Dr. Robert Lustig

And so you feel completely empowered to basically take your prefrontal cortex offline.

as an example.

Now you mentioned food.

Food's a big problem too, because one of the things that keeps your amygdala in check is serotonin.

And serotonin comes from the afferent vagus nerve, except the afferent vagus nerve is not working.

That's why intuition is down in the sewer right now, because that's one of the ways serotonin manifests itself.

But why do we have such low serotonin?

Because we're eating ultra-processed food.

Because tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin, is the rarest amino acid.

And virtually no foods that are ultra-processed have very much tryptophan in them.

So we're all pretty much serotonin deficient as well.

Plus, if you have metabolic syndrome, which is very common in people who eat ultra-processed food, your liver takes that tryptophan, and instead of allowing it to reach the brain to be turned into serotonin, turns it into another molecule called chiurinine, which then becomes quinolenic acid, which is actually a neurotoxin.

So you can basically turn this amino acid tryptophan into something that helps your brain, or you can turn it into something that hurts your brain, all dependent on what you ate.

So we have drugs, we have technology, we have ultra-processed food, we have sleep deprivation, we have basically created the environment where our amygdala

is allowed to run hog wild.

And that, I think,

is the basis for all of these systemic mental and societal health issues.

And the problem is we're not going to be able to solve it until we solve that.

They could solve world problems.

if they were in the right hands.