Power Foods for the Brain (22 page)

Folate and vitamin B
_6.
If blood tests show that your homocysteine level is high, it may be sensible to add folate and B
₆
to your regimen. As we saw in
chapter 4
, Oxford researchers used a combination of 800 micrograms of folate and 20 milligrams of vitamin B
₆
, along with 500 micrograms of vitamin B
₁₂
in people with high homocysteine levels. The vitamin combination reduced homocysteine and boosted their cognitive function. If you do not have a high homocysteine level, you’ll get the folate and B
₆
you need from foods alone.

Vitamin D.
Although vitamin D’s best-known function is to help you absorb calcium from the foods you eat, it also has an anticancer effect that is worth knowing about. The natural source is sunlight. Fifteen or twenty minutes of direct sunlight on your face and arms each day gives you all the vitamin D you need. But if you are indoors most of the time, you’ll want to take a supplement. The US government recommends 600 IU per day for adults up to age seventy and 800 IU per day for people older than seventy.

Because of vitamin D’s cancer-preventing effects, some authorities recommend daily doses as high as 2000 IU per day. This level of supplementation appears to be safe, but do not exceed that dose without a physician’s directive.

DHA.
As we saw in
chapter 3
, your body makes the DHA
your brain needs. However, some people hedge their bets with a DHA supplement. If that includes you, it is best to choose a vegan brand (as opposed to fish-derived brands) and to have 100 to 300 milligrams per day.
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So you’re babying your brain with healthful vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains, and giving it the vitamins it needs. You’re skipping animal products, added oils, and toxic metals, and your brain is thrilled. You are now miles ahead of most other people.

But while a healthful diet is Step One of our brain-protecting program—and it gives you enormous power—don’t forget Steps Two and Three. Step Two is to exercise your brain and body. That means regular mental stimulation through reading, puzzles, and social interaction, or one of the specially designed online programs mentioned in
chapter 5
. These cognitive activities are enriching in every way, in addition to their ability to strengthen the connections in your brain.

And be sure to get your heart pumping, once your doctor gives you the okay. Begin slow—a ten-minute walk each day is fine for starters, and keep your pulse in the safety zone you calculated in
chapter 6
. Then, each week, increase your duration by five minutes until you are exercising for forty minutes at a stretch. Focus on your pulse, not on distance, and stop whenever you need to. And be sure to put exercise on your calendar if you have not done so already.

Step Three is to tackle physical threats—sleeplessness, medication side effects, and medical problems that can harm your brain.

When the clock strikes 10 p.m., turn out the light and go to
sleep. You’ll wake up refreshed, and you’ll notice the benefits for memory, mood, and overall well-being. If sleep is a problem for you, carefully review the guidelines in
chapter 7
to get you back on track.

If you are on medications that could affect your memory or cognition, check with your physician regularly to see if you really need them, paying special attention to those listed in
chapter 8
. Also be attentive to the medical conditions listed in that chapter. Your doctor will help you.

Now your menu is in good shape, you’re putting your brain and body through their paces, and you’re giving special attention to sleep and medical issues. You’ve done yourself a huge favor, and your brain and body will thank you.

But we’re not quite done. In the next chapter, we’ll tackle what, for many people, is the biggest issue of all—sticking with a healthful diet over the long run. We’ll learn how we go astray and how to stay on track.

H
ave you ever been attracted to a food that you knew was not good for you? Did you ever dig into a greasy burger, a triple-cheese pizza, a candy bar, or double-chocolate cake, knowing that they could affect your weight or clog your arteries?

Of course. We’ve all been there. Even when we know that some foods are not doing our bodies any favors—maybe even
especially
when we know they are bad for us—we are like moths to a flame.

Why does that happen? It is perhaps the single most important question we could ask. Sometimes understanding the facts about what can destroy or protect the brain is not enough to motivate us to action, and we need more incentives to eat right.

The fact is, a war is going on inside your brain, and one small part of your brain is winning. Its weapon is
dopamine.
It can kill your resolve to stay healthy, and it may end up killing
you
. Let’s take one last trip to England, where we’ll spot the problem.

Just as the Beatles hit the peak of their popularity, the drug culture was exploding. In San Francisco, New York, London, and everywhere else, marijuana, hallucinogens, cocaine, and heroin were becoming widely available for the first time, and society was trying to sort out how to deal with them.

Musicians seemed especially vulnerable to the deadly effects of drugs and alcohol. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones were all part of the so-called 27 Club, named for their age at death. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast,” John Lennon said in a 1980 interview.
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“We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world.” Cocaine, LSD, and alcohol all came along, too.

Now, a key part of a manager’s job is to fend off drugs, alcohol, and any other threat to success, or at least to try to contain them as much as possible. After all, if the band stops showing up for gigs or cannot make it through a performance, the game is over.

But Epstein—the forward-thinking, exquisitely organized planner who always seemed to know the best path forward—did not stop the Beatles’ drug use. He couldn’t, because he was pulled into the world of drugs himself.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Drugs were everywhere in the music business at that time. Moreover, Epstein pushed himself to the absolute limit. Most people would have been satisfied to be managing the most successful musical group in history. But Epstein simultaneously took on another Liverpool group—Gerry and the Pacemakers—and guided them to stardom with “Ferry Cross the Mersey” and many other hits. He also
managed Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and Cilla Black, merged with the management company that handled Cream, the Who, and the Bee Gees, launched a theater, and took on endless other projects. For a young man who had fallen into the music business by taking a job in his parents’ furniture store’s record department, success came dizzyingly fast. Drugs became a coping mechanism. Epstein fell into amphetamines, marijuana, and barbiturates, experimented with heroin, and sometimes drank more than was good for him.
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On August 27, 1967, Brian Epstein did not answer his phone. A knock on his apartment door elicited no response. His live-in assistant broke open his bedroom door and found his pulseless body lying on his bed. The medical examiner took blood samples, which revealed Carbrital, a barbiturate.

This was not a suicide. Barbiturates had been Epstein’s way to turn off his brain and get to sleep, and over time it took more and more to shut out the day’s events.

So 1967 did not bring us a picture of the sober manager who reined in the rowdy rock band and kept them on the straight and narrow. Epstein was drawn into the world of drugs and was ultimately destroyed by them.

If drugs are so deadly—if they can get you into trouble with the law, destroy your relationships, ruin your career, and maybe even kill you—why do people take them? The reason is dopamine.

Deep inside your brain, in what is called the
reward center,
dopamine waits in tiny round vesicles inside brain cells. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. That is, it is a natural chemical that carries messages from one brain cell to another. It is actually waiting for you to find something to eat—some really
good, tasty food. As soon as you do, dopamine bursts out from one brain cell and races across the gap to give the news to a neighboring cell. Other brain cells follow suit—one cell squirting dopamine at the next, all of which creates a little party in your brain and a feel-good sensation for you.

Your brain is not doing this just for fun. Your brain uses dopamine to make sure you remember the sights, sounds, and smells of this happy event, so that you’ll come back and do the same tomorrow. After all, food keeps you alive. Dopamine resets your priorities to make sure that whatever else you might have had on your schedule—battling a neighboring clan, planting a garden, flying to the moon, or whatever—it will all come second to whatever got your dopamine flowing. Dopamine organizes your to-do list.

If this sounds odd, it is important to remember that for much of our time on Earth, food was not just sitting at the corner grocery store. You had to go out and find it, and you had to be able to separate what was nourishing from what was poisonous. And so the reward center has been part of the mammalian brain since long before the dawn of our species. Our biological cousins use it, too. At Gombe, on the shores of Tanzania’s Lake Tanganyika, Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees digging into the succulent strychnos fruit. As the juice dripped down their chins, you could almost see the dopamine sparks in their brains.

Your reward center is also keen on sex. No, sex doesn’t keep you alive, but it goes a long way toward keeping the species alive, so it has gotten favorable treatment as evolution shaped our brains.

So your reward center is looking for food and for a receptive mate, and when it finds them, out comes the dopamine. But this primitive system can be hijacked by drugs. A whiff of marijuana, a snort of cocaine, a shot of heroin, and, in fact, virtually
all drugs of abuse trigger the release of dopamine. The same is true of a glass of wine, a cigarette, and a cup of coffee. Whatever else they do in your brain—calm you down, pick you up, create hallucinations, ruin your driving, or anything else—they also trigger dopamine. That’s why people use them. The market for legal and illegal drugs depends on a flaw in the human brain: Its dopamine switch is easily manipulated.

Drugs are
much
more potent at triggering dopamine compared with foods or sex, which is why addicts often lose interest in food, sex, and more or less everything else in favor of their drug of choice. But food manufacturers found that they could play that game, too. The dopamine release that you get from an apple, an orange, or a strychnos fruit is actually pretty modest. So, over time, the food industry has learned how to enhance it, making products that are less and less like food and more like drugs.

Exhibit A: sugar.
Yes, an apple or an orange is pleasantly sweet, and it tastes very nice on a hot summer day. But why stop there? By extracting and purifying the juice from sugarcane or sugar beets, sugar companies get pure, concentrated
sucrose—
table sugar. And sugar is a hit. We bake it into cookies, pies, and cakes, and give it to children to show our “love.”

In the brain, sugar stimulates the release of mild opiates—that is, natural compounds that are in the same chemical class as heroin and other narcotics but much weaker. You probably already know of some of the opiates the brain creates—the natural endorphins that cause the “runner’s high” that marathoners experience. Sugar also stimulates the release of dopamine.

Exhibit B: chocolate.
In prehistoric Central America, Aztecs
turned cacao beans into a warm drink they called
chocolatl
. It was bitter, and neither they nor the early Spanish explorers saw much commercial potential in it. But in the mid-1800s, chocolate manufacturers discovered that by extracting and concentrating cocoa butter and then combining it with cocoa powder, sugar, vanilla, and other flavorings, chocolate becomes irresistible. Dopamine receptors light right up.

Exhibit C: cheese.
Cows produce milk for one reason: to nourish their young. But about ten thousand years ago, some adventurous humans decided to taste cow’s milk themselves. In your digestive tract, milk’s
casein
protein breaks apart to release mild opiates, called
casomorphins
. They are not produced by your brain cells. They are actually in the milk protein that nature meant for the rapidly growing calf, and as you digest it, the opiates are released and absorbed into your bloodstream. In turn, these opiates trigger dopamine release.

Later on, someone figured out that coagulating milk and expressing out the water transforms it into cheese. And now we’re on to something. Cheese has concentrated casein and so delivers a much larger casomorphin dose. It may smell like old socks and have more saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium than a steak, but people flock to the cheese counter to get their hit of opiates and dopamine.

Exhibit D: meat.
Humans do not have the long canine teeth that natural carnivores like cats and dogs use to kill and dismember prey. At least three and a half million years ago, our ancestors’ canine teeth withered away to be no longer than their incisors. So while we were pretty handy with fruit, leaves, nuts, and anything else we could pick with our fingers and opposable thumbs, dismembering a mastodon was not really in the cards. Then, when the Stone Age brought us hatchets, arrowheads, axes, and knives, we finally were able to eat like
carnivores. Never mind that we still have pre–Stone Age bodies that develop heart disease and colon cancer in response to meat eating. Meat, like sugar, chocolate, and cheese, has an opiate effect in the brain, which in turn triggers dopamine release. Researchers have shown that when people are given a drug that blocks opiate effects in the brain, they lose much of their interest in meat.
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