You might have heard that dopamine is the “feel good” neurotransmitter. In many ways, it is. In this podcast, Dr. J and Dr. Evan are talking about dopamine and how it is essential for our health.
Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter. Your body makes it, and your nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells. That's why it's sometimes called a chemical messenger. Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure. It's a big part of our unique human ability to think and plan. It helps us strive, focus, and find things interesting.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani
In this episode, we cover:
1:58 All about Dopamine
10:15 Specific nutrients
15:06 Sunlight and Dopamine
22:08 Hormonal Changes
27:18 Healthy diets
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We are live. It's Dr. J here in the house with Evan Brand. Today we're going to be talking about dopamine. What is it? What are the symptoms of low dopamine? And what are the natural solutions that we can implement that get to the underlying root cause of why your dopamine may be low or even out of balance? Evan, what's going on, man? How you doing?
Evan Brand: Oh, doing? Well, let's dive in. This is a fun one. You know, we've been looking at dopamine for many years. I mean, over 1000 times, you've and I have looked at different clients around the world. And I would say, there are some people that have normal dopamine, like we'll see it occasionally. But as a general rule, the people that are reaching out to us, I would say, resembled the same as like your typical American because typical Americans probably less healthy than our clients are trying, our clients are trying to be healthy, and they still have low dopamine. And what does this look like symptom wise, let's go straight into that. So we got to give credit where credit's due Julia Ross did an amazing job with her book, the mood cure, I think that actually came out maybe the 80s and 90s. But then she's new versions of it. But she's got a chart in her book about low dopamine. And so I'm just going to run top to bottom real quick of symptoms, because I think this is where people need to, to think, Oh, this is not just me, this is potentially dopamine or the catecholamines in general. And it's craving pick me ups. So like caffeine, sweet starches, chocolate, apathetic depression, lack of energy, lack of drive, lack of focus, concentration, attention deficit disorder, easily bored. That's low catecholamines. And then she goes into treatments, but we're not ready for that yet. So that's kind of what you're, you're looking for. And this can happen in kids too, right? So parents think, Oh, my kids just a crazy kid. No, they could have low dopamine. We've seen it many, many times in children. And I think a lot of it is just due to toxicity for various sources.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so just to kind of dovetail a little bit more kind of root cause stuff, or just kind of laying the foundation, what is dopamine, you kind of already talked about what some of those symptoms are, which are important, but don't mean it's a feel good neurotransmitter, it's going to help with focus, it's part of the pleasure reward system in the brain. That's also known as the motivation molecule. It's also known as the I Love You molecule, it's that little bit of you know, a little bit of squirt comes out on that dopamine when you have that feeling of connection or loved one with your family or spouse. It's it's gives you that little bit of sense of satisfaction when you make your bed or you clean up your home or you achieve something at work or with your family. Right. That little bit of pleasure you get so dopamine is very important. It's also helps with stress it helps with dealing with signaling from the brain down to the ovaries or to the adrenals. In regards to healthy stress, communication from the brain or healthy sex hormone communication to the to the gonads in man, it can help with libido and women. Healthy levels of dopamine are very important for keeping prolactin in check when dopamine goes low. prolactin can increase and that can throw off the female hormone cycle, it can throw off FSH and LH it can start to cause imbalances in estrogen and progesterone. So dopamine doesn't just affect one thing, which is just mood. But it helps you manage stress, it helps you feel good and also can affect your hormones, which then can affect a lot of mood issues, especially as a female as you enter the end of your luteal phase. And you go into pre menstrual time, that seven day time before you men straight or it can also have a big effect on guys just causing low libido and giving you a short wire. So all those things are possible connections for sure.
Evan Brand: Wow. Yeah, you did a great job painting the picture. And on the I guess the far end of the spectrum in terms of issues with dopamine is Parkinson's disease is definitely connected to this right. I'm not saying that low dopamine necessarily, is the cause of Parkinson's. I think there's a lot of causes and things that go into that. But the way that they treat Parkinson's, for example, is they're going to use some type of a drug like levodopa, that's going to work on it, they're going to basically, they'll give you the precursors for dopamine. And yeah, and then and then in terms of less patho note, you know, less pathogenic levels, like less disease level state of treatment. This is where, you know, all the college students know it's going to be the whole amphetamine category, it's going to be like your Adderall, or vyvanse is maybe even cocaine, those are really going to hit those are really going to hit that and they're going to be agonist what are called agonist of dopamine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so in general that the Kava dopa the levodopa, these basic, more pharmaceutical based dopamine type of analogs are used for sure. The problem with a lot of those is they don't really give you a lot of the building blocks to make it and then also, when you take a lot of dopamine support, if you take high levels of it, over time, you're actually going to deplete serotonin because the aromatic decarboxylase enzyme that helps you metabolize dopamine or help you metabolize the precursors, whether it's phenyl, alanine to tyrosine to L dopa to dopamine. Those require specific enzymes. Those enzymes also get up regulated when you're taking a lot of those building blocks in metabolizes serotonin. So you can actually create some functional serotonin imbalances when you're doing high dose dopamine support. Now there is a direct connection, obviously, Parkinson's, it's more of an autoimmune issue where your substantia nigra, it's which are the cells that make dopamine in the midbrain, they get destroyed, you know, for a lot of different reasons. So it could be you space, it could be autoimmune, contributed by gluten or heavy metals, it could be a whole bunch of stuff, right? conventional medicine isn't really aware of what a lot of the root causes. But we know there's a lot of weird autoimmune stuff at play. So that's important to know. Now, if we see someone on the Parkinson side, yeah, we may want to support that it depends on how bad they are, if they need to be on the pharmaceuticals. But if they if they are, you know, we're going to be supporting all the building blocks like B six and the B vitamin family and fully methylated, b 12. All methylated we're going to be giving high quality magnesium, vitamin C, maybe a little bit of calcium cysteine. And sulfur amino acids are very, very important when you're making a lot of these brain chemicals. You need good good sulfur, to help with that conversion, whether it's cysteine, or Sammy or muthiah. And you need good cysteine to help norepinephrine epinephrine conversion and don't and dopamine is a precursor to that. So the problem is when you chronically are stressed, your body will take dopamine and it will go dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine. And the problem is you'll pull dopamine to go down these adrenaline pathways. epinephrine, norepinephrine are all going to be catecholamines are adrenaline, right? adrenaline, epinephrine, catecholamines, they're all the same way of saying the same thing. conventional medicine loves to confuse people. So you have dopamine, it can go down the stress pathway. So fixing whatever that chronic stress is emotional, physical, whatever it is sleep, food, you have to fix that. Or you're going to be always pulling dopamine to go downstream to your stress hormones. Same thing and women with progesterone, progesterone chronically stressed, you'll go progesterone downstream to cortisol. So you've got to fix that. So you don't overly pull these good brain chemicals downstream to manage stress.
Evan Brand: And yeah, great explanation of what you're saying. Sounds kind of crazy, right? Like on your average street corner, this conversation would blow people's minds. But What in God's name is this guy talking about? This is not an uncommon situation, though. This is extremely common, like the way you're talking. And then the way I'm listening, I'm trying to like, listen as like an onlooker to this conversation, they would think, oh, wow, this sounds crazy. I don't have Parkinson's. So it sounds like I'm okay. No, there are major, major, major dopamine issues among the general population. And we talked about those symptoms, briefly how it manifests, this could be where you can't get up in the morning. Now, that could be a low cortisol situation to right, you have permission, as you say, you have permission to have multiple things wrong. So it could be a, you wake up in the morning, you don't want to get out of bed, when you do get out of bed, you really don't want to get the day started. You're just kind of lethargic, you can't really focus, you can't concentrate, you're really having tough time getting yourself together. These are the people that say, Oh, God, you know, don't schedule anything with me before 11am. Because I am spent I am toast in the morning. It could be a low cortisol, but it could be a low dopamine thing, too. So you would already mentioned some of the nutrients but also, we'd like to use the amino acids like we'll come in and use things based on testing. So can you guess and check? I guess that's one question. I want to bring up one conversation piece. Can you just guess and check? Can you look at symptoms alone and then just come in with supplements? Yes, you can. But I would argue that you would probably want to test it because as you're mentioning the endorphins, the catecholamines, it'd be nice to look at things like your norepinephrine or epinephrine levels on organic acids testing, because if there's more emotional sensitivity stuff, you and you and I might come in with something like dl phenylalanine, as opposed to just a straight tyrosine. So like tyrosine, we may come in for dopamine, or the velvet being the macoun appearance. We may come in with that for dopamine. But if we see low endorphins, we might want to do a combo. Maybe we do a little bit of DLP, which some converts over to dopamine, but there may be a bigger endorphin problems. So this is where getting a good urine organic acid testing done initially helps because we'll also look at serotonin and as you mentioned, I want to tell a quick story about what you said. You talked about how supplementing and working on dopamine pathway long term can affect serotonin. I had a yoga teacher as a client one time and she had been taking long term brain support but she was just spot treating like one amino acid but not all the others. And we looked at her brain chemistry and it was completely shifted She had completely boosted up some brain chemistry and completely depleted other brain chemistry. So it's like a spiderweb is kind of the way I talk about it. Like if you touch this side of the web, you're going to affect the other side of the web. So that's why you want to be targeted with your approach when you're coming in with nutrients.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% So, we have specific nutrients. We talked about the conventional medical approach that are giving the cinnamon or the levodopa carbidopa that can create a lot of problems in the long run because it can decrease serotonin. And then a lot of times it can deplete a lot of the sulfur. And so a lot of times there can be a toxicity component with low dopamine, whether it's mold or heavy metals or pesticides, or just recreational drug use. I've heard of patients doing you know, let's just say more cocaine or more stimulant medications that can actually deplete your dopamine because you're basically flooding a lot of the dopamine past that synapse. And you're basically whipping a tired horse right? So you stimulants are like the way of whipping a tired horse right? feeding and nourishing a tired horse. Right? construct vehicles are like good nutrition, sleep, hydration, good adequate nutrient dense foods, right? healthy proteins, healthy fats that's like constructive vehicles, destructive vehicles are going to be stimulants. methamphetamines, cocaine, Adderall, vyvanse, all these different things that are going to just overly whip you, right? Too much caffeine, too much coffee. That's like whipping a tired horse. Short term. Can it work? Sure. Right long term? Definitely not. So we were the one to make sure that when we're working with people, we're kind of drawing the line between constructive and destructive vehicles, because the goal was never just to fix the symptoms. Now, because we can do that with short term, destructive vehicles. Right, we want to use construct of vehicles that fix it and actually heal it in the long term. We want to make sure whatever those diet and lifestyle habits that kind of drove this to begin with, we want to make sure those are at least neutralize, or we at least have enough habits to kind of balance out the healing on the other side of the fence. So we always got to look upstream. At the organ systems that may not be functioning well. adrenal is female hormones. Looking at adrenaline because adrenaline plays an important role with the adrenal is because when the adrenal is are overly stimulating cortisol or having chronically stimulated cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenaline, or epinephrine, and norepinephrine, same word, don't get confused there. They play a big role. And so epinephrine and adrenaline, they all are like the first responder that gets cortisol ready to go and prime. So when people talk about cortisol, stress and adrenal stress, it's impossible to have chronic cortisol stress and not have some type of adrenaline or epinephrine stress alongside because they work side by side.
Evan Brand: Yeah, well said. And then I'd say the guts tied in maybe not as much with dopamine as it is serotonin. But we rarely see issues like this happening with a perfect gut situation, because we know that the amino acids you're going to get from your proteins, assuming you're digesting your proteins, well, those are going to help and act as precursors for brain chemicals. So we will look into the gut to I mean, we can do urine testing, and look at neurotransmitters like I know the guts looks at neurotransmitters a bit I prefer the organic acid panel, you know, from into it, because I do a mold panel with it. So I prefer that for brain chemistry. But the guts still important, and we've seen which is kind of interesting. Just by improving people's gut, we've seen neurotransmitters come back online without having to specifically supplement brain chemistry nutrients, which is pretty cool.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% so when we look at someone's dopamine, we always got to get to the root cause right? Can a crappy diet with just too much refined sugar cause low dopamine? Yes, right? that's a that's a destructive vehicle. high amounts of sugar. high amounts of alcohol can flood dopamine past that synapse. And it can create that dopamine rush that people are looking for. Chronic stress can obviously can things just like gluten exposure or some kind of a gut infection or gut inflammation or gut bug? Like you kind of alluded to absolutely how, because it can create stress and inflammation in the gut. And that can create malabsorption of important amino acids, like your dopamine phenylalanine tyrosine, right, your dopamine precursors, all those building blocks, all your sulfur as well. So of course, anything that affects gut absorption can have a major impact on those building blocks, getting to where they have to go, it can create a bottleneck. Anytime we're just overly stressed whether it's physical, chemical or emotional stress, that's going to cause you to convert more of your dopamine to adrenaline, noradrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine to manage that stress. Same thing with women and cortisol, right? Women can go progesterone right to cortisol and that can create estrogen dominance like issues and again, hormones with women can play a big role on your neurotransmitters so adequate levels of progesterone can help but Gabba Gabba can help relax relaxing, right? The more relaxed You are the less chance that you're going to be converting dopamine to adrenaline. So you see how healthy female hormones and healthy cortisol levels play a role with not needing to over stimulate the neurotransmitters. Well, they're all connected.
Evan Brand: Yep. Let's go into just some like basic stuff. I sent you a link in the chat you can check out which is a good list that has some studies to back it up. So I'll just kind of run through a few of these kind of easy ones that people don't think about in regards to lifestyle. You hear about people talking about sunlight and dopamine. It is true there is some some papers on dopamine being increased and this is why a lot of people may get more seasonally depressed in the winter. I think a lot of it's more serotonin but I do believe dopamine has a factor of exercise, of course increases dopamine, meditation, yoga, touch massage, music, we've already hit on the foods we've already hit on some supplements. Interestingly enough huperzine which we love huperzine I use huperzine and a lot of brain nutrients. So we all we often use huperzine to increase acetylcholine going yet memory learning, but I didn't know this it also increases dopamine. There's a paper here it says it increased dopamine by 129% above baseline with huperzine I thought it was primarily working on the acetylcholine esterase enzyme but apparently-
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: -not connected. Yeah. I know with serotonin and dopamine you can you can help support Gabba just by having healthy serotonin and dopamine so everything's connected. So when you work kind of, you know, above below, inside out, you tend a lot of these things tend to trickle down and and support that healing.
Evan Brand: Resveratrol. That's interesting. Resveratrol increases dopamine by 53%. Oregano, that's pretty cool. We typically use oregano for gut infections, but apparently it's increasing dopamine levels by decreasing dopamine breakdown. So must be working on that enzyme again.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, makes sense. Interesting.
Evan Brand: Probiotics lacto. Last one here, Lactobacillus plantarum. That'll increase dopamine. So that's pretty cool. I mean, we you and I've seen this thousands of times where we see that mood issues improve by fixing the gut, and that would include probiotics. So there's a mechanism that we didn't necessarily think right off the top of the head lactobacillus helping.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I know also vitamin D and curcumin, anything that's tends to be more on the anti inflammatory side can help I know vitamin D plays a big role, obviously helping with the immune, but that can also play a big role in helping with dopamine as well. Curcumin plays a big role as well and increases serotonin and dopamine levels in mice, which is very interesting. We'd already talked about tyrosine and phenyl. alanine, typically we use tyrosine over phenol, alanine, because it's a little bit later on in that transition, that conversion, we may even use some l dopa, but I recommend don't use l dopa, just if you're an you know, just a regular person trying it out, it's can be a little bit potent. And if you do too much of high dopamine precursors, especially l dopa, it's so potent, you can feel incredibly spaced out and almost drunk. It's, it's pretty bad. Like you don't want to be operating a vehicle. If you do too much dopamine, it's you're pretty disoriented, and loopy. I've done it a couple times by accident as I was dosing up. So it's harder to do that with tyrosine support. But you know, all your B vitamins all your methyl donors B six, and B nine, which is full eight, or B 12, methylated. You know, B one, two, and three, I mean, riboflavin, niacin are all very important. We talked about the soul for how an important role that plays. And then you know, of course, your good curcumin and fish oil, they all have kind of a mono aiming oxidase inhibition. So mano a means or like, these are going to be things that help break down or model aiming inhibitors. They basically allow these neurotransmitters to hang out between the synapses longer so you have a presynaptic synapse, a postsynaptic. And this is the synaptic cleft where they kind of hang out. And anytime you can delay the breakdown of that, you're going to increase the levels of that neurotransmitter between them. Now the problem is when you do drugs or SNR eyes, right serotonin or selective norepinephrine, reuptake inhibitors, right? You can get a short term bump, but the problem is, the longer you cause those brain chemicals to hang out there, the faster they break down. So you end up kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. So some of the natural compounds that help that can be better because it's kind of more of a gentle nudge versus overdoing it and causing more of a problem.
Evan Brand: Yeah, so I want to hit on one thing. Now this is like low dopamine, we're talking about not high dopamine. But one thing that we've seen clinically, I think may be important is the issue with clostridia and Clostridium being a bacteria that really messes up the enzyme. Yes, yeah, long, long word. It's gonna make me sound smarter than I am. But it's called dopamine, beta hydroxylase. That's the enzyme that gets messed up with Clostridium. We've seen it so many times. And we see it a lot in kids. And we see it in kids that have behavioral issues. And so that would be a situation where testing comes in. Because you may look at a kid and they go, they're they're, you know, bouncing all over the place. They're not focused. It actually could be a high dopamine situation. We've seen it many times, and you have to come in and fix those gut infections. You've got to come in and really address that clostridia first and then the brain chemistry will fix itself. So there are some situations We're just assuming you have low dopamine throwing amino acids and somebody would not be a good strategy.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. So when we're looking at someone, and we're trying to assess Is there a neurotransmitter component, we're always kind of looking at the dietary component because if we don't get nutrient dense foods with lots of good B vitamins and lots of full spectrum essential amino acids, especially from animal products, we're gonna have problems if we're not able to break those foods down. with adequate enzymes or HCl, we're gonna have problems but we have a lot of adrenal stress or hormone imbalances that can play a big role. And hormones play a big role in helping to allow those neurotransmitters to work better in the Hangout longer between the synapses, okay, especially females, because progesterone and estrogen dominance can play a big role in that too. The other component is chronic infections can affect the absorption of a lot of these things and create bottlenecks. But we'll also run organic acid test alongside to see how these metabolites look. So we may run things like [inaudible] or homovanillic, which gives us a window into homovanillic. dopamine and give us window to vandal Mandalay adrenaline. So if we have higher amounts of adrenaline, that means we're pulling a lot of that dopamine to make it or if we have low amounts of adrenaline, that tells me that those pathways are probably been whipped like a tired horse for a long time. And now now that amounts low, probably because there's some level of depletion upstream with dopamine. And same with dopamine. If we see low dopamine that tells us there's depletion if there's a chronic high dopamine metabolism. We've been whipping that tired horse and we kind of treat I treat dopamine, high and adrenaline high, like the same thing. You're just over stimulating that pathway. And we got a comment down.
Evan Brand: Yeah, and I've seen it a lot in let's talk about some of the people like when and where are we seeing this? I mean, technically could be anyone. Right? But I would say after having babies, so women will we'll see, you know, depleted neuro transmitters after babies. I mean, you're up all night, you know, you're young, you're stressed. You're you're breastfeeding middle of the night. So I would say new moms, we see this quite a lot. I think some of the whole postpartum depression. There's a lot of mechanisms. Have we done a show on that, by the way? Maybe we should add that to the list. Have we done that?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: No, we should do that. Okay, cool.
Evan Brand: So we'll have to hit that. But I think part of that goes into the neuro transmitters. I know there's a big hormonal change, too. But I think new moms would be a big one, I would say business owners, CEOs, entrepreneurs, maybe pilots that are changing a lot of time zones, anybody working more than I'd say 40 to 50 hours a week. I mean, you see 60 70 hour work-week people, they're going to be depleted, I would say, night shift workers, ER workers, doctors, nurses, you know, frontline health care workers, those people generally we're seeing a lot of brain chemistry stuff. They're just burning the candle at stress. What else? Am I missing? Anybody? Can you think of any other like big patient population group that will be affected by this?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I mean, I would just say, if you have an eating disorder as well, anorexia, chronic low calorie eating, all those things can be you know, a real thing. People talk about a lot of the benefits of fasting, but if you aren't getting enough nutrition, that that benefit of fasting becomes anorexia pretty fast, right? Anorexia is basically just starvation, chronic low calorie, which low calorie equals low nutrition as well. And so if you're chronically fasting, and you're better leading to a chronic low calorie diet, that's a problem too. So we have that component we got to keep an eye on so if we're going to be doing fasting, well, you got to make sure it's a punctuated fast. Or if you're doing more intermittent fasting, you still have to make sure you're getting enough nutrition during that compressed six to eight hour feeding window.
Evan Brand: Yep, that's good advice. Yeah, the eating disorder. One is huge. And people might not even know they might not be, you know, had to be diagnosed. I mean, even this whole idea of orthorexia, right, where people are trying so hard to be healthy, we did a podcast on that. I think people will get into that by accident, they're going to low carb, they're going to low calorie. Maybe they're having food reactions. So they're limiting their diet, and then boom, by accident, like you said, the neurotransmitters get affected, then you're, then you're not motivated to get back on track. Right. So then, once you're off track, then what happens? Well, maybe you go into too much sugar or too many cookies. I mean, you can, you know, there are effects. We're not just talking the brain chemistry in a vacuum here, we're talking how does this affect your life? Well, you know, getting things done, cleaning, organizing, taking care of your kids, getting your business done doing your taxes, I mean, just all the stuff you need to get done becomes so much harder if it if it's requiring an extreme amount of effort to get things done. Consider cortisol, but also consider dopamine.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, you really want to like look at the whole picture. So I know we're kind of really focused on dopamine today. So people listen to me would say, hey, I want to get my dopamine check. That may be a good call, but I recommend looking at everything looking at least the adrenals looking at maybe some of the organic acids, any gut issues at all definitely look at the gut. Remember, half of all gut issues may be things like energy or brain fog, or mood stuff. So people kind of have their gut connected to like bloating and diarrhea and constipation and acid reflux, that may not be the case. So I always tend to to recommend look at all three body systems, so you have a more holistic look. And we always want to go upstream at the underlying systems that may be out of balance. We also look at the underlying stressors that broke those systems down to begin with, whether it's chronic exercise, chronic exercise can be people that are looking for that runner's high that dopamine serotonin hit. And over time, they just that exercise is going to deplete it. It's like a tired horse, the right amount of exercise not too much. cardio can be very supportive and can be a gentle stimulant, where you go over the top too much CrossFit, too much long distance aerobic that may actually cause a chronic depletion. So we got to, we got to hit it from both sides, we got to look at the underlying stressors, food sensitivities, gluten inadequate sleep, we can look at just over stress, maybe needing to add in things like meditation or visualization or appreciation or prayer, things like that to kind of help hit the gas pedal and help your body relax. Those are all very important too.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah. Good call on the athletes. I forgot to mention that when I had a lady who was a runner. And she was a college student. And she was running, I want to say it was either three or five miles a day. And we looked at her brain chemistry, my God. I mean, it was one of the lowest dopamine and endorphin levels I've ever seen ever, except for a guy who was a real estate person who was doing cocaine. He was about the lowest brain chemistry I've ever seen. But this lady was a close second divorce. Yep. And man, I just told her, I just say, Look, just stop running. I know you don't want to but stop. You're addicted to it, but you're tired. And we just got to run some gentle exercises. I told her go for a walk, go for a hike, lift some weights, but keep your heart rate relatively low. And on the retest her brain chemistry It was amazing. Now granted, we did do some supplementation, too. But yeah, so good call on the the over trainers. How about personal trainers do maybe they're teaching people to movement? So they're just like working out all day? I think those people could be at risk as well.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: 100% Yep. 100%. So looking at everything here, we always want to get to the root cause. So we talked about some of the nutrients, right, we talked about, we talked about some of the testing that we have to look at here. We talked about the low hanging fruit, right healthy proteins, healthy fats, you know, more more vegetables than fruit and starch out of the gates. Now, if you know that you do better with more fruit and starch because you're more leaner, you're already at a good weight fine. People can overdo sugar and carbohydrates to increase dopamine levels too. So that sugar addiction, that's real people talk about like, Oh, I, I'm an emotional eater. What does that mean? It's too like, abstract for me. But what I hear is, Hey, I'm whipping that dopamine up. So I feel good and can manage the stress of my day, right? I'm trying to artificially get my dopamine levels up. And that's not good. So people that are emotionally eating, you're just trying to get that little whack and dopamine and that little whack of serotonin, which I get it in the short run that that may be okay for you. And that's a clean piece of dark chocolate, something like that. But if you're overdoing lots of carbohydrate and sugar, inflammatory foods, not good. We rather use a lot more of the nutrients and other things to kind of get it up. So I really want to get to the underlying cause physical chemical, emotional stress, look at the body systems, get some you know, you want to test not guess, use some of the natural supplements stay away from the bigger you know, l dopa stuff out of the gates work with the good functional medicine practitioner like myself or Evan, EvanBrand.com for Evan, JustinHealth.com for myself, we'll put links down below and just start with the low hanging fruit. And if you want to dive in deeper, get some testing and start with the foundational things out of the gates. Evan, anything else you want to highlight?
Evan Brand: Yeah, great calls on all of it. Thanks for the website. So yeah, JustinHealth.com or EvanBrand.com. Please reach out. And the good news is you can reverse this and you can change things relatively quick. I mean, we're talking within just a few months you can have a significantly different profile in regards to your neurotransmitters so don't give up. If you're feeling depleted you don't even have enough dopamine to click the subscribe button. Well, I hope this podcast gave you enough motivation to hit the subscribe button, share it and then if you need to reach out please do we're here for you. We love helping people and there is always hope so hang in there.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: We appreciate it guys. Also, down below. There's a little review link JustinHealth.com/iTunes. Click that review. Really appreciate it. And you guys have a phenomenal day. Take care Evan.
Evan Brand: Take care now.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Bye bye.
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