Dr. Todd LePine
speaker
114 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Todd LePine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I've seen patients where they'll get brain fog when they're in a certain building. They'll get brain fog after they've had a certain meal. Certain foods may trigger brain fog. And it is something that I think is intimately connected to the gut. I think the, and I'll talk about that in this particular case, is gut fermentation is oftentimes a cause for brain fog.
I mean, it's like bugs fermenting the food you're eating, creating all these nasty byproducts.
And I don't know, Mark, if you've had patients who've had, this is a really interesting thing because I have patients come in and they say, I feel like my gut is just like bloating and I'm fermenting and that's exactly what's happening. So there is a condition. I just recently had a patient who had auto brewery syndrome. Yeah. So you have your own like beer factory.
So when you want to make beer, what do you do? You take sugar and you add yeast to it and you can actually produce alcohol. And I've had a couple of cases where it was missed. And it's actually not just the recent findings. It's not just yeast in the gut that do this, but also Klebsiella bacteria. So both bacteria and yeast can actually produce these compounds, which are toxins. Alcohol is a toxin.
That's why when you get drunk, you're intoxicated. And you actually produce alcohol and other toxins which affect your brain.
Maybe in your stomach. Well, it's manifesting in the head. That's the whole thing. And we have these artificial boundaries between the brain and the body and the mind. And they're all interconnected. And brain fog is a real phenomenon. And then you have to sort of figure out what's doing it. The other thing that is interesting that I see with some people with brain fog is just gluten and dairy.
And I tell patients that one of the most addictive foods is pizza. And the reason for that is that pizza has gluten in it. It's true.
I tell you, it's one of the foods that I'll occasionally indulge in, but I don't have it that often because it's not the best food for you.
Exactly, yeah. But the two foods which are interesting is that gluten and dairy both get broken down. The proteins in those get broken down into caseomorphins and gluteomorphins. And casein morphins are the ones from dairy and gluten morphins are from gluten. And those have morphine-like effects. So you literally become a little high. You get a little high. You get a little foggy in the brain.
And it also can cause cravings. And it can sort of make you sleepy. You know, you eat it and then you get a little sleepy from it also. And that's, you know, when children drink breast milk, they go to sleep after. You know, they conk out. I mean, that's because of the morphine-like action in milk. Yeah. So that's true.
has to go through the liver. And the reason for that is to filter all of the toxins that are there. So there's a lot of immune cells, the copper cells in the liver, and a lot of filtering processes and detoxification takes place in the liver prior to the blood from the gut then going into the systemic circulation.
So sometimes you'll have, in addition to a leaky gut, you'll have problems with detoxification in the liver itself. And that's, you know, an example of that is the condition of hepatic encephalopathy, which is a brain fog. That's, that's essentially.
I learned, I learned, and I think I mentioned this before, and it was one of the things that really stuck with me is when I worked at the VA hospital, there were a lot of alcoholics. And when you're an alcoholic, you basically turn your liver into a pickled liver. You trash your liver. You trash your liver. And then you're not able to detoxify.
And I would typically see this over and over where patients had cirrhosis of the liver and their liver was not able to detoxify. And then when they would eat foods, especially high protein type meals, they would get hepatic encephalopathy and literally go into a coma.
Totally, totally connected to the brain. Absolutely. And in some cases, there have been cases of people actually having psychosis from
gut dysfunction yeah you mentioned auto brewery syndrome i remember reading a case of a woman who was arrested for driving under the influence and it turned out she wasn't drinking but she had a high blood alcohol level that was coming from her gut yeah yeah it is yeah and it's it's a very real phenomenon you have to think about it and the way that you actually test for that is you you can it's actually quite simple is you just have somebody do what i call a pancake challenge you basically some pancakes full of carbs but throw some maple syrup on it eat it
and get a blood draw at point zero, eat the meal, and then half an hour later, check your alcohol level.
So infections. Infections can do that. Another one that is- Tick infections. Oh, absolutely. Tick infections. Yeah. Oh, those are, yeah, those, I would say that that's in addition to brain fog, you get a lot of cognitive dysfunction too.
It's more severe. It's much more severe. The one thing that I see a lot is allergies. I call it the allergic brain.
And you can have food allergies that can potentially do that, or even environmental allergies or mold. And the high levels of histamine, because histamine is actually acts as a neurotransmitter. And I've seen this in a number of patients. I've had some patients with another condition, which we're seeing more and more of is mast cell activation syndrome.
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