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

Foods Uniquely Designed to Screw Up Your Brain Bagels Biscuits Cake Cereal Milk chocolate/white chocolate Cookies Energy bars Crackers Doughnuts Muffins Pastas Pastries Pies Granola bars Pizza Pretzels Waffles Pancakes White bread Milkshakes Frozen yogurt Ice cream Batter Gravy Jams Jellies Fries Chips Granola

The swelling can be so severe that it impairs blood flow and increases abdominal pressure, hindering the animal’s ability to breathe. Sometimes the liver and other organs will even rupture from the stress. Cruel and inhumane, it provides an excellent, if extreme, illustration of exactly what we’re doing to ourselves as a consequence of chronic sugar consumption: developing fat-filled livers and creating foie gras right inside of our own bodies.

What they found was striking: higher levels of the inactive form of IRS-1 (signifying impaired insulin signaling in the brain) predicted Alzheimer’s disease development in patients with 100 percent accuracy.20 Even more breathtaking, the difference in these blood markers was evident ten years prior to the emergence of symptoms. This suggests that maintaining the brain’s insulin sensitivity throughout life may be a major step toward preventing the disease.

a healthier brain enhances our experience of the world, it allows us to be the truest and most expressed versions of ourselves, capable of feeling, learning, loving, and connecting in ways that make life worth living.

Broiled wild salmon, for example, contains a considerable amount of AGEs, and yet wild fish consumption has been associated with healthy cognitive and cardiovascular aging in many studies and trials. Additionally, many anthropologists believe that it wasn’t just the consumption of meat but the very act of cooking it that helped our ancestors to extract more calories and nutrients from their food, allowing our brains to reach their robust modern size. The safest way to integrate meat products into your diet is to consume cuts that are organic and grass-fed (or wild, if we’re talking fish), which will ensure higher amounts of antioxidants, and to use as little heat as possible (though, of course, you’ll need to cook food thoroughly enough to avoid illness). It’s also important to bear in mind

alone.

Oleocanthal possesses anti-inflammatory effects so powerful that it is comparable to taking a small dose of ibuprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, but without any of the potential side effects.

biological requirement:

fuzzy whiskers—they were comparable to genes in humans, having links to Parkinson’s disease, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. The degree of gene disruption was so profound, head researcher Fernando Gomez-Pinilla commented in the UCLA release: “Food is like a pharmaceutical compound” in terms of its effect on the brain. But that power also swings in the other direction—the negative impact that fructose had on both cognition and gene expression was attenuated by feeding the rats DHA omega-3 fat.

In fact, vegetarians have been reported to have more circulating AGEs than people who eat meat,

They concluded that plaques in the hippocampus “are likely modulated by blood glucose levels.

surrounding

In fact, vegetarians have been reported to have more circulating AGEs than people who eat meat, and it’s thought that the reason for this is their higher reliance on dietary carbohydrates and a greater intake of fruit.19

The combined effects of fructose may add up to altered gene expression in the brain. In a study out of UCLA, rats were given the amount of fructose equivalent to drinking a one-liter bottle of soda every day.22 After six weeks, they began to show typical derangements: they had escalating levels of blood sugar, triglycerides, and insulin, and their cognition began to break down. Compared to mice fed only water, the fructose-drinking mice took double the time to find their way out of a maze. But what surprised the researchers most was that close to one thousand genes in the brains of the fructose-fed rats were altered. These weren’t genes for cute pink noses and

Consuming fat also leads to a short post-meal triglyceride spike, but lipogenesis due to fructose consumption can dump more fat into your blood than even the highest-fat-containing meal—following a high-fructose snack, your blood can actually take on the appearance of pink cream for this very reason. This is also why fasting triglyceride levels (a marker used to assess metabolic health and heart disease risk) are nearly universally influenced by carbohydrate consumption, and by fructose in particular.

for the first time, our eating habits are killing more Americans than our smoking habits.

Another compound, psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in “magic” mushrooms, prevents serotonin reuptake and also mimics serotonin, activating its receptors. This is unlike MDMA, which floods the synapses with your own serotonin. For this reason, psilocybin may have fewer negative long-term effects. In groundbreaking research performed by both New York University and Johns Hopkins University, psilocybin was shown to alleviate anxiety and increase feelings of life satisfaction in patients with life-threatening cancer for six months after just a single dose.16 The cognitive-enhancing potential of low doses of psilocybin, called micro-dosing, is currently being studied.

NAFLD has been associated with cognitive deficits, which increase with the severity of the disease. In mice that are overfed to develop NAFLD, brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease begin to emerge, and mice that already had Alzheimer’s-related abnormalities (not a perfect model of human Alzheimer’s, but interesting nonetheless) exhibit exacerbated signs of disease and greater inflammation when fed concentrated fructose.23

Whole-fruit consumption is also self-limiting, because the fiber makes it more filling. For example, it would be quite difficult to eat five apples, but it’s a breeze to drink the sugar contained in five apples when juiced.

WHAT DO WHALES KNOW THAT WE DON’T? FISH OIL VS. KRILL OIL

Foie gras is a well-fattened duck or goose liver and is revered for its rich, buttery texture—something this type of liver is not typically known for. To make it, tubes are inserted into the throats of healthy geese and ducks and they are force-fed grain (usually corn). With the animals eventually consuming far more carbohydrates than they ever would in a natural setting, the livers swell with fat, growing to nearly ten times their normal size.

The safest cooking style involves moist heat, such as sautéing or steaming. (Plants will contain fewer AGEs than meat, regardless of cooking style.)

The A1C is not a perfect test, but it reaffirms how damaging sugar can be.