9 Key Causes of Brain Fog and Memory Loss

January 26, 2018

Do you often forget people’s names or why you went into the next room? Is it becoming more difficult to concentrate and focus at work? Dr. Hotze reveals 9 key causes of brain fog and memory loss.

Podcast Highlights 

2:18: Today we’re going to talk about loss of mental sharpness, mental acuity, which most commonly in lay terms, I hear it particularly from women, they go “I have brain fog.”

10:41: Thyroid is so critical because it enables the cells’ mitochondria, the power plants within the cells, it activates them so they can produce energy.

11:23:  Other things that can cause it, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone deficiency will adversely affect your body’s ability to utilize the thyroid hormones.

12:11: The toxins that are produced by the yeast can cause headaches, can cause brain fog, loss of mental acuity, lack of concentration.

12:23:  If you’re on a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet, you’re going to have sugar highs and sugar lows, and that adversely affects your ability to focus and think clearly.

13:01: Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can also cause problems with brain fog.

14:00: Your brain’s made up of cholesterol and fatty acids, primarily, 90%. You need to have good cholesterol levels so the brain functions well. That’s why statin drugs, there’s a product statin drugs will suck cholesterol out of your body to of your brain, and it causes people to get global amnesia and a host of cognitive problems.

14:28: The prescription drugs like the statin drugs, anti-anxiety medication, sleep medications, antihistamines, antidepressants, and beta blockers that they use for blood pressure, narcotic painkillers, and muscle relaxers, all these can have an adverse effect on your ability to focus and think clearly.

15:00:  Smoking, of course, is a problem because you breathe in all kinds of chemicals in the smoke, and those are highly toxic to the body, and they also decrease you’re amount of oxygen that you get, and that adversely affects your ability to think.

15:13: Artificial sweeteners, the yellow and the pink packs and the blue packs, the Splenda and the NutraSweet, and the Equal. Splenda contains sucralose, which is a chlorinated hydrocarbon, which is highly toxic. Aspartame is in NutraSweet and Equal, and it’s a neurotoxic substance as well. Both these things can have tremendous adverse effects on your brain cells and your ability to focus and think

Podcast Transcription

Stacey: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. This is Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Hey, everybody needs a health coach, and everybody needs to hear the podcast that we have, so I just want to remind everybody to go to HotzePodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E Podcast dot com.

I was also reminded that if you’re watching us on YouTube, you can just click right there to come subscribe, it is so easy.

Interesting topic today. It’s one that a lot of people suffer from, the where-am-I, what-was-I-doing, where-was-I-headed, it’s called brain fog and memory loss.

While we kind of make fun of it a little bit, you wander into a room, you’re like I know there was a reason why I was walking in here, but I forget, that’s kind of funny, but it’s not so funny if you have more serious conditions where you forget how to drive home, maybe, or other issues like that, that are really cutting into the quality of your life, and making you have concern.

Dr. Hotze, maybe you can speak a little bit to the audience about brain fog and memory loss.

Dr. Hotze: Right. I want to reiterate and underscore what you said earlier, Stacey. I believe that everybody needs a health coach. You need a doctor and a staff of professionals who will coach you onto a path of health and wellness naturally, without using pharmaceutical drugs, so that as you mature and age you feel healthy and well, you’re full of enthusiasm, you’ve got vim and vigor, you got get-up-and-go, you’re optimistic about life, and enjoying life. If you’re going to be alive, you might as well be alive, right? Does that make sense?

Stacey: It makes sense.

Dr. Hotze: Instead of being part of the walking wounded, or the nearly dead, my goodness, linger for 20-30 years, and have a poor quality of life.

Today we’re going to talk about loss of mental sharpness, mental acuity, which most commonly in lay terms, I hear it particularly from women, they go “I have brain fog.”

You can imagine a fog, all of us can think of a foggy day, and how you can hardly see the buildings or the cars and the surroundings. That’s brain fog. You can imagine having that fog in your brain, and some of you, probably many of you, have experienced this in brain fog.

We see it commonly in women, particularly as they march through their menstrual life as their hormones become imbalanced and decline. That’s a common feature and a complaint that I see in so many individuals. It’s the lack of mental clarity, mental sharpness, and memory loss, which they describe as brain fog.

I’m sure there have been times, as Stacey has discussed, where you’ve wanted to introduce a friend to another friend, and you can’t remember their name, and you’re grasping.

Stacey: Awkward.

Dr. Hotze: You know where they live, you know what color their car is, but you just can’t get their name out. Or you’ve gone into room, you had something to do, you walk in the room and just go like “What was I doing?”, so you walk out, and enter it again, hoping it will come back and click where exactly, what you were doing. Or maybe you’re balancing a checkbook, and you have a hard time working with the figures.

Terri’s Story: Misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s

I had a gal that was a guest of ours years ago, by the name of Terri Jaggers. Terri, and I’m not saying anything out of school because Terri’s been on numerous of our videos, and Terri was a wonderful gymnastic coach, and had a gymnastic team that won nationwide awards. That was what she did for a living, she had this gymnastic school. When she got into her forties, she was having problems balancing her checkbook, she was having problems remembering what room was in what room, and the kids’ names, and she was really concerned that her mental status was declining.

A little more history on her, she had had numerous miscarriages, was unable to conceive as well, and she was in her forties. She’s a wonderful woman, she and her husband adopted a lot of children, are big into adoption, and they’re wonderful, wonderful folks, but she was having problems, and her family was concerned about her, so they took her down to Baylor College of Medicine, to the Alzheimer’s Center, and they did studies on her, and they said she has early Alzheimer’s, and we’re going to need to put her on all these drugs.

Terri said she went home, and she prayed, you know, “Lord, help me, I don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t want to have to take all these drugs, can you help me”. I happened to have a TV ad that popped up, and she went oh, my goodness, right after she had prayed that morning, there it is on the TV, she called up, and she came out and described her problem. She was fatigued. Her mental sharpness was shot, it was dull, as a dull as an old knife. She had brain fog, couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t sleep, had body aches and pains, couldn’t function, was unable to get pregnant and carry pregnancies to term. She just felt terrible. We evaluated her, and she had all the classical symptoms of hypothyroidism, many of them. Plus, at her age she had some hormonal imbalances.

What we did was we balanced out her hormones, started her on some natural thyroid, got her on some vitamins and minerals, got her on a good eating program, and then an exercise program. That’s basically our regimen. Good healthy paleo eating program. For many people we’d even recommend ketogenic, which is like paleo on steroids, a higher fat content diet with vegetables and meats, that’s the paleo diet, more fats mean you’re going to be more on a ketogenic diet so you’re not burning sugar but you’re burning your fat, is producing the energy within the power plants within the cells.

Second thing we do is we replenish the hormones because the hormones, particularly thyroid, activate the power plants within your cells. The third thing we do is use vitamins and minerals and nutrients to help you detoxify. When you’re toxic, your power plants in your cells are sick, and they can’t produce enough energy. Besides, those vitamins and minerals are also needed to activate and to be utilized by your power plants in order to produce energy that’s needed for the biochemical processes in the cells.

Then exercise is important because it stimulates the mitochondria, your power plants, to produce energy. It’s a simple four-point regimen that we have people on. That’s what we put Terri on, and she did remarkable. As a matter of fact…

Stacey: How remarkable?

Dr. Hotze: I’m going to ask the president of our company to come in, and I’m going to show you a picture. I want you to see a picture of this.

Stacey: This is amazing.

Dr. Hotze: Anyway, she started to feel so well, and lost weight, trimmed down, she looked like a million dollars, and she was 45-years-old. One of her daughters said, “Mom,” this is an adopted daughter, “Mom, why don’t you run for Mrs. Texas?” She’s 45, okay, right, she’s running against 25 and 30 year-old women, and guess what, that year that she came in and got on the program, she was elected Mrs. Texas. Two years later, she was at 47, in the Mrs. USA contest, and she won that.

Stacey: That’s incredible.

Dr. Hotze: She went back to law school, and this woman has done tremendous, and she’s teaching one of the local colleges, and she has done absolutely fantastic, but had she stayed with her conventional physicians, they would have put her on a bunch of drugs, antidepressants, and then drugs for Alzheimer’s, none of which have proved to be effective whatsoever, and don’t change the course.

Betty’s Story – From Drooling and Medications to being Lucid and Sharp as a Tack

As a matter of fact, I remember I had a gal come into my office one time, her daughter brought her in, and I said “What happened to Betty?”  She was drooling, she couldn’t put two sentences together, she’d been a guest of ours for three or four years and had done well, but one of her friends had convinced her to go see her doctor because her doctor had helped her with her memory. Well, the doctor diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s, which she didn’t have, early Alzheimer’s, and she was about 65, and put her on a bunch of Alzheimer’s medication. I asked her daughter, “What in the world’s going on?” She told me the story. I said “let me see the drugs she’s on”, and she showed me. I said “do me a favor, take Betty off all those drugs, come back and see me in a week”.

The next week, Betty, who by the way is a very strong Baptist, and she goes all over the world teaching bible studies, came back in and she was as lucid as you or me. She was bright, sharp as a tack. That was several years ago. I had wondered, because I don’t see guests primarily, we have other providers that see our guests here. I guess I hadn’t seen Betty in two or three years, and one time I was coming back wondering what had happened to Betty Tapscott. I pulled into my parking place after lunch, and a car’s pulling away, and I look, and it’s Betty. I go Betty, what are you doing? She said I’m on my way to Romania, I’m doing bible studies over there.

Here’s a woman that had been diagnosed, like Terri Jaggers, with Alzheimer’s, and the doctors had wanted to put her on Alzheimer medication, and all she needed, the Alzheimer medication made Betty Tapscott terrible, where she couldn’t even put two words together, and Terri didn’t take it, both of them were on our health and wellness program, and they were sharp as a tack, bright, alert, and living full, rich lives.

Stacey: You know, Dr. Hotze, those are great stories. It’s also a bit terrifying because they were both misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and put on Alzheimer’s drugs, which begs the question if that happened with those two ladies, how many other people are being misdiagnosed that could be helped?

Dr. Hotze: With natural approaches to health.

Stacey: Absolutely.

Key Causes of Brain Fog and Memory Loss

Dr. Hotze: Here are some of the key causes of loss of mental sharpness and mental acuity:

1. Thyroid: We mentioned thyroid. Thyroid is so critical because it enables the cells’ mitochondria, the power plants within the cells, it activates them so they can produce energy. High energy production means you’re going to have a high voltage. You want to be a high voltage individual, not a low voltage individual. You want to be high voltage. You want to be a live wire, so to speak, not a slug. You want to be the live wire. You’ve heard people say look at that person, they’re a live wire. That really goes back to that energy production, our body produces electrical energy. You want to have a lot of electricity in your body, you want to have a high energy production so you’re full of voltage. That’s important. Thyroid does that.
2. Other things that can cause it, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone deficiency will adversely affect your body’s ability to utilize the thyroid hormones.
3. Yeast: If you have yeast in your system, if you’ve had recurrent sinus and bronchial infections, and you’ve taken antibiotics over time, that will kill normal healthy bacteria in the gut, and yeast overgrows. Women oftentimes will get female yeast infections, which can be cleared up, but you still have yeast in the colon, and that can cause what we call, what doctors refer to as irritable bowel syndrome, but it’s really a leaky gut syndrome where you get inflammation in the lining of the colon, and the food particles pass before they’re fully digested into the blood stream, and you begin to have reactions to it as well as some of the bacteria, and you begin to have reactions which can lead to autoimmune disease. The toxins that are produced by the yeast can cause headaches, can cause brain fog, loss of mental acuity, lack of concentration.
4. The other thing is poor diet. If you’re on a high sugar, high carbohydrate diet, you’re going to have sugar highs and sugar lows, and that adversely affects your ability to focus and think clearly.
5. Food allergies are another thing, very common, wheat, corn, eggs, milk, yeast, or soybean can cause a host of allergic reactions. They cause the release of histamine from your mass cells that line your mucosal membranes in your nose and down in your gastro and esophageal track, and the histamine is vasoactive and neuroactive, and so it can cause you to have problems with your ability to focus, to think clearly to maintain your attention span.
6. Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can also cause problems with brain fog. If you’re eating a poor diet, not getting proper vitamin and minerals, particularly fish oil is so very important. I take at least one to two tablespoons of cod liver oil every day, plus some additional fish oil, plus fish oil tablets. That oil contains two essential omega-3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA.

Dr. Hotze: DHA is Docosahexaenoic Acid, and EPA is Eicosapentaenoic Acid.  These are essential fatty acids that really are in your brain, and they allow your brain to properly function.  Your brain’s made up of cholesterol and fatty acids, primarily, 90%. You need to have good cholesterol levels so the brain functions well. That’s why statin drugs, there’s a product statin drugs will suck cholesterol out of your body to of your brain, and it causes people to get global amnesia and a host of cognitive problems. People that get on statin drugs, and now you can’t think clearly, you go to the doctor, and he says you have Alzheimer’s, you’re on Alzheimer’s drugs.

Stacey: Exactly.

Dr. Hotze: They just stack one drug on top of another, so the prescription drugs like the statin drugs, anti-anxiety medication, sleep medications, antihistamines, antidepressants, and beta blockers that they use for blood pressure, narcotic painkillers, and muscle relaxers, all these can have an adverse effect on your ability to focus and think clearly.

7. Physical inactivity of course, if you’re not physically active you don’t get good circulation. I always recommend that when we say physically active I’m not talking about running a marathon, just get out and walk a couple of miles every day.
8. Smoking, of course, is a problem because you breathe in all kinds of chemicals in the smoke, and those are highly toxic to the body, and they also decrease you’re amount of oxygen that you get, and that adversely effects your ability to think.
9. Finally, artificial sweeteners, the yellow and the pink packs and the blue packs, the Splenda and the NutraSweet, and the Equal. Splenda contains sucralose, which is a chlorinated hydrocarbon, which is highly toxic. Aspartame is in NutraSweet and Equal, and it’s a neurotoxic substance as well. Both these things can have tremendous adverse effects on your brain cells and your ability to focus and think.

Those are some of the key causes of brain fog and lack of mental sharpness and mental acuity, and lack of the ability to concentrate and really focus. If you’re having these problems, you need to address them at the root cause, and not let some doctor put you on a host of pharmaceutical medications which in and of themselves are toxic and can further complicate your problems.

Stacey: Absolutely, and a great way to end this podcast is with that wonderful photo of Terri Jaggers, as promised.

Dr. Hotze: Look at this. That’s Terri Jaggers at 45 years of age, and she won the Mrs. Texas contest, and then two years later, Mrs. USA. She’s drop-dead gorgeous, there, isn’t she?

Stacey: Absolutely.

Dr. Hotze: And she was told she had Alzheimer’s disease, and was going to have to be on medication, never be able to work again. That’s the difference, and that’s what happened to Terri Jaggers. It could happen to you. It’s a common occurrence here at the Health & Wellness Center, where we help people who are having significant health problems due to aging and the decline of their hormones and poor eating habits. It effects the quality of their life adversely, so they end up going to see a conventional doctor, who doesn’t treat the underlying cause, but treats the symptoms with a host of prescription medications, and when we get them up on our program we help them naturally obtain and maintain health and wellness without using prescription drugs so they have a better quality of life, so really that they get their lives back.

Stacey: That’s our mission. That is absolutely our mission, and we’ve seen that happen hundreds of thousands of times, and we’d love to be able to serve you as well. If you have been suffering from those symptoms, and you want to do a 180 and take charge of your health naturally, then give us a call at 281-698-8698. That’s 281-698-8698, because everybody deserves to have a health coach. Thank you for joining us today here at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

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Tags: brain fog, brain fog causes, causes of brain fog, memory loss

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