The Brain Health Secret to Successfully Ending Addiction

Imagine battling a destructive force that hijacks your brain, stealing your motivation, fogging your thoughts, and fooling your body into craving its undoing. What if the real culprit behind addiction wasn’t a moral failing or a simple bad habit, but something much deeper… a hidden biochemical imbalance in your brain? And what if the key to lasting recovery didn’t lie in shame or sheer willpower, but in feeding your brain exactly what it needs to heal itself?

Key Takeaways

• Addiction is often rooted in brain chemistry imbalances, not weakness, lack of willpower, or purely psychological issues.

• Nutritional support can restore neurotransmitter function and reduce the dependence on substances by addressing underlying deficiencies.

• Conventional treatments ignore the biochemical root of addiction, which may be why they have such low long-term success rates.

Why Nutrients May Be the Missing Piece in Addiction Treatment

What if you were a doctor and you could successfully treat only 25 percent of the patients who came to you with a particular problem? You’d probably conclude that the condition was a very challenging one.

And if you started with the assumption that the condition was due to moral weakness in your patients, your protocol and attitude would reflect that. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Charles Gant, M.D., PhD, a long-time expert in treating addictions naturally, points to various failures in traditional addiction treatment protocols and believes there’s a better way… supporting your brain with the nutrients it needs.

Millions of chemical reactions occur every second of every day in every cell in your body. And each of those reactions requires specific nutrients to fuel them. If you’re not getting the required nutrients, chemical imbalances will leave you susceptible to physical and mental health deterioration... and addictions.

These imbalances are especially problematic in your brain cells, or neurons.

Neurons produce substances called neurotransmitters. They’re your brain’s messengers-- the communicators. They control nearly everything in your body.

Neurotransmitters dramatically affect our moods and behavior. When your brain can’t produce enough of them due to poor nutrition, toxins, illness, genetic vulnerabilities, or stress, you may feel agitated, angry, restless, depressed, or unable to focus. It’s no surprise so many of us reach for substances to cope.

Why You (Temporarily) Feel Better When You Use Substances 

When you use an addictive substance to compensate for a poorly balanced brain, you further short-circuit your brain chemistry. The substance temporarily makes you feel better by “fooling” your brain into thinking it’s producing enough of a missing neurotransmitter.

And since your brain tries to tightly control neurotransmitter levels, it stops producing natural neurotransmitters in response to the fake ones. So, your shortages of natural neurotransmitters rise, as you become dependent on ever-increasing amounts of the substance to just “feel normal” again.

Here’s an example from Dr. Gant...

The neurotransmitter dopamine powerfully affects how we feel and behave and gives us the fullest enjoyment from pleasurable experiences. However, if there’s a shortage of even one key nutrient, dopamine levels may plummet.

Several drugs, especially cocaine and certain amphetamines, act as dopamine substitutes. They can adversely affect natural dopamine production, making you more and more dependent on the drug.

A Key To Recovery 

Dr. Gant believes that 25 years of clinical experience and a mountain of research show that substance abuse problems are primarily the result of biochemical imbalances in the brain. The key to recovery is to get your brain chemistry back to normal, with nutrients that support your brain’s neurotransmitter production.

This rebalances your brain and body chemistry. It helps you experience your feelings again, not the feelings that are artificially induced by some substance.

Dr. Gant says that the failure rate of conventional substance abuse strategies is so high because none of them consider the biochemical aspects of substance abuse.

Where The Four Conventional Substance Abuse Treatments Fail 

Conventional approaches to healing substance abuse have been used for 175 years and have a deplorable track record. They are often founded on myths such as drugs, alcohol, and nicotine cause substance abuse and even if you successfully stop using the substance, you’ll constantly struggle not to relapse for the rest of your life.

Dr. Gant shares the four most popular approaches to substance abuse treatment and the specific problems he sees with each of them:

• Moral approach: This is often based on the myth that substance abuse stems from a lack of willpower and moral and spiritual weakness. Substance abusers often become ostracized from family and friends, as well as people in the community and workplace.

• Psychological approach: Many substance abusers receive very intensive and very competent counseling, including those in prison for drug abuse. Yet 80 percent of them relapse or end up back in prison.

• Medical/psychiatric approach: Substance abuse has been dubbed a “disease.” The professional view is that the substance caused the disease. Unfortunately, many of the drugs thrown out as a medical solution are also addictive drugs. With this approach, the recovery “depends” on the skill of the attending physician and effectiveness of the drugs, instead of the power of the individual. Recovery rates are below 30 percent with this approach.

• Psychotropic substance approach: This approach is based on the myth that chronic substance users are “victims” of a disease that should be treated with prescription drugs, as we treat other diseases. Psychotropic drugs work by mimicking the effect of neurotransmitters. The substance can occupy receptors designed for a specific neurotransmitter. In effect, it fools the brain into thinking it is producing its natural neurotransmitters in adequate amounts.

These are the cornerstone beliefs of traditional approaches to substance abuse. The only problem is they don’t yield good long-term results. On average, just 25 percent of people who use these conventional approaches recover. That means your chance of recovery through these four conventional approaches is a lousy one in four! Not very good odds.

How Nutrients Help Fight Addiction 

At one point early in his career, Dr. Gant had been plagued by periods of low motivation and lack of energy. He read two articles about using the amino acid tyrosine for treating depression. So, he immediately went out and bought tyrosine for himself.

Less than two hours after starting tyrosine, his depression lifted. He attributed its success to the positive effect tyrosine has on dopamine production.

As it turned out, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Much research has been done in the past few decades on neurotransmitters, their chemical makeup, and how to support their production. One discovery was that nutrients are the only substances necessary to produce neurotransmitters.

Secondly, scientists have discovered additional neurotransmitters (besides dopamine) that have a profound impact on how we think, feel, and act.

Biochemically, there are only two types of substances – nutrients and toxins. Any substance that can’t be used to carry out your body’s cellular processes is a toxin.

The Missing Part Of The Treatment Equation 

Dr. Gant warns that unless the biochemical imbalances within the brain’s system of neurotransmitters -- the root cause of substance abuse issues -- are addressed, the benefits of all the traditional approaches in a person’s healing will be marginal.

He points to four types of neurotransmitters that guide our behaviors and influence the development of compulsive or addictive behaviors.