David Perlmutter - The Grain Brain Cookbook More Than 150 Life-Changing Gluten-Free Recipes to Transform Your Health

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.