Here are five signs that your brain might need more vitamin C or copper. Hi. I’m Dr. Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this is Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name the game is “Details?
Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!” And here are five signs that your brain might just be hungry for more vitamin C and copper. In the brain there is a class of neurotransmitters called neuropeptides, and 50% of all neuropeptides rely on the same two enzymes for their biological activity. Those enzymes depend on vitamin C and copper.
They are also zinc-dependent. I suspect that zinc deficiency is a less common cause of having low activity of these enzymes and that other symptoms of zinc deficiency are much more prominent, but we should add zinc to the trio of nutrients that might be involved here. And when we look at what are the major things that these enzymes are involved in controlling, we see five things that stand out. Number one, they control the pigment in your skin and hair. So, greying of hair may be sign number one of what we might call low vitamin C copper brain syndrome.
Number two is they control your appetite. Eating too much might be the second sign of the syndrome. Number three, low affectionate response to intimacy. The love chemical oxytocin is one of the ones that falls into this category, and that’s what makes you respond to physical intimacy from anywhere from petting your dog to hugging to nursing a baby to sex. If that physical intimacy is not creating the affectionate bonding response as well as it should, that might be the third symptom of this syndrome.
Number four, you pee too much A few episodes ago, I talked about ways to help make antidiuretic hormone, ADH, at night to prevent you from waking up to pee. That chemical is another one in this category. And then number five, low thyroid and low adrenal health. The combination of low thyroid and low adrenal is very good at causing brain fog. And then low gonadal hormones particularly could lead to low libido, and probably brain fog is all the more likely if you have low levels of all these hormones.
So, the brain fog and low libido could indicate that trio of low thyroid, low adrenal, low gonadal hormones.
And when you take all these together when they occur in this cluster, that really sounds like low vitamin C low copper brain syndrome, which is not a medical term. It’s something that I invented based on the cluster of things that these hormones that depend on those nutrients do. So, what I would do is, if you have this cluster of symptoms, play around with vitamin C supplementation. Vitamin C supplementation is very safe.
There is a chance that it can raise oxalates in some people. It can cause diarrhea at too high of a dose. But it’s completely plausible that you might need higher vitamin C levels to get vitamin C into the brain if there’s some impairment in your transport activity. Maybe your vitamin C in your diet is normal, but just not enough of it is getting into the brain. Who knows?
Play around with vitamin C supplementation. See if it helps. I wouldn’t play around with high-dose copper supplementation. I would test your copper status, and I would try to normalize it.
And I will link in the description to episodes I’ve done on copper, and of course, Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet is something that would be worth managing copper, and vitamin C, and zinc with.
And if you don’t have a copy of that, you can get it at chrismasterjohnphd.com/cheatsheet, and you can use the code LITE5, LITE and the number 5, LITE5 to get 5 dollars off on that. So, look at these nutrients. Play around with supplements, play around with the foods, listen to the other material that I put in the description here, and see if any of these things resolve, and let me know what you think once you’ve tried Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite,.