Power Foods for the Brain (12 page)

Exactly why coffee should help prevent Alzheimer’s is still very much up in the air. Caffeine is a stimulant, of course. Coffee also contains antioxidants and dozens of other chemical compounds ready to take credit.

So far, evidence for any benefit from other caffeine-containing beverages, such as tea, is much weaker. As we saw above, tea contains traces of aluminum, which remains a consideration.

There is, of course, a downside to caffeine. It can disrupt your sleep, which, in turn, can harm your memory. It can also make you irritable and even aggravate problems with heart rhythm. Caffeine’s effects vary from person to person, so I suggest that you see how it affects you.

As we have seen in the past three chapters, protecting your memory starts with three improvements to the menu:

1. Shield Yourself from Toxic Metals

You’ll want to limit exposure to copper, iron, and zinc, and there is no reason to expose yourself to aluminum at all. With a few judicious choices when it comes to food products, cookware, multiple vitamins, antacids, and so on, you will have enormous control over these potential toxins.

2. Give Your Brain an Oil Change

We need to stop the attack of toxic fats and give your brain the traces of healthy fats it needs. That means shifting from a diet based on meat, cheese, and other animal products to a plant-based menu and avoiding the partially hydrogenated oils that turn up in snack foods and fried foods. As you choose your foods, it pays to be generous with vegetables—especially the green leafy varieties—as well as fruits, legumes, and whole grains.

Skip the cooking oils. In
chapter 9
, I’ll show you simple techniquee that allow you to go beyond oil-based cooking.

3. Build Your Vitamin Shield

Four vitamins are key here: vitamin E and three B vitamins.

• For vitamin E, have some broccoli, spinach, sweet potatoes, mangoes, or avocados. Or, for a bigger dose, try almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, pecans, pistachios, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, or flaxseed. A small handful of nuts or seeds (about 1 ounce) sprinkled on your salad is a good idea.
  

Next, be sure to get your B vitamins:

• Folate is in green leafy vegetables, as well as beans, peas, citrus fruits, cantaloupe, and fortified grain products.
  
• Vitamin B
  ₆
  is in beans, green vegetables, bananas, nuts, sweet potatoes, and many vegetables, and also in whole grains.
  
• Vitamin B
  ₁₂
  should come in the form of a supplement or fortified foods.
  

The good news is that the diet changes that may protect your brain are remarkably similar to those that are good for your heart. And they help trim away unwanted weight in the bargain. If you happen to have high blood pressure, diabetes, or cholesterol problems, a healthful plant-based diet can help enormously. A simple set of menu changes accomplishes all of this at one time. In
chapter 9
, we’ll pull it all together in an easy-to-follow menu plan, followed by many recipes to get you started.

By now, you might be thinking, “A healthier diet probably would have been really good for me. But it’s too late now. The damage has been done.” Let me tell you about someone who decided
not
to say that.

Benjamin Spock, MD, was the world’s best-known pediatrician. His book
Baby and Child Care
revolutionized how parents thought about raising children and remains one of the best-selling books of all time.

He was a tall man, strong and athletic, and won an Olympic gold medal with the Yale rowing crew at the 1924 games. Graduating at the top of his class at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, he specialized in pediatrics and went on to study psychoanalysis for six years.

But later in life, his health began to fail. In 1991, he began to suffer from chronic lung problems—a recurrent pneumonia that he could not shake. He had had a prior exposure to tuberculosis, and accumulating fluid around his heart and lungs left him vulnerable to chronic infections that antibiotics could not clear. Around the same time, a case of serious food poisoning left him with chronic neuropathy, weakening his legs. His energy was shot.

His doctors at Boston’s New England Medical Center had no effective treatment for his worsening health problems. Essentially, they gave up. After all, Ben was in his eighties, and he should not expect miracles. Stay home, buy a wheelchair, and install an elevator, his doctors told him. You’ve lived a good life.

That didn’t sit well with Ben. It was not the implication that he ought to just wait to die that troubled him; it was when he saw the price of installing an elevator that he got steamed!

With the encouragement of his wife, Mary, he decided to try a different approach, which involved taking a long look at his diet and making some major changes. He consulted with a knowledgeable nutritionist, who felt that it was not too late to try something new. Out with the meaty, cheesy junk food, and in with the vegetables and whole grains. Mary kept him on track, preparing soup, rice, stir-fried vegetables, and many other dishes.

Within days, he started to sleep better. By the three-week mark, his strength and energy were back. By six weeks, he had lost fifty pounds of fluid and felt like a new man.

It was not always smooth sailing, however. At a restaurant one night, he was tempted by the menu and decided to “treat” himself to steak. Almost instantly, he felt sick again. His energy was gone and his sleep was disrupted—and that proved to him that it really was the healthy food that had made the difference. He got back on track and felt good again.

Shortly thereafter, he went back to the New England Medical Center—not for a medical appointment this time, but as an invited speaker—and he saw the physicians who had consulted with him before. They were stunned to see his dramatic improvement.

After these life-changing experiences, Dr. Spock began to advocate for a healthful diet. He rewrote
Baby and Child Care
to include information about the value of plant-based diets and getting away from meat and milk—foods he had once thought were essential for children. He worked with my organization, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, as we pushed the federal government to change its dietary policies.

Speaking with Dr. Spock in his nineties was like talking to a young man embarking on a new adventure. He had a vast knowledge, generous disposition, and a sense of purpose that never left him. Mentally clear every day of his life, he died just shy of his ninety-fifth birthday.

I
n the same way that exercise can build muscular strength and endurance, you can do the same thing for your brain.

Cognitive exercises can strengthen synapses—the bridges that connect one brain cell to the next. The more solid these connections, the better off you’ll be.

Physical exercises increase blood flow to your brain and actually have been shown to reverse age-related brain shrinkage. Even if you haven’t thought about physical activity in some time, there is a new twist on exercise that makes it surprisingly easy. We’ll start slowly, take it gently, and you’ll be in control every step of the way.

As you’ll see, the food choices you learned about in Step One work hand in hand with the simple exercises you’ll learn about now in Step Two. The benefits for brain function have been proven in controlled tests and scans of brain structure.

I
n a huge, airy loft on Kearny Street in downtown San Francisco, a young man is hunched over a computer screen. Near the top of the screen, a raindrop appears and slowly descends toward the bottom. Written on the raindrop is a bit of arithmetic. It says 9 + 2. The young man quickly punches the number 11 onto the keyboard, and the raindrop explodes into pieces.

Another drop appears. This one says 6 x 1. He punches 6 into the keyboard, and that raindrop explodes as well. Then another says 34 + 10, and he punches in 44. Away it goes. The drops start coming faster and faster, some on the left and others on the right. Intently focused, he reacts as quickly as he can, scoring points for each correct answer.

Next to him, a young woman is looking at a computer screen, too. But hers shows animated human figures. They appear to be customers at a food counter, and they are looking at her
expectantly. She has to remember their names and what they’ve ordered. When she gets them right, she gets a tip.

Across the room, another woman is seated at a computer that is displaying three letters. It says “CAP.” She types “cape,” “caps,” “captain,” “capsize,” and “capture,” and then pauses to think of more words with the same three-letter beginning. The more words she comes up with within the allotted time, the more points she earns.

These people are not playing video games. They are part of a team of computer experts and graphic designers. They are working on a training program that builds what scientists call
cognitive reserve
. It is a new concept in neurology, and one that may help us hold on to memories for much longer.

Not long ago, researchers made a striking observation: Using special neuroimaging techniques, they looked into the brains of living people and found that many of them had quite a lot of amyloid plaques—the microscopic abnormalities that lead to Alzheimer’s disease. But despite their ominous-looking scans, some of these people showed no signs of any cognitive problems at all, so far as anyone could tell. They could balance their checkbooks and pay their bills, and they did not stumble over their grandchildren’s names.
¹
Despite changes in their brains, they somehow managed to keep their memories more or less intact.

How did they do it? The reason, scientists speculate, is intellectual stimulation. By giving their brains constant input over the years, they had built up so many connections between brain cells that they could compensate for losses later on. This is cognitive reserve.

Think of it like a highway. You’ve got your regular route that
leads to your destination. But what if the road ahead is blocked? It helps if you know of a detour or maybe have a choice of several alternate ways you could take. Something similar happens in your brain. If you lose some brain cells or synapses, it is great if other cells or cell connections can get your messages through. The theory is that the more connections you have between cells, the more options you can use in case any start malfunctioning.

So how do you build cognitive reserve? The most obvious way is in your years at school. Yes, all that time plowing through books, working at the blackboard, writing essays, solving math problems, and studying for tests really does strengthen connections in your brain. Indeed, a large study of older adults living in Memphis, Tennessee, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, showed that people with higher levels of education were more likely to retain their mental clarity into old age, compared with people with little education or low literacy levels.
²
Other studies had shown much the same thing. Well-educated people have more “alternate routes” ready in case they need them.

Here’s what this might look like from your brain’s point of view: You’re out with some friends, and someone asks who starred in
Gone with the Wind
. “I can see her face,” you say. “But what the heck is her name? It’s on the tip of my tongue. She was one of the most famous actresses….”

If you had seen the movie, you may or may not remember the star’s name. But what if your brain happened to have laid down a few extra connections? Your brain suddenly starts coughing up all the bits of information it has stored, one linked to the next. The movie was set in the Old South… the plantation was called Tara… the Civil War was brewing… it came out just before World War II… what’s-her-name was in love with Ashley… Ashley went off to war… she ended up destitute and married Rhett Butler… frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn…
that was Clark Gable… Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh…. Oh yeah! That’s her!

It’s not pretty, but out of that salad of ideas comes the name you’re looking for. The more connections you’ve made, the more likely you are to remember things.

Education is good. But you do not need a PhD in nuclear physics. Whatever education you had or didn’t have in the past, the activities you do
now
can make a difference. In the Chicago study, even simple mental activities, if done often enough, helped prevent Alzheimer’s. That could mean reading a newspaper, a book, or a magazine; working a crossword puzzle; playing cards or checkers; going to a museum; and even watching television or listening to the radio—as long as it’s something else that gets your neurons firing. Over a four-year period in Chicago, people who were engaged in these activities the most cut their risk of developing Alzheimer’s by about two-thirds compared to people who got very little mental stimulation.
³

That was encouraging. So a team of researchers developed a specific set of brain-training exercises to see if they could prevent mental decline in older folks. The project was called the ACTIVE study, short for Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly.
⁴
The researchers, from Alabama, Michigan, Massachusetts, Indiana, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, invited a group of 2,832 older adults to participate.

Each participant received up to ten training sessions in memory, reasoning, or processing speed. Some had to remember word lists or do other memory tests. Others were asked to identify patterns in series of letters or words (such as: a… c… e… g… i…). And still others were asked to remember the locations of items that flashed briefly on a computer screen and then vanished. The researchers also gave the participants booster training later on.

Five years later, the participants were tested. And indeed, they were noticeably sharper. How much sharper? They were able to essentially counteract seven to fourteen years of aging.