David Perlmutter - The Grain Brain Cookbook

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

H IPPOCRATES, THE FATHER OF MODERN MEDICINE

S EVERAL YEARS AGO OUR beloved terrier, Teako, began losing his fur, so my wife and I decided to take him to the veterinarian. The first question the vet asked in the exam room was simply, What are you feeding your dog? As my wife responded, I was struck by that insightful question. Few of us are surprised when our vet asks what we are feeding our pets because we readily accept the notion that the foods they consume play a significant role in their health and wellness (and, conversely, in their risk for illness and disease). What dawned on me was how unusual it is for a doctor to similarly ask an ailing human patient, What are you eating? No doubt, most people would be taken aback by such a question, and some might even consider it offensive. They expect queries about their medications and symptoms, not inquiries about their dietary choices. Sadly, they also anticipate more drugs to add to their daily regimen, with no mention of what kinds of modifications they could be making in their eating and lifestyle habits to treat their health conditions.

Food matters. I believe that what we eat is the most important decision we make every day in terms of our health and our ability to resist and combat disease. I also believe that the shift in our diet that has occurred over the past centuryfrom high-fat, low-carb to todays low-fat, high-carb trend, fundamentally consisting of grains and other damaging carbohydratesis at the root of many of the modern scourges linked to the brain, including chronic headaches, insomnia, anxiety, depression, epilepsy, movement disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and those senior moments that quite likely herald serious cognitive decline and full-blown, irreversible, untreatable, and incurable brain disease.

The idea that our brain is sensitive to what we eat has been quietly circulating in our most prestigious medical literature recently. And what cutting-edge research is finally revealing, to the bewilderment of many, is that the human brain is far more responsive to nutritional choices than we ever imagined. While its common knowledge now that heart smart diets can help support the cardiovascular system, and that we can prevent osteoporosis by getting plenty of calcium and vitamin D in our diets, its not universally appreciated yet that we can indeed affect the fate of our brains healthfor better or worseby what we put in our mouths. Hippocrates got it right thousands of years ago when he said that food should be our medicine and medicine our food.

I covered this topic at length in my 2013 book Grain Brain, in which I detail how and why food impacts brain health. And I devote a lot of space in that book to explaining that we can employ the power of nutrition to prevent whats perhaps the most dreaded brain condition of allAlzheimers disease, an affliction for which there is no meaningful remedy whatsoever. A bold, aggressive statement to make, I know, but the science is finally here to show how this is possible. In 2013, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a new study showing that the costs for dementia care in 2010 were estimated to be as high as $200 billion, roughly twice that expended for heart disease and almost triple what was spent on cancer. By some estimates, 2.7 million Alzheimers patients in America today might not have developed this disease, which robs its victims of their ability to respond to the world around them, if only they and their families had learned that food matters. If only my father, once a renowned neurosurgeon, had known this decades ago before his own brain plunged down the path to advanced Alzheimers. Indeed, my mission is deeply personal. But it isnt just about ending Alzheimers disease.

Ive been a practicing neurologist for the past thirty-odd years, dealing with a wide array of brain disorders and dementia on a daily basis. I work in a medical system thats unfortunately still trying to treat patients with strong drugs rather than cure them through prevention. In todays world, were told that we can pretty much live our lives, come what mayand then, if our health is affected, we just turn to doctors to provide us with magic pills that (might) alleviate the problem. But you often cant take a pill to cure a brain condition. And while drugs exist to address symptoms, they wont necessarily eradicate the source of the problem. This is true whether were talking about anxiety or migraines, depression or dementia.

One of the examples I highlight in Grain Brain is the incidence of ADHD in this country, which shows just how reactive rather than proactive weve become in healthcare. In the past decade, diagnosis of ADHD has increased 53 percent. Im not convinced ADHD is a medical condition that should be treated with powerful drugs; I believe this increase is almost certainly due to what were feeding our children. But our medical establishment too often convinces parents that the quick fix of medication is the best option. Indeed, 85 percent of all ADHD medications produced in the world are used exclusively in the United States, a sobering statistic. A full 11 percent of all American children now carry this diagnosisthats 6.4 million American children ages four through seventeen. By definition, these metrics clearly qualify ADHD as a national epidemic. More heart wrenching is the fact that an incredible two-thirds of those children are now on medication for a problem that may have been completely preventableand may be reversibleusing diet alone. Clearly, there is something wrong with this picture.

Let me give you one more example. About 10 percent of Americas adult population suffers from depression, a statistic that qualifies this condition as an epidemic as well. And while we normally dont think of depression as a serious illness, its directly associated with approximately thirty thousand deaths in this country every year. Depression is almost always treated with potent pillsdrugs that change the natural chemistry of the body and brain and come with many side effects. Antidepressants, in fact, are among the most prescribed drugs in America, fueling a multibillion-dollar industry.

But as Ive already stated (and as I describe in detail in Grain Brain), depression, Alzheimers disease, and ADHD, among other brain-related ailments, can be prevented through diet. The various medications prescribed for these conditions focus squarely on symptoms, basically treating the smoke while ignoring the fire. I argue that we need to focus on the fire itself: inflammation.

Contrary to what you might think, the inflammatory process thats involved in the degeneration in your arthritic knee or your coronary arteries is the very same one that leads to the deterioration of the human brain. Your arthritic knee is painful because its inflamed. So what do you do? If youre like most people, you reach for an anti-inflammatory medication to put out the fire. And thats exactly what we need to do in the brain. But that doesnt mean taking a medication; it means creating an environment in which the fire never burns in the first place. Thats the cornerstone of preventing every brain-related condition or disorder. As John Kennedy said, The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.