The UltraMind Solution (34 page)

Right?

What happens if you don’t get the right nutrients to help your enzymes function optimally? It’s simple: you get sick. If your enzymes run too slowly
or too quickly your core systems get pushed out of balance. The results are mental disorders, illness, and weight gain. Controlling the function of your enzymes means controlling your health.

This is why nutrients are so essential. Without them, your biochemical wheels grind to a halt. Your enzymes don’t get the messages they need to perform their critical functions. Of course, this isn’t an all-or-nothing situation. It’s not as though you either have nutrients or you don’t. You have differing levels of nutrients and different enzymes that respond differently than other people’s enzymes do to these nutrients.

This is why making sure you have the right amount of nutrients for
you
is so important. And one of the easiest ways to do that is by taking vitamins and minerals. Vitamins and minerals are the cofactors (or
coenzymes
) that make things runs smoothly. Vitamins and minerals help your enzymes do what they were intended to do.

It is for this reason that using a single baseline like the DRI to determine everyone’s nutritional needs no longer makes sense. The overwhelming evidence that now exists indicates that giving
more
than the minimum amount of nutrients necessary to avoid deficiency diseases may be critical to healing disease.

Bruce Ames, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, at the University of California, Berkeley, in his landmark review of over fifty enzymes controlled by nutrients that vary genetically from person to person, states that: “Our analysis of metabolic disease that affects cofactor binding [the joining of the vitamin or nutrient to the enzyme], particularly as a result of polymorphic mutations [person-to-person genetic variations], may present a novel rationale for high-dose vitamin therapy, perhaps
hundreds of times
the normal dietary reference intakes (DRI) in some cases.”
²⁸

This means that genetically some of us may require much higher (and even mega) doses of certain vitamins for our enzymes and cells just to function normally. In fact, many of us are born with needs that may be two to one hundred times higher than someone else’s.

Few Vitamins and Minerals, Many Jobs

Also absent from our current nutritional recommendations is the notion that each vitamin and mineral has many—and sometimes hundreds—of functions. The body uses the same nutrients for many different jobs. A single nutrient may catalyze hundreds of biochemical reactions and suboptimal levels may lead to cellular and molecular dysfunction that is not
recognized as a “deficiency disease,” yet still has a dramatic impact on our health.
²⁹

For example, just a little vitamin D
^30
;
31
prevents rickets, but a higher dose may have a role in treating or preventing heart disease, osteoporosis, tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, depression, epilepsy, type 1 diabetes, and cancer. Folate not only prevents dementia, but also depression, colon and breast cancer, birth defects, Down syndrome, and more. Magnesium plays a role in over three hundred enzyme reactions.

That’s only three vitamins and minerals! Imagine the havoc suboptimal levels of many or all of the nutrients I listed on pages 118–19 might wreak on your body.

Robert Heaney, M.D., professor of medicine at Creighton University,
³²
admonishes us that this view overlooks two important facts.

First, living for a long time with suboptimal levels of nutrients may cause similar but more subtle effects as the regular deficiency diseases. For example, having soft, tender bones may result from low-grade vitamin D deficiency. Though this wouldn’t be defined as rickets, the effects are similar.

Second, there may also be very different mechanisms for developing disease after many years of low-grade deficiency because nutrients are involved in so many body functions. That is how suboptimal levels of folate can lead to cancer, heart disease, depression, or dementia.

The bottom line: we need nutrients, they are essential, and without them our bodies and our brains don’t function.

Now that we have established the critical role of nutrients as the building blocks of life, let’s look more closely at the ones that are the most important for the brain and mind.

If you have ever seen a map of the New York subway system you know it is an incredibly complex interconnected set of train tracks. Imagine what would happen if there were a break in those tracks. Worse, imagine what would happen if there were a break in the tracks at Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal. Much of the interconnected networks of trains would slow or shut down.

If you have ever seen a map of the biochemical pathways of a human being you know that it is thousands of times more complex than the New York subway. This map would fill an entire wall, and the words would be so small you could barely read them.

The most important set of biochemical pathways in your body, perhaps
the central switching station for the whole operation, are the “train tracks” responsible for keeping two specific trains (or biochemical processes) running smoothly. They are the “
methylation
” train and the “
sulfation
” train.

Many critical steps of our biology depend on these trains running smoothly and constantly. A break in the tracks on which these critical, interconnected processes depend causes
many
illnesses.

Problems with methylation and sulfation are involved in all mental illness and neurological dysfunction, especially depression, autism, attention deficit disorder, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more. They are also responsible for heart disease and cancer.

There are a few processes so central to health and biology that they explain much of what goes wrong with our brains, and how disease is created in general. Methylation and sulfation are two such processes. Think of these as natural laws—like the laws of physics—that explain all the phenomena we see with a few basic principles. Think of these interconnected biochemical pathways as part of the basic laws of biology.

In fact, breaks in the methylation and sulfation tracks are the deep roots of nearly all illness and can explain what goes wrong in nearly
all
the other keys of UltraWellness.

Why Are “Methylation” and “Sulfation” So Important?

Every important function in our bodies is regulated by or depends on these simple processes.

Our genes and our nutritional state control whether the methylation and sulfation trains run slowly or quickly, and whether or not they are likely to run off the tracks. Good genes and good nutrition lead to on-time express trains. Bad genes, poor diet, and toxins lead to train wrecks.

The good news is that these processes can be almost completely fixed through diet, detoxification, and special nutritional supplements, even if you have “bad” genes.

For methylation and sulfation to stay on track, your body needs a daily source of three special vitamins—B
_12
,
, B
_6
,
, and folate
—to help keep the process of
methylation
running.

Beside B
₁₂
, B
₆
, and folate the body also needs a continual source of
sulfur
for the
sulfation
train specifically. This comes from foods like broccoli and garlic as well as fish, eggs, sunflower seeds, and poultry, which are high in methionine, and can be boosted by special nutrients such as NAC (n-acetylcysteine) and alpha lipoic acid and an herb like milk thistle.

The UltraMind Solution

Figure 9: Methylation cycle (control of DNA, creation of cell membrane, and production of cellular energy), detoxification, and antioxidant protection

A lack of these important nutrients is what causes the methylation and sulfation trains to break down. The tracks break, and the trains grind to a halt. And that prevents your brain from functioning the way it was designed, leading to depression, autism, ADHD, dementia, and almost all variations of broken brains.

Because sulfation is a critical part of detoxification, I will focus on that process more in
chapter 10
. For now, let’s look more closely at methylation.

Do you have problems with methylation? Take the following quiz to find out.

In the box on the right, place a check for each positive answer. Then find out how severe your problem is using the scoring key below.