Protecting Your Brain - Quercetin, Toxins & Inflammation

Protecting Your Brain- Quercetin, Toxins & Inflammation
Dr. Michael Ruscio

“Hi this is Dr. Ruscio and I wanted to talk with you briefly about the toxin PCB and if that toxin could be damaging your brain. Now PCBs have been proven to cause cancer, brain damage, and mutations. PCBs are a family of toxins that because of this have been banned. They were banned in 1979.

They were used in a lot of manufacturing, heating, cooling, PVC pipe, piping, as a plasticizer for certain paints and because of their wide spread use they were able to infiltrate a lot of the environment and to this day still cause a lot of environmental pollution. They still contaminate our water, our oceans, and our soil so people are still being exposed to PCB so doing whatever you can do to limit the damage associated with this exposure can be helpful.

Now, a group or researchers asked the question “Could we do something to protect from exposure to PCBs?”  They took a group of rats, and they injected some rats with PCB, and then some rats with PCB and an antioxidant called quercetin. What they found was that the rats that were injected with the toxin PCB and the quercetin actually had a relative decrease in brain inflammation.

So essentially what these researchers found was that the antioxidant quercetin can help protect your brain from the damage and inflammation that can occur from exposure to PCB which we’re all exposed to in varying levels. Quercetin is an antioxidant found in apples, onions, citrus fruits, parsley, red wine, tea, just to name a few, so a healthy diet is certainly going to be the foundation of achieving this.

Now, I myself take a broad spectrum antioxidant supplement that contains quercetin in it, because I want my brain to be functioning for as long as I can. I try to take extra steps to protect myself, my brain specifically, from all the environmental toxins that unfortunately we’re exposed to every day. So the take home is a diet high in antioxidants and also maybe some additional supplementation with antioxidants can help protect your valuable, precious brain tissue from the inflammation that can be caused by some of the toxins that we’re all exposed to.

This is Dr. Ruscio, I hope you found this helpful.”

Quercetin & Brain Inflammation Study