HOW DIET AFFECTS BRAIN HEALTH AND MENTAL DECLINE

Our information stems from a book authored by Dr. Georgia Ede, who is a psychiatrist that specializes in nutrition and metabolic psychiatry. She has authored the book “Change your Diet, Change your Mind.” Her main focus is to reveal the connection between diet and mental health, in which she offers practical help on reducing inflammation and balancing blood glucose and insulin in order to improve brain function and mental clarity. So, as you can see, she fits very nicely into the Genesis model.

First of all, Dr. Ede talks a lot about how refined carbohydrates and seed oils (like canola, soybean, corn, and sunflower oils, etc.) contribute to inflammation, and oxidative stress, which are detrimental to the brain. We discussed this concept in our five-part series on insulin resistance, as well.

While in psychiatry school in the late 1990s and early 2000s, students were trained to think of mental health problems as chemical imbalances in the brain to be addressed with medication, but she states they were never really taught to think about what was causing those chemical imbalances in the first place. However, today they know that inflammation and oxidative stress are the most powerful influences and deeper forces that affect and underlie brain health.

So, every time you get these waves of high glucose in the brain, you are setting off waves of inflammation and oxidative stress within the brain. This reaction destabilizes brain chemistry or neurotransmitters, which are a main component of the brain’s infrastructure.

Those neurotransmitters, which we are always told are the root cause of psychiatric conditions (like imbalances in serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, etc., along with two very important neurotransmitters that we don’t hear much about – glutamate and gaba) can all easily be thrown off balance by inflammation and oxidative stress.

Here are five foods that Dr Edie says you want to avoid for optimal brain health and to avoid brain disease:

1. Alcohol. It is a toxin and can be quite addictive for many. When the liver sees alcohol in the system, it stops everything else it’s doing to get rid of it. That is the liver’s top priority. It’s called oxidative priority. The liver will actually even stop metabolizing fat at that point in order to deal with the alcohol.

2. Legumes, which are beans, peas, lentils and peanuts. The problem we run into with legumes is that they are primarily starch. And unfortunately, our insulin resistance is too high as a society, with the majority of Americans having insulin resistance.

The other thing about legumes is that they are technically seeds. The seed needs to be protected in order to reproduce. So, they are armed with very intelligent chemicals that can disrupt the gut lining and create inflammation. This is why many people with autoimmune or bowel diseases are not able to handle legumes, as they already have leaky gut and other gut dysfunction.

3. Grains. They are high-glycemic, therefore, creating high blood glucose and insulin spiking, which further promotes inflammation and insulin resistance. They are also a type of seed.  While grains and seeds are often confused with each other, the biggest difference between them is that a seed is an embryonic plant, while grains are the seed or fruit of grasses. The word grain is used to describe the edible seeds of cereal grass, like rice, corn, wheat or barley.

4. Refined vegetable oils. These are high in omega-6 fatty acids. The most common is linoleic acid, or LA. In fact, it is the most predominant omega-6 in the Western diet, and it is very pro-inflammatory. This is not to be confused with conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, which is found in pastured/grassfed animal foods. CLA is anti-inflammatory, while LA is inflammatory, especially at the levels eaten within the American diet. This inflammatory/oxidative substance affects the entire body, including the brain.

Now granted, Dr. Ede does not go so far as to say that if you avoid these things and eat right, you can reverse all mental health conditions. There is no way to specifically gauge that. However, she can certainly speculate based on biology what she knows about food, and what she knows about the brain and body, that a decent percentage of the mental health problems we see today could be prevented, and that most existing mental health challenges can be managed.

In fact, she states that we know this, because there is a very rapidly advancing science of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry that is demonstrating this in clinical trials. And in some cases, they have seen very serious, long-standing issues brought into complete remission – even those who have not responded to every single medication available, hospitalization and psychotherapy.

It’s no coincidence that 80% of people with Alzheimer’s disease have insulin resistance. According to Dr. Ede, there is much high-quality, scientific evidence that shows insulin resistance to be a key, driving force and causal factor in Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Ede is not saying that all cases of Alzheimer’s are caused by diet and lifestyle. There are certainly other causes, but this condition is driven, to a large extent, by insulin resistance. So, hopefully this has helped you understand that learning how to eat healthy as a lifestyle is not only important for weight loss in optimal health -it is also important for brain health.