I am thrilled to introduce you to my beautiful wife, Tana. When you hear her incredible story, I know that you will LOVE her. Without giving too much away, her doctors told her that she had been dealt a bad genetic hand and had to accept taking multiple medications. As a health warrior, she insisted that there had to be a better way! One of her doctors actually told her that she was in denial and should see a psychiatrist. She wants me to tell you “that is NOT how we met.” Get to know Tana by clicking the play button below.
You can listen to and download this mp3 for free!
What an inspiration! Being sick motivated her to get well. Together with her nursing experience and training in health and nutrition, she has spent over the last 10 years healing herself and helping patients at the Amen Clinics. She was raised in a culture of illness, but now she is determined to leave a legacy of health. Her mission is to help YOU realize that your history is NOT your destiny.
Tana wants to teach you how to eat like THE OMNIVORE YOU ARE! Will you join us? Tune in each week on YouTube for our Change Your Brain Change Your Life show and start learning to reverse illness and feel amazing.
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Dr. Amen: Hi, I’m Dr. Daniel Amen.
Tana: And I’m Tana Amen. Welcome to Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.
Dr. Amen: You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better and we can prove it. In this episode, I’m actually going to introduce you to Tana. Most people, they see her and they go, “Oh, she’s beautiful. What would she know about being sick? How could she help me?” And this is one very special woman that not only did I fall in love with her because she’s beautiful and she’s smart, she has just a huge heart to help people and so, can you begin to share really why you care about the brain, why you care about health and why you care about helping other people?
Tana: Yeah, I can. Well actually, usually I like to start with a little story because it’s an interesting story. It’s about a sick little girl who really wanted to be a doctor, two gorillas, bible-believing churches and a group of drug addicts and criminals. But what’s interesting is these stories all come together and I use these stories to teach people how to become a warrior for their own health. So, you know, you might not know by looking at me today because I am healthy. The healthiest I’ve ever been but I was that sick little girl and my life was filled with a lot of trauma and drama. So you know …
Dr. Amen: A lot of drama.
Tana: Yeah, lots of drama. And in fact when I was 4 years old, I still remember the day that my uncle was murdered in a drug deal gone horribly wrong, and you know, I had a single working mother who …
Dr. Amen: who worked three jobs.
Tana: Three jobs to put food on the table, and it was tough. Times were tough. I grew up very poor but I was also sick, a lot. So, in the medical field we have something that we call, we have a term we use for people who come in and out a lot in the hospital, we call them ‘frequent fliers’. Well, I was a frequent flier. I earned my miles the hard way. So, I end up with lower GIs by the time I was 4 years old; laundry list of health issues; first surgery when I was nine.
Dr. Amen: And it’s no sort of coincidence that if you end, if you have severe emotional trauma that that then begins to affect your GI system, your immune system and so on.
Tana: Right. The way that I described it …
Dr. Amen: When we first met and I sort of put that …
Tana: I thought it was nonsense. But see, I learned to survive by becoming tough but at least I thought. Okay. So I thought I was surviving by being tough and building this wall. And as I became more savvy and I started to realize, “Oh maybe there’s a lot of connection to what’s going on, you know, what was happening in my life and how it was manifesting itself.” So I like to describe it like there was this white tiger, hiding around every corner and you never really knew when something bad, it was going to jump up and bite you. So there was this chronic stress. You know, I was one of those kids that came home and locked myself in because we can’t afford a babysitter. So I would soothe my stress with, you know, my best friends – the tiger, the captain, the leprechaun and a few others thrown in for good measure, and they really, you know, I really didn’t know anything about nutrition and it wasn’t for lack of love. It was for lack of knowledge and lack of, you know, we didn’t know what we were doing and we didn’t have a lot of money and so I just grew up eating whatever was there. But that chronic stress and the really low quality food, it attacked my immune system. So I was sick a lot. And then a few years later, my grandmother came to live with us. It wasn’t so that she could help take care of me. In fact, it was so that I could help take care of her. She had diabetes and her diabetes had become unmanageable. So she actually went legally blind and by the time I was eleven, I was giving her insulin shots, which is really scary for a kid because I remember practicing on oranges and being told that if I gave her the wrong dose I could make her really sick or you know …
Dr. Amen: kill her.
Tana: Yeah, I could kill her and so that was a lot of responsibility for a kid but when you grow up poor, you grow up fast, and you just put on your game face and you do what you have to do. But I spent so much time around doctors when I was a kid that I really wanted to be one. And, unfortunately, life had a different plan for me. In my early twenties, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and it was just one of many things that had happened but I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer that had been there for a long time and metastasized so it came back three times. So, what would have been a fairly simple procedure turned into not such a simple procedure and …
Dr. Amen: Right. They told you that, ‘Oh, this is a treatable cancer. There’s a high survival rate and …’
Tana: Well, fortunately it is a slow growing cancer but when it comes back three times, it changes the game a little bit. So, yeah, so it changed my plans for medical school, and in fact I became very depressed.
Dr. Amen: Which in part is when you don’t have thyroid because, you know, when you have thyroid cancer, you have to kill your thyroid gland.
Tana: And back then they would, you would go a couple months, 2-3 months with no thyroid in your system before they would give you your radiation treatment.
Dr. Amen: which is why it’s important to get your thyroid checked and always have it optimized because without it being right, your brain is not right.
Tana: Right. But at one point I was so sick that I was literally on nine medications but a lot of the medications I was taking were to manage the side effects of other medications. Now to me this seemed crazy. It was very frustrating and I remember going to the doctor and at one point destroying a line and going, ‘I can’t do this.’ The quality of life is terrible and so I was taking, you know, medications to go to sleep at night, to wake up through the day, to you know to manage the heart rate, you know, I was on heart medication. It was just crazy. So, I went to the doctor and I told him like there’s got to be a better way. I cannot do this and this was a huge turning point in my life because he told me that I was in denial. He told me that it was genetic, that I should be grateful for the medications that I have available to me. Now I want to be very clear. I am grateful for the medications that I have available to me. I’m a nurse. I get it. If I go into a trauma unit, I don’t want someone offering me willow bark. Okay. I understand. There’s a time and a place for medications and I’m grateful. But I am against the indiscriminate use of them without addressing lifestyle and just continuing to put me on more and more medications.
Dr. Amen: And this guy, because I went to some of her appointments, with their candies in the waiting room, cookies are in the waiting room. And I walked in the first time and I’m like, ‘Oh, we should leave because it doesn’t fit.
Tana: Yeah, for Endocrinologist who deals with diabetes.
Dr. Amen: I’m like and it’s just crazy disconnection between medicine and nutrition. It’s like why aren’t they synonymous.
Tana: Because most doctors get like 16 hours of nutrition. They’re just not connected. They treat illness. They don’t work on wellness.
Dr. Amen: It’s a little crazy and then what did they tell you?
Tana: So he told me I was in denial and that I, maybe I should see someone to help me learn to accept it and I looked to him and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You know, like a psychiatrist.” That’s when I almost fell out of my chair. So I guess we should clarify.
Dr. Amen: It’s not how we met.
Tana: It’s not how we met. Yes I agree. I probably need a psychiatrist. I own it. But, hey I recommend him. I highly recommend him but that’s not how we met. But that was a really hard time and it was a big turning point because it’s when I really started digging in myself. Now if you know anything about me I’m not one to really talk about my own story a lot. At least back then, I wasn’t. It was really hard for me to do that. It took me a lot of years to build this wall. So, you know, if I was going to be …
Dr. Amen: I’m like tip in a way out of her head. I mean people have to hear your story because no one can relate to, you know, just a beautiful woman. Nobody can relate to that but when you really see what’s underneath that – the pain, the struggle, the hardship – well now people can relate.
Tana: Yeah. First time I was speaking and a woman said to me. She raised her hand, she said, “How would you know what I’m going through? You have no idea. Look at you.” And I went, “Whoa!” And that’s when you told me you’re going to have to start sharing your story, which is not an easy thing to do. So, but little by little I realized that it really does help people. If it helps anybody go, ‘Hey, if you can do, maybe there’s an answer. Maybe there’s a way then I’m willing to …
Dr. Amen: Well, that’s how you actually become more real to the people in your life. So many of us want to just present a perfect face and, you know, a long time ago I realized but then nobody can relate to me. So if you’ve read most in my books, you know, I talked about all the craziness in myself and in my family. Now, I get to share her craziness with you too.
Tana: So, like I said I did grow up with a lot of drama but it started actually way back. So when I was 15 years old actually, there was another interesting thing that happened. I was 15 years old and I was actually walking to high school and a guy grabbed me and he dragged me down an alley and he nearly raped me. It was a big struggle. It was intense. I fought really hard. I got away from him and I decided then, I spent about a few days being scared and I don’t like being scared. It’s really not comfortable for me to be, feel like a victim or to feel scared. And so I’ll do almost anything to get out of that mode. And so I decided then and there I was never going to be a victim and so I learned how to fight and I like this concept of being a warrior. So I learned how to fight but when I got cancer it was a totally different fight. You know, the attacker was inside my own cells and I felt completely betrayed. How do you fight back? I didn’t know what to fight back? I didn’t know what to do. And I got knocked to the mat more than once and it was hard. But, you know, I realized at some point I kicked back in. You know, that training, I used that as a metaphor for life. I use my martial arts training as a metaphor for life. You know the difference between a winner and a loser? The winner gets up one more time. You might fall down seven times but you get up eight times and you just have to keep doing it. And so I decided to take on that metaphor from martial arts in my everyday life and become a warrior for my health. So, you know these guys had to go. So they’re not my friends and, you know, it’s interesting because the food industry does not have your best interest at heart. They look almost enough, right? So they come marching into your living room anytime they want to. You just turn on your TV and they got a billion dollar bankroll. So this is …
Dr. Amen: And they’re going after your children.
Tana: This is war. So I think of this as war and we need warriors and when you eat foods that are, you know, highly processed, high glycemic, genetically modified, low fiber, you are at risk to become as sick or sicker than I was. So ideally for a lot of people who are sicker than I was. So you need to understand that food is medicine or it’s poison, and everything you put on the end of your fork matters. Sorry, I get a little round up. But it’s true.
Dr. Amen: She scares me too. People don’t know she has a black belt in Taekwondo. She’s getting ready to get her second plaque of belt in Kempo Karate. There’s absolutely no abuse happening in my house.
Tana: Always not to me. So, yeah. So you’ve got to be a warrior for your health and food is medicine or it’s poison. So, you remember those gorillas I talked about in the beginning? Well, their names are Bebac and Mokolo. I just think they’re so handsome. These guys are cool guys. They live at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. And they are what you call ‘warehouse gorillas.’ That’s what you call gorillas that live in zoos. And unlike wild gorillas, the number one cause of death for warehouse gorillas is heart disease. So, wild gorillas don’t die of chronic illnesses like diabetes or heart disease, they die of acute illnesses or they’re poached. So I got to interview the zoologists over the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
Dr. Amen: Yeah and that was really fun.
Tana: It was fun and I talked to them and they explained to me that you know heart disease is a number one cause of death. These guys were barely middle age. They were both dying of heart disease and it made them pause and start to think, why? So, zoologists, for a long time, have been perplexed by this. They didn’t really know why and the zoologists over the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo begin to suspect their diet because what a lot of people don’t know is that gorillas that are in zoos are most commonly fed nutritional cookies. You know it just seems a little crazy. Now it reminds me of children’s vitamins, right?
Dr. Amen: Right, vitamins and sugar. It’s like, “How does that make sense?”
Tana: And why are we doing that? But gorillas don’t eat grains, or starch or sugar in the wild, not at all. So they decided to start replacing their diet with their natural diet of wild grains, and nuts and seeds, flax, bamboo and berries and they scattered it around their habitat. So it used to she’ll gobbled up the cookies and now started taking them with their new diet about 75% of the date of forage for this new diet. And get this; their new diet was double the calories of the cookies. Double the calories of the cookies and within one year, both gorillas lost 65 pounds each eating double the calories because they were high quality calories. And we’re going to talk about that in another point. What that means. Does that mean you get to eat whatever you want? No. But we’ll talk about the calorie issue.
Dr. Amen: You want to be calorie-smart but, you know, when push comes to shove always the quality of the calories matter the most. But still you have to be smart …
Tana: Yeah we’ll talk about what that means.
Dr. Amen: and not eat too much. You know I think of calories sort of like money that you understand …
Tana: But it comes from different countries so the currency doesn’t have the same exchange rate. So …
Dr. Amen: You want to be smart but the most important thing is to think of the quality of the calories that you put into your body.
Tana: Right because you get a higher exchange rate for some. So that’s how I think of it. But anyway, so within one year the gorillas lost 65 pounds each but what’s really cool and important and this is so apropos is that Bebac reversed his heart disease and Mokolo radically slow the progression of his heart disease. Now another interesting thing …
Dr. Amen: So you are not stuck with what you have. You can make it better by making better choices.
Tana: Right and another interesting fact about warehouse gorillas. Almost all warehouse gorillas also suffer from these weird neurotic behaviors. They pull out their hair and they eat it and they regurgitate their food up to four times an hour and re-eat it. And Bebac and Mokolo were no exception.
Dr. Amen: And those behaviors are not seen in the wild.
Tana: Ever. They’re never seen in wild gorillas. And so that has totally perplexed the zoologist but after they changed their diet, those neurotic behaviors completely stopped in Bebac and Mokolo. So of course it made me think of, “Well, oh, my gosh! What about the patients we see that come in with similar behaviors?” I mean I get it. Correlation is not causation but they, we see these patients that come in with these similar behaviors of pulling up their hair, regurgitating their food, being anxious and neurotic and, you know, so were the gorillas being, were they crazy or were they being poisoned? But it reminds me of the sign we saw. Remember the sign we saw when we were in Monterey?
Dr. Amen: Right. This is on 17-Mile Drive in Pebble Beach. Tana and I were planting a brain healthy treatment center.
Tana: Right.
Dr. Amen: A drug treatment center in Monterey and we were teaching them to be brain healthy and we had a break so we took the drive in 17-Mile Drive and then we took a hike and I saw this sign and I had to take a picture of it because if you read it, it says, ‘Please don’t feed the animals. Bread and snacks are unhealthy for squirrels, deer and birds.’
Tana: And gorillas and children.
Dr. Amen: And humans. ‘Handouts can lead to malnutrition and starvation. The animals need their natural diets. Let them find their own foods,’ which totally reminded me of the gorillas but just down the street are all these fast food places, which is not our natural diet.
Tana: It’s not our natural diet.
Dr. Amen: If you actually go on the web, pick your favorite fast food meal and then look at the ingredients in it. It will horrify you. There’s many things you can’t even pronounce.
Tana: There are many of you who have grandparents that came from other countries. They would be horrified at the foods that we eat here. It’s crazy. So even still other countries oftentimes don’t eat what we eat but like Cookie Monster, Bebac and Mokolo were grumpy for about a week. They missed their sugar. They were literally irritable for about a week looking for it and you know what, they got over it and they got healthy. And so that’s really what we’re trying to teach you and help you with and we will hold your hand. You will get over it and you will get healthy and it takes three to seven days. So it’s not that hard. It’s a paradigm shift. They didn’t even miss the cookies after that but they got healthy. Heart disease went away. Their neurotic behaviors went away, you know, so it’s worth that little bit of effort. So we know that food is medicine or poison and yet people in hospitals, churches, I mean we see in churches, drug rehab centers, prisons. You know they’re fed the worse foods. You know you get to wonder why. It’s just, it’s crazy. These are the people who needed the most.
Dr. Amen: So as we think about your story that it really starts with your grandmother and her struggles.
Tana: Right.
Dr. Amen: And then your mother, having to work three jobs in order to survive. You grow up in chronic chaos and stress and you end up helping to take care of your grandmother. She’s probably one of the reasons you became a nurse.
Tana: Oh sure.
Dr. Amen: Most people don’t know that Tana is a nurse, surgical ICU nurse, which man highly skilled, took care of the worst patients in the hospital. I mean the patients – brain tumors, gunshot wounds to the head, so on.
Tana: Train wrecks like for real.
Dr. Amen: For real, train wrecks, right. But she trained and she worked at Loma Linda and Loma Linda is in San Bernardino County which has terrible smog but it’s actually part of the blue zones where people live longer than anywhere in the world.
Tana: Yeah. It was very interesting. So, those of you who don’t know Loma Linda, it’s a 7th Day Adventist Institution. Now I wasn’t raised 7th Day Adventist but I like going to college there very much. Their lifestyle is very wholesome. It’s very healthy. And I didn’t really understand it at first. You know I used to think, “Okay, it’s different, different from where I was used to.” I’d walked around the campus with my little thermos of coffee, you know. There’s no coffee anywhere around on campus or anywhere, nowhere. There was no meat. There was nothing. I mean they were just a very, they were very health conscious.
Dr. Amen: They were serious.
Tana: They were not kidding because it’s part of their religion.
Dr. Amen: They were serious and they also live longer.
Tana: Well, and it’s also about temperance. So it’s about their nutrition and exercise and living this life of temperance, meaning that you balance things so manage your stress and things like that. And so I used to it and here I am working on, you know, one of the toughest units in the hospital and I would occasionally get these patients in that were 98, 103 and they had no health history. No previous history of anything had ever gone wrong and they’ve got no lines on their face. They look peaceful, they’ve got no wrinkles and I’m like, “That is just so weird. It’s eerie.” It’s a little creepy, really. So they looked a little Stepford to me. I was like, “What’s going on? What are they drinking around here? And it turns out they were almost always the ones who are 7th Day Adventist that have been practicing this lifestyle most of their lives. And so no smoking …
Dr. Amen: So lifestyle can make a huge difference in how you look on the inside and the outside and how you feel.
Tana: And that’s when I begin to put it together. So, you know, when in fact, most of the patients we get in their thirties they just look like they have been beaten up but these patients that had a very different demeanor about them and just their health history and everything and I really began to put that together and go, “Ah-hah! Okay. I’m kinda smart. There’s got to be something to this.”
Dr. Amen: So if we go back because I want to make this connection. So the struggles with your grandmother, diabetes, obesity, mental health issues, your mom having to work so hard and we’ve talked about her ADD in some of our public television shows and it’s just hysterical about how and when we met and thinking about how that affects people in your family and then your struggles with cancer, some of the emotional issues that went along with that but ultimately it’s really not about your grandmother, your mother and you. It really becomes about Chloe who’s our eleven-year old …
Tana: Generations of me and you.
Dr. Amen: and our grandbabies. So talk about that a little bit.
Tana: What it really, I mean, so Epigenetic is a really interesting concept. So Epigenetic really means that it isn’t just about you. That you’re affected not just by your genes but you’re affected by your environment and what you put into your body. So.
Dr. Amen: So Epigenetic is an interesting term. So everybody understands genetics, you know, what I’ll inherit from my mom and dad, the color of my eyes, the fact that I don’t have much hair and tendencies toward heart disease, diabetes, and so on but really it’s just the last 20 years or so, we’ve been talking about it’s not just your genes.
Tana: Right.
Dr. Amen: That your habits turn on or off certain genes, so that’s what Epigenetic is.
Tana: And your environmental surroundings.
Dr. Amen: that habits and environment turn on or off our certain genes that make illnesses more or less likely not only in you …
Tana: You pass them on.
Dr. Amen: but in generations of you.
Tana: So and actually your habits you can pass on. You can turn on and turn off genes that you pass on to your offspring as well. It’s not just if you do drugs.
Dr. Amen: So when we got together, Chloe was two.
Tana: Right.
Dr. Amen: Cute and she love me which just totally surprised her and as this journey of health that I think one of the most beautiful things I see is Chloe get involved in this. And I love for you to tell the red bell pepper story.
Tana: Oh yeah. So, yeah, it was really fun. So he was wondering if what you’re saying, you know, rubs off on your kid especially if you have very strong-willed kid like I do.
Dr. Amen: Red hair, both of them. God’s warning signal.
Tana: So, you know, I’m, you know, when your kids are little, I just want to profess this because I think we’ll do a show just on this but when your kids are little you have a lot of control, you know, I do the grocery shopping, I do the cooking at that time and you know, there really wasn’t a lot of room for argument because there’s nothing else in the house. But as they get older you have to really make sure that your kids are getting that internal voice that’s talking to them on their own and it’s not always perfect, not even with a kid who grows up in an environment that’s really healthy. So you need them to start really listening to themselves and we’ll do a show on that but at one point I’m wondering, you know, ‘Is my daughter really understanding this because she loves to push back, just for the sake of pushing back.’ And …
Dr. Amen: Where did she get that from?
Tana: I don’t know. Stop saying that. So anyways, you know, we cook in the kitchen together, we do healthy scavenger hunts, all these things and one day we were hiking and it was a tough hike. For her it was really tough hike. She was only six or seven and so she was huffing and puffing. She was sweating and we get to the top of the hill and I was so proud of her because she didn’t complain the whole time and she’s just sweating. And I looked at her and I said, “Wow, Chloe!” I’m like, “You’re a tough cookie.” She puts her hands on her hips, she said, “I don’t want to be a tough cookie. I want to be a tough red bell pepper.” And that was one of those moments where I went, “Ah-hah. Okay.” So what we’re doing is rubbing off at some level so she’s getting it.
Dr. Amen: At then there was a Christmas time. Remember the Christmas cookie story?
Tana: The Christmas cookie?
Dr. Amen: So they’re in class and it’s Christmas time and they’re handing out cookies and they said all the kids can come up and take one.
Tana: No, you can take two. You could take two cookies. You can eat one and then save one and she didn’t want to eat one and so they were telling the kids, “Eat a cookie now.” And so because the teacher didn’t want them to eat them both and she didn’t want them to be walking around with these two cookies. So she’s like, “I want you to eat a cookie now and then I want you to save the other cookie until later in the afternoon. “ She doesn’t want the sugar high. She was telling me like this is the worst time of the year for her and so Chloe wouldn’t go take a cookie and so she wouldn’t eat one and I thought she was not eating it because I was there. But in fact she was actually just not eating and so I told her, I said, “Chloe, you can go and have a cookie. It’s okay. If it’s because I’m here, you know, don’t worry about it. You know, it’s your day, you figure it out. You can make your own decision. Go have a cookie.” And she looked to me and she’s like, “It’s not because of you. She roused me. She said, “I’m not eating a cookie right now because I don’t want to feel bad. She’s like, “I will take it. I’ll eat it after lunch when I get home after I’ve already eaten something else.” And she said, “I’ll eat one cookie then.” And so what I like was that she didn’t give into the pressure of all the kids eating cookies or even being told specifically ‘go get a cookie and eat it’ by someone in authority.
Dr. Amen: So one of the little lies people tell themselves is I’m obese so I have diabetes or I have hypertension because it’s in my family and it’s that lie that you tell yourself that actually prevents you from getting well because what we’re changing is this genetic family history of illness that can definitely turn into a family history of health by making the right choices. I think of the Indians that I’ve consulted with. So I’ve been a consultant to the Akamai Indian Reservation and the fact is before we introduce awful food to the Indians and alcohol that they weren’t obese, that they didn’t have diabetes.
Tana: No. They were gatherers and hunters. They have some of the best physiques as far as athletic physiques of any people on the planet. So quite some time ago, as a result of some of the craziness that I’ve grew up with, I started packing my lunch. That’s where I realized that I could not live my health in the hands of anyone else. I have to be my own advocate and a warrior for my health and I started packing my lunch and taking it with me every day to the hospital and I was exercising everyday and I was getting into really good shape and feeling pretty good and I remember one of the surgeons, now this is the part really struck me as he’s a physician, he’s a surgeon, right? And he was overweight and I caught him smoking outside one day. Anyways, he saw me on the unit with my little lunchbox and he said, “You know, all that healthy living is only going to add like four or five years to your life, max.” And I looked at him and I went, “You don’t get it. Look around you. Like it’s not about the number of years that I live especially with what I’ve been through. It’s not the number of years. It’s the quality of the years that I’m alive.” So, you know, if I have a short life I want to have a really kick-butt life. Pardon my French but I have a mission and I want to share that mission and all of you have a mission so maybe you’ve discovered it already, maybe you haven’t but you have one and if you feel well and you’re healthy, you will not only discover that mission but you will have the energy to just take that mission and rock it. And that’s really what I want for people. That’s why I’m so passionate about this.
Dr. Amen: And that’s one of the reasons we do this show for you. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. We can prove it. Take care of it.
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