Feeding Your Brain
Almost every day there’s another diet, rediscovered “ancient” food or newly developed supplement powder or pill claiming to protect the brain and save you from dementia. Most of these promise a fairly quick-fix or simple strategy; the majority are aligned to one product or another, claiming to have an answer if you buy one product or another. It can be hard to know who to believe, but I encourage you to consider, when faced with enticing promises, who is making the claims and whether there might be commercial gain behind them.
The body and the brain—and the way food can help or hinder the work we need them to do each day—are immensely complex. There is no simple picture and no simple answers to keeping your brain healthy. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise and provide advice accordingly, is either misguided or, more likely, trying to sell you something that will ultimately disappoint.
When it comes to your brain, the way it performs at any stage of your life depends on everything that’s been thrown at it day in and day out, over the years. That includes your genetic make-up; your physical and mental activities; meditative and lifestyle practices; what you have eaten and done during all that time; as well as the impact of any sort of injury it has suffered: they all combine to determine the ultimate health of your brain.
The key to brain health, when it comes to food, is not in any magic food or restrictive diet, it’s in the complex interplay of these myriad factors, including nutrition. There are hundreds of different nutrients—some are needed in greater quantities, some in just very small amounts—and the human body is truly incredible, being able to draw what it needs from the variety of foods we give it each day. You need to eat the right foods to provide the nutrients, but the ability of your brain and body to extract what each cell needs from everyday foods is outstanding. The marketers of supplements or the latest diets often fail to recognize those abilities, suggesting that you are unable to get by without the help of the product they are promoting. The old adage of “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” so often applies.
Lifestyle Changes You Can Make to Boost Brain Health
There are many factors other than diet that influence brain health: making lifestyle changes where you can is important. Where possible, improve your brain’s chances of staying healthy by increasing physical activity; maintaining social connections; practicing relaxation; seeking learning opportunities; and avoiding brain injury.
Fighting Gravity and Staying Physically Active
Let’s be quite clear here, this is a book all about food, but no matter how important that is in brain health, nothing is as powerful as regular physical activity. It does so many things to boost brain health:
It maximises blood flow through the brain as well as the body, helping get nutrients, fuels and oxygen to brain cells.
It helps in the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which builds and supports both new and old connections, increasing brain plasticity so it can adapt in the face of any injury. Any exercise (higher-intensity activity might work best) seems to help production of BDNF.
It assists with glucose metabolism and diabetes management and reduces insulin resistance. This is important because diabetes is associated with a higher incidence of dementia, thought to be mostly related to insulin resistance. The more regular exercise you can do, the better your ability to use insulin (whether that be what you produce naturally if you do not have diabetes, or what you receive via a medication or injection). In other words, reducing insulin resistance helps your brain.
It increases levels of mood-enhancing (and therefore positive to brain health) neurotransmitters.
It greatly reduces chronic inflammation.
It gives the whole brain a workout by bringing into play all the different systems from many areas in the brain that are needed to keep your walk, golf game, bike ride, dance class or gym session planned and coordinated—from memories of technique, rules, strategies and the like to managing muscles, balance systems, and all the senses needed to see, hear and feel those activities.
Social Connection, Meditative Practice and Brain Downtime
Your brain needs a combination of lots of things to do, with time in between to rest and recoup. Research clearly shows that social connectedness is very good for the brain: chatting, interacting with old and new faces, negotiating all the nuances of good manners and expectations. All of these and more keep neurons in the brain firing, maintaining existing as well as forging new connections; however, it needs rest. Anything you do that allows a bit of time away from complex thought is good for your brain. It doesn’t matter if that’s going for a run, having a game of golf or paddling a kayak, prayer, meditation or Gregorian chanting—anything you can do to help your brain “switch off” or focus on just one thing in a quiet way is important.
Cognitive Reserve
Every day, life gives the brain myriad opportunities to build more and more networks between neurons. That does more than just keep us functioning in our world. Every new experience, every challenge mastered, every skill practiced and honed, all the ways we dare our brains to do new things, forces it to set up more and more complex internal networks, making more and more connections between individual cells. The more connections brain cells make throughout life, the more you amass what is called “cognitive reserve.”
It’s like a well-stocked pantry and freezer: if you can’t get out to shop when you’d like to, you still have plenty available to make yummy meals. And the greater the number of different things you have in stock, the more varied your meals can be and the longer you can hold out before you go hungry. If there is not much there to start with, you will struggle much sooner. You don’t want your brain to “go hungry,” so you need to do all you can to stock the pantry and freezer, and keep it that way. That’s especially important as you age. The more you stock your brain “pantry” with experience, learning, practices and activities, the bigger the network of connections—the cognitive reserve—that will keep it from going “hungry” and not being able to do what you need of it to keep your life on track.
A greater cognitive reserve provides the brain with more space to adapt if connections are lost at one point or another. The more experience you can give your brain at any age, both physically and mentally, the better chance you have of weathering any such problems later on, should they occur.
It’s never too late to add to your cognitive reserve: brain training exercises, crosswords, sudoku, brain games and the like are all great, but do try to mix them up a bit—you need to add new activities and learn new skills now and then to get the best benefits.
Brain Health Through the Ages
The differences in the nutritional needs of older and younger adults, when it comes to brain health, underlie all discussions on maximizing brain capacity. The brain needs the body to carry it around and to supply it with resources, and the maintenance of muscle underpins independence and physical as well as mental capacity as people get older.
If You Are Younger Than 50
It is never too early to eat foods that will help protect your brain in your later years. As well, this is the time to look at the overall balance of life. Every bit of physical activity you can do, everything you learn and all the ways you give your brain a chance to take a break through meditative, quiet practice and downtime, help your brain. They help build its reserves, keep chronic inflammation down and improve the efficiency of its defense and maintenance systems, all of which give it the best possible chance to maintain peak health.
This is also the time when you need to be thinking about doing everything you can to keep your weight down and maintain physical activity. Obesity in early and middle adulthood is well accepted now to be strongly predictive of later-life dementia, so everything you can do to reduce weight will be good, no matter the method you choose to lose any excess. This is also the time that intermittent fasting strategies come to the fore while you are still young enough to avoid later-life problems with unhelpful muscle loss. These fasting plans trigger responses in the body that are anti-inflammatory and therefore of great benefit to the brain.
The other very important thing to remember is that merely eating more energy in food than your body needs to use up each day, drives inflammation. So even if you are not putting on weight, if you find that you never feel “hungry” and always leave a meal feeling just a bit stuffed full of food, it is worth thinking about skipping a meal here or there, or reducing the size of your plates so you eat just a little less.
This is certainly the time of life to focus on vegetables, salads and fruits. Your plate or bowl should contain at least half or more of these nutritious foods. Add to that grains, nuts, seeds, pulses, fish, good oils, dairy foods and meats: Mediterranean- or Asian-style diets are good. You need protein, calcium and all the nutrients in the latter group of foods, but the vegetables will give you not only the majority of the antioxidants your brain so desperately needs, but mean your meals will not tend to contain excessive calories. Most people at this time of life easily eat enough food to be able to pack all the nutrients needed into their day.
50 to Late 60s
Everything said for the under-50s applies to this age group as well, and in these years you still have time to get rid of excess weight without muscle-loss issues, as long as you stay active.
In these years especially I want to stress the importance of avoiding too much sitting time. This applies to people who are younger too, but it’s something that can become a dangerous habit in these years as a few extra aches and pains might begin to creep in. Immobility, including sitting too often at work, driving when you could walk, slouching in front of the television, employing help cleaning or gardening when you could really do most of it yourself and reap the muscle rewards, driving right to the shop door when you could park a little further away and enjoy a little walk: all of these rob the body of opportunities for working against gravity, and it’s fighting gravity that helps keep our muscles supporting our bodies and brains.
70-Plus
In these years, weight loss is to be avoided because of the muscle loss it causes. Instead, maintain the weight you have achieved already and stay as active as you possibly can.
The most important part of nutrition at this time of life is making sure you get enough protein and keeping up good muscle activity to maintain essential muscle reserve as discussed throughout this book. There is always benefit in eating colorful brain-protecting foods and those containing omega-3 along with that.
Nutrition is always a balancing act between what might be the best idea at the point in time and what might be a potential problem. The overriding and well-tested things that we know are of benefit to the brain are maintaining physical activity, doing regular exercise and eating foods that offer antioxidant and anti-inflammatory protection for brain cells as much as possible.
In these years it is reduced appetite and finding yourself not feeling hungry at mealtimes that is not only common, but potentially very dangerous. Medications play a part in this, along with illness, social isolation, grief and a number of age-related changes in the digestive system.
You need to realize that these “I’m not hungry” signals are mistakes your hunger center is making. Your brain needs a constant supply of nutrients and fuel and, since most people tend to eat smaller meals later in life, each one must pack nutrients in to provide it the support it needs.
Ngaire Hobbins is an international expert on nutrition for aged care and a sought-after speaker. She is a member of and presents at conferences for the International Federation of Ageing, the Gerontological Society of America, and the British Society of Gerontology. She has deep clinical experience as a dietitian both in hospital and private practice. She self-published her first two books, “Eat to Cheat Ageing” and “Eat to Cheat Dementia.”