GrainBrain

I continue to learn new and powerful things about how to live healthier, longer, and more vibrantly.  I recently finished the book titled Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar – Your Brain’s Silent Killers (Perlmutter, 2013).  Dr. Perlmutter is a neurologist, so it seems safe to say that he probably knows his business when it comes to the human brain.

Like so many other works I have read in the last couple of years, this book challenged my thinking and debunked a whole host of "truths" to which I had subscribed for the last three decades.

Here are some of my biggest takeaways from this book (though not an exhaustive list, by any means):

• Modern grains are silently destroying our brains.
• Our food actually regulates our genetic expression.
• Alzheimers and dementia (as well as other diseases of the brain) are predominantly dietary in genesis.
• High carbohydrate and high gluten diets set our brains "on fire" through inflammation, which causes oxidation (i.e. "rusting").
• Gluten is the equivalent of tobacco for our generation.
• Fat - not carbohydrates - is the preferred and fundamental fuel for the human brain (and always has been).
• Fat is good.  Cholesterol is good. Statins are bad. Sugars are bad. Carbohydrates are bad. Gluten is bad.  For the brain.
• The brain thrives and grows as an effect of physical exercise. 
• The fatter the human, the smaller the brain.
• A tremendous amount of neural activity occurs in our intestines (our "second brain").
• Our brains do, in fact, behave like muscles - they grow, they strengthen, they become more nimble, they have better endurance, when challenged.

There's a ton more I learned from this book, but I'll stop here, in the interest of being relatively succinct.  If you read it, get ready to have many assumptions and myths about health/nutrition challenged and debunked.  

A very good read.