanna minimize the sugars and the starchy foods, so that we keep our blood sugar nicely balanced. So that that's not deteriorating our brain, and that's a great recipe for keeping your brain healthy as we go through life, and so... Yeah, and you're also mentioning just to the fresh vegetables and the fruit as well... Absolutely, yeah, and it be a little moderate with fruits because of the sugar, I know they're finding now that too much fruit can be very damaging, and that's really kind of a new finding, fruit contains fruit trigger, which is called Fruit dose and in high concentrations, fructose can be even more harmful than white sugar to our bodies.

So that is something that a lot of people don't realize. And one of the things I don't ever recommend is fruit juice because it's a highly concentrated sugar, you'll be surprised at how sweet it taste if you just put one ounce of fruit juice in a glass of water, so if you like fruit juice, do that instead of having a big glass of orange juice, which has maybe the juice of four or five oranges in one class to... Exactly, you can dilute it. diluting your great fruit juice and some water is a nice, very refreshing beverage, you can even put some sparkling mineral water, kinda make it delicious that way, but dilute that fruit juice, don't overdo that, and maybe one or two servings a day of fruit, if for people is fine, but if you're doing five or six serves of fruit a day, it might end up being a little bit of a sugar overload, and I've even talked to people who've ended up gaining weight doing that, so you wanna write too much sugar... What about avocados? Avocados are excellent for you, wonderful fats in avocados. So definitely I incorporate those in a lot of... Misha, some wonderful qualities.

Women, we're here in the capital, right? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit more about all of your ideas about the brain, the brain health and everything in the lifestyle, we talked about a little bit of exercise, and of course it would depend on the age group we're talking about so much about Alzheimer's and dementia now, so... Right, right.

It depends on, again, the age group, so exercise moderately, depending on how old you are.

Correct and check, but there are a lot of exercises that we can do... When I say exercise, you don't have to go to a gym and knock yourself out for an hour, you can do just moderate exercise, and one of the things that I really like are called ankle weights, and you can pick them up at Target or any sporting good store and they're like little strips that are filled with sand, and then they have velcro strips on the ends and you can wrap them around your risk, you can wrap around your ankles, of course, assuming that your legs and feet are healthy enough for that, but even just walking around the house with those on gives you some passive kind of exercise 'cause you're activating your muscles, some of the biggest muscles on your body, so it's good for metabolism as well, or putting them on your arms and doing little arm lifts and things like that, which you could do while you're sitting and watching TV or reading a book, or I put them on my... When I take my walk every day, the first part of my walk is downhill and I'll put them on my arms and do some arm exercises, and at the bottom of the hill, I put those little things around my ankles and walk up hill, and that gives me a little bit more resistance. And it's amazing, they're only... You can get them in a one-pound or one and a half pound or a 2 pound... Wait, start slow. Start with one pound, you'll be amazed even after a couple of hours, you could feel it the next day in your legs, it's really amazing.

So easy exercise, yoga, find a really nice stretching, relaxing yoga class, not crazy yoga, but relaxing a Hatta yoga or yoga for seniors, things like that, really good to keep our flexibility and to get our circulation moving.

Excellent, well, this is great information, and right now we have to take a quick break, but more on brain health with baller in just a moment. Stay with us, we'll be right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to the past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now, back to our interview with nutritional consultant, Valery Hall, and we're talking about brain health, and it's so important with everything going on out there, we're hearing about an aging and I are that we need a lot more of vitamin B for things like memory and stress management, can you talk about those?

Absolutely, the B vitamins, for a long time, we've known that if we were low in B-12, it could really make us feel stressed out, so stress, mood and memory actually have a lot to do with B vitamins, vitamins were named all those years ago because these were essential nutrients, and if we are deficient in them, it can really lead to disease, and that's why vitamins were... Amounts of vitamins and things like that were established in the very first place, so a lack of these B-vitamins is a huge problem for the body, and equally problematic, many of the B vitamins forms that were used in years past were not being well-used by us, so there's been this kind of a revolution in B vitamins, and there have been some new forms that have been released just over the past couple of years, and they called them coenzyme B vitamins, which means that they are converted into the form that the body needs, so that the body itself doesn't have to do the conversion, and this is important because a lot of people were not converting well, so let's start with folic acid, that's one that many of us are familiar with, it's often talked about in terms of pregnancy and how important that is for the baby. And that's very true. However, that's a really good microcosm of just what folic acid does, it helps us to replicate cells properly replicate the DNA and ourselves properly, so improper DNA mutations can be because of not enough of this foliated policed is synthetic, however, and we have to convert it in our bodies, something called methyl folate, so what we ideally wanna do with our folic acid, whether we're getting it from Food or supplement sources, is add a methyl molecule to it, it only seems that half of the United States can do that properly, so the other half who take folic acid are not getting the full benefits, in fact, they find now that over a third of elderly Americans have unconverted fully acid in their blood, and then it starts to cause problems... Gum up the works. So we want this better co enzyme, methyl folate and whatever vitamin multi-vitamin or be complex that you're buying out there, get smarter about it and get a co enzyme one.

So the method is really important, not only for pregnancy, but also for mood, they find that low folate levels can really lead to a depressed mood, it's also really important for our heart health, it recycles homocysteine, which is one of those chemicals when that homocysteine gets to kids when in the markers for heart problems, so it helps us to keep that under control and keeping our DNA healthy, it governs on 10th of our DNA, so we have 20000 different genes, 2000 of those are governed by folic methyl big player out there. And it's a big player in keeping our brain healthy, in our memory healthy, they find out that one of the biggest common denominators for people with dementia is low folate, so it affects so many different things, not just our brain, but really big impact on our brain to get that better form of methyl, and one of the companies that I really like that's in mother's market, that has an excellent be complex and excellent multi-vitamins is called ultra laboratories, and their emerald Laboratories is their brand that they use for their multiples and their be complex to be complex is called be healthy, and then they have multiples for men and women and different age groups, so you have some really nice specific ones for their multiples, they do as simple as a one a day for people who want real simplicity, or you can do it two a day or a four a day, so they have a couple of different versions available depending on how much nutrient support that you feel you need for someone who eats a real healthy diet, maybe just the one a day is fine, but someone who needs extra support, maybe we're getting a little bit older. Things like that, I take the four day to do with breakfast and two with dinner, so that method is in there, another one that Americans were having a hard time converting was vitamin B 12, the old form is called Ciano co-balam. And oh my goodness, they were using a scion, Im, don't think I wanna take that just on general principles, and then now they have meth Coleman, so again, the methyl form already added to it, so our body doesn't need to do anything extra, it's all ready to go, and that one's really instrumental for brain as well, you know those two things, folate and B-12 are some of the highest deficiencies, nutrient deficiencies around the world, and certainly in the United States, and being low in either of those can mimic dementia. It may not actually be dementia, but it can really affect how well our memory can work if we are low in B12 or fully, so keeping those... Keeping our status good on those, I think is a big helper for a lot of things, and B12 is also known for its help with stress management.

All of these years, I've studied nutrition, they always talked about how B-vitamins need to be taken together, so if you're taking bell for stress, it's gonna work much better if you are also taking a B-complex, so you get all of your different B vitamins because they really kinda work as a team. It's like if you've got a... You can't just win a Super Bowl with a quarterback, you need the whole team behind you... Right, yeah.

You need everybody working together.

So when I think back now on how many people weren't using their B-vitamins very well, I think that a lot of people weren't getting the full spectrum or the full benefits that they could when they have it already in these usable forms, B2 has a more usable form as well, which is called R5, and then be fix has a different form called p5p, and so those are all the consumed forms, and those are the ones that we can really utilize easily.

When I found out about this full-late problem and how many people have trouble with these conversions, I got a blood test, so It especially affects people of western European descent, so Caucasians and Hispanic people are the ones who are most affected and most likely to not be able to convert their B vitamins very well.

And so, yeah, so I am of western European descent, I'm Scottish, German and English.

So I had my blood test and that the blood test they look at is called the MTF test, methotrexate, that's a Melcher is my 5 word for the day.

And I inherited that from both sides of the family, from both my mom and dad, so I do not convert polo acid very well. And so it's just a wonderful thing, I've been taking it now for a few years, one of the things that I noticed about taking this is that if when you get full late in your body, that is usable, it really helps you with your sleep, and so I used to use trip to fan all the time to go to sleep. And when I started using a methyl, I didn't need to took fan anymore, I just fall asleep well and stay asleep, and it's a wonderful thing for that too, so it just affects so many different areas for us, and these new forms, I think are just dynamic in what they can do, and this should be a B-complex or a multi that people can feel in these consummated forms, they should feel better energy and so forth, so we can really make the best of our brain, keep it healthy as we go through life, I think that is... All of us want to do that. It's a really critical thing.

So these coenzyme B vitamins and just do a great job, by the way, most people don't need both a-B complex and a multiple because multiple vitamins are be complex with other things put in, so one or the other is usually adequate for people.

Wow, this is really fascinating. And I guess a question that kinda came to mind when you talked about the Concordia, Ted, is it sort of like time to release, is that... It's not time release, it is... The methyl group is added to the full rate, so that's what our body should be doing, so it's already converted, I guess that's a better way of describing it into the form that we need, so it is immediately usable for the body.

A and B vitamins tend to linger in the body somewhere around four or six hours... Oh, okay. There's a note.

Yeah, so I really like taking them with breakfast and dinner and that will get a much fuller spectrum, a much longer time that they are active in the body.

Okay, I do have a question about that MT, HR that I said that was really interesting when you talked about that and about that blood test, I guess that's... Yes, and that's commonly available in the doctor's office, but you pretty much have to ask for it because it's not something that's just being automatically done yet, I suspect that it will be in the future that just like now that they found that so many people are deficient in D3, it's a part of the blood panel now for everyone, and I think that that's eventually what's gonna happen with this nth FR since it affects about half of the United States, they're gonna start looking at that and hopefully recommending the better form for us if people don't have that gene mutation, then they can use police acid just fine. They don't have that problem, but unless you have your genetics done or your blood work done to find out that... And if you are from Hispanic or western European descent, and who knows, you know, I find it interesting that most of us don't know beyond two generations back in our family where we really come from, and it's really interesting to watch these shows now where... And we have this great stuff like ancestry dot com and stuff where we can just go back and... That's on my list of things to do. I'm gonna do that for my birthday this year, I'm gonna do the 23 and Me, the genetic testing as well as the ancestry, and really go back a little deeper into the family. I think that's just a tasting, but we don't often know what our origins are unless we've had that kind of testing done, so I think it just makes sense for everyone to take the better form, and that way their bases are covered and they're sure to be able use these new co-animated forms of B vitamins.

Well, I think this is fascinating, and I appreciate you coming on to talk about that, and I think we should all try to again, be life-long learners anyway.

Exactly, exactly.

And a couple of other nutrients that are just great for the brain, there's one called PS, which stands for phosphate sharing, and aren't we glad? They just call it PS.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with that one.

Yes, let's remember that. So PS is actually on the surface of all of the cells in our body is something that we make in the body already, and so it helps the thoughts to jump from cell to cell, from neuron to neuron through the brain.

So PS is another one, omega 3s, and these wonderful consumed B vitamins give us a great recipe for a Healthy Brain, and vitamin E helps to protect the fatty parts of the body from oxidation, so Vitamin E can be helpful to...

I like the full spectrum of vitamin E, they now have... There were four different to coveralls and four different Toots, and so some of them now have all eight natural forms of vitamin E in them, and so those I think are excellent choices as well.

Well, great, I can't stop taking notes at every time you are on, so you get an A on a team.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Valerie, and we so appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again as YouTube, but in the meantime, you can get some more information on Valerie and your website. It is Valerie Hall, nutrition dot com, and learn more about her natural approach to making us all healthier. Thank you, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show. And for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition,