Understanding Brain Fog | El Paso, TX (2022)

Introduction

In today’s podcast, Dr. Alex Jimenez DC and Master Nutritionist Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega discuss what is brain fog and how does it affect individuals also the type of nutraceuticals that can help the brain.

 

What Is Brain Fog?

 

[00:17:13] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: OK, guys, we’re talking today because we have many patients the way we do when we discuss functional medicine, we try to assist people not only symptomatically, but the treatment protocols are sometimes global. But these treatments that we offer are unique to what we do in our practice. So we sometimes like to showcase a product that we like to use specifically for certain things. These are things that are out there. Again, it’s very important to understand this is a review from our perspective. However, everybody should evaluate and be evaluated by their own physician before ever trying to treat anything that is outside of their understanding, first of all. Second, I must understand what’s going on with this particular product. And what I’ve seen happen with a clinical case, or sometimes even in a case series. So today, we’re going to be talking about brain fog and try to understand what it is. So we have a lot of disorders, from Parkinson Alzheimer’s to diminished cerebral function, that we can matter with; we realize that the human mind, though it’s not a physical thing, is composed of a lot of components. The primary five things the mind is made up of are A. your memory. Your memory is part of your mind, the intelligence, which we get in school and learn. Then we have another part of the mind, and you can make your intelligence better as time goes on. So the other part of the mind’s third component is your creativity, the creativity, the things that make you creative to solve problems and mitigate issues as they happen. So the other part of the mind is the ability for the brain to have the will and desire. The gunshot and the thing you can do is get up and go. The other and final part of the mind is a level that is now sometimes seen. It’s called intuitive sense, OK, and that develops over time. So when someone says that you’re losing your mind, you may be losing your memory, you may be losing your intelligence. You can’t grasp ideas. You may be losing your creativity, you may be losing your will and desire, and you may get hit by just the door and never have intuitions with everything that happened. So part of your mind has been a complex issue and dynamics beyond even most neurosurgeons’ scope. You could put many neurosurgeons in a room and say, what is intelligence? And many of them don’t understand other than we know that it is a conglomeration of an expression of how the brain functions. Now there are types of products that we know out there that we have at our disposal. College students know that caffeine is one of those big what they call a new line process called nootropic and old tropics, which enhance the brain’s function. So one of those nootropics in caffeine limits circulation and your distal extremities. You are away from your center core and open central circulation, allowing more oxygen to occur. However, there are things that we have learned that not only help with oxygenation but can also help with actually through studies, a little bit more of the function. The product that we have displayed here is Percepta. One of the things that I want to bring here is the team we have Kenna Lee Vaughn, our senior health coach, and Ana Paola Rodriguez Arciniega, who can talk about a little bit of the products and these substrates that are making up this component. Now there are many pattents and issues, which is not my point here; getting involved in bringing in the positives that I have seen due to this product. So Ana, take a bit of the product away if you need them. If you need to take the screen, go ahead and do that and present your side of things as we go, but go ahead.

 

[00:21:44] Ana Paola: OK, I will share my screen.

 

[00:21:48] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah, and we must be sharing screen and back and forth, and you’ll see on the screen as it propels in different directions. That’s cool that the modern technology of Zoom is one on one.

 

The Five Functions of The Brain

 

[00:21:58] Ana Paola: Yes. As you said before, all of the intelligence and our brain cognition and brain function can be separated into a few factors like memory, movement, mood, motivation, creativity, attention, focus, and cognition and learning. So actually, nootropic was a term that was like you can divide it into noo words that mean mind, and tropics, that means to function. So yes, it’s like a whole new level of investigation right here. So you were talking specifically about this product called Percepta. Percepta is a product made out of two main components: cat’s claw and a combination of many teas. So as you said before, the caffeine that coffee has tended to have like this function that can pass a bill and profuse how a lot of blood into your brain and can leave the circulation out of your body, so that is something extraordinary. Still, we want to start with cat’s claw right here, and it is a Peruvian plant. So it has thorns that look like a cat’s claw, so it gets its name from. And it’s very abundant in Peru, and it’s been used in many different medicines and antioxidants. And that’s there as a power for powerful plaques and tangles reducing activity. And this is what we want to talk about. Percepta has like this activity on the patients taking this product. So you said that you had taken it before?

 

[00:24:34] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yes, as a matter of fact, you know, as we age, we think that most of us probably suffer from a moment where we were absent-minded. And what’s interesting is is that as we get older, we tend to remember how our brain used to function. So we end up being in our 50s and later 60s, and hopefully, we can get to 100 for each one of us. But as we go through the process, we start noticing that the ability to grasp the concepts we think about in our frontal cortex; we have seen through people who have had strokes from the frontal cortex to the Wernicke to the Broca area, which is the thing that propels words and allows us to comprehend the connections sometimes diminish as time goes on. Sometimes you’ll see people have an amazing frontal cortex, the Wernicke and Broca motor actions. They are extremely intelligent and seem that way, and you’ll see them on Jeopardy when they can react really quickly. But sometimes, just remember where the keys are in your hand or the glasses you can’t find on your forehead. So there are simple things that start affecting us, and we start noticing that our brain has a limitation of its function. Now we turn to nootropics in our own way, from tea to green teas to coffees to cokes to different things, to trying to amp our system up.

 

Nootropics

 

[00:26:06] Ana Paola: Yeah, even cracking in is like a very general nootropic. We use it to enhance our performance for those who lift or diminish that sense of exhaustion after our workout. But it has a lot to do with that neuro function, and it’s a unique nootropic, so there are a lot of nootropics all around the world in this particular one was found in South America. So this is like one of them, but you can name many of them.

 

[00:26:45] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: Yeah. And what we learn is that as we assess these dynamics, the importance of understanding that when a neutral pick affects not only circulation, but now we’re getting into the world where there’s, you know, neuroplasticity of the brain to be able to adapt. We’re learning that inflammation directly affects how the astrocytes in the microglia cells interact by producing certain neurotransmitters like GABA, which are necessary but sometimes too much. So we’re learning that dietary changes can cause an improvement in thinking processes. So when we run into a product that we enjoy learning about and testing and seeing people discussing it, we like to present it to you. So this particular Percepta is a product with specific issues. But you mentioned it here, and I noticed that you talk about its antioxidative capacities and NF-kappa b pathways. Tell me a bit more about that, Ana.

 

[00:27:50] Ana Paola: Oh, well, this is an actual study performed in and it was like a critical study, and they found that it could protect against oxidative stress because it would inhibit the NF-kappa B pathway, and as we know, the main pathway is the one that is going to cure all of those pro-inflammatory cytokines that are all over the place. So that would produce a little bit more neuroinflammation. So by including this particular supplement or this particular nootropic that we’re talking about, we can see a lot of protection against this reactive oxygen species and protection against inflammatory markers. So this is what they found in this study.

 

The Supplements For The Brain

 

[00:28:52] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: We noticed that it’s important to depict what’s different about this. It’s not just a stimulant; we have a study here that represents the fact that it shows a change in the molecular composition of how the brain interweave. We know that Amygdala Flex specifically collects in disorders like Alzheimer’s. And in these disorders, we sometimes can’t see these on MRI unless we do a biopsy and actually see those plaques. Sometimes the plaques get so intense that you can identify areas of the brain that stop functioning. So one of the things that neurologists notice is you can do an MRI, especially a functional MRI, and see an overall function with different colors. One of the essential components is when a brain stops functioning well or has, let’s say, a lack of functioning. It actually shrinks. The frontal cortex shrinks, and you’ll notice that the actual physiology, the brain’s anatomy, changes. So we’ve learned that the adaptation processes or the, I guess, degradation of the brain is very well known to cause presenting symptoms and deficiencies. I’m going to take the screen for a second here, and I’m going to share my screen so that you can see what I’m talking about on my side. So in terms of this product, you can see that you will notice that there are molecular changes that occur in these studies. So when you see these sometimes within a few days, you can notice the changes in the dynamics of an individual. So what we have been able to try is to test this product. And before I do anything like that, I want to see if this thing works because I want to see if I can actually hook thoughts and ideas that sometimes just stick.

 

[00:30:51] Ana Paola: We can’t find that equation word we are looking for.

 

[00:30:56] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: I got to tell you it works. So I got to say to you that the outside effects that inhibit my ability to sleep without the side effects that can get into causing a few negative presentations in development, or many times you take these products and you have a down as a result. So yes, my perspective, I want you to know that I will be investigating this product much more. But it is a new game player. I’ve put the insights and the links so that my patients can start looking at them. And as I learn and as I do more research, we may be able to get some of the actual developers of this product to come out and discuss their particular products where they must explain what it is in the laboratory. Now I will tell you this the NCBI, where a PubMed researcher area is a place where things are reported, and we see studies coming out. But sometimes, that’s the cutting edge that we got. That’s as far as we can go. But to talk to the professors and doctors who are actually with the beakers and see the clinical effects before the presented studies. So we look forward to bringing those individuals here for you to discuss what is up and coming to help individuals with disorders such as early-stage Alzheimer’s, early-stage dementia, or maybe brain atrophy that we can assist in those processes. Again, this is a neurological subject matter that is a very contested and heated area because we want to help the ones we love. We want to help ourselves in this process. So by no means am I indicating that this is a cure-all. But it is an option that you can do because nootropics have a pharmaceutical world. They also have a supplemental world. They also have nutraceuticals, and we can also go into the area of individuals; we can find out if certain people are predisposed to Alzheimer’s by doing certain genetic coding in certain snips, whether the homozygous heterogenous or even the wild type of presentation in the genomes. So Neutra Genomics plays an important role in describing and helping people to navigate their normal, natural genomics. So as part of that, dietary changes are significant. Nutritional things and everything we put in this hole in our mouth will be very critical in determining the frontal cortex function. So I hope I leave it there, Ana; I know you wanted to mention some other things. Go ahead.

 

[00:33:34] Ana Paola: Oh, you were talking about nutritional assessments, and we have to dig a little bit more into that because actually, microbiome and its diversity can affect a lot of things in our neuro technicians. So you might want to talk about it, or we might mention it because LPS or lipopolysaccharide play a significant role in neuroinflammation and play a critical role in the blood barrier and blood-brain barrier as well as its permeability, so something that you might want to know how this works is that this particular PTI zero -zero-seven-zero-three pattern that this doctor discovered and he kind of harvest. It can cross the blood-brain barrier, which is crucial to have antioxidants such as cat’s claw or even curcumin or green tea compounds, so it’s essential to preserve the permeability of all of our barriers, even if they are. First and most important, blood for blood-brain barrier. And, of course, the digestive tract. That is a vital thing to save.

 

Conclusion

 

[00:35:10] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: When we see cognition, when we see it being affected by the gastric biome, we see prolonged inflammatory states of the colon. We hear words like leaky gut and understand the dynamics of what leaky gut is. We see the pro-inflammatory effects leading into areas of the brain. And crosslights, as you indicated, that is…

 

[00:35:32] Ana Paola: It is affecting the microbial.

 

[00:35:34] Dr. Alex Jimenez DC*: The microbial cells that affect astrocytes. So what we see here is we see the world is changing. And one of the components is a symptom, which is brain fog. And we’re lost. And in essence, we sometimes have to look at the symptom and understand that that may guide us in the direction of the overall dynamics or the area of the affected body. So what we wanted to do, Ana, Kenna, and I Kenna had to leave because of a minor emergency. So what we want to do is we want to present this product in a much more elaborate way and the studies in a more dynamic way. So we wanted to present the product because I believe that once we find something useful and it’s changing people’s lives, we have a level of obligation to expose what it is but bring to light what makes it happen. So I want to thank you, guys. We’re going to look back, and I think you have plenty of there to find it on the internet. And if you have questions about it, I’m willing to go ahead to talk to the doctor. And I can only tell you that I may be talking to Dr. Snow very soon because we need to figure out what’s going on here, and I need him to explain to my peeps what’s happened individually. And that would be the closest we can do before the studies get on paper. So if we can do that for you and present this to you, we’re going to knock it out of the ballpark. So I hope that makes sense. So, Ana, thank you very much. I wish you the best, and we will meet you guys back on the following one next week. You guys have a blessed day and enjoy yourselves. God bless. Thank you, Ana.

 

Disclaimer