The Mindspan Diet: Reduce Alzheimer's Risk, Minimize Memory Loss, and Keep Your Brain Young - Hardcover

Estep III, Preston

 
9781101886120: The Mindspan Diet: Reduce Alzheimer's Risk, Minimize Memory Loss, and Keep Your Brain Young
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101886129 ISBN 13: 9781101886120
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From an esteemed geneticist and the director of gerontology at the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School comes a revolutionary plan for curbing memory loss and improving cognitive longevity that will forever change how you think about diet and aging.

All around the world people are living longer than ever, but record numbers of us are experiencing cognitive decline and other brain disorders later in life. New studies show that Alzheimer’s disease is the number three cause of death in developed countries, behind heart disease and cancer. But there is good news: We now have the knowledge to extend both lifespan and mindspan, helping to ensure that our minds and bodies stay in peak form at any age.

Studying the diets of the “Mindspan Elite”—those populations that live longest with low levels of dementia—as well as the ways that certain food additives and ingredients interact with our genes, Dr. Preston Estep explains how the recent slew of popular brains-and-aging books have steered us down the wrong dietary path. Shattering myths about which foods are (and are not) beneficial to our brains, The Mindspan Diet reveals a simple plan to slow cognitive decline. Startling in its revelations about healthy eating for those over the age of forty, it challenges us to rethink our approach to many common staples, including:

• Iron: While iron-fortified foods sound healthy, high iron intake can be toxic, especially for people over forty, and increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease.
• Whole grains: Processed grains such as white rice, pasta, and flour are actually staples in the diets of cultures with the best cognitive health.
• Protein: Though it’s considered by some to be a miracle macronutrient, high levels of protein are actually hard on the kidneys, and may promote cancer and accelerate the progression of dementia.

Complete with food recommendations, shopping lists, advice on reading nutrition labels, and more than seventy delicious recipes, The Mindspan Diet shows that you can enjoy the richest flavors life has to offer and remain lean, healthy, and cognitively intact for a very long life.

Praise for The Mindspan Diet

“Eye-opening . . . fascinating, important . . . Estep includes plenty of practical info on improving one’s mindspan and puts some refined grains back on the table.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Presenting a sensible regimen that people can follow easily, this recommended diet book [has] useful information about aging.”—Library Journal

“Dr. Estep exposes common misconceptions and well-intentioned but misguided advice on aging and diet. Rigorously researched, this book is also full of tasty tips—illuminating not just a set of rules to follow as blindly as the last set, but how you can apply scientific methods to assess these and other important issues in our increasingly technical world.”—George M. Church, Ph.D., Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard Medical School

“This gem of a book offers a practical road map for maximizing vibrant cognitive functioning throughout life. We come away convinced that a longer and better life is as close as our own kitchen cupboards. And the Chickpea and Fava Bean Tapenade is to not die for!”—Ronald C. Kessler, Ph.D., McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School

“A fascinating guide to modifying your diet to prolong the longevity of your brain as well as your health.”—Dr. Tim Spector, author of The Diet Myth

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Preston Estep III, Ph.D., received his doctorate in genetics from Harvard Medical School. He is the director of gerontology at the Harvard Personal Genome Project, and he manages the project’s genome sequencing pipeline. A co-founder and adviser to multiple biomedical start-ups and nonprofit organizations, Dr. Estep is a founder and the chief scientific officer of Veritas Genetics, and the chairman of the Mind First Foundation, a mental health nonprofit that he established with professors at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Estep lives with his wife in the Boston area. This is his first book.

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1.

Mindspans on the Move

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.

—Probably said first by Henry Wheeler Shaw (pen name Josh Billings), but also attributed to Artemus Ward and to Mark Twain

Our highest aspiration should be to make our mindspans soar—to maximize both longevity and mental performance. With our best possible minds we can confidently tackle the most challenging problems; we can better forecast and plan for the future; and we can live the fullest and happiest lives. In other words, we can experience and do everything better. Now, however, we face our days with less certainty and confidence.

According to recent polls, Alzheimer’s disease is the most feared diagnosis. Some of our uncertainty and fear about the future comes from the lack of scientific consensus on the most healthful path forward. There are all manner of claims, from hopelessly bleak to hopeful and inspiring. Some say nothing can prevent or substantially slow the decline. Others say cognitive decline can be stopped and even reversed by some implausible miracle cure. Both are wrong. I selected the Josh Billings quote to head this chapter because, of all the health-related information that inundates us these days, critical parts just ain’t so. They just ain’t. And, as Mr. Billings said, that gets us into trouble.

Choosing a Diet

I have seen and heard about countless diets over the decades. Most focus on weight loss, others on physical fitness or athletic performance, some on health. These are all laudable goals, but neglect what is most important: the long-term performance and health of your mind—and the minds of your loved ones. Think about being a caretaker for many years for someone you love as he or she slowly descends into the abyss of mental darkness we call dementia. Now reverse the roles and picture your loved ones caring for you as all of your memories and relationships fade one by one, leaving them to care for your progressively debilitated body and your ravaged mind. We want to remember the best of our loved ones, but it is difficult to disregard the repeated questions, odd behaviors, incontinence, and the like. The only reasonable goal in choosing a diet is maximum mindspan.

In recent years, both fatty foods and carbs have been vilified. Common assertions are that we’re being poisoned by our foods, we’re suffering from our bounty, and our diets and health are worse than ever. I agree generally with the first two of these claims, but not with the specifics. As for the state of our diets, in some important ways, they are better than ever. But that doesn’t stop the grim downpour of gripes and the rising tide of misguided solutions.

Some health gurus harken back to bygone days. They say if we could go back many millennia we’d see people living in pristine health. As we’d chat around the campfire with our cave kin, they’d be amazed by our descriptions of computers, cellphones, and routine airplane travel while being equally puzzled by our relatively recent ailments such as heart attacks, cancer, and dementia. These gurus are fascinated by our Paleolithic ancestors’ health, speculating as to why, for example, starches made up such a tiny fraction of their daily diet.

While our kin of millennia ago were leaner and far more active and diabetes was much less common, the juiciest parts of these stories—especially those used to justify currently popular Paleo diets—come from imaginations gone wild. Genetic evidence shows that over time humans have been evolving an increasing ability to digest starches and sugars. (Today, for example, we produce more than five times the amount of digestive enzymes needed to break down starches as chimps, our closest ape relatives.) The changes with the largest effect date to at least 50,000 years ago, which contradicts the belief that starch consumption is recent and therefore evolutionarily unimportant.

Scientists agree that diseases of older age such as heart disease, cancer, and dementia were less common many thousands of years ago—but primarily because old age as we know it was less common. In fact, mummies from around the world are found with cancer, atherosclerosis, arthritis, and other diseases, which appear to have been at least as common then as they are now when age is taken into account.

If we flash back to the turn of the twentieth century, we’ll see that the current ailments of old age were common. In fact, the age-adjusted rates of cardiovascular diseases—which remain leading killers today—occurred more frequently, as did age-adjusted rates of other deadly diseases, such as pathogenic infections.

Still, more than a hundred years later, it is clear we have some big problems, one of which is that many people have an unnecessarily high risk of cognitive impairment. It is very disturbing that as people and countries become wealthier, cognitive problems in later life become more common. But to see the best direction forward in dealing with such risks, we must get our facts straight.

Maximum Mindspan Means Optimal Health

Mindspan translates to longevity and performance of the mind, and it is the ultimate measure of overall long-term health. If the cardiovascular system is in poor shape, blood flow to the brain is impaired. Similarly, poorly functioning kidneys, lungs, or liver also impact mental performance. It is therefore unsurprising that a host of leading health problems, including diabetes and high cholesterol, are risk factors for mental decline. Optimal health and longevity of the body come baked into the overall recipe for achieving maximum mindspan. If you are eating a conventional diet—even one typically considered healthful—my dietary program will reduce your risk of all killer diseases.

Mindspan Rising, Mindspan Falling

First, the good news: We’ve made impressive headway in just the last few generations, both in overall longevity and in performance of the mind. Over the last 150 years, industrialized countries have achieved the greatest longevity increases in history. Improved prenatal care and reduced infant mortality have driven huge gains not just in overall life expectancy, but in adult years too. My great-grandparents were born just before the turn of last century. When they were children in the year 1900, a seventy-year-old woman living in the United States could expect to live about nine more years, a statistic that has increased to fifteen years today. And recent trends in record long life show accelerating growth. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of centenarians (age one hundred and up) of many populations increased dramatically—even more than doubling in some, including in Japan, which leads the world in longevity.

The realm of the mind has experienced similar gains. Modern mental testing didn’t become common until after the turn of the twentieth century; but once started and applied widely, testing showed gradual increases similar to those observed for longevity. The mental realm is highly complex and important changes are less easily measured than those in longevity, but measured gains in memory, IQ, and other cognitive functions are impressive: reportedly as high as 25 percent over the twentieth century. As with life expectancy, previous increases of this magnitude likely took many times longer.

While these gains are most often measured in children and adolescents, tests on adults show gains across the board, including in older adults (which is one of the important developments opposing the trend toward increased dementia as people live longer). In other words, it appears people are living longer than ever at about the highest-ever...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101886129
ISBN 13 
9781101886120
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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