Food For Thought: Eat Right to Save Your Brain

Richmondchironeu • December 16, 2019

Hello Everyone:

Here is more great info on how food impacts our brain health and our ability to avoid dementia.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2293082

Conclusions and Relevance: In an older population, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with olive oil or nuts was associated with improved composite measures of cognitive function.

While this study looked at our older population, the same holds true for any age. But what is the real traditional Mediterranean Diet?

Mediterranean Diet?

• The more traditional Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) associated with health improvements is characterized by:

– Limited intake of animal-derived and processed foods

– Consumption of a variety of plant-based foods (fruit, vegetables, some breads, and other whole-    grain cereals, pulses, nuts, and seeds), wine, and olive oil (as the main source of lipids).

– Am J Clin Nutr 2013;97:369–76.

– Red meat only a few times per month

– Fish once or twice per week

– The Mediterranean dietary pattern is not as strict in guidelines relative to autoimmune diets and those with other nutritional considerations, such as those requiring low oxalate or low sulfur or specific food allergies…and these will require individualized tweaks, but for most of us, the Med Diet is the place to start.

  - Ageing Research Reviews 31 (2016) 80–92

Bottom Line: Invest in reading about how to consume a food pattern associated with the best health benefits overall. Right now, looking at the available science, it appears that the MedDiet is optimal for most of us. The book by Valter Longo, PhD, is the best one out there right now for two reasons: He gets the food part right, plus he adds periods of intermittent fasting to really supercharge this food plan. His book is “The Longevity Diet” and I highly recommend it.

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Health News Update: Pesticides, Cancer & Why Go Organic 6.29.26 Hello everyone: Slowly but surely, despite the health and food industries downplaying the risks, evidence is emerging that the long-term consumption of trace amounts of toxic chemicals can add up to some serious health consequences. “Our process-based model, encompassing 31 key pesticide active ingredients, together with an innovative stratification of cancer cases by developmental lineage, reveals a robust spatial association between environmental pesticide exposure risk and cancer incidence. In pesticide-associated cancer hotspots, exposomic profiling of liver tissue—a primary target of chemical carcinogens—uncovers a distinct transcriptomic signature of pesticide exposure, implicating a non-genotoxic mode of action that disrupts core regulatory circuitries sustaining cell identity. Collectively, these findings strongly support a mechanistic link between pesticide exposure and cancer, challenging assumptions of human non-carcinogenicity derived from reductionist experimental models. This study redefines the exposome as a lineage-conditioned, mechanistically tractable framework and shows how complex pesticide mixtures can contribute to carcinogenic trajectories, with profound and far-reaching implications for global health policy and socio-ecological equity.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-026-00087-0 pesticide exposure & cancer risks Bottom Line: Whenever possible, purchase your food from organic sources including local farmers that use regenerative and organic practices. Not all foods need to be organic, and to decide which ones absolutely need to be, you can access the Environmental Working Group’s yearly list of the Dirty Dozen foods that are the highest in pesticide residues. This will also include the Clean 15 foods that do not need to be organic as they are usually grown without or with very low pesticide levels. https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty-dozen.php dirty dozen food guide Additionally, high quality nutrients support the natural detox processes our bodies use to get rid of any and all toxins. When we consume the Standard American Diet or Westernized Diet, we are low in the nutrients and co-factors needed to support optimal detox cleansing. So always start with food upgrades as they will carry your upgrade the farthest. Remember that most chronic health conditions start 20 years before you even notice them creeping up or becoming diagnosed. What you do now is creating your future. It used to be said that you are what you eat. Another way to say that is we become what we eat…so please take good care and make sure you always put high grade fuel into your Temple.
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