Genius Foods

Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life

Max Lugavere, Paul Grewal, M.D.

• Publisher: Harper Wave
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062562852
• eBook ISBN: 9780062562890
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics

New York Times Bestseller

Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere.

After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition.

Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood.

Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, including

• the nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them);
• the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age;
• a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; and
• the foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term.

With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.

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Part 1

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You Are What You Eat

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Chapter 1

The Invisible Problem

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with fear, brings sleeplessness and aimless anxieties. . . . In these ways I hold that the brain is the most powerful organ in the human body.

–HIPPOCRATES

Ready for the good news?

Nestled within your skull, mere inches from your eyes, are eighty-six billion of the most efficient transistors in the known universe. This neural network is you, running the operating system we know as life, and no computer yet conceived comes close to its awesome capabilities. Forged over millions and millions of years of life on Earth, your brain is capable of storing nearly eight thousand iPhones’ worth of information. Everything you are, do, love, feel, care for, long for, and aspire to is enabled by an incredibly complex, invisible symphony of neurological processes. Elegant, seamless, and blisteringly fast: when scientists tried to simulate just one second of a human brain’s abilities, it took supercomputers forty minutes to do so.

Now for the bad news: the modern world is like The Hunger Games, and your brain is an unwitting combatant, hunted mercilessly and relentlessly from all sides. The way we live today is undermining our incredible birthright, fighting our optimal cognitive performance, and putting us at risk for some seriously nasty afflictions.

Our industrially ravaged diets supply cheap and plentiful calories with poor nutrient content and toxic additives. Our careers shoehorn us into doing the same tasks over and over again, while our brains thrive with change and stimulation. We are saddled with stress, a lack of connection to nature, unnatural sleep patterns, and overexposure to news and tragedy, and our social networks have been replaced by The Social Network—all of which lead ultimately to premature aging and decay. We’ve created a world so far removed from the one in which our brains evolved that they are now struggling to survive.

These modern constructs drive us to compound the damage with our day-to-day actions. We convince ourselves that six hours in bed means we’ve gotten a full night’s sleep. We consume junk food and energy drinks to stay awake, medicate to fall asleep, and come the weekend go overboard with escapism, all in a feeble attempt to grasp a momentary reprieve from our daily struggle. This causes a short circuit in our inhibitory control system—our brain’s inner voice of reason—turning us into lab rats frantically searching for our next dopamine hit. The cycle perpetuates itself, over time reinforcing habits and driving changes that not only make us feel crappy, but can ultimately lead to cognitive decline.

Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are caught in the crossfire between warring factions. Food companies, operating under the “invisible hand” of the market, are driven by shareholders to deliver ever-increasing profits lest they risk irrelevance. As such, they market foods to us explicitly designed to create insatiable addiction. On the opposing front, our underfunded health-care system and scientific research apparatus are stuck playing catch-up, doling out advice and policy that however well intentioned is subject to innumerable biases—from innocuous errors of thought to outright corruption via industry-funded studies and scientific careers dependent on private-interest funding.

It’s no wonder that even well-educated people are confused when it comes to nutrition. One day we’re told to avoid butter, the next that we may as well drink it. On a Monday we hear that physical activity is the best way to lose weight, only to learn by Friday that its impact on our waistline is marginal compared to diet. We are told over and over again that whole grains are the key to a healthy heart, but is heart disease really caused by a deficiency of morning oatmeal? Blogs and traditional news media alike attempt to cover new science, but their coverage (and sensational headlines) often seems more intent on driving hits to their websites than informing the public.

Our physicians, nutritionists, and even the government all have their say, and yet they are consciously and subconsciously influenced by powers beyond the naked eye. How can you possibly know who and what to trust when so much is at stake?

My Investigation

In the early months following my mother’s diagnosis, I did what any good son would do: I accompanied her to doctors’ appointments, journal full of questions in hand, desperate to attain even a sliver of clarity to ease our worrying minds. When we couldn’t find answers in one city, we flew to the next. From New York City to Cleveland to Baltimore. Though we were fortunate enough to visit some of the highest-ranking neurology departments in the United States, we were met every time with what I’ve come to call “diagnose and adios”: after a battery of physical and cognitive tests we were sent on our way, often with a prescription for some new biochemical Band-Aid and little else. After each appointment, I became more and more obsessed with finding a better approach. I lost sleep to countless late-night hours of research, wanting to learn everything I possibly could about the mechanisms underlying the nebulous illness that was robbing my mom of her brainpower.

Because she was seemingly in her prime when her symptoms first struck, I wasn’t able to blame old age. A youthful, fashionable, and charismatic woman in her fifties, my mom was not—and still is not—the picture of a person succumbing to the ravages of aging. We had no prior family history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease, so it seemed her genes could not be solely responsible. There had to be some external trigger, and my hunch was that it had something to do with her diet.

Following that hunch led me to spend the better part of the past decade exploring the role that food (and lifestyle factors like exercise, sleep, and stress) play in brain function. I discovered that a few vanguard clinicians have focused on the connection between brain health and metabolism—how the body creates energy from essential ingredients like food and oxygen. Even though my mom had never been diabetic, I dove into the research on type 2 diabetes and hormones like insulin and leptin, the little-known signal that controls the body’s metabolic master switch. I became interested in the latest research on diet and cardiovascular health, which I hoped would speak to the maintenance of the network of tiny blood vessels that supply oxygen and other nutrients to the brain. I learned how the ancient bacteria that populate our intestines serve as silent guardians to our brains, and how our modern diets are literally starving them to death.

As I uncovered more and more about how food plays into our risk for diseases like Alzheimer’s, I couldn’t help but integrate each new finding into my own life. Almost immediately, I noticed that my energy levels began to increase, and they felt more consistent throughout the day. My thoughts seemed to flow more effortlessly, and I found myself in a better mood more often. I also noticed that I was more easily able to direct my focus and attention and tune out distractions. And, though it wasn’t my initial goal, I even managed to lose stubborn fat and get in the best shape of my life—a welcome bonus! Even though my research was initially motivated by my mom, I became hooked on my new brain-healthy diet.

I had inadvertently stumbled upon a hidden insight: that the same foods that will help shield our brains against dementia and aging will also make them work better in the here and now.¹ By investing in our future selves, we can improve our lives today.

Reclaim Your Cognitive Birthright

For as long as modern medicine had existed, doctors believed that the anatomy of the brain was fixed at maturity. The potential to change—whether for a person born with a learning disability, a victim of brain injury, a dementia sufferer, or simply someone looking to improve how their brain worked—was considered an impossibility. Your cognitive life, according to science, would play out like this: your brain, the organ responsible for consciousness, would undergo a fierce period of growth and organization up to age twenty-five—the peak state of your mental hardware—only to begin a long, gradual decline until the end of life. This was, of course, assuming that you didn’t do anything to accelerate that process along the way (hello, college).

Then, in the mid-nineties, a discovery was made that forever changed the way scientists and doctors viewed the brain: it was found that new brain cells could be generated throughout the life of the adult human. This was certainly welcome news to a species heir to the flagship product of Darwinian evolution: the human brain. Up until that point, the creation of new brain cells—called neurogenesis—was thought to occur only during development.² In one fell swoop, the days of “neurological nihilism,” a term coined by neuroscientist Norman Doidge, were over. The concept of lifelong neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to change up until death—was born, and with it a unique opportunity to mine this landmark discovery for greater health and performance.

Flash forward just a couple of decades to today and you could almost develop whiplash from the progress being made toward the understanding of our brains—both how we can protect them and how we can enhance them. Take the developments in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research. Alzheimer’s is a devastating neurodegenerative condition affecting more than five million people in the United States (with numbers expected to triple in the coming years); it is only recently that diet was thought to have any impact on the disease at all. In fact, though the disease was first described in 1906 by German physician Alois Alzheimer, 90 percent of what we know about the condition has been discovered in just the last fifteen years.

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GIVE DEMENTIA THE FINGER

I had the privilege of visiting Miia Kivipelto, a neurobiologist at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet and one of the foremost researchers exploring the effects of diet and lifestyle on the brain. She leads the groundbreaking FINGER trial, or Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability, the world’s first ongoing, large-scale, long-term randomized control trial to measure the impact that our dietary and lifestyle choices have on our cognitive health.

The trial involves over 1,200 at-risk older adults, half of whom are enrolled in nutritional counseling and exercise programs, as well as social support to reduce psychosocial risk factors for cognitive decline such as loneliness, depression, and stress. The other half—the control group—receives standard care.

After the first two years, initial findings were published revealing striking results. The overall cognitive function of those in the intervention group increased by 25 percent compared to controls, and their executive function improved by 83 percent. Executive function is critically important to many aspects of a healthy life, playing a key role in planning, decision making, and even social interaction. (If your executive function isn’t working up to snuff, you might complain that you are unable to think clearly or “get stuff done.”) And the volunteers’ processing speed improved by a staggering 150 percent. Processing speed is the rate at which one takes in and reacts to new information, and it typically declines with age.

The success of this trial highlights the power that a full lifestyle “makeover” can have on improving the way your brain works, even in old age, and provides the best evidence to date that cognitive decline does not have to be an inevitable part of aging.

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As a result of this shift in our understanding of the brain, institutions such as the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have sprung up, dedicated to filling in the gaps of our collective neuro-knowledge. Other emerging specialties have followed suit, eager to explore the links between our environments (including diet) and various aspects of our brain function. Take Deakin University’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: You Are What You Eat
• Part 2: The Interconnectedness of It All (Your Brain Responds)
• Part 3: Putting Yourself in the Driver’s Seat
• Acknowledgments
• Resources
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher