Food and Gut Brain Health
“Always be Counting (ABC’s) – Not calories but the number of fruits and vegetables. Aim for at least 30 different types of fruits and vegetables each week to maximize the benefits to your gut microbiome.”
— Arpana Church, PhD
We fuel our brain with the food we eat.
There are hundreds of foods that help the neurons in our brain grow, stretch, and branch into a super-powerful organ every single day. We fuel our brain with the food we eat. In other words, the quality, the type, and the amounts of food we consume impact how we think, make decisions, solve problems, and our overall mood.
This might seem like a stretch… but hear this out. We have heard about certain foods increasing our metabolism or helping us reduce weight. But what we eat affects more than our bodies; it also affects our brain.
Our brain is always listening and responding to the composition of our diets. Cutting-edge research studies have shown that the typical Western diet can increase depression by up to 35% when compared to the Mediterranean diet and the Japanese diet. Western diets are filled with many weapons of mass destruction. They are high in processed meats, have few vegetables and fiber, and contain a lot of processed and refined oils, sugars, chemical additives, and preservatives that are secretly damaging brain function. The good news is that it is never too late to control how our brain performs.
As Dr. Daniel Amen, psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist notes, “You are not stuck with the brain you have, you can make it better”.
Exiting scientific evidence from the new, emerging field of Nutritional Psychiatry suggests a promising link between the consumption of healthy, whole foods and nutrients to improve our mental well being and overall health. Each of us consumes an average of 3 pounds of food per day, of which the brain uses about 20% of our daily calories. Putting this math into perspective, that’s about one thousand pounds of food per year, meaning that we will consume about eighty thousand pounds of food in our lifetime. In these eight thousands pounds of food lies our greatest opportunity to manifest a healthier and happier brain.
Feeding our brain the right fuel can go a long way when it comes to improving the health of our brain and body.
The foods that we eat are also closely linked to our gut health which in turn influences the health of our brain. After the brain, the gut microbes contain the largest number of neurons in the body that are in constant communication with the brain through the brain-gut axis. There is a connection between the food we eat, the types of bacteria produced in our gut, and how these bacteria produce compounds that communicate with the brain. It is the presence of good versus the bad bacteria that affects our brain’s functions.
Clearly food provides more than nutrients and energy for the brain and body. Making healthier choices in your diet benefits your waistline, helps lift your mood, and provides a long-lasting increase in energy and focus. This has huge implications for the future of health and how we can use food as medicine to ward off disease and even prevent it.
The trick to a healthier and happier brain is about to get much simpler. Grounded in fascinating science, practical nutritional recommendations, and delicious, brain-healthy recipes, Our Naked Brain is the go-to guide to optimizing your brain health with food.
As we let Alice continue her journey of discovery, we need to make every bite count.