Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome back to our best of the vlog series. In this vlog, this fan favorite called, "Once a Pickle, Always a Pickle," We address that age old question. Is it true that once an alcoholic always an alcoholic? That if you have food addiction and you start doing Bright Line Eating® and give up sugar and flour, does that really mean that you won't ever be able to eat sugar and flour again? That sounds awful, right? But is it? Check out this week's vlog, Once a Pickle, Always a Pickle, and find out for yourself.
I want to share with you a question that a woman named Maggie sent in. She actually wrote this in asking me to type a response to her, and I thought it was such a good question that I wanted to share it with you and share my answer with you, because I thought other people might have this question too. Maggie writes, "In a recent vlog, you spoke about the brain is a cucumber becoming pickled and never being able to return to a cucumber, and it's the only thing I've ever heard you say. That doesn't make sense to me. What about neuroplasticity and the healing powers of Mother Nature? Dr. Dale Bresin, and I don't know if that is so I might be mispronouncing his name, sorry, but Dr. Dale Bresin has research showing Alzheimer's in remission, mainly through diet. There are breakthroughs in treating ADHD, depression, autism, OCD, etc. Nobody is saying your brain is screwed up and there's nothing that can be done. What is the part of the brain that becomes hopelessly pickled?" Maggie, great question, Maggie.
First of all, a little caveat. I am not an expert on healing degenerative conditions through diet or whatever. For example, I don't know exactly what the changes are in the brain that reverses or halts the progress of Alzheimer's disease when you change your diet. I know a little bit about Alzheimer's disease, the plaques and the neurofibrillary tangles and things like that. I know a little bit about it, but I do know enough that I can answer your question. Here's the deal.
There's two types of plasticity involved. When neuroscientists talk about neuroplasticity, what they primarily mean is the growing of new synapses between neurons and the strengthening or weakening of old synapses based on experience. For example, there's this classic old study of taxi drivers in London learning to drive a taxi cab. London looks like a pot of spaghetti that's been dumped out. If you look at a map, it's like really, really, really confusing stuff, and the British are pretty particular that their cab drivers know where they're going. You can't just decide to be a cab driver in London. It's not like you could just say, "Oh, I'm from wherever"? the United States, Pakistan, wherever, and "Oh, I'm just going to be a cab driver." You have to take a test. Most people study for this test like people in America study for the bar exam if they want to be a lawyer. It's a test that you study for a year or two full-time to take.
So, researchers at the University College London long time ago, this is one of the seminal original studies demonstrating neuroplasticity. They took a look at the part of the brain that governs sort of spatial organization and spatial reading in people before they studied for this test. And after and afterwards, that part of the brain showed tremendous growth, increased complexity development. Basically, the neurons in that part of the brain had, the neurons themselves hadn't proliferated, but the number of synapses and the strength of synapses in that area had proliferated as the result of the studying that had happened over the course of that year. That's typically what's meant by neuroplasticity. These brain changes through learning, through responding to the environment in different ways. They don't ever completely go away. They just don't. They don't ever completely go away. Let's take Pavlov's dog for a second.
So, Pavlov's dog, you ring a bell and you present meat. I mean, I think it was meat powder, but whatever, you present food and over time the dog learns that the sound of that bell means the food's coming. So, all you got to do is ring the bell and they start to salivate. That's Pavlov's dog. That's the deal. Ring the bell. Salivate. Now you can make that response go away. You can make it go extinct. All you got to do is give my daughter Maya, who's six that bell for a couple of days in the presence of those dogs, and she'll run around ringing that bell all day long and pretty soon the dogs will learn that the gig is up, that there's no food coming. That bell does not predict food reward like it used to, and they will now stop salivating to the bell. You've just made the behavior go extinct.
Let's imagine that when we were first training up those dogs, it took say 30 pairings of the bell and the food to teach them to salivate in the first place. All right? Now, if I grab the bell away from Maya, I kick her out of the house, I get the dog, I ring the bell, the dog doesn't salivate. Maya's just made that behavior go extinct. Fine. I take the bell and some food, I ring the bell, and I pair the bell with food again, the dog eats the food, and later that day I do it again. I ring the bell and I pair it with food. Boom. That dog will now salivate again to the bell as readily and strongly and robustly as it did before Maya made the response go extinct. In other words, the first time it trained the dog, it took 30 pairings of the bell and the food to make it a robust response. Afterwards, it took two pairings. Do you see what I'm saying? 30. And then two. What that means is that the part of the brain that learned that association between the food and the bell, it still knew it. The response wasn't there anymore, but underlying the brain's networks of connections were still there. Okay? So yes, neuroplasticity happens like Maya grabs the bell and now there's a whole different thing that's happening. The behavior has gone extinct, but underneath that, the behavior was still there. The brain still knew the behavior.
So, with food addiction, what happens is a whole set of underlying cue response behaviors happens. A whole set of dopamine downregulation, and all this stuff happens. What happens is once it's happened to the brain, given the same set of conditions, it comes back like that. The other analogy that I like to use is a dry riverbed. It takes millennia for a river to groove a riverbed. Millennia. Think the Grand Canyon. It takes millennia for water over dry land to groove a riverbed. It takes a long time, but if you divert that water to a different pathway, what you've got still is a dry river bed, then all you got to do is let a little water through and you got a river again. It doesn't take much after the river bed is already formed to have a river again, if you've got a dry river bed, that is pretty much the best analogy to what happens in our brain. If you've developed the behaviors and the brain organization and response and chemistry and stuff, you want to know the parts of the brain. We're probably talking about ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and orbital frontal cortex. I don't know if that means anything to you, but these are probably the parts of the brain that we're talking about. You asked for the parts. So, I'm giving you the parts. Once those parts of the brain have developed the suite of characteristics of someone who responds to food in an addictive manner, you can start doing Bright line Eating, respond to food normally, not be upset. Like for example, me. I can serve cupcakes at my kids' birthday party and get frosting all over my hands and not even be tempted to lick my fingers. It's like I have paint on my hands. The stuff doesn't trigger me at all. I just go wash my hands at the earliest opera. Even if I'm outside at a picnic on a field and there's no bathroom around, I still won't lick my fingers. It's like I have paint on my fingers. I'll get a napkin if I can find one. If not, I'll just walk around like this until I can find a place to get this frosting off my fingers. The cupcakes don't bother me. The frosting doesn't bother me. I respond to someone who is not addicted to that food. That's my response today. But I have the brain of a food addict. So, if I eat any of that frosting, if I allow water back down that river, I am back to full blown food addiction in a hot second. Later that night, you would have to have a loaded gun, and even then, I'm not sure you could keep me away from the convenience store where I'm going to go buy a pint of ice cream. Seriously.
So, I have the brain of a food addict, but I can respond in the world like someone who doesn't. This is a very different thing than, for example, reversing Alzheimer's through diet. Alzheimer's is a chronic degenerative brain condition that is exacerbated in a profound way through bad diet. And reversing the diet is going to do things like balance out the Omega-3 Omega-6 ratios. It's going to reduce inflammation as you start eating whole real foods. It's going to help the brain not advance down the path of a chronic degenerative disease. That's not the same thing as putting to sleep the cue response behaviors of a previously learned response.
I hope that makes sense. I'm super sorry that unfortunately, once the brain goes from cucumber to pickle, there's no going back. But there's a mountain of research to support this. I'll give you another example. Baby is born in France by two years old, is pretty darn fluent in French, although not perfectly, is adopted by American parents at the age of two moves to America, never hears another word of French until the age of 80, at which point she moves to Paris and is fluent in French within months, like just boom with no accent, no anything, and learns French to a proficiency that someone who'd been studying the language for five or 10 years as a non-native speaker could not attain for two years. She learned French as a baby, never heard it again, and now all of a sudden, boom, perfectly fluent in a short period of time. That French in a 78 year hibernation period, that learning, those synapses were still there. They were dormant. They weren't helping at all, but they were there. That's exactly what happens to our food addiction. That's why once you've been pickled, you can't go back to a cucumber because it's a learning process that the brain retains and never lets go of it. It's always lying there in remission, like a dry river bed. All you got to do is put a little water through that channel and you're back to a full-blown river.
I know the cucumber pickle analogy really resonated with a lot of people. I saw a lot of people in Bright lifers and in the Boot Camp Facebook houses posting about it and stuff. It is a robust analogy. It is actually how the brain works. We start out as cucumbers. Some brains are more predisposed to becoming pickles than others. Some brains can never be pickled in the food addiction way. Not really. Other brains are just right for it. Just give them enough Ben and Jerry's, McDonald's right there, so if you have one of those brains and you think you're a pickle, unfortunately what it means is that for the rest of your life, forever and ever, forever and ever and ever, you are going to have to be way more vigilant around food than someone who never had that problem in the first place. No matter how peaceful you feel around food, doing Bright Line Eating, no matter how easy it feels, all of the old bad stuff is waiting for you. The moment you go back to any of your old eating behaviors, foods of the past, lifestyles, any of that, you bring it back and it's right back there. That's just the way the brain works, and I'm so sorry to say that because to be honest, I wish it weren't true as a pickle. I'm telling you, I wish there were a way to make a pickle a cucumber again, but there isn't. In the meantime, we have Bright Line Eating. So, Maggie, I hope that helps answer your question. You can see why I wanted to answer it in a vlog, because that would've been a lot of typing if I'd have tried to email you back, and I hope other people enjoyed the question too. That's the weekly vlog. I'll see you next week.
