Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a Ph.D in biomedical science and expert on nutritional health. Her podcasts and other videos can be found at FoundMyFitness.com.
Rhonda is a fantastic guest that has been on JRE many times, today i’ll talk about her first appearance in which she insisted to come on in order to correct some statements that other guests claimed regarding nutrition. Rhonda is a true scientist, doing her own experiments in her field while publishing peer reviewed material.
Vitamin D deficiency proved to be a prevalent topic in her first appearance, vitamin D requires sun exposure to be produced and it may be quite apparent to you already that many don’t get as much sun exposure due to modern workplaces often having people located indoors for most of the day. Rhonda discovered herself that vitamin D is linked serotonin in that if your vitamin D levels are low you will also find yourself lacking in serotonin.
Serotonin is known as the ‘feel-good’ chemical, it actually has many roles but it is most famous for being heavily relied on by our prefrontal cortex which is the part of the brain that controls our personality and executive functioning. Low serotonin levels are shown by scientific study to link directly to physical and mental problems.
If people are feeling as though they could not be getting enough vitamin D it is highly recommended by Rhonda that you get your blood tested and it wouldn’t hurt to supplement if you can’t get more ‘sun-time’.
Vitamin D and magnesium are also tied to preventing DNA damage, DNA can mutate randomly and it can only be a matter of time before something undesirable is caused by this, for example if the DNA nucleotide responsible for preventing certain cells from producing copies of themselves is deactivated then it can lead to cancer later in life. That’s right, Rhonda claims lack of proper nutrition may lead to cancer.
Multiple types of nutritional deficiencies are linked to depression, when someone is diagnosed with depression perhaps we should be looking at their health, their gut biome and nutritional intake? These days we just give them an anti-depressant and tell them to continue on, it appears that in order to truly bring someone back to normal they need to look at their physical health as well as their mental health because these two aspects of us are highly related.
You know when you feel anxious or nervous mentally you might feel a ‘sinking’ feeling in your gut, this is the reaction in your brain making it’s way down the large collection of nerves in your spine. Our brain is after all just another physical part of us, with this understanding it is quite apparent that mental and physical health affect each other.
Another claim Rhonda put forward that I found fascinating was that using your brain and exercising more can affect your genes which affects which genes you pass down to your offspring, so if you want your child to be active and healthy it’s not only a good idea to lead by example but it’s also a good idea to get those activity related genes activated before you pass them down!
One last snippet, Rhonda mentioned how scientists did an experiment wherein they cultures cancer cells in space to find that they were significantly less aggressive, this was replicated on earth in environments that reduce gravity. Cancer grows slower without gravity, wow.
Rhonda’s appearances are numerous and all extremely insightful into the current science of nutrition. I’d recommend checking them out if you want to take your health seriously in a word in which scientists get drowned out by pseudo-science.
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