Dr. Scott Sherr
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
and even hormones over time because it's stimulating the system, it's clocking the system without giving it the support that methylene blue can do at the same time. The amazing thing about methylene blue is that not only is it enhancing production of energy, but it's also helping you with the detoxification side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Most nootropics are going to be, at least the classic nootropics that we think of, are going to be giving you more energy and more focus, but they're not going to be giving you the supportive detoxification side of things as well. Now, this isn't always the case.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
If you're using caffeine, of course, in coffee, caffeine and coffee also has polyphenols, which are also going to be supportive and antioxidant at the same time as you're drinking the caffeine that's in the coffee or in tea, for example. So it's not always the case that a nootropic that's stimulating you is only going to have that capacity. In fact, coffee is great for that reason.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And tea is that great for that reason as well. What's also nice about tea, for example, a lot of tea has L-theanine in it, right? L-theanine is something that works on the GABA side of life as well. If you are supporting the GABA side, which GABA is a neurotransmitter that helps relax the brain, calm down the firing of the brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
and increase the what's called the parasympathetic nervous system or the rest relax digest recover nervous system then that's also going to be supportive as well as tea and coffee are great examples of nootropics that can be used over the long term because they have antioxidants in them at the same time so i'm a big fan of using methylene blue regularly especially in my clients and patients because it's a great way
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
to support that mitochondrial function. And as you described, John, what you'll find when you take it, when you find the right dose, is that you feel like you have just brighter focus. You have a little bit more endurance. You just feel like you can sustain yourself for longer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And even on the other side of this, like on the athletic side, endurance, elite athletes, I've been working with a lot more of them using methylene blue because it can help in that capacity. In fact, I just worked with somebody recently that ran the Leadville ultra marathon race over here in Colorado. That's a hundred miles through, I think 12,000, 13,000 foot peaks. This is an intense race.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It's takes a long time and I work with somebody and we were using This time around, we used methylene blue for him, 36 milligrams every four hours. And he shaved three hours off of his time versus the year before. And there were certain other things that we did as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We supported his, actually his GI system a little bit better using an amino acid called glutamine, which we can talk about if you're interested. But in essence, the methylene blue was able to increase his endurance capacity because he was allowed, he was able to maintain his heart rate for longer without having to slow down.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
This is because methylene blue can act just like oxygen in the cells and become that final electron acceptor. So you can maintain an elevated heart rate for longer when you have methylene blue around because you have the extra capacity, the extra aerobic capacity as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
As I was describing, GABA-aminobutyric acid is one of our primary inhibitory or relaxing neurotransmitters in our brain. And it's the unsung hero of the brain, John. Most people think of the superstar neurotransmitters when we're thinking about the brain or neurotransmitters in general. We're thinking about dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And these are important, obviously, but in much smaller quantities compared to how much GABA we have in the brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
and so methylene blue itself actually works on a system called the monoamine inhibitory system so it actually prevents the breakdown of norepinephrine dopamine and serotonin and so as a result of this you get more of those neurotransmitters and you get a mood boost as a result of having more of those neurotransmitters around you get more focus a little bit more
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
endurance just because of that piece as well. But the key also is to understand that not only do we wanna be on and focused and energized, we also wanna have time to rest, recover, detox and digest our food. And so it's very important to be thinking about the GABA system. And the problem in our world, in America especially, is that we're a hustle culture as John. We wanna be on all the time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We wanna be hustling all the time. It's very difficult for us to just shut down and relax. And that's the responsibility of the GABA system. And so a lot of my focus these days with my patients and the work that I do is okay, let's support mitochondrial function. Let's improve your performance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
But at the same time, how are we going to support this GABAergic system in the brain that is so important for us to rest, recover, relax, digest, and detox.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Ah, so this is a great question. And this is one actually I talk to a lot of my fellow clinicians about because what it comes down to is that GABA deficiency is so prevalent and most of us have no idea that we're GABA deficient. If you're anxious, if you have anxiety, it's very likely that GABA is playing a role here and your GABA deficiency may be a part of this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
If you have depression, GABA is often a cause of depression and rumination or perseverating thoughts. Do you have trouble sleeping? If you have trouble sleeping, GABA may be also involved here because GABA is here to help you relax, recover and rejuvenate. Other kinds of things, anxiety, fear, depression, short temper, phobias.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
impulsiveness, disorganization, addictions, migraines, and insomnia, they're all associated with GABA deficiency. And if you're having some of these symptoms, it could be that you're GABA deficient and don't know it. Unfortunately, Most clinicians aren't going that route.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
If you have anxiety, they're thinking about giving you maybe something that affects the GABA system, like a benzodiazepine, like Xanax or Ativan or Valium, but they're not thinking about how you can support the GABA system so that you can work on your anxiety without using those potential very challenging and very addictive medications. The same thing goes with depression.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We know now that depression is not a serotonin deficiency. Certainly we know that taking something like an SSRI can be helpful in patients with depression. There's no doubt about that. There's good studies to show that, but we also know that depression is not a serotonin deficiency. This is actually something that came out over the last couple of years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And it's shocking in the sense that we thought we were giving a medicine to help with depression because people had a serotonin deficiency, but they do not. However, do these patients have a GABA deficiency? The answer is very likely possible. In fact, a new drug was just approved over the last six months to be used in postpartum depression.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And it's a GABA-A agonist, meaning it works on the GABA system and it works extremely fast. Unlike SSRIs and SNRIs, these other newer generation antidepressants, GABA medications work very fast to optimize the inhibitory side of the brain. And what's also interesting as well is that if you have anxiety or depression, you have about double the number of thoughts that an average person has in a day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Now, the average person in a day has about 70,000 thoughts per day. If you're anxious or you're depressed, you have 120, 140,000 thoughts per day. Please don't believe everything that you think. This is a lot of thoughts, John. And so what the GABAergic system is doing, GABA is doing, it's like the gate. It's the waylay station. They're called interneurons, I-N-T-E-R, neurons.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
They are the gate between the sensory information that's coming from the rest of the world and our brain and our processing. So if you can imagine, if we were processing and trying to process at least all the stuff that was coming into our brains or into our senses at any moment, it would be hugely overwhelming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So the problem with people with GABA deficiency is that they start being unable to process all that information. They just have too much going on. They don't know how to gate that information. They get anxiety, they get depression, they get insomnia and everything else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
As far as we have here understanding that the GABA system is responsible for regulating mood, regulating our cognitive stability. Like the GABA deficiency side is likely very much playing a role here, but it just, as far as I'm aware, hasn't really been studied in the sense that can you optimize somebody's GABA system and make them not suicidal?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The answer is probably yes, because if you're regulating their mood and you're regulating their anxiety and their thought patterns and being able to decrease those thoughts from 120,000 thoughts to 70,000 thoughts, you likely are going to see significant benefit. And it all goes together, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
In the sense that if you're looking at suicide, you're looking at people with severe depression, with severe PTSD, with severe anxiety that aren't able to create any distance or any space from the thoughts that are in their mind. It's one thing that, you know, it's very important is to help people realize that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
the thoughts in their mind are not them, but it's very difficult to be able to demonstrate that to people when their mind is going so fast or when they're down so down so deep. And so what I've seen at least is that if you can enhance the GABA system, you can regulate the flow of information better, you can slow down those thought processes, then you can have the conversation with people and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
bring in a new perspective. And that's actually, it's a very important perspective. And one that I think is very impactful is just to remind people that they are not their thoughts, that thoughts are happening in their mind, but there's some other part of their brain that's not having those thoughts at the same time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So if they're having another part of their brain not have those thoughts at the same time, then they can't be those thoughts. There's something else that they have to be if they can observe those thoughts and observe the part of their brain that's not having those thoughts at the same time. And it's like this, it's like sort of meditation ninja in some ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It's like in a sense of trying to, but that's really difficult and really difficult in people that are so down or so anxious, right? So that's why like enhancing the GABA system, it's like turning off anxiety or shutting it down 50% can be huge to have this kind of conversation. So I think it very much plays into all of them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So when it comes to epilepsy specifically, GABA regulates the flow of information within neurons and neural networks. And so what happens with epilepsy is that there is an overabundance of this other neurotransmitter that's always in a balance with GABA. So it's called glutamate. So glutamate is your primary excitatory neurotransmitter. And GABA is your primary inhibitory neurotransmitter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And they're always in a balance. And in fact, glutamate actually turns in to GABA in the brain. There's very little GABA outside of your brain itself. And so glutamate, again, your excitatory neurotransmitter has to be in balance and actually convert into GABA in the brain. You need two cofactors to be able to do this, magnesium and vitamin B6. So if you're magnesium deficient,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
you're gonna have a hard time converting. If you are B6 deficient, you're also gonna have a hard time converting that glutamate to GABA. So what happens in epilepsy and a lot of these other conditions as well is that you have an overabundance of this glutamate. And so glutamate is excitatory. It makes you feel on, it makes you feel connected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It makes you feel like you have control of like your executive function. You can think and think clearly and think fast. And the problem also though, but if you have too much, glutamate causes excitotoxicity, causes too much excitability in the brain, it can cause seizures. So one of the main reasons why people have seizures is as a glutamate toxicity and a glutamate overload.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And getting more GABA involved can be very effective here. And this is why a lot of the drugs that are involved in treating epilepsy are working on the GABA receptors themselves things like gabapentin for example which is a drug that works on the GABA receptors in a pretty novel way and actually we don't really understand exactly how that drug particularly works but that's an example of that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
There's also some degeneration in Parkinson's and in Huntington's as well that you were describing that's also affecting the glutamate and the GABA balance. And that's why you get choreic movements with Huntington's, which is like these movements that Huntington's patients will make are because of a imbalance between your glutamate and your GABA levels.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so this is what's happening in Parkinson's we think as well. There's also some studies that show that there's a dysregulation of the GABA neurons as well in schizophrenia at the same time. If you have an imbalance between your glutamate and your GABA systems, you're going to have excitability of the brain that is hard to control.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It can be disease pathology like Parkinson's, Huntington's, schizophrenia, but it can also be in mental health time kinds of conditions as we were describing. depression, anxiety, insomnia, irritability, tremors as well. So all these can be a part of agglutamate overabundance versus GABA deficiency. And it's that GABA deficiency that we really need to focus on more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
brain or neurotransmitters in general we're thinking about dopamine norepinephrine and serotonin and these are important obviously but in much smaller quantities compared to how much gaba we have in the brain methylene blue itself actually works on a system called the monoamine inhibitory system it actually prevents the breakdown of norepinephrine dopamine and serotonin as a result of this you get more of those neurotransmitters and you get a mood boost you get more focus a little bit more
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Yes, of course. And so those are the two main types of GABA receptors. GABA-A is the more common one. GABA-B is also very common. So GABA-A receptors have what are called these subunits. They have five subunits on them that change depending on where they are in the brain. GABA-A receptors are everywhere in the brain, but some are more focused on anxiety relief. Some are more focused on sleep.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Some are more focused on sensorial gating, like in the thalamic area, for example. The thalamus has lots of GABA-A receptors. And so the GABA-A receptor, the way it works is that it has a central channel called a chloride channel. And what happens is when GABA binds to the receptor, this channel opens. When this channel opens, chloride channels go, the chloride goes in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Sorry, the chloride goes out, excuse me. Chloride goes out. And when the chloride goes out, what happens is that the GABA receptor and the GABA receptor itself, which is on a neuron, remember, is going to what's called hyperpolarize, which means that it stops firing. So that's what happens here. So I misspoke. So chloride's going in, not out. Okay, so chloride's going into the channel.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So GABA-A receptors have chloride channels that chloride goes in. It hyperpolarizes the membrane there that the receptor is in. And as a result of that, the neuron that's on what's called the postsynaptic side stops firing. So that's why it's called an inhibitory neurotransmitter because when GABA binds to its site, it opens up the receptor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
GABA aminobutyric acid is one of our primary inhibitory or relaxing neurotransmitters in our brain. And it's the unsung hero of the brain, John. Most people think of the superstar neurotransmitters when we're thinking about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It prevents the firing of the neuron on that postsynaptic side. So most of the drugs that we know of affect the GABA receptor, the GABA-A receptor, and most of the drugs don't bind to where GABA binds, but they bind on what are these called, these allosteric sites, these sites around on those subunits that either enhance the affinity for GABA to bind or decrease the affinity for GABA to bind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The most common one that all of us know about that we have on a regular basis across the United States and the world is alcohol. Alcohol binds to an allosteric site on the GABA-A receptor, increasing the affinity for GABA to bind, increasing the chloride going in, and inhibiting that neurotransmitter, inhibiting that neuron from firing. There's lots of other ones that we can talk about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
There's lots of drugs. There's lots of natural plants that do it as well. But we can talk about, I think, that in a little bit. When it comes down to the GABA-B receptor, GABA-B is a little bit different. GABA-B is called a G protein couple receptor. And it just basically means it has something on the presynaptic side and the postsynaptic side that are working together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Calcium, potassium, those are the electrolytes that are going on there. And that basically has the capacity to decrease the firing of that postsynaptic neuron as well. So the major drug that works on the GABA-B receptor that most people know of is baclofen. which is an antispasmodic drug. So it works mainly in the spinal cord actually to decrease spasm of muscles.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And the other drug that's very commonly used or not very commonly used, but very commonly known as the date rate drug is GHB or gamma hydroxybutyric acid, which is GHB. And this is a, it's known as a date right drug, but it's actually a really great drug used for spasm, used for narcolepsy, used for sleep as well. And so it's got some medical benefit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So you have your GABA-A receptor and you have your GABA-B receptor. And the GABA-A has all these subunits that other kinds of compounds can bind to that help the GABA itself bind to its site on the receptor. And then you have the GABA-B receptor as well, which is this G protein coupler receptor a little bit different.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Well, the thing about what happens is that alcohol binds very tightly to the GABA receptor, to the site where it binds on the receptor, which is again, this allosteric site, so not where GABA binds, but it increases the affinity for GABA to bind, but it does this in a very strong way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And as a result of that, you have this strong binding of alcohol to the receptor, you have this strong affinity for GABA to bind, And what happens over time very quickly is that your body tries to compensate for this. And this is why you have tolerance. Eventually you have withdrawal when it comes to alcohol as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
But the tolerance part is because with alcohol binds so tightly, it starts depleting GABA very quickly. And when you start depleting GABA, the body tries to compensate that for decreasing the number of GABA receptors available and also decreasing the number of GABA sites that you have available on the GABA receptor. And so as a result of that, you need more of the alcohol to get the same effect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The other problem with alcohol, John, is that binds very quickly and tightly, but then it unbinds very quickly as well. And so this is why if you drink alcohol before you go to bed, you wake up, most people wake up like two or three hours later and they feel like wide awake or they feel terrible. This is how I used to feel when I was a kid and drinking alcohol.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I could wake up two or three hours later with the worst headache ever. Why is that? because now you've all of a sudden had this overabundance of glutamate as well, because you've screwed up the balance between the two of them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so that GABA unbinds very quickly, the GABA gets depleted, and then all of a sudden you have all this glutamate around and then you feel terrible, you get headaches, you get irritable, all those things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so that's why alcohol is terrible for people who wanna, in general, alcohol is not very good for a lot of different reasons, but for sleep, it's very bad because it really affects the whole aspect of you trying to, it may help you fall asleep, But it will not help you stay asleep and you will not get good sleep if you drink alcohol.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So you want to avoid it for those reasons, at least other reasons to avoid alcohol of which there are myriad as yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Well, as long as you weren't drinking too much when you first started. The problem, if you're drinking a lot and you stop cold turkey, you could potentially have a very dangerous situation here, right? Where you can have severe withdrawal. You can get what's called autonomic instability, where your blood pressure gets crazy. Your heart rate gets crazy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
This is all that overabundance of that glutamate, that excitatory neurotransmitter, because the body is so depleted from GABA, from so much alcohol use for such a long time. So that's one thing to mention. So if you're gonna stop alcohol and you've been drinking a lot of it, don't drink it, don't stop abruptly. You could potentially hurt yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The same thing goes with like benzodiazepines, for example. So the other drugs that affect the GABA receptor that are very common, your Ativan, your Xanax, your Valium, these are your benzodiazepines, along with your alcohol, of course. Like those are the main ones that we think of. But if you don't wanna stop those drugs, cold turkey either, because you've got the same problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
They cause such a tightly bound, increased affinity for GABA to bind, that you get a depletion of those GABA neurotransmitters over time, or the GABA neurotransmitter itself, and also the GABA receptor as well. So now, if you're gonna do this in a slow way, you're going to wanna make sure
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
that you're thinking about increasing your GABA production at the same time if at all possible nobody's really thinking about this but that's why we're talking about it and so what how do you do that and so what you want to do is thinking about the precursors that are responsible for you be making more GABA in the system so what's the precursor to GABA we talked about is something called glutamate right but what's the precursor to glutamate and that is the amino acid glutamine
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So we talked about glutamine and we've heard a little bit about glutamine before. I think many of your listeners, like glutamine is an amino acid and glutamine is extremely important for a lot of different things. It actually is the fuel for your small intestine at the same time as it is a precursor for glutamate, which then gets converted into GABA in the system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So the first thing I think about when I'm working with my patients that are looking, that have been drinking a lot of alcohol, or if they've been on benzodiazepines and we're thinking about supporting their GABA system,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
is looking at making sure they're getting enough glutamine in their diet, not only for their gut, if they have leaky gut, they even need more than if they have not a leaky gut, but then also thinking about the cofactors that are responsible for the conversions of your glutamine into your glutamate into your GABA. So you're thinking of vitamin B6 and magnesium mostly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
But I alluded to it earlier, if you have a leaky gut, if your gut's not doing well, if you're having a hard time there, You're going to need more glutamine to support your small intestine before you even get over to make enough glutamate and make enough and make enough GABA. So there's lots of glutamine containing foods as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Your meat containing products are going to be your highest in glutamine. And so your meat, eggs, poultry, dairy, those kinds of things are going to be the highest in glutamine overall. And but there's a lot of benefits of supporting your GABA system while you're starting to wean yourself off of things like alcohol and benzos. Yeah.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
those are great foods to use. I mean, what it comes down to for me is looking at a holistic picture, right? When somebody in my estimation is GABA deficient, which is very common these days, you wanna think about it holistically. You wanna think about what are the types of foods that are gonna support GABA and glutamine production?
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
What are the minerals that you're gonna require to be able to create that? conversion very easily. And then how are you going to prevent yourself from stopping the depletion of GABA so quickly?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Now we talked about the drugs, we talked about things like alcohol or benzodiazepines, but if you're stressed all the time, your cortisol, the stress hormone in the body is going to deplete GABA very quickly. You're also going to deplete minerals as well when you have high cortisol levels for long periods of time. And are any of us stressed? Of course, we have stress in our family.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We have stress with our work. We have stress with just the types of exposures that we have. If we're on airplanes, we're stressed on an airplane, not only because of being on an 200 other people that you have never met before coughing all over you, but also because you're in tin box, tin can up in the sky with more radiation exposure and things like that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So stress is everywhere and it's depleting GABA like crazy. And I think that's the main thing that I always... emphasize with the people that I work with is that if we're going to enhance the GABA system, we have to figure out ways to improve our capacity to decrease stress.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And one of the main ways that we do this is trying to find ways that we can engage people to become parasympathetic or relax and digest, right? One of the ways actually you can do this, interestingly enough, is have people sit down for a meal and eat. Eating actually makes you more parasympathetic
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
As long as you're not eating on the run and trying to feed your four children and eating at the same time, I'm not guilty of this at all ever, of course. But if you're resting and eating, you're actually going to become more parasympathetic. If you can work on your yoga, your mindfulness and your breathing techniques and increasing your exhale. So shorter inhale, longer exhale.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
that's also gonna make you more parasympathetic. And if you can do that on a regular basis, you're gonna improve your GABA system. Interestingly enough, exercise also enhances the GABA system too, because exercise is going to help with the balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And as a result of that, you're going to reset your parasympathetic nervous system, which is great. There also is the release of a factor called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is extremely important as well for a lot of different reasons, for neuroplasticity, for new growth of neurons, but also for increasing GABA in the brain. And so these are some of the things I think about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I also think about sleep a lot too, because if you're going to enhance the GABA system, you need to reset your nervous system. And the best way to do that is by getting better sleep overall. The challenge that we have, of course, is that not everybody can do this immediately.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so what are we gonna do to support the GABA system very quickly while people maybe are on the longer path of trying to optimize their vitamins, minerals, nutrients, their stress levels. Maybe they'll get a sleep divorce. You know what a sleep divorce is, John? Have you heard of these? This is when people...
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
decide to sleep in separate bedrooms because their partner is snoring or keeping them up or kicking them in the face or things like that. And then that's a huge stress too. But that's a difficult conversation to have with a partner sometimes. Hey, you know what?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Sometimes maybe we shouldn't sleep in the same bedroom because you're snoring or because you keep punching me in the face or something like that. So anyway, this stuff takes time. It takes time for people to make these kinds of changes and to see these kinds of manifest benefits while they're enhancing the GABA system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So sometimes what we need to do is support the GABA system with natural equivalents, plants, fungi, other kinds of things that can work in conjunction with diet, with lifestyle, with supplementation. And that's really the key, I think, is that you have to look at it all different angles to really help people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Habits are where everything starts and ends, right? I think they say, but 90% of what we do on a day-to-day basis is a habit. I read a great book by Charles Duhigg a long time ago called Habits and How We Make Them and How We Break Them. And I think it's a great book if anybody's interested.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And when it comes down to habits in general that we want to cultivate are ones that increase our capacity to become more parasympathetic, to relax. Our default as humans these days now is to be on, on. But how do you turn on your off switch? How do you do it? That is the GABA system. So creating habits that help you turn on your off switch are going to help you in so many ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So what are some of the things you can do? Well, first thing you don't want to do is wake up and the first thing you do is check your phone immediately for all the messages and all the other kinds of notifications that you might see there. Finding a way to create space from the world around you just a little bit can go a long way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And this is what we were discussing earlier when we were talking about 70 to 120,000 thoughts per day. The human organism is not evolved to do this. Our human organism is evolved for two things, if you believe this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Some people believe more, but in general, we're evolved for fitness and for function, meaning we're evolved to be able to do certain things for a certain period of time so we can procreate and pass on our genetics. And then the rest is just...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
In our world, it would be icing on the cake even now, but especially in Paleolithic times, if you live longer than 40, 50 years old, it was a gigantic thing, right? It takes a lot of intention for us to take the time and realize that being parasympathetic is going to give us longevity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It's going to allow us to live a much longer, much healthier life because if we're always in sympathetic dominance, we're not gonna be able to rest, recover, heal, detox. And so if you can't detox, you're gonna build up with toxicity over time. and you are not going to live as long. Cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, these are associated with stress.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So some of the habits that I like to talk to my patients about. One of them is actually very simple, we just described, taking time in the day when you're not looking at phones or screens. This could be five minutes, it could be 10 minutes, it could be longer. I like this in the setting of meditation if people will do it, or if they're just gonna do some deep breathing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Increasing your exhales is going to increase your GABA sympathetic, your GABA tone, and decrease your sympathetic tone. That's a very simple thing that you can do. Another thing you can do is have fun. Play, enjoy yourself. I have four kids at my house, especially when they were younger.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
They're still pretty young, but especially when they were younger, if you're rolling around the floor with your kids, you're not in sympathetic dominance. You are in parasympathetic mode. You're in rest, recover. Another great way to do this, and this is the Italian way, this is the Mediterranean way, John, is to have great meals with friends, family, and laugh
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Like crazy, laughing is a great way to reset your sympathetic and parasympathetic tone because laughing, it engages your diaphragm and then you release your diaphragm and all of a sudden you have this like relief, this relief. And that is the same way that you can increase your parasympathetic tone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
There's so many things you can do, even just, one of the things I like to have a lot of my patients do is take walks. Not crazy walks at huge paces, but just walk in nature, getting outside, getting sunlight. There are so many things you can do behaviorally to improve your parasympathetic tone. And those are just some examples.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Yeah, it's a great meditative event in essence, because what they teach in meditation oftentimes is that the sound that your feet make when you hit the ground is just as important as those thoughts in your mind. It's all just things happening in conscious awareness in space. And so nothing really gets more weight unless you choose it to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So you can, in those sounds that you're hearing when you're walking, you don't have a choice of whether you hear those sounds or not. But you can actually create this sort of internal presence of those sounds and understand that it has a huge, this ecosystem that you're creating inside your mind is anything you choose it to be.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And you can put any weight on these certain things that you choose to make. And having time off of computers, off of phones, or in my case, as with my kids, is a great way to remind yourself that there's more than those thoughts in your mind. And when you start doing this and you start putting these things into practice and your patients, in my case, start doing this, their health transforms.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And it may not be overnight. That's for sure. It may not be tomorrow where you take one walk in nature and then the world is an entirely different place for you, but you can start getting inclinations here. And then, and this is where supplementation, things like enhancing the GABA system can be very helpful too, along with changing mindset, along with the nature, along with
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
breath work, along with meditation. If you just start giving people like a little bit more of an accelerated capacity, that's where the power is.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I'm fantastic, John. Thanks for having me back. It's good to see you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
100%. We are just, we're living in a whack-a-mole triage setting at every moment of every day. And that is just because we're getting so many inputs and then we're getting depleted on things that are helping us maintain a stability and mood. in function, especially GABA as well.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So you'll find, and I see this clinically, once you start enhancing the GABA system, once you start becoming more parasympathetic, then you start getting more grounded. You feel more grounded, you have more space between your thoughts, your emotions, and your senses, and then you show up better in your life, both
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
for yourself, which is probably the most important, but of course, with the people around you. And one of the things that I often like to ask my patients about is actually, I like to ask my patients, family members about this is how are they doing? How are they like, because that's one of the best ways for people.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
A lot of us don't realize when we're improving, actually, it's actually very common in men specifically is that men don't realize that They're just not as observant in general. We just don't have the same capacity as women just naturally overall. And women have these superpowers as we know.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
But asking family members how they're doing can be very indicative on these journeys that people are having once they start doing some of the things that we're talking about. And then I'll be like, well, and then it'll be like, well, tell me about your day yesterday. How many times did you scream?
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
How many times did you get so angry that your mind just went completely blank and you couldn't think for X amounts of minutes? Think about in the last three months, how many times has that happened? Ask your kids, how many times have I yelled at you last week? If you can't remember yourself. And I've done this actually myself personally, just in various experiments that I've done.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We're a very bad judge of how, in general, how we're doing. So sometimes, especially in the beginning, when you're starting to create more of that sense of grounding, it's helpful to have those external conversations that go like, how am I doing really? And I found that to be helpful when I'm on that path of optimizing these kinds of things.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I think the best and the easiest way is to learn a breath practice. And it doesn't have to be something that's too crazy at all. People have heard of box breathing, for example. That's a very easy way to become more parasympathetic. I have my kids do what's called three-five, three seconds of breath in and five seconds of breath out.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Just lengthening your exhales, just doing that for two to five minutes, will make you extremely impressed at what breath can do if you start doing it consistently. So I think that's the simplest thing for people to do from a lifestyle perspective.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The other thing to do that can be helpful is start exercising because exercise can also help balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But I hesitate for that to be my first because that can also be, if you're just going to exercise and then going to do something else and then something else and something else, that's not going to be very helpful. But I think
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
When I talk to my patients, the one thing I emphasize a lot is the breath work piece. Now, if that's part of the meditative practice, all the better, but I don't even think it's necessary to start off with, to be honest. I mean, if people think meditation's too woo-woo, I get that. That's not about not having thoughts. It's just about observing your thoughts, really, in meditation.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And then there's other stages, of course, if you wanna go there, but in general,
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
breath work and just prolonging your exhales so there's the three breathing patterns i teach my patients are either box breathing something called four seven eight so you breathe in for four you hold for seven you breathe out for eight or i do the three five the three minutes the three seconds in and five seconds out there's a lots of other permutations of this and there's lots of other ways to do it i have a good friend of mine
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
named Brian McKenzie, who does a lot of work with CO2 tolerance. And these are called breath holds. And so you can learn about doing this and increasing your CO2 tolerance. And that also improves your stress over time. But I think that's secondary to just learning how to exhale for longer than you inhale. That will be transformative if you can do it on a consistent basis.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And I think what it comes down to is when you're looking to enhance the GABA receptor itself, what you want to do ideally, like from a supplementation perspective is number one, remember that GABA supplements don't work actually. GABA supplements are, GABA itself is a too big of a molecule to get across into the brain. And as a result of that, if it does work for you,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Well, I mean, nootropic is a big category in the sense of there's lots of different definitions that people use as to what a nootropic is and what it isn't. I think we actually dove into this a lot during our last podcast. So if anybody's interested, they can go check this out. There's things like health optimization nootropics and performance optimization nootropics.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
GABA is getting through because you have a leaky blood-brain barrier, and that's also called a leaky brain. Now it sounds scary, but in essence, that just means oftentimes that you have a leaky gut. Leaky gut is when your gut's allowing things into the system that shouldn't get in there.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And as a result of that, you're getting more inflammation in the system, and that also can affect the blood-brain barrier and cause a leaky brain. So when you are supplementing to improve GABA levels, you want to be improving them by using compounds that enhance the GABA receptor, but not using GABA itself.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So what you can use there, for example, are things like kava and even some of the cannabinoids like CBD and CBG. These work on the GABA receptor, enhancing the binding of affinity for GABA to bind to that receptor too. But in addition, you also want to use something that's going to bind to the GABA receptor at the GABA site as well.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And this is called an obligate pair, which means that you do both at the same time. This is so that even if you're giving something that's safer, like kava or CBD, CBG, something called honokial, honokial from magnolia bark, these are all binding to the GABA site, the GABA receptor on separate sites. you want to also give them something that's going to replete their GABA levels at the same time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So what I use is something called nicotinyl GABA, which is a vitamin B3 attached to the GABA molecule. That makes sure that the B3 gets across the blood-brain barrier no problem, and it takes GABA with it. And then as a result of that, you get mild B3, which is actually mildly activating, which is good.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
in essence because the gaba itself in the brain is going to help you relax so you get this sort of calm relaxation without feeling too tired which is very nice another one that i use that binds to the gaba site of the gaba receptor as well is called agarin agarin is from a psychedelic mushroom called the amanita muscaria mushroom and what's really cool about this particular compound is it's non-psychedelic and so the amanita mushroom is well known as like in santa claus mythology it's well known in like for alice in wonderland and mario brothers
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
very famous mushroom known to be psychedelic because another ingredient in it called ibotenic acid which is actually neurotoxic But the agarine works on the GABA receptor at the site where GABA would bind. And so you put that in there at the same time as you use something like Hanakyle, which is increasing the receptor binding affinity for GABA itself so that you already have this combination.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so as a result, you don't deplete GABA over time. You decrease the risk of withdrawal with tolerance, with dependence, and you can use very low doses for long periods of time and significant impact. So the key with enhancing the GABA receptor is that you're doing both. You're enhancing it by giving it something that supports on that allosteric site.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So it binds to the GABA receptor, not where GABA is binding, but on another site. And then you're also enhancing the GABA site because you're giving something like GABA, like nicotinyl GABA, vitamin B3 attached, or the agaric. So I give that preamble, John, because when you're looking at
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
i've been very interested as always in the kind of integration of neutral nootropics with more of a comprehensive understanding of mental health physical health from a macroscopic scale from you know what it looks like when you're talking to somebody or how you feel personally but also from a microscopic scale your vitamins minerals nutrients
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
AI, when you're looking at how we're gonna use this kind of system to enhance and understand and diagnose GABA deficiency, the keys with AI always, and I know this very well because one of the guys, one of my mentors and the founder of the companies that I work with
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
is one of the founders or like one of the early guys in ai back in the 80s and 90s the most important thing about ai not only is it the algorithm itself but also the inputs the prompts as it were that you're using to create the ai system without prompts you're not going to have a great ai output when you're thinking about
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
diagnosing or enhancing the GABA system, you have to know what the inputs are going to be to create the ecosystem in the body that you're going to allow the most optimal recovery of the GABA system in this capacity. So for me, the way I see AI working is that you're going to be able to look at multiple different
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
inputs at the same time knowing what those inputs are at least in essence and then having algorithms that are trained on what's happening cellularly in various types of permutations to know what may be going on Then you can take those permutations along with the inputs that you created and the prompts, and then you have an output that's going to be fantastic.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Especially John, when you're not only looking at one subset of data, but you're looking at multiple sets of data. And the way I think about this is that right now, everybody knows about the genome, right? Everybody knows about genomics, but we have. genomics, we have transcriptomics, we have proteomics, we have metabolomics. These are all various levels of expression of our DNA.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
We have epigenomics as well. We have so many others. Then we have the capacity with AI soon to be able to, excuse me, to crunch all this data and find ways to be able to harness it to create significant change in the system. Knowing, of course, how to prompt the data beforehand to make sure that we're getting things that make sense. That's the key.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
It's not only just the data itself, but it's the prompting that is so important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So Troscriptions is the company that we created about four years ago, and it's the for-profit entity of a nonprofit organization called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice. And that's Home Hope for short. Home Hope is training practitioners who
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
licensed practitioners, non-licensed practitioners on how to optimize health of their patients and clients without the optimizing health, without focusing on treating disease. And that's the framework shift that's very different. And the seven module certification course, the first module is metabolomics actually.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And that's what's so foundational to my own practice and to a lot of the work that we're doing. Metabolomics has been called the 21st century stethoscope for a reason. It's robust, but with AI, as you were alluding to John, Now we're looking at all these levels and how we're going to be able to integrate all this data together is going to be transformative.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
and cofactors that are responsible for truly optimizing our cellular biology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So if you're a practitioner looking for more training, we have it's all at homehope.org. You can check out our seven module certification. With transcriptions, we have products there that can help people right now while they're on the path. to optimizing their health. And we have ones that are based on methylene blue. Those are helping with energy, with focus, with endurance, with inflammation.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
But we have a whole suite of products that are based on the GABA system. We have one called TroCalm. We have another one called TroZ. TroCalm for anxiety stress reduction. And we have TroZ, one for sleep and sleep optimization with eight different ingredients. So our focus with those products is helping you turn that on switch off.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so if you're interested in learning about more of these products, more about the GABA system and how it all integrates with anxiety, with stress, with sleep, insomnia, depression, you can go to Troscriptions.com or you can go to Instagram at Troscriptions and find out more information. And then if you're interested in learning more about
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Me, I'm at Dr. Scott Scher, D-R-S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R on Instagram. I do a decent amount of posting there. You can also go to drscottscher.com and I have a bunch of my own resources there. I do work with patients directly. I do remote consulting in the worlds of health optimization medicine, which I have my own practice, hyperbaric medicine. I think that's enough for you. I think that's good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And then within that, I've been, a lot of my interest always and continues to be on mitochondrial health and how improving mitochondrial health overall is going to raise your cognitive and physical bar all the time so that maybe you don't need nootropics all the time, but maybe you can only use them in more of a targeted way rather than more comprehensively or more often depending on the situation.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Thanks for being back. It was a pleasure to be back, number three. I look forward to number four.
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
That's all good. Take care, John. Thanks for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So it's super interesting. Methylene blue, as we talked about, it has been around a long time, but we're really starting to dial in the dosing of it, understanding that very low doses of this particular compound are fantastic for those mitochondria that we were just discussing. So what's interesting about
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Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
the US right now is that 94% of the US population has some element of mitochondrial dysfunction. This means that they cannot make energy effectively or they cannot detox with the energy that they make. So just to back that up for a minute for people, when you have these mitochondria in our cells, They are the powerhouse. They are what make energy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
endurance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so we have a lot of mitochondria in some types of tissue and very few mitochondria in other tissue. In fact, the most mitochondria we have per cell are in our ovaries or in our sperm, depending on our gender, our brain, our heart, our liver, and our musculoskeletal tissue. So
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
In fact, I've talked to Gabrielle Lyons about this, and she likes to remind everybody that you have your most mitochondria per cell in reserve actually in your musculoskeletal tissue so you can run when you need to run.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Now, the problem, though, is that if 94% of the US population has mitochondrial dysfunction, this is going to show itself in the various tissues depending on where those tissues are having the most effect with that mitochondrial dysfunction. So is infertility an issue now, John? It's a huge issue, right? More and more people cannot get pregnant, men and women.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And that's a major reason why is because of mitochondrial dysfunction. If you have issues with your brain, if you have concentration problems, fatigue issues, if you have difficulty with your memory or verbal fluidity when you're speaking, this is all potentially a mitochondrial issue.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So cardiac issues, detoxification issues, exercise induced fatigue, this is all related to mitochondrial dysfunction. And so what methylene blue can do here
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And this is what's cool about the dosing is that we have like low doses of methylene blue, four, eight, 16, maybe 25 milligrams of methylene blue, where you're actually improving that mitochondrial function itself, where you go to higher doses around a milligram per kilogram, which is around 50 to 70 milligrams, depending on the person, maybe higher.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
That's more of an anti-infective dose and also really good for like significant acute mitochondrial stress. And one other piece of this is that mitochondria make energy, they make ATP. And this is our energy currency. We make a lot of ATP. I can't remember, but it's like almost a couple of kilograms of ATP a day. It's a lot of ATP that we make.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Now, not only do we make ATP or energy, but we also have to be able to deal with the quote unquote waste products of making energy. And those include some of the things that we know,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
like carbon dioxide water but we also make something called reactive oxygen species or free radicals these free radicals are very important because they're signaling molecules that tell the mitochondria to make more energy not making as much energy and things like that but in essence what you see here is that you're making more energy and you have to detox from the energy that you make and if your mitochondria aren't working very well it could be either or it could be or that you're having a problem
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
now you bring in methylene blue and methylene blue what it can do is it can help on both sides it can help on the side of helping you make more energy and it can help on the side of helping you detoxify from the energy that you make and the problem with making energy for many of us now is that we have these complexes on our mitochondria there's four of them in total and many of us for especially complex one and complex two but especially complex one are not working very well and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I didn't say why people have mitochondrial dysfunction, John. Why is that? So the number one cause is insulin resistance. This is people that are obese, morbidly obese, super morbid obesity, where you have insulin resistance. That's the number one reason why people have mitochondrial dysfunction, and it affects that complex one. The second reason is medications.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
The third is toxins and the fourth is infection. So COVID infections, for example, were very notorious for affecting complex one and complex two and also complex four, but definitely complex one mostly. What methylene blue can do is it can bypass various complexes in your mitochondria. If they're not working very well, help regenerate some of them, help you make energy more effectively.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And at the same time, like I mentioned, you're helping with the detoxification side. So you're not getting a huge amount of stress in the system, even if you're making more energy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So when it comes to neurodegenerative diseases, there are a couple of studies that have been ongoing looking at methylene blue specifically for Alzheimer's. And it was a very interesting initial study that they did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
where they use very low doses methylene blue eight milligrams twice a day and this is a this is their placebo group which again is not a placebo this is very common in a lot of these studies because when you're giving somebody methylene blue you're also trying to make sure that people know that they're getting it or if they're getting it like if they're getting a high dose low dose they don't really know but the idea with methylene blue and the challenge in this case is that methylene blue makes your urine blue so what they tried to do
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
let's give a very low dose of methylene blue to the placebo group or the sham group and a much higher dose to the treatment group, okay? And so in the study, in this group of population, this population, methylene blue actually improved cognitive function in the placebo or sham group much more than it did in the treatment group, interestingly enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so this is not actually surprising to me because what happens if you give a very large dose of methylene blue very quickly, it might be too much for the system to be able to handle. And this is very common, unfortunately, in brains that are already under significant stress.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
So if your brain's already under significant stress because you have mild cognitive impairment, because you have Alzheimer's, as it were, then you're going to be more susceptible to the requirements for the need. You have higher requirements of things like antioxidants, for example. And if you give a very high dose of methylene blue very quickly,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
you're going to induce the capacity of the brain to try to make more of that antioxidant, but you're not going to be able to do it is what it comes down to. So the key with methylene blue and neurodegenerative disorders is to really focus on low dose and titrating that dose over a period of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
There's a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin named Dr. Francisco Gonzalez Lima, who's done a lot of great work on neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's models, looking at the use of methylene blue.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And if you can optimize energy production, if you can optimize the capacity of those protein complexes, the electron transport chain to work better, you're going to see improvements in cognitive function. And then if also you're improving the capacity for detoxification by using these low doses of methylene blue, you also see benefit there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Now, when it comes to the other population, what did you mention? You mentioned neurodegenerative and the other one was, what was the other one?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Right, so the chronic fatigue, the brain fog, those patients. And so in the end, what that really is, John, is a mitochondrial dysfunction. And so what we are seeing now, at least clinically, is that you're seeing improvements in cognitive function in all varieties of patients that are coming in with cognitive dysfunction. Is it chronic fatigue? Is it post-viral syndrome? Do you have mold?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Do you have infection? You're gonna see improvements in mitochondrial function because of this amazing compound.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
If you're using it in an intermittent way, especially at low doses of methylene blue, it's going to be very supportive most of the time. And the reason is because it's supporting that mitochondrial function. And most of us are having some element of that on a regular basis. If you have stress in your life, does anybody have stress? Does anybody? That's also going to stress your mitochondria.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Do you have, excuse me, do you have... exposure to toxins in your environment. Anybody have exposure to toxins in their environment? Is anybody going on an airplane tomorrow or the next day or in the next couple of months? These are all stresses on our mitochondria.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
And so what I've found is that if you're using something supportive like methylene blue, you are in a good place to use it regularly over a long period of time. Low doses, of course.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
With other types of nootropics, you might want to be a little bit more careful in the sense that if you're using a nootropic that has a lot of stimulation capacity, so if you're using something like nicotine every day or even caffeine every day, it may be something that starts depleting you of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients