402: Memory Loss, Dementia and Ammonia Toxicity
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Welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast, where East meets West in the world of medicine. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and here we explore how modern Western science and traditional Eastern wisdom come together to unlock the body's full healing potential. Each week, we'll dive into powerful tools, techniques, and approaches from both sides of the world to help you optimize your health and live with vitality. Let's bridge the gap between ancient practices and cutting-edge medicine. Let's get started.

Hello friends, welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast where East meets West. I'm your host Dr. Chris Motley. Today I want to ask you if you ever feel as though your brain is on fire. Do you ever say the phrase, my nerves are so fried? Are there too many thoughts that are happening at one time in your head when this fried brain feeling comes upon you? In fact, it's so overwhelming that

that you often can disconnect from yourself. You feel like I cannot connect with my own self. I can't even get centered because of all that is going on up here. If that is you and you're raising your hand and you couple that with chronic headaches, extreme brain fog, and the feeling as though you can't get one clear thought in, you could be suffering from a thing called ammonia toxicity.

Now, ammonia toxicity is very, very important because ammonia is represented by the molecule N1 nitrogen and 3 hydrogen, NH3. And ammonia is very important because it is a natural byproduct within certain cycles of your cell, namely the nitric oxide cycle, which is the cycle that helps keep your arteries smooth, pliable, and soft.

allows your arteries to expand and contract properly so you don't have arteriosclerosis, hardened arteries, or any type of vascular disease. Ammonia is a natural byproduct within this cycle. That is where ammonia buildup can occur.

Write this down. If you have ammonia toxicity and you have all these symptoms, there's a process called NOS, nitric oxide synthase. Now, nitric oxide, again, is that molecule that helps keep your arteries nice and soft. But if there's a variant or a, quote, a defect in that gene, your ammonia will build up. That's one possible way from variant genes. The second possibility is that you have too many infections. Parasites can produce quite a bit of ammonia. Ammonia is...

basically building up because of these microbes giving it off and your body doesn't have the ability to actually dispose of it through your liver or kidneys or your colon. Ammonia will build up, especially with people with chronic infections, and those individuals will feel manic, especially around full moon. If you feel like you're feeling manic, this is one big possibility. Now, one thing that I will say as I look at my notes is that

Whenever you're dealing with an infection state, I find it one of the priorities that I have here at the office when I'm working with any individual is to test them through muscle testing, kinesiology, biofrequency. If they have an infection that's in high levels, such as Epstein-Barr virus, strep, staph, Lyme disease, one of my go-tos is always checking ammonia. Because if you kill off the infection, but you don't get rid of the ammonia, they'll still have the brain fog, the manic behaviors, and the brain feeling fried. Hope that makes sense.

So that's number two. So you have genes, you have infections. Number three could be that you have a high amino acid diet, too many proteins. Now, I love meat. I know many individuals do carnivore diets. Some people do keto. There's nothing wrong with that. What I am saying is if you eat too much meats and you eat too much proteins, that meat breaks down to amino acids and the amino acids can break down in high levels into ammonia.

So at times when patients had chronic infections like parasites or Lyme disease, I would tell them, I would rather you not eat too much meat during this time because you already are producing ammonia from the parasites and Lyme disease. I don't want to add in more ammonia from high protein diet. So we'd have to find some plant alternatives to proteins, even in smoothies to help with getting some strength and nourishment. Now, when you have all these three factors, you had to be careful because if a person is a genetic variant, plus they have a heavy infection,

All three can meet together. They could have more protein. And the reason being is because I've experienced it before. When I had Lyme disease, I was going through my cleansing. I used to always feel like I was eating right. I would go get me grass fed burger, which is beautiful and delicious. I'd have some vegetables with it, some sweet potatoes. And I would literally feel so bloated and gassy in my stomach. And I'd feel like there's a lot of sourness in my stomach. A, I had too much yeast in my system. B, I had some alpha-gal syndromes from Lyme.

But I was producing quite a bit of ammonia. I would literally, after every time I'd eat, after about 30 minutes, I would feel like my head was in the clouds and my brain would feel like it's on fire. I read about ammonia toxicity. I was like I was being manic and I found out, oh, that ammonia did it. And I sure enough took a couple of things that you can take. Ammonia reducers such as butyrate. Butyrate is raw butter. Butyrate is a component of raw butter that will actually absorb ammonia. The next thing is glutamine. Now, glutamine is...

is an amino acid that actually is one of the main components of glutamate. And glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. But without getting too confusing or getting, you know, too nerdy, glutamine helps pull off the N or the nitrogen molecule.

off of the NH3. Does that make sense? The glutamine will rip off the nitrogen atom off the three hydrogens, which then allows your body to do what? To take that excess nitrogen, put it into urine, and pee it out. Whenever the nitrogen is turned into a form of urea, it is more easily expelled. That's why at night, what I do personally, is that I will take

Glutamine powder and I put into this nice sleep powder has different forms of tyrosine a little bit of GABA I'll put that together with magnesium breakthrough sleep breakthrough powder put some glue Glutamine in there and I also put a gut repair a GI repair powder and I mix it up and I take that at night I sleep really well, but it helps get all the excess stuff out of my brain So my brain doesn't feel foggy in the morning. So butyrate write that down and

and glutamine these are two good product lines zymogen x y m o g e and zymogen with an x and allergy research group all have really good products of these two supplements so at night what i do is i'll take the glutamine even at a teaspoon or half a teaspoon

And if I do switch to butyrate, which I have, I usually use the capsules and capsules smell. They just smell like raw butter. Sometimes they smell a little pungent. You take one or two of those at night and you'll start draining the pneumonia. I had to do that for a long time because I had so much ammonia in my body. I also noticed that my blood pressure started to regulate. And the reason being is because in the nitric oxide pathway,

as the NH3 is a byproduct, the ammonia of this whole nitric oxide pathway, it's starting to produce nitric oxide to give to your arteries. I noticed my blood pressure was fluctuating. Now, I can get into all the specificities of it, but if your body doesn't have proper nitric oxide levels in there, you're going to have some problems with your blood pressure. So if you add in blood pressure and you have all these other symptoms, you definitely need to look into ammonia toxicity. It is very, very important. Now,

One thing that I think is really interesting is that when we're talking about nitric oxide pathways, you have to relate it to athletes. Certain athletes can go for a very long distance run. Some athletes can push themselves and they can go long miles on a bike or running. And they say, how in the world can that person do that without cramping up or having too much muscle fatigue and soreness? Why is it that they don't produce tons of lactic acid? Because our body has the ability to.

to produce quite a bit of nitric oxide. In fact, if you test some of these athletes, they'll have heavy amounts of nitric oxide that allows their arteries to carry more blood to their muscles, to the heart, to their brain. That's what makes them such great performers. So when you look at nitric oxide, one of the things you have to see is if you have a variant in a gene called the NOS.

Also, another one's called the ARGT. Now, you don't have to write that down, but NOS is if you got a gene test and you found that you had NOS variant genes where they're defective. I hate to use the word defective, but that's what some people recognize them as. It's going to be very hard for your body to take arginine, arginine, which is an amino acid, and break it down into actually a usable form of nitric oxide. So arginine, though,

If you don't have sufficient amounts, of course, you're not going to make a lot enough nitric oxide in the first place. But if you don't have a good NOS gene, which is an enzyme to take that arginine and attaches it to the gene, the enzyme attaches to arginine and it gets converted to nitric oxide. The flip side is.

arginine can be turned into ornithine, which is another amino acid with the ARGT. But if you looked at your gene test and both those genes, the ARGT or the NOS were defective or they're variant or they're recessive, you're going to have a hard time taking any arginine you take and creating nitric oxide, which leads to higher blood pressure. So when people say, well, I just got to take a blood pressure med, I'm having all the symptoms that I just mentioned. My head feels like it's frying. Well, it's all because of my blood pressure.

My head feels like it's on fire because I just have blood pressure issues. That's true in some cases, but it really is the amount of ammonia that's being produced in the body. In fact, I would have to say that most people that have higher amounts of blood pressure issues need to get their ammonia checked. It's very, very important. You have the nitric oxide, you have the ammonia. Another flip to this coin is this. Your body, you eat in that arginine, which is in green leafy vegetables, certain vegetables, and even in certain protein sources, but arginine

When you take in the arginine, your body knows a couple things. If there is an infection lying around, such as Lyme disease or the strep or the staph, and you take the arginine, your body will take the arginine and start to create a couple of different oxide or oxygen species. It will take your arginine and create what we say superoxide, superoxides, like Superman, superoxide, and also peroxynitrites.

Now, if you come in and people say, I don't even know what that is. I totally get it. But this is important. If you create superoxide or in peroxynitrite, those are directly letting you know that there is an infection that's hiding in your brain or in your body somewhere. Hey, friends, Dr. Motley here. And let's talk about healthy blood circulation, heart rate and blood pressure.

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Arginine gets converted into a form of oxygen species, the NOS gene, and then it gets carried down to the BH4 pathway, and it'll start creating more peroxynitrites or superoxide because the small oxygen species, picture this in your head, you have these oxygen species, little oxygen molecules, and you have these little electrons running around, and those little electrons ping off like little pinballs, and their attempt is to kill off any excess infection. So the story would be, let's say in your brain,

that you got Lyme disease in your brain or that you have some form of parasite like Babesia or malaria in your brain. Those infections somehow have made their way past the blood brain barrier. Maybe strep got in there and it could have got through placenta, through the mother's bloodstream into the baby. We don't know. It's in the brain. The body sees it as an enemy. What do I do with this? Causing all the immune cells to try to kill it off.

What it will do is say, hey, we need extra help up here. We need to tear these infections apart so that our immune cells can take the debris and take it back out and we can flush it out by the snot, by the mucus, by poop, by pee, sweat.

So your body will then incorporate the oxygen species to use as a pinball effect to go tear through the infections to help tear them apart. At the same time, though, those little oxygen species, if they're too high, if the infections are too high, the oxygen species will tear through your arteries and through parts of your brain. It will injure your arteries, your veins. It'll injure the tissue of your brain because they're called oxidants. That's why we take antioxidants in the form of vitamin C.

Vitamin E, alpha lipoic acid, certain types of omega fatty acids. They all have an antioxidant effect. They help with absorbing those extra oxygen species. So all the pinballs are flying. They're damaging the tissue in heavy excess amount. Your body goes, I can't handle this. I'm getting brain fried feeling. Then you take an antioxidant capsule, starts to feel better. That's why people say it's so important to take your antioxidants.

So you have those effects. So you got blood pressure issues. You can have heavy infection issues. You can have arterial damage, brain issues because of all these infections. And then whenever you get into higher amounts, remember of hydroxy nitrites or the superoxide in genetic research, they say if those get in high levels, that's a very dangerous area to be into. Now, why? Because it goes into microglial activation.

And microglial activation are the glial cells that will go in and they will eat away and try to get to those infections. But overall, it will start to damage the glial cells. It'll hurt the blood brain barrier, the brain area that helps protect the actual brain itself. It will cause all of these issues to be created in the brain. And what you have to be careful of is that when the glial cells get activated, it starts to damage the cells, the layers of protection of the brain.

So you have this damaging effect and then you start to see that there's higher amounts of uric acid in the body and uric acid gets in the joints, it gets in the brain. You start seeing people with gout and it's a perfect storm. So when people get this, you will notice most people that have some form of neurological issue like an Alzheimer's or dementia or any type of MS usually have microglial activation. The reason I say this because I have family members close to me that have these types of issues.

With microglial activation, I don't say this to be alarming, but it's a danger ground. And if you have that kind of ammonia levels, you have to reduce it down. You have to get those down. And then you have to start to clean up all the infections heavily. So you know that whenever you start to see these types of symptoms come together and you start to understand why you're getting the brain fried feeling, you know that there's a way out.

So the first thing I always recommend to my patients is let's look into taking a couple of capsules of butyrate. B-U-T-Y-R-A-T-E. We'll put that into the show notes. Butyrate or glutamine, L-glutamine powder. You don't use both of them. Take one at a time. I also love the super antioxidant formulas by Designs for Health. There's many of them out there, but Designs for Health has a really good antioxidant support formula. You put those together, you start absorbing the excess products.

oxidation out of the brain. So your brain's not rusting. That's what oxidants mean. Your brain will start to rust. If you start to clean this up, you're going to start noticing your blood pressure change in a positive way. There's another formula that we can put on the show notes called Nitric Oxide Plus. It's by NutriWest. And it is a really good product and has so much good components in there to help clean up the brain. It helps with arginine production and metabolism.

Your body is a really efficient recycling mechanism. So it's taking amino acids, it's creating something to help your arteries and your veins to keep soft. It also has the ability to create up oxygen species that actually kills off infections and help clean them out of your body. But the flip side is if you can't absorb the excess oxidants, that's what causes the brain to feel fried. Then you would say, how do you help your body absorb it? We do the antioxidants. Now,

But when you have biotin, you have B3s and B6, all those are essential for that nitric oxide cycle to run. I don't want to be confusing, but for us to actually handle our ammonia well, we would need those three B vitamins in sufficient amounts to help us with recycling ammonia. Okay. So if you add in molybdenum and zinc, which are good trace minerals, good essential minerals for your body, and you put in magnesium, those are there too to help you with that whole nitric oxide cycle. Okay.

But many of us don't take enough foods or supplements that have molybdenum or zinc. On the majority, most people are zinc deficient. So right then, we don't have the structural basis, the fortification to actually run this cycle efficiently. Now, one of the things I'm really, really conscious about is this. When people get severe anxiety, this is a kicker. If you have superoxide,

or the peroxynitrate, let's backtrack. If you got those oxidant species that are running around because of the variance in that nitric oxide cycle, so you have all these oxygen species floating around because there's too many infections, A, you'll get higher histamine. And one of the extra things you'll get is glutamate, not glutamine, glutamate. That's why people get MSG. You ever heard of MSG? Why do they say that you shouldn't eat it? Because it's hyper excitatory to you. Microneuronal activation in your brain.

Glutamate is overexcited. If you have too much glutamate production, if there is too much in there and you don't have enough glutamine, that glutamate will make you excited and it will not let you calm down. You'll stay highly activated. That's when all those oxygen species are floating around. Higher glutamate means higher anxiety. So I know this is a lot to take in. We go back. We look at we have higher anxiety, brain fog. The brain feels fried. You have all the symptoms I just mentioned to you.

Ammonia toxicity. So we talked about glutamine, butyrate. We want to make sure that we take a good methylated B complex of some sort that has biotin, B6, and B3 in it. And you want to take a mineral complex as well. So let's put that in the notes. And you can do a good mineral complex. I use Reacted

multi-minerals, reactant multi-minerals by Ortho Molecular. Ortho, O-R-T-H-O, molecular. That's a good one. You don't have to use it, but that's a good one. And I'd always suggest a good omega fatty acid. So right there, an antioxidant.

Like you can get a good antioxidant formula, a good multimineral, a good B-complex that's methylated, and an essential fatty acid of some sort. I really like the ones from Designs for Health. I'm not sponsored by them, but they have a good one. Zymogen has good essential fatty acids with omega-3, 6s, and 9s. That right there will help you with a lot of the cycle process. One of the things, though, if you need to find out the infections, though, if you have high amounts of nitric oxide production, it's because the infections are floating around.

When the infections are floating around, you have to try to identify which ones you have. Now, that's a whole podcast in itself. But when you have strep or staph or Lyme disease or parasites, trying to identify them is very, very essential. Now, without getting too much overload with this podcast, I know many of you guys are driving or just listening. But look at your history. This is the biggest thing. It can be, you know, look at your history. Look at when you're a kid. This is one of my go-tos. When you're young,

Do you ever remember a time when you were really, really sick? Some people say, no, I had a really good childhood. I was hardly ever sick. But there's many of us out here that will say, oh, I remember when I was a kid, I always got sore throat. I always had a very congested throat.

I used to get those lumpy lymph nodes around my throat. I used to always get bronchitis. I always got a chest cold. I always had ear infections. I always had eye infections. I always had, you know, yeast infections, such and such. You keep going over that in your history. And if one or two of those completely kept reoccurring over and over again, the likelihood that you got rid of them is very low. In fact, most of those infections reoccur over and over again. So you want to break the cycle.

because they're not really get you're not really getting brand new infections. You're just getting reactivations of old ones. Most of the time, what I do when I know that I've got yeast, I've got mold, I've got such and such. What I do is I go in and I'll take Desbio. Now, I don't have my box right here. No, I love Desbio. I'll use it here. D-E-S-B-I-O. But guys out there, they do want you to work with a professional because homeopathics are very strong.

But what I'm saying, you can even look into their line of products and see that there are certain homeopathics that help you break the connection of the infection to your body, break the connection of the memory to your body as well. And I see tremendous results of people with chronic strep and Lyme when I give them homeopathics, they start to break that connection. In fact, old symptoms come to the surface that they thought they got rid of because their body is releasing the memory.

You will stuff it down just like layer upon layer like a layered sandwich. You'll just keep pressing it down You have to breathe to the surface. So I love homeopathics You get the homeopathics and I I usually get the series of symptoms relief series or you will box sets that help you with the symptoms first you start cleaning the things out like Epstein-Barr virus or strep or Borrelia or Babesia use homeopathics to help that you can find a good homeopathic practitioner in your area and then find the herbs and

That will help you clean up the infections. If you have an iota, like I know I had yeast infections. Research some labs that have good yeast infection tests. I love Microgen DX. We'll put that in show notes. I love Microgen GNDX. They test for over 50,000 different types of fungal, yeast, and bacterial species. This is for your health. This is for your brain. I'm so conscious of people who get dementia and Alzheimer's. I'm not saying pneumonia causes it. I'm saying that these are byproducts in my opinion.

I get so sad when I see people come in and they have loved ones that lost their memory. Even individuals can't have short-term memory issues. The real notion is you don't want these things to turn into something more harsh. Memory loss. I could not imagine my life if I ever lost my memory and I couldn't remember who my loved ones were. And I'm not trying to be negative. I'm just being real about this.

It is very good for anybody that's finding any type of memory issues or any type of problems with their mentality is to look in for any type of infection that frames the brain. Lyme disease, Babesia, malaria, chronic strep, any infection that's a hemolytic infection, hemolytic lysis, killing off blood cells, anything that attacks the brain tissue. Research those, get microgen DX or get Lyme disease testing. Find those out.

Start taking the supplements I talked about. Start flushing out using homeopathics. You can find a good practitioner that incorporates these. But if you research and listen to this podcast, research on your own. But you have to look back in your history and find out what you chronically had. Then get tested for it. Then starting using herbs, vitamins and minerals and homeopathics to help start cleaning them out. Eventually, you want to try to find somebody in the field that sees eye to eye with you and sees you in this journey.

I know it takes a while to find those kind of individuals, those type of practitioners, but it's possible. Research these things. Check them out. Let me know what you think about ammonia. Ammonia, mental fatigue, mental fog is not just that. It could lead to stronger problems such as dementia. And in my opinion, things like Alzheimer, MS could associate with them, could be a byproduct of them and make it harder for you to handle those kind of conditions. All right, guys.

Hope you have a blessed day. I hope this was informative. And if you guys want any extra, you know, tips about some of the deeper things I talk about within the membership, I'm going to do another video. It's a little deeper dive, nothing too extreme, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about the extreme things that go on with Alzheimer's and dementia that's associated with ammonia. So if you guys want to, you can check it out in the membership. We'll put the link in the podcast notes below.

And guys, I really appreciate all of you so much. I hope that you guys have a blessed day. Remember, like and subscribe. Send this podcast to somebody that you know that may have memory issues or are fighting some heavy mental fatigue such as dementia or brain or memory loss. Okay? Until next time, from all of us here at the NHL Podcast, thank you so much. Have a blessed day. Take it easy.

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Thank you for joining us today on the Ancient Health Podcast. We hope you've gained valuable insights into the harmony between Eastern and Western medicine. If you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, share, and leave us a review.

Remember, true health is about balance, mind, body, and spirit. So stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore how ancient wisdom and modern science can work together to help you thrive. Here's to your health, balance, and well-being. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and I look forward to our next episode together.