Healing The Brain: A holistic Approach With Georgia Ferris

Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome into Pushing the Limits. Today I am super excited to be with my good friend and the manager of my business, Georgia Ferris. Georgia, welcome to the show, fantastic to have you.

Georgia Ferris: Thanks for having me here. Excited to be here.

Lisa: I'm excited to have you because you're going to be interviewing me today. So Georgia is an incredible young lady. She is a yoga practitioner, she's an Ayurvedic practitioner, she's a health coach, she also runs my life and she's my right hand. So she's the one doing all the magic behind the scenes. But this is Georgia's first podcast, so she's never been on camera with me before, or anybody else for that matter. I said to Georgia, "Look, I want to do a session on head injuries and brain injuries and I need someone to interview me rather than me trying to remember everything." So you're going to pull the questions out for me. So Georgia, tell us a little bit about yourself before we jump in and, you know, what do you love about working with me? There you go, that's a curly one for you.

Georgia Ferris: Yeah, it's awesome. I've been just learning so much on the go. There's plenty of variation, every day is a little bit different. Yeah, it's so easy to get along with Lisa, and just really grateful for the opportunity to learn alongside such a knowledgeable and experienced, amazing woman.

Lisa: Likewise, and thanks for sorting my life, because it was a hell of a mess before you came along, I can tell you that much. No, it's really cool to have you, Georgia.

Lisa: So today let's dive in. You've got some questions there that we've dug out, to jog my memory really, basically to help me bring to fruition some of the knowledge that I've collected over the last 10 years studying brains and interviewing lots of incredible people. So take it away, Georgia, give me the first question that you've got there on the list.

Georgia Ferris: So I'm guessing probably the best place to start for the audience is why don't you just tell us a little bit about what is a brain injury, what defines that, and how does that extend beyond traumatic brain injuries?

Lisa: Yeah, okay, brilliant. So brain injuries can happen in a number of ways. We have, as you mentioned, traumatic brain injuries. Well, these are ones where you've had an accident, you've hit your head, you've been knocked out on the rugby field, you've done something like that, motor car accident. These are the sorts of typical things that we think of as being a head injury. And in this time, when you have an injury like that, there can be bruising, there can be breaking of the blood vessels, there can be increased pressure in the brain, there can be a lack of oxygen with certain types of brain injuries, there can be damage to nerve cells, there's damage that can be done to the pituitary gland, which we're going to dive into a little bit deeper today. And yeah, it's just all of these types of things that can happen when you have a brain injury.

Lisa: But there's also other types of brain injuries that I wanted to touch on, because some people don't sort of recognise these as brain injuries. These can be things like toxins that are in your environment. So when you're exposed to things like glyphosate, which is unfortunately everywhere in our environment, or other pesticides or other chemicals — and there are over 100,000 chemicals that have been dumped into our environment in the last 100 years, and 99% of them have not been tested for "are they safe for humanity", and a lot of them aren't, and we're breathing them every day, we're exposed to them every day — these can cause inflammatory brain injuries.

Lisa: Then we can also have brain injuries from viruses. COVID was a good example. Lots of people walking around with brain fog and their brain not working. I think a lot of people will relate to that after having COVID. That is a type of brain injury. And any sort of inflammatory thing can cause it. So even foods that maybe you are sensitive to or allergic to, or you have any sort of leaky gut, which can lead to problems in systemic inflammation, which can cause in turn damage to the brain.

Lisa: So all of these, and then you have the typical ones like stroke and aneurysm, like Mum had an aneurysm and a stroke. Then there are things like brain surgeries, like when you've had brain tumours, which Mum also had. All of these types of things are brain injuries.

Lisa: And the other thing, when I'm working with people with brain injuries, a lot of them, when I ask them, "Have you had a brain injury?" — because I'm picking up some indicators maybe in some of the tests that I've done that there's something off with their hormones or there's something off with their nutrition — and I ask them, "Hey, have you ever had a brain injury?" and they typically go, "No, no, never had a brain injury." And I have to ask you usually four or five times, "Have you had a brain injury?" Because once again, people forget that something maybe happened when they were three years old and they fell off the playground and banged their head. They don't know, they can't remember it maybe, but that can still be having an effect. These brain injuries don't just go away and heal themselves. Typically the brain has to rewire itself and find another way around to do things, but you lose a little bit of your reserve capacity every time when you have a brain injury.

Lisa: And so we have to go carefully through your whole history of all the brain injuries that you've had. And you might think, "Well, I wasn't knocked out, so it's not a brain injury," and that's another real mistake that people make. You do not have to be knocked out to have a brain injury. In fact, just doing things like heading a ball when you play soccer repeatedly, that sort of minor trauma repeatedly can also lead to brain injury. So even things like — Dr Mark Gordon, who I had on the show recently, he was talking about roller coasters and the g-forces and that type of up and down, he said he wouldn't do those things because they can cause brain injury. So all of these ways that we could have had a brain injury which could be leading to problems. So that's basically what I want you to be thinking about when you think about, "Do I have a brain injury, or do I have a history of brain injury?" Does that make sense?

Georgia Ferris: What sort of steps do you take towards diagnosing those brain injuries, especially the ones that are not caused from a trauma?

Lisa: Yeah, so really good question, because we need to look at sometimes the symptomology of what's going on in the person. So it could be looking at things like — we're obviously going over their history — and overseas in America they have something called a SPECT scan, which I would love to have here, or functional MRIs, where we can actually see damage to the brain.

Lisa: Now typically when you knock yourself out and you end up in ED in the hospital, you may get a CT scan. But a CT scan will only show massive bleeding, basically a massive haemorrhage going on, where we need to go in and save your life type of situation. It will not show a minor brain injury, and these minor brain injuries can be quite devastating — "minor" is the wrong word — but it will not show most of the brain concussions that you've had. Okay? So it will only show some major, major thing happening, that there's blood right throughout the brain or something of that nature. So you need to understand that just because you've had a CT scan and the doctor's gone, "Oh no, you're okay," doesn't mean you're okay.

Lisa: So SPECT scans overseas, they measure where blood flow goes, and you can see these amazing SPECT scans that they have. And if you look up SPECT scans online, just Google SPECT scans and brain injuries, you'll see these holes in areas of the brain, and basically that's where there's no blood flow, and that's a brain injury. And we can tell — or the experts then can tell — where the damage is in the brain from those SPECT scans.

Lisa: So that's one way. We can also test for downstream effects. We can be looking at something like the pituitary gland, which is your master hormone gland in the brain. It produces a lot of the body's neurohormones. And when you have a brain injury, the pituitary gland looks like an upside-down ice cream cone, for the want of a better description, and it's a very easily damaged gland. It gets shaken, and if you shook an ice cream cone upside down, what would happen? It would fall off the cone. And pretty much, this is a very easily damaged structure, in other words.

Lisa: And so often what happens — not always, but often — your hormones could be affected by a brain injury. So you need to do a full blood workup of your hormone panels. And there's dozens of things, so I can't really go over the whole list, but we need to be looking at human growth hormone and IGF-1 and IGFBP-3, and we need to be looking at testosterone and oestrogen and LH and FSH and your thyroid, all of these aspects, and there are many others as well that we can look at: progesterone, cortisol, your adrenal function. All of these things can have a knock-on effect.

Lisa: And if you imagine, your brain is your control centre for your whole body, and the pituitary is the control centre of the control centre. So if you don't have your hormones, which are messengers to tell your organs what to produce and to do, then you could be in deep, deep trouble. So you might see that your testosterone level, if you're a young man and your testosterone level is falling off a cliff, that's an indicator — it's not a conclusive one, but it's an indicator — that possibly you've got damage to your pituitary gland, and you need a full hormone workup and assessment and the appropriate treatment for that. And that is not always, by the way, just going and smashing a whole lot of testosterone. There are other ways that we can go about that that are a bit more gentle, but sometimes we do need to go to testosterone.

Lisa: The interview to listen to for all of that really in-depth information is Dr Mark Gordon. I did a two-part series with him recently, and he is Mr Brain Injury and Hormones. He knows them inside out. He has full panels that you can get done to test where your hormones are at, and then he and his team can tweak exactly what you should be putting back in and so on and so forth. And we have some fantastic people in New Zealand who do that as well, who are trained under Mark Gordon. I'm hoping to do the training soon.

Lisa: So all of these aspects of what we can look at. But it's understanding the fact that you can't put on muscle mass may be related to the brain injury. It's understanding that if you have a leaky blood-brain barrier, which you can have after an injury — so we have a barrier around our brain that protects our brain, and it only lets in what should come in and lets out what it should let out. It's a very protective space. When you have a brain injury, that's often compromised and it's broken in places and it's leaky and the junctions can pull

Lisa: apart. You would have heard of a leaky gut — well, you can have a leaky brain, and very often when you have a leaky brain and a brain injury, you within hours have leaky gut. Actually, all of the barriers in the body — it's not even just the gut barrier, it's your lungs, it's your eyes, it's your mucosal barriers — all of these can be affected by that brain injury. So there's a huge impact on gut, so microbiome testing is another way that we can assess whether there's something going on.

Lisa: If I'm working with a person who has a brain injury, I like to do a full hormone workup, a full microbiome workup, a full thyroid panel and adrenal panel, often a DUTCH test if we can, depending on money, because all of these tests cost money, right? But that would be a really good workup, plus blood tests and things, in order to make a sort of full assessment of what could be going on.

Lisa: And then you've also got the structural component. This is where neuro chiros come into play. I have a wonderful friend, Louise Baschel, up in Auckland, who's a neuro chiro, and a couple of my clients that I've been working with, we've passed on to her to work on the neuro chiro side. And then there's the things like QEEG, like the brain electrical stimulation. So it takes a bit of a team, really, to get to the root problems for any one person facing a brain injury.

Lisa: And I forgot to mention that brain injuries — I'm also including things like dementia and Alzheimer's, right? These are longer ongoing pathologies, but they are a brain in dire straits, and the same sort of thing needs to be done as a full workup. I did an interview with Dr Dale Bredesen, who's probably one of the world's leading experts on Alzheimer's, and he is the maker of the Bredesen Protocol. The Bredesen Protocol sort of takes this multi-pronged approach that I'm talking about, and he talks about an analogy of 36 holes in the roof, which means when you've got Alzheimer's or dementia or Lewy bodies or any of these things, you need to be plugging all 36 holes. And these 36 holes — you can go and read about the Bredesen Protocol and listen to the podcast that I did with him — but it can be things like red light, and it can be diet, and it's exercise, and it's nutrition, and it's workup of your hormones, and it's this and it's that. This is a really comprehensive approach to doing it right, rather than the one-drug-fixes-all approach.

Lisa: Billions and billions and billions of dollars have been pretty much wasted with very little to show in Alzheimer's research, because they were down the whole path of the tau proteins and the neurofibrillary tangles, and all of this was aimed at getting rid of the tau out of the brain and getting rid of the neurofibrillary tangles and ripping them out of the brain, basically. Those are part of the pathology, they're not necessarily the only piece of the puzzle, right? And when you pull them out and get rid of them with a drug, it often causes massive problems. Again, go and listen to Dr Dale Bredesen on that, and some of the others that I've interviewed, because this is one of the biggest disasters in medical history, really — the billions that have been spent down one avenue that has bought very, very little, when this holistic approach makes a hell of a lot more sense. But it's more difficult, right? And it's no one drug that's going to fix all, and there is never going to be, in my opinion, one drug that's going to fix all.

Lisa: So I think taking this multi-pronged approach — and that's exactly what I did with Mum. It was exercise, it was diet, it was hyperbaric, it was red light therapy, it was vitamin C, it was peptides, it's nutrition. It's all of the above. It's the testing, it's the microbiome, it's all of these things, which is complicated, expensive unfortunately, because most of these are pay-out-of-pocket sort of situations. But the consequences of doing nothing when you have severe problems and you have brain injuries or repeated brain injuries — go and look up what it costs to put your loved one into a dementia unit. It's like $8,000 a month in New Zealand, roughly, right? So that alone should give you a thought like, maybe it's good for me to go and invest and have some hyperbaric sessions and do some of this testing, because it's going to be a hell of a lot cheaper than down the road being stuck in one of these dementia units, which are not nice places to be. And by then you're in deep trouble anyway, and paying $8,000 a month. You're going to pay the piper one way or the other, often, when you have ongoing brain injuries.

Lisa: There's so much we can do, and I'm passionate about this because I've seen Mum's brain come and go, come and go, with so many assaults to it — from the stroke to the aneurysm, to a couple of dozen concussions as she learned to walk again and fell, over the period of 10 years, to brain tumours where half of her brain was a tumour, to having that cut out, to chemo, to all the insults from all the medications that she's had to be on, to hip operations, to E. coli infections. Mum has got disabilities now, but she still can talk and read and write and have an intelligent conversation with you. Her memory is not the greatest, but she can remember stuff from way back. Yesterday, what you had for lunch — probably not. But I've seen her go from being completely gone to coming back again and again and again, because I throw the bus at it and I do this whole 36 holes approach.

Lisa: So when people get a diagnosis — oh, you've got mild cognitive decline, or you've got dementia, you've got Alzheimer's — and they go, "Well, that's my lot, there's nothing I can do," it's nothing further from the truth. But do you want to do the hard yards? Do you want to do the hard work? Because it will take you and your family a lot of hard work. That's the question at play — not whether someone can be helped or not. They can be, but you have to be invested in the process, be dedicated to the process, do the hard yards and put in the change to your lifestyle. Mum's lost 58 kilos on this process that we've been through, and this rehabilitation. That's a whole person. She was diabetic, massively overweight. We've got genetic tendencies towards aneurysms and strokes because we've got very poor genetics in that regard. And I didn't have a clue about any of this back then. I wish I had, and that's why I'd love to share all this information.

Lisa: So sorry, George, I haven't let you get a word in. I think there's some more questions on the list.

Georgia Ferris: That's okay, I've just been really enjoying it. I think probably, if you strip it back for anyone dealing with a brain injury, what would you sort of touch on in terms of nutrition? I know you're quite a fan of the keto diet. Do you want to explain how that works and what that does for brain rehabilitation?

Lisa: Very, very good question. So first of all, cut the crap. Cut the processed food out, cut anything that comes out of a packet. If man makes it, don't eat it, if you can. And I know none of us are perfect, and we're all going to be cheating at some point in life. But if you're dealing with something like a brain injury or Alzheimer's, the closer you are to the cliff — the cliff being falling off into a terrible way out — the harder you've got to press on that brake. And the brake is to change your diet first and foremost to one of whole foods, like real foods, where possible organic, as money allows and access allows, and going low-carb.

Lisa: Now the keto diet is not for everybody and for all things. However, when you have a brain injury, it's a very good diet for a number of reasons, and that is when you have a brain injury, your ability to uptake glucose into the cells of the brain for energy is impaired. You have problems, you get insulin resistance. Now, you may have heard me rabbit on about insulin resistance in regards to metabolic dysfunction. So when we get older and we get that weight gain around the middle, that is metabolic dysregulation, often leading to insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, and then eventually diabetes, which is the gateway to hell, is what I like to call it. It increases your risk for all of the age-related diseases, so we want to back off that cliff.

Lisa: However, when you have a brain injury, you can become instantly insulin resistant, because it's a different thing than the metabolic changes that are happening over time. This is more because the brain cells are just unable to get the glucose into the cell via insulin signalling. So what you need to do in that case is get ketones. Now, ketones are what the body produces when we have a low-carb diet. When we don't have many carbs, we go to our own fat cells. When our body's hungry and it's not getting enough food coming in, it goes to our fat cells, takes the fat out, takes it to the liver and converts it into ketones, and ketones are then transported around the body and to the brain, where it becomes a fuel source.

Lisa: Now that's all well and good, and I think the keto diet is really, really good if you have a brain injury. So you want good high-quality fats, you want vegetables, your green leafies mostly. You want to watch the fruit. I've watched so many people drinking fruit juices thinking that they're doing themselves a service, and they're not. That's like straight sugar. You never should juice your fruit. You should eat your fruit. If you're going to have fruit, you should be eating it with the fibre and everything, and don't juice them. And you should be having low-glycaemic fruits, so fruits that aren't very high in sugars — things like berries, blueberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, that type of thing that are low in sugar but high in the polyphenols, right? A little bit of citrus maybe. And when you think about something like an apple or a pear, they are bred now for sugar. They're bred for size and sugar. So what an apple was in 1940 is not what an apple is now in 2024, right? It is much more sugar, not to mention all the pesticides and everything if it's not organic.

Lisa: But just coming back to the keto: you want mostly good quality fish, fish oils — fish oils we'll get into in a minute, because that's its own topic — you want vegetables and you want a little bit of fruit, and a real good basic diet, basically. And you want to stick to nothing out of a packet, nothing with E numbers in it, flavourings, preservatives, all of that.

Lisa: You can also, to support this process — I'm a big fan of exogenous ketones. Exogenous just means ketones from outside. These are ketones that you drink. So we have in our

Lisa: In our range we have a product called Kenetik that we get in from the United States, and I was super excited to get this product because it is what it used to cost — like 10 years ago, one bottle of this used to cost $6,000 and was just out of reach for anybody except for the Tour de France riders, who used to drink this stuff, because it was pure fuel for them, for their bodies. Nowadays they've got the science down so pat that they've reduced the costs, but now that it's doable — it's still expensive, but it's doable — so for a couple of hundred a month, which is still a lot of money, I know, you can have exogenous ketones.

Lisa: I give this to Mum three times a day, high doses in her case because of the extensive brain injuries that she's had, and this provides her body with ketones. Now, as I said, you can do that by the keto diet as well, but a lot of people struggle with the keto diet obviously, and certainly long term. Secondly, if you're on certain medications it will inhibit your ability to get into ketosis. And thirdly, when you're older it's often hard to get into ketosis, especially when you've been metabolically deranged and dysregulated for a long period of time. So I like to use exogenous ketones to help people transition into ketosis, and if possible to stay on these exogenous ketones for a longer period of time.

Lisa: It lowers the inflammation in the brain, which is massively important, and it provides a fuel source to the brain. It's also anti-cancer and does a lot of other positive things, and it gives you steady state energy right throughout the day, so you don't get these sugar spikes that you get — you get a big rush after eating some sugar and then you collapse and you've got no energy and you have to have more sugar, and you get the hangries. It avoids all of that and it stops the cravings.

Lisa: So for people that are trying to go low carb and they are struggling because the cravings are like, "I'm going to kill somebody for a piece of chocolate right now" type of situation — which I can totally relate to — the ketones take away that craving for you, so that you're not actually even thinking about food at all, because you've got energy. When you have cravings, it's the body yelling at you that it's not getting the energy that you're putting in.

Lisa: Getting slightly off topic of brain injuries, but if you're eating a lot of sugar and then you're becoming insulin resistant, that means you're having to produce more and more insulin to get that sugar into the cell, and then you start to become pre-diabetic and diabetic after being like that for a while. And the sugar in the blood is running around damaging all your blood vessels, causing glycation end products, advanced glycation end products, and stiffening your arteries and damaging the little vessels in your eyes and your legs. We've all seen diabetics who have lost their legs, who have gone blind, that type of thing, and that's what sugar's doing.

Lisa: So when we get these exogenous ketones in, it stops all that, because you stop all the craving and you're actually feeding your cells, you're actually getting the energy, and it's a steady state energy. I had a little bit of ketones this morning so that my brain is hopefully switched on and that I'm focused and able to answer. And with Mum it's just night and day when I've got her on ketones and then when I forget to give it to her. With her, I'd give it to her sort of six-hourly, because her brain starts to fade off after sort of five or six hours, so I have to keep topping it up. But it's causing epigenetic changes because it's changing her inflammatory response in the body.

Lisa: So exogenous ketones — huge fan of. I'm going to be doing podcasts on ketones, and I've done a few already, but just to say that keto diet and ketones and good quality fats. Now, why are fats important? Fats are the building blocks of our membranes, and our membranes are the brains of our cell. That decides what comes in, what goes out. We can live without the nucleus of our cell, actually, for a long time — the cell can live — but not without the membrane. The membrane is this really complex structure that is super important, and it is made of phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylserine, and plasmalogens.

Lisa: When you have good quality fats going into your diet, you have good quality membranes, your ability to communicate between the cells is much better, your ability to let things in and out of the cells so it can produce energy is better. So having good quality fats is really good. Now, bad fats — your trans fats, your fish and chips, your Kentucky Fried Chickens, all of that — if I had to choose between having a huge amount of sugar and having really bad fats, having the huge amount of sugar would be the better option, because I can burn sugar off. Fats become the building blocks of your membranes and stay with you for years.

Lisa: So when you have bad fats, you are making bad membranes, which stiffen, and then you're not going to be functioning properly. The membranes are not going to be functioning. So every time you have shitty fats, that's what you're doing to yourself. And when you start to put good fats in, it can take a couple of years for the membranes to be replaced with the good fat.

Lisa: This is where — I did an interview with Dr Michael Lewis that's just come out, and he is an expert in fish oils and brain injuries, and he uses high dose fish oils depending on the severity of the trauma. Do listen to Dr Lewis's episode for the protocols and so on, but one of the protocols is three grams a day of the right fish oils. Don't go out and buy cheap shitty fish oils, because these ones are ethyl esters and they can't be absorbed by the body. You need it in the triglyceride or the phosphatidylcholine forms, right, and it needs to have DHA and EPA. So you need a good quality fish oil. So I script for all my clients the fish oils that I know are going to work, and then he starts people off on very high doses.

Lisa: Listen to that episode about how and why and what and wherefore, and the miracle recoveries he's had with people in ICU who were almost — they were pulling the plug on them — and then fish oils have saved their lives. Some pretty incredible stories. But fish oil is very, very important for the membranes, and it downregulates all the inflammatory cascade that goes on in the brain.

Lisa: So when you have a brain injury, you have the initial ripping of the axons and the neurons and the bruising and the bleeding and the inflammation. You have that initial injury. What happens then afterwards is a biochemical cascade of inflammation that happens in the days, weeks and even months following the injury, and that is where you start to see real problems. I didn't understand this when Mum had the massive aneurysm and she survived the first operation and started taking blood off the brain. What I didn't know is that we would not see the extent of the damage to her brain for months, and it would be weeks before we knew she would even survive, because the inflammatory cascade was just starting. At the very beginning she could still talk, she could still move things, and then that inflammation started to happen.

Lisa: Just like when you twist your ankle — what happens? You initially twist it, and then a lot of people will get up and limp on and they'll carry on their race or whatever they're doing, and then only the next morning, if it wasn't such a bad injury, the next morning they go to get up and they're like, holy crap, and it's hot and it's red, and it's 24 hours later, and now all this inflammatory cascade is happening. And that inflammatory cascade has positive things about it — it's bringing in the immune system to do its job, to fight the problem that's going on.

Lisa: But we've all heard about, in the time of Covid, the cytokine storm. Well, that's an inflammatory cascade that's happening. We want those cytokines initially, for a certain amount, but these immune cells come in and they basically carpet bomb everything. They don't care about the collateral damage. They're trying to kill the bacteria, the virus, or help with the trauma, but they damage other tissues, and this is the problem. It's like, we're just going to carpet bomb everything, if it's a virus. And in the case of a brain injury, you've just got these inflammatory cytokines that are upregulated and then they cause swelling, and when you've got a fixed skull that cannot expand and you've got a brain that's swelling, you can imagine what's going to happen: the brain tissue is going to start to die off, you're going to get neurons dying. So we want to quench this inflammation as fast as possible.

Lisa: We want to do a number of things. There's a book by Dr Kabran Chapek, who I interviewed a few years ago now, but it's still my number one bible that I go to. Actually, that's the book there, if you can see it — Concussion Rescue. Dr Kabran Chapek — highly recommend it, really easy to read. And that episode is absolutely gold that I did with him, because it tells us what we should be taking immediately after the event, and then days after the event, and then weeks after the event, and then what we should be thinking about further down the line as far as hormones and all of that sort of thing.

Lisa: So things like [inaudible], curcumin, fish oils in high levels, vitamin C, vitamin D, progesterone — which is a hormone that is usually associated with women, but in this case it's really important for men to have as well for brain injuries — ketones, of course, as I mentioned before, and amino acids. PerfectAmino is one of my favourite products I have in my range. All of these things are just the basics. There's a lot more, but if we have these things on board prior to the injury, even better.

Lisa: In other words, if you've got a kid that's playing rugby or some contact sport, if you've got them on fish oils and maybe some curcumin and some other things relevant to a kid, obviously in kid doses, that will protect their brain if they sustain an injury, and that's a really good approach. From my perspective, I would love to see all the sports teams that are in contact sports having protocols of what these guys should be on, and girls, what they should be on prior to taking the field, so that if they have that injury and it happens, they've got some nutrients immediately to get the job done, and then once the injury happens, that they immediately start these protocols.

Georgia Ferris: Would you sort of suggest a lot of this is just important for everybody to sort of incorporate into their routine, because so many of us are exposed to environmental toxins that are going to cause a bit of neuroinflammation? Quite supportive even if we don't have an injury?

Lisa: I love that question, Georgia. I think that's a brilliant question, and yes, I do think that, and that's exactly what I do. Because, like you say, we're exposed —

Lisa: — to chemicals and things like that, so we want to keep our detox pathways open. We want to support things like fish oil, having fish oil every day. There's another one called plasmalogens that I'm a huge fan of, and another one also called Fatty15. These are all specific types of fats that are super protective to the membranes of the cell.

Lisa: Plasmalogens — I did an interview with Dr Dayan Goodenowe, and he is the author of "Breaking Alzheimer's", and he talks about plasmalogens. Now, plasmalogens are a type of fat, if you like, that are produced in the peroxisomes of the cells, and these are even more powerful than fish oils — like fish oils on steroids, for want of a better description. I still use fish oils because I still want the omega-3s and things in there, but the plasmalogens, there's two types: one called Glia and one called Neuro. And Glia we typically do in a loading fashion for a few weeks, and then we add in the Neuro. The Glia helps with the wrapping of the myelin sheath. So you would have heard, like, people that have multiple sclerosis and the myelin sheath being damaged and so on — well, this is happening in many pathologies, or when you've had brain injuries. So we want to improve that myelin sheath, which is like the insulation around your electric cable, if you like, so that the signal can get through. So the Glia does that, and then the Neuro, which we put in once you've had Glia on board for a few weeks, the Neuro comes in and it increases the signal between the synapses.

Lisa: I'll probably butcher the science, so go and listen to Dr Dayan, he's much better at explaining it. But plasmalogens are sacrificed whenever we have any injury, be it a brain injury or be it a viral injury, or we catch the cold or the flu or anything. The body sacrifices these plasmalogens to put out the inflammation. However, when we sacrifice the plasmalogens, we better make sure that we have a lake full of plasmalogens to replace them. It's like having a fire truck that's using up all the water from the lake to put the fire out, but then the lake's empty. So you want to make sure that you're topping up your plasmalogen levels in order to maintain your ability to put out fires as they happen.

Lisa: They did one study — people with high plasmalogen levels at the age of 95 had the same mortality risk, risk of dying in the next five years, as 65-year-olds with low plasmalogen levels. So what does that mean? Basically, it gives you back 30 years of life. So Glia and Neuro — I'm a huge fan of Dr Dayan Goodenowe's work and plasmalogens. These are found also in seafood, certain seafoods like sea squirts, and our green-lipped mussels actually have plasmalogens in them as well. We're looking into that with what we're doing at AAM, to see whether we can utilise that in some way, shape or fashion. Needs a lot more research, probably be a few years' worth of research, but that's exciting, because plasmalogens are just so, so important.

Lisa: But at the moment we can use Dr Dayan Goodenowe's formulations, the Glia and the Neuro. Unfortunately they are very expensive, because they're very difficult for him to make, and it's taking him a long time to synthesise these, to make them, to be able to provide these building blocks for your body to make these plasmalogens. So I like to do a mixture of fish oils and plasmalogens. I mean, I can't afford the plasmalogens for myself, because I give Mum high doses, right? So she gets first dibs on everything in our family.

Georgia Ferris: I think just even spending a bit of time with your mum, I could really notice the improvement in her sort of cognitive functioning once you got her on the plasmalogens.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And with Mum it's hard to tell which ones are helping, because I've got her on so many things. I've got her on the aloe polysaccharides from Dr John Lewis, I've got her on the fish oils from Michael, I've got her on the plasmalogens from Dr Goodenowe, I have her on ketones at high doses. But that is why, like, I went to the neurosurgeon last week, because she's got water on the brain. That's the one thing I can't influence, right, with all of this fancy stuff I'm doing, because this is water that's been accumulated after the injuries that she sustained, and it's causing massive vestibular problems. So her balance is off completely. And this is one of the major problems that I have at the moment, still ongoing. She's got more water on the brain than she had, so in other words, that's deteriorating. So we're looking at putting a shunt in, which would drain the fluid, but it's a very dangerous operation for someone with her comorbidities and her risk factors. So I'm desperately still trying every other option I can before we go down that route. And hopefully — I don't want to go down that route — but that's the one thing I can't influence with this.

Lisa: But everything else we've been able to get back, cognition and all of that sort of stuff. And the neurosurgeon said to me, "I just cannot believe she is alive, for number one, and I cannot believe that she is so functional. I cannot believe she's walking. She's the greatest, most determined woman I've ever met, and she's a walking miracle." This is a neurosurgeon who operated on her both times, from the cancer and from the aneurysm. And I'm like, "Yep." And he wanted to know what the hell I was doing, actually, because he could not believe it. When he took out the cancer, he said, "Look at this, look at the scan here." Half of her brain was a whiteout on the scan. He said, "Now look at it, there's no whiteout." And her brain has recovered massively, except we've got this bloody water on the brain situation going on.

Lisa: So that's validation for me, and it's an n of one, unfortunately, and not a clinical study on a million people that we can actually utilise, but it's a powerful story. And it's because we do all of this. And don't get me wrong, I've still got lots to learn, and there's many things I'm sure I'm doing not quite right, and I learn all the time from these people. But that's why this is really important to share, I think.

Georgia Ferris: On the topic of your mum, I know peptides have been a real cornerstone in her brain rehabilitation as well. Explain what kind of peptides you give her and how they influence that rehabilitation.

Lisa: Yeah, so there's many peptides, and peptides are an area that are so — like, the future of peptides, this should be the future of medicine. Peptides are so big, they are so important, and people don't know about them here in New Zealand hardly at all, except for a few crazy biohackers that are into it. But we're not prescribing them. There's only a couple of doctors who are even trying to do anything with them, and there's no sort of legal framework set up for them. That's the problem. It's not that it's illegal, it's just no framework, really.

Lisa: But peptides — I have a doctor in America who prescribes peptides for Mum, and we do things like — we've done a number of different ones now. Cerebrolysin is one. Cerebrolysin actually comes out of Austria, and that's used over in the hospitals in Austria, where it's actually mainlined, like IV, as soon as someone has a stroke they will put IVs of Cerebrolysin into them, because the clinical research is just incredible. The amount of research on Cerebrolysin for healing of brain injuries is huge. I managed to get Cerebrolysin, but it was very, very difficult. I had to get a prescription from America sent to Austria, get a friend in Austria to get it sent out to me. And all I could get was the one-mil dosages, not the IVs of it. So I could only get very low doses. I would love to have had massively high doses of Cerebrolysin. Really, really brain-healing.

Lisa: Then there's one called dihexa, and two others called Semax and Selank, and these are all injectables. So you have to mix them, you have to know how to mix them, you have to study this for a bit. I know how to do all of that. So dihexa — there's interesting studies with dihexa in Parkinson's disease, for example. They did a rat model where they had rats with Parkinson's, and they used to do this hanging test that they showed a video of online, where the rats are hanging off a bar, like doing sort of a pull-up sort of position. And they had a normal rat that didn't have any problems, and how long could it hang? And then the rat with Parkinson's, of course, it fell off pretty much straight away. And then they did a rat with Parkinson's given dihexa, and it stayed on longer than the normal rat. So the strength was able to hold on longer than the normal rat. So dihexa has been used extensively for things like Parkinson's, but also for any sort of neurodegeneration. Dihexa is one to look at.

Lisa: And Selank and Semax are two that I'm using currently with Mum, and these I have as a nasal spray, and they're also very powerful. So look up Selank and Semax, and go Google those if you're looking to do peptides. I also have Mum on Thymosin Alpha 1, which I have for the immune system, because as we get older the immune system goes awry and it can become your worst enemy. What was once your best friend turns into your worst enemy as you're older. And one of the reasons is that your thymus involutes. Your thymus is a massive gland in the chest that starts to shrink as we get older, and the thymus is a university for your T cells, and so it helps you recognise pathogens, create antibodies to those pathogens and so on.

Lisa: So when you are older, that's one of the reasons why old people do not respond hardly at all to vaccines — which may or may not be a good thing — but they don't, or at a much reduced rate, because they don't have the ability to create these antibodies. So you're putting in the vaccines with all the negatives that those bring, from the aluminiums, the heavy metals and things, without the good side of it. And that's because the thymus is no longer doing its job. So Thymosin Alpha 1 is a peptide, gives you back the function of a younger person's immune system. And I've seen it in Mum's lymphocyte ratio, as being a key indicator of how much stress your immune system is under, and do you have soldiers in the fight or not many. And typically when you've had cancer, your lymphocyte count goes down considerably, and Mum's was very, very low, especially going through all the cancer stuff.

Lisa: And after the hip surgery she ended up having — which was a mistake, I shouldn't have allowed them to give it to her — a bisphosphonate, which was an infusion to try and increase the density in the bone. And I was against it, but I was pushed into it, and anyway, I did it. It was the wrong thing to do. She nearly died the next day of hypercalcaemic shock. And that's a story for another day. But it also completely took out her immune —

Lisa: — system. She went down to two lymphocytes in a living person. Anybody with a bug within a mile of here would have caused massive problems. So we do Thymosin Alpha-1 to bring that up. And that's why my company is also going after the immune system — Aeon Labs, our biotech company. Our flagship product, which comes out in a few weeks, which every person on the planet needs to be on, especially when you've got an ageing immune system or when you've been attacked by any virus or anything — which is going to strengthen the immune system, give you back, without having to do an injectable, the function of a younger immune system, improve the barriers in the body, improve the blood-brain barrier, improve, if you've got leaky gut or anything, all the barriers in the body, which are really crucial. I won't go into that now, but going in and supporting your immune system is absolutely key.

Lisa: And you don't want things that just boost your immune system, for the very reason we talked about before, where there's a time and a place to boost. So things like echinacea, which can be very good, boost the immune system when you're fighting something, but you don't want to long-term boost things. You want to modulate. You want those cytokines to come back down, you want that inflammatory signal to come back down right after the initial event. And when it doesn't, that's when we get so many things going awry in the body, whether it be arthritis or degenerative joints. It's actually from the initial injury, the inflammatory response thereafter, and then not having that inflammatory response dial back down, because you live in an inflammatory environment or you're eating inflammatory foods, which is continuing that disease process. So the same thing with the brain: we want to get this inflammation down. Does that make sense?

Georgia Ferris: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I suppose that's where something like hyperbaric oxygen therapy is so crucial.

Lisa: Perfect. Perfect segue — you're good at this, Georgia. So hyperbaric lowers inflammation throughout the body. It's one of its main things. It also produces more stem cells and releases those into the body, and stem cells then go to repair whatever needs repairing, whether that's in your brain or your body or wherever you've got a problem. Our bodies are remodelling all day, every day, for our entire lives. It's just that when we get older, it remodels slower, because we've got less stem cells coming out. And hyperbaric helps you release more stem cells, helps lengthen telomeres. Telomeres are the end caps on your chromosomes that protect your DNA, and you want these to be tightly bound and you want them to not be shortened. When we replicate our cells — so every time the cells have to divide to replicate, to replace themselves — it shortens the telomeres. And this is why when we get older we have shortened telomeres. I'm doing a whole series with Dr Bill Andrews, who's the world's most foremost scientist on telomere science, which is key to ageing. One of the kingpins of ageing is shortened telomeres, and once we get down to 5,000 bases, basically that cell dies, and then we get more and more of these cells dying as we get older, and these telomeres shorten. So we want to make sure that we lengthen those telomeres, and hyperbaric does that.

Lisa: So it does the inflammation, it does the stem cells, and angiogenesis, so it creates new blood vessels. I've seen it on scans, where people had a blockage into the heart or whatever and they were going to have to have stents, and then they've done a block of hyperbaric — not one or two, but a block of 40, 50 hyperbaric sessions — and it's created new blood vessels around the blockage, which is quite incredible. So it does all of these things. So in the case of a brain injury, you want to get into a hyperbaric as fast as you possibly can. Overseas they get people with things like strokes into a hyperbaric very quickly, in some countries like Israel, where they're leading experts in hyperbaric medicine.

Georgia Ferris: When you have a brain injury, that inflammation you spoke about following — is that also going to cause some degree of hypoxia in the brain, where that hyperbaric is going to be really beneficial to support?

Lisa: Absolutely. And that's why you run my hyperbaric clinic for me, Georgia, because you know it so well. So yes, exactly — hypoxic tissue. We get more and more hypoxia as we get older. Hypoxia just means a low oxygen state in the cell. And because we have inflammation, or because we have a wound or an injury or whatever, all of these are hypoxic tissues, these are tissues that are not getting enough oxygen. Cancer is a hypoxic tissue, right? It hasn't got any oxygen. So we use hyperbaric as an adjunct therapy — not as a standalone, as an adjunct therapy — for cancer, because it surrounds the tumours with oxygen, so it's a beneficial thing to fight it, because cancer doesn't like oxygen. And the same with inflammation in the brain: yes, we can get more oxygen through.

Lisa: So that's the other thing hyperbaric does — it compresses the size of the oxygen molecule down, because it's under pressure. In our chamber we're at 1.5 atmospheres. Some clinics go to two and 2.5 atmospheres, but typically in the hospital setting — and there are a couple that do do two atmospheres, one down in Wellington, Wellington Hyperbaric have a two atmosphere, and there's one in Nelson. So it compresses the oxygen molecules down in size so that it dissolves into the plasma of the blood, and then it can cross into the blood-brain barrier. And we can get up to 12 times the amount of oxygen into our bodies than we can at sea level, because it's no longer attached to the red blood cell, but it's dissolved into the plasma, and it can get straight into that brain where the brain is injured and needs that extra oxygen to get through to it — to help heal it, to help deliver the nutrients, to help produce ATP, do all the things that the cells need to do. It needs oxygen. We take food and we take oxygen and we create ATP, putting it oversimplified, in our cells. ATP is our energy currency.

Lisa: So when we can get enough energy into the brain through this oxygen part of it, and then good nutrition on board with the fish oils and the plasmalogens and all the other stuff I mentioned, then we've got a good environment for healing, to speed up that healing process. And that was Mum's absolute cornerstone of her recovery. It wasn't the only thing, but it was the key linchpin for her — hyperbaric.

Lisa: And the hard thing with hyperbaric is that most people will not do a block of treatments, and you need a block of treatments for anything. The absolute minimum that you should do would be 10, absolute, for only a minor thing. And this is the hard sell, right? Because then we've got to get people to come in in close proximity as well, to do 10, 20, 40, 50 sessions, depending on the severity of what you're dealing with, and then a maintenance schedule of maybe a block of 20 once a year or twice a year in order to maintain, and to fight against ageing, and for longevity. Doing a maintenance schedule would be great as well. But if you're dealing with something like a stroke or a brain injury, you need 40-plus treatments in close proximity. So that's a big commitment, a commitment financially — it's $100 a session and you're wanting people to have 40-odd sessions in close proximity, so that's a time commitment. But if they do that, the chances of healing from what would otherwise be maybe a lifelong stroke and never coming back, or cancer, or concussions, or fighting off ME, or all of these things — you give it enough sessions, you will see the benefits, and you'll get all these epigenetic changes, stem cell release, lowering inflammation in the body. In other words, helping you live a longer, healthier life, which is the goal at the end of it.

Georgia Ferris: Yeah. And like you mentioned at the very beginning, supporting so many other systems in your body. I think a lot of people are probably struggling with these systems but maybe not even realising that they could originate from a historic brain injury that's sort of in the background. People are coming with hormonal issues or gut issues, whatever it may be, and maybe it's actually the brain sort of influencing that in the background.

Lisa: That is exactly the point that I needed to get across today, really. If you're dealing with chronic fatigue, if you're dealing with gut issues, if you're dealing with hormones, check as part of your workup — it may be related to a brain injury that you've had. It may not be, it might be a virus or it might be something else, but it could be. So put that on your radar, think about that.

Lisa: And I've had hypoxic brain injuries because I ran a lot at altitude, and I did a lot of training in Hypoxico, where I took a lot of the oxygen out of the air for training, for preparation for these altitudes, and ended up knocking off my brain cells because I didn't get enough oxygen. So that's an unusual way to get a brain injury, but it was a very bad injury. And then I've knocked myself out a few times with accidents and things like that. So we've all had them. And then we've got all the environmental stuff, as I said, that we're exposed to on the daily. And Covid, unfortunately, has caused a lot of neuroinflammatory problems, so a lot of people are dealing with brain fog. Brain fog is a sign of injury.

Lisa: Another thing I just wanted to mention: MSG. MSG is monosodium glutamate, and it's in a lot of our prepackaged foods. If you see — I think it's the number 621, the E number — if you read the back of packets and you see the number 621 (I might have to double check that number, but I think it's 621), that's monosodium glutamate, and you want to avoid that like the plague, because it causes neuronal firing, especially if you've had brain injuries. It causes the ongoing firing of the neurons until they can die, if you have too much of it. That's why sometimes if you go to something like a Chinese restaurant or whatever that's used MSG, or you ate a lot of Doritos or something, then you could end up with headaches, because that's brain damage. You're damaging your brain right then and there with monosodium glutamate. So just be aware of those sorts of things.

Georgia Ferris: Yeah, yeah, I've definitely had that in the past, something like Doritos, and really feeling like I've got a headache following it.

Lisa: And they put it on this because it tastes amazing, unfortunately, and we all crave sometimes those chips, right? And there's a reason why you can't stop at two or three, you have the whole packet, because it's designed to hit those reward centres, those dopamine receptors, to make you have that pleasure response, and then you just want more and more and more of it. And then you have a whole lot of that monosodium glutamate and you'll have a brain injury — and if you've already got a brain injury, whoa. And it can affect your GABA pathways. Dr Scott Sherr, who I've had on the podcast, who's an expert on hyperbaric, is also

Lisa: — an expert on the GABA pathways in the brain, and these are really important for the calming of the nervous system, calming of the brain, sleep and sleep architecture, all of that sort of thing. So we can really bugger ourselves up with doing things like that. All those E numbers and stuff — try and avoid that crap as much as you possibly can. It's really hard because you have to make everything from scratch and all of that.

Lisa: We'll have to wrap up, because poor Mum needs to go out for her coffee treat, but I think there were a few things to think about before I wrap up. Exercise was another thing I did want to mention, Georgia. Typically when we have a brain injury we're told to go and lie in a dark room and rest. Well, obviously if it's massive and you're in ICU you're not going to be exercising, but if it's a minor sort of thing, what the doctors are now saying is get onto an exercycle or something that's going to get the blood flowing, so you're not over-exerting yourself, you're not doing high-intensity interval training, but you're getting blood flow. Because blood flow brings in nutrients, brings in oxygen and brings healing with it. It lowers that inflammation and it gets the blood going, and when the blood is going, it's bringing oxygen, it's bringing nutrients. So we want to do some light exercise.

Lisa: So if you've had a knock to the brain and you're not too nauseous or too sick or with too big a headache — take some medical advice on this — but think about exercising, getting out there and actually doing some gentle exercise where you're getting some blood flow. You will heal much faster if you exercise.

Lisa: Prioritise your sleep and try to prepare your body for sleep. So avoid blue lights at night time, don't do anything over-stimulatory, try to stop eating a couple of hours to three hours before you go to bed. No alcohol, absolutely no alcohol if you've had a brain injury. And do all of these things in order to give yourself the ability to sleep well and have good sleep architecture. Because when you're asleep, the brain actually shrinks, and you have this thing called the glymphatic system. The glymphatics is a bit like the lymphatics in the body, which is like a sewage disposal system, if you like, in the body, and it doesn't have a pump, so we have to move our body to move our lymph. But when we're asleep we have this glymphatic system, and it basically washes the brain of the tau proteins, of all of the aggregates that have collected over the day, and then washes it back out.

Lisa: If you don't have good sleep, then that's not going to happen. Your brain actually shrinks in size and there's more cerebrospinal fluid and it washes it out, for the want of a better description. So the glymphatic is happening, that wash-out cycle — it's like a rinse and repeat cycle for your brain at night time. So sleep is absolutely important, and going to bed at a regular time and getting up at a regular time, so that you really create routine around your sleep patterns and how you prepare.

Lisa: I have to prepare, because I have such an overactive brain — can you tell? I'm like this all the time, and over-stimulated and over-sympathetic drive. I have to have sort of a two-hour wind-down routine where I do my yoga, I take my magnesium, I take various different supplements, valerian root sometimes, sometimes melatonin, to help me prepare for sleep, and do some yoga and have chamomile tea and things like that to wind myself down, so that I can actually turn my brain off. Because a lot of us don't have the ability to turn our brains off.

Lisa: And then I do breath work exercises. I like to do something called a physiological sigh, which is where you go — and then you have a long exhale. You see children when they're crying, they do this. That's the body actually trying to turn on its parasympathetic nervous system response, and we can use that tool to actually calm our systems down. I do that three or four times a night, because I have to get up to my mum to change her and look after her at night time. So to get back to sleep, I have to do these breath exercises two or three times a night to calm myself down again, enough to turn my brain off so it doesn't start going off on some tangent, which it will do otherwise, to actually power myself back down and get back into sleep.

Lisa: Looking after somebody like that is hugely detrimental. So this is the other cost when people have Alzheimer's or massive dementia and things — the cost to the caregivers is not just a financial cost, but a huge health cost. I have to have a very regimented day in order to cope with the levels of stress that I'm under, and the lack of sleep because of having to get up to her multiple times a night. That's really not ideal for my ageing process and my health, but no options. So all I have to do, the option I have, is to put in good inputs: put in good food, good exercise, good saunas, good hyperbarics, the things that I'm lucky enough to have, and then do the best I can to get to bed pretty early and have as much routine around it as I possibly can.

Lisa: Have you got any more questions for me, Georgia, that I missed? I mean, the episodes that maybe we can link to in the show notes: Dr Kabran Chapek and his book Concussion Rescue; Dr John Lewis on aloe polysaccharides, which I didn't even get to. Aloe polysaccharides have been shown to reverse Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. Very powerful. There's a supplement called Daily Brain Care and it's in my range that I've managed to get in from America. Go and listen to Dr John Lewis, because that stuff, if you're dealing with dementia and brain and autoimmune and many other things too, by the way — aloe polysaccharides, very, very fantastic clinical research done on those.

Lisa: Then Dr Dayan Goodenowe on the plasmalogens. Then Dr Dale Bredesen on the 36 holes in the roof and the Bredesen protocol and how to attack Alzheimer's and dementia. Dr Michael Lewis on high-dose fish oils, really, really powerful, and then there was an episode that I did with New Zealander Dave Jenkins as well on that. And then I've also done episodes on transcranial photobiomodulation with Dr Lew Lim. That's a device that you have on your head that puts red light into your brain and it can help with brain injuries. And I've also done one with the CEO of Neuronic — N-E-U-R-O-N-I-C, Neuronic — and I'm about to get one of those devices for the clinic and for Mum, so I'll be trying that out with her. That's a 1070 nanometre range red light therapy, so a different one than Dr Lew Lim's, which is in the 810, I believe, nanometre frequency. Red light does a whole lot of things, and that's probably for next week's podcast, maybe. I've done episodes on red light with Daniel Ebbett from BLOCK Blue Light. I love their devices. We have red light therapy in the clinic, don't we, Georgia? And that's another part of healing, for energy production and for brains. Really, really key.

Lisa: So I think we've nailed it.

Georgia Ferris: I think you've covered a lot in that one.

Lisa: I think we've definitely done well, and you've got your first podcast behind you. Well done, your new interviewing career. Well done, Georgia.

Georgia Ferris: Oh, thank you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity, and yeah, I really enjoyed that.

Lisa: Congratulations, I think you just did brilliant. There you go, we're clapping you. Very good. All right, Georgia. Well, thanks everybody for listening. If you've got any questions, please reach out to Georgia and I — support@lisatamati.com — if you want to know anything about what we've just talked about. There's some pretty important things, and make sure you go and check out all of those interviews with all those incredible doctors and scientists. I think we're going to have to put a PDF together, Georgia, to put all of those in one place. So that's your next job.

Georgia Ferris: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I think so many people are struggling with the symptoms of these, whether it's on the lower side or on the more severe side, so really important stuff to learn about.

Lisa: Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, thanks, Georgia, for your time today, and I really, really enjoyed being interviewed by you. It's fabulous. Thank you.

Georgia Ferris: Thanks, Lisa.