Food for Thought!

I’m not a scientist but I have worked up close and personal with people over the past 15 years.   So many of whom ask about how to approach and prepare to minimize the risk factor for neurodegenerative disease as we get older.    I have become excited over the past couple of years with the idea that with our diets and lifestyles we have a powerful say in our cognitive destiny!!   

People don’t realize this but a lot of the kinds of diseases that we talk about, began in the brain decades before the first symptom, that is why, to me, the impetus is really on us, to do what we can to minimize our risk.   We talk a lot about the role of diet in modulating the health of our bodies, and what I’m trying to do with my work is really usher in this conversation, about how diet affects brain health and brain function.  

When we talk about diet, we are talking about two things –about micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients.

Micronutrients include:

Vitamin D, which is profoundly important!! (A proportionally large part of our population is said to be deficient in vitamin D) It regulates the expression of nearly 1000 genes of our genome!!  We are sun people after all.  It is incredible, it is great at quenching the sort of pro inflammatory process which is the biggest existing challenge for all of us.  It is also been found that people that are deficient in vitamin D actually have accelerated cognitive decline. so this is a major thing that people should be paying attention to.

Magnesium is a really interesting compound, it’s a mineral and it’s actually a co-factor for a number of enzymes in the body and those enzymes range from helping you create ATP (adenosine triphosphate (ATP), energy-carrying molecule found in the cells of all living things. ATP captures chemical energy obtained from the breakdown of food molecules and releases it to fuel other cellular processes) which aids your body in getting up, moving around, having thoughts and things like that. Important things too like repairing DNA damage, and DNA damage is really at the root of everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. 

Omega-3 fatty acids are really important because they provide, essentially, the building block for the brain, and it goes a long way to best articulate a sort of brain protective lifestyle habit.  The brain is 60% fat, and the vast majority of fatty acids are known as DHA fats (seafood) which are a polyunsaturated fat in part of the omega-3 family of fatty acids.

Polyphenols are plant-based compounds that are rich in plant-based foods in fact if we can relate to brain health there is an inverse association between vegetable consumption especially dark leafy greens such as Kale and Spinach.
Interesting about dark leafy greens that green color is given to vegetables by chlorophyll, and at the center of the chlorophyll molecule is that compound magnesium, that we’re just talking about so nature has effectively color-coded things that are really good for us green.   Something like 60% of the population doesn’t get adequate magnesium, we know that people aren’t eating enough vegetables, and yet this is really one of the keys to modulating our brain health.

The microbiome (“Microbiome is a term that describes the genome of all the microorganisms, symbiotic and pathogenic, living in and on all vertebrates. The gut microbiome consists of the collective genome of microbes inhabiting the gut including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi”.) 

I think is so exciting there’s a lot that we still don’t know about it but there is a lot that we do know, the brain has a direct effect on the stomach and intestines. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach’s juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut.  (Beautiful and interesting book by Harvard Health – The gut-brain connection.

Our gut lining, if you were to take it out, and spread it out on a floor, it would take up the square footage of a small apartment!  Colon is around 1.5m and small intestine 3-5m!!  We have this incredible immune interface but the thing about the gut is that it’s not like Vegas what happens in the gut doesn’t always stay in the gut…..we really have to cater to these 30 trillion microorganisms that we have living in our large intestine, and one of the best ways to do that is to provide it with the same polyphenol.  It benefits our Physiology; in addition, dark leafy greens are an amazing source of fiber and a great source of this fermentable prebiotic fiber, the best kind for our human body.

Macronutrients :- the three most important macronutrients as I see them to the brain are fat, carbohydrates and fiber .

FAT is actually dramatically important to the health of our brains, it provides your brains with a building block, in fact scientists think that the brain’s early access to that DHA fat, is the catalyst to really grow our brains. CARBOHYDRATES are another macronutrient that is very important.  Estimates from scientists that really study the microbiome, speculate based on research that our forbearers were getting something like 150 grams of fiber per day, and fiber did not come from animal foods, they come from vegetables and starches, and today we are eating dramatically different carbohydrates.  Food in general was not always readily available, we had periods of feast and we had periods of famine.   Today however, we eat a huge abundance of carbohydrates, at every meal, and yet we’re relatively sedentary!  We sit in traffic or desks for large amounts of time in every day, and what ends up happening is we find ourselves carb loading for desk jobs and that’s really not healthy unless you are an extremely active person outside of work hours. There is a place for those carbs to go to and that is to refill your muscles of the stored sugar that we call glycogen, but to be eating carbs at every meal when we’re relatively sedentary that sugar has nowhere to go but it’s our fat stores.

FIBER usually gets lumped under the carbohydrate category, but I think that fiber is so incredibly important we tend to think of fiber only in one context right digestion but fiber feeds those 30 trillion microbes that live in your large intestine, and they fermented to compounds namely short chain fatty acids. Aside from the fact that fiber feeds those microbes, which keeps them happy and  goes a long way towards modulating the inflammatory response in your body and keeping it to a minimum those carbohydrates get fermented directly into something called butyrate, which is one of the most important short chain fatty acids.  Butyrate has been shown to not only profoundly mitigate the inflammatory response in the body, but it’s also been shown to boost neurotrophic factors in the brain chemicals in the brain that are responsible not only for promoting the growth of new brain cells but ensuring the survival of existing ones.  They can also boost memory which is amazing so I think that we really need to retrain our relationship with fat and let go of the belief systems that we were raised with. 

Important TIP!   Make sure the oils that we consume is not rancid!!

I am a huge fan of scrambles and egg is nature’s own natural multivitamin.  It is full of a compound called choline which is a precursor to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, two of the primary drugs that they give to Alzheimer’s and other you know with patients with neurodegenerative diseases, work to boost this neurotransmitter in the brain called acetylcholine!  So getting choline from eggs is vitally important they also provide a great source of DHA fats which again are a brain building block.