Sweetened Drinks Associated with Increased Depression Risk

Story at-a-glance

• Preliminary study findings report that drinking sweetened beverages – whether they’re sweetened with sugar or artificial sweeteners – is associated with an increased risk of depression.
• Those who drank more than four cans or glasses of diet soda or other artificially sweetened beverages had a nearly 30 percent higher risk of depression compared to those who did not consume diet drinks. Regular soda drinkers had a 22 percent increased risk.
• Potential mechanisms through which sugar intake could exert a toxic effect on mental health include causing insulin and leptin resistance; suppressing activity of a key hormone called BDNF, which are critically low in depressed patients; and promoting chronic inflammation, which is thought to be a primary cause of depression.
• Previous studies have also shown that aspartame has a detrimental effect on brain function, neurological, cognitive, and behavioral health.

By Dr. Mercola

Foods have an immense impact on your body and your brain, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan is the best way to support your mental and physical health.

Avoiding sugar (particularly fructose) and artificial sweeteners is in my view, based on the evidence, a very important aspect of preventing and/or treating depression. Both contribute to chronic inflammation, and can wreak havoc with your brain function.

Preliminary study findings that will be presented at the 65th annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology reports that drinking sweetened beverages – whether they’re sweetened with sugar or artificial sweeteners – is associated with an increased risk of depression. Coffee was associated with a slightly reduced risk.

As reported by WebMD:¹

“Researchers say the findings suggest that cutting down on sweetened drinks or replacing them entirely with non-sweetened beverages may help lower depression risk.”

The study included nearly 264,000 American adults over the age of 50, who were enrolled in an AARP diet and health study. At the outset of the study, the participants filled out a detailed dietary survey. At a 10-year follow-up, they were asked whether they’d been diagnosed with depression at any point during the past decade.

• Those who drank more than four cans or glasses of diet soda or other artificially sweetened beverages had a nearly 30 percent higher risk of depression compared to those who did not consume diet drinks
• Regular soda drinkers had a 22 percent increased risk

Meanwhile, those who drank four cups of coffee per day had a 10 percent decreased risk of depression, compared to those who drank none. Researcher Honglei Chen, MD, PhD, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told WebMD:

“While our findings are preliminary, and the underlying biological mechanisms are not known, they are intriguing and consistent with a small but growing body of evidence suggesting that artificially sweetened beverages may be associated with poor health outcomes.”

While the featured research does not prove causation, and some have pointed out that those who are depressed may turn to sweets for self-soothing, there is plenty of other evidence indicating that both sugar and artificial sweeteners can have a significant and detrimental impact on mental health, so the findings really are not at all surprising. As for the underlying mechanisms, previous research has offered up a number of compelling clues.

Why Sugar Can Increase Depression Risk

Let’s start with sugar. There are at least three potential mechanisms through which refined sugar intake could exert a toxic effect on mental health:

• Sugar (particularly fructose) and grains contribute to insulin and leptin resistance and impaired signaling, which play a significant role in your mental health
• Sugar suppresses activity of a key growth hormone called BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor) which promotes healthy brain neurons. BDNF levels are critically low in both depression and schizophrenia, which animal models suggest might actually be causative
• Sugar consumption also triggers a cascade of chemical reactions in your body that promote chronic inflammation. In the long term, inflammation disrupts the normal functioning of your immune system, which is linked to a greater risk of depression

In 2004, noted British psychiatric researcher Malcolm Peet published a provocative cross-cultural analysis of the relationship between diet and mental illness.² His primary finding was a strong link between high sugar consumption and the risk of both depression and schizophrenia. According to Peet:

“A higher national dietary intake of refined sugar and dairy products predicted a worse 2-year outcome of schizophrenia. A high national prevalence of depression was predicted by a low dietary intake of fish and seafood. The dietary predictors of... prevalence of depression are similar to those that predict illnesses such as coronary heart disease and diabetes, which are more common in people with mental health problems and in which nutritional approaches are widely recommended. Dietary intervention studies are indicated in schizophrenia and depression.”

One of the key predictors of heart disease and diabetes is in fact chronic inflammation, which, as Peet mentions, is also associated with poor mental health. And sugar consumption is a primary driver of chronic inflammation in your body, so consuming excessive amounts of sugar can truly set off an avalanche of negative health events – both mental and physical.

Following my recently revised nutrition plan is a simple way to automatically reduce your intake of sugar from all sources. Another previous study published in the International Breastfeeding Journal,³ found that inflammation may be more than just another risk factor. It may in fact be THE risk factor that underlies all others... According to the researchers:

“The old paradigm described inflammation as simply one of many risk factors for depression. The new paradigm is based on more recent research that has indicated that physical and psychological stressors increase inflammation. These recent studies constitute an important shift in the depression paradigm: inflammation is not simply a risk factor; it is the risk factor that underlies all the others.

Moreover, inflammation explains why psychosocial, behavioral and physical risk factors increase the risk of depression. This is true for depression in general and for postpartum depression in particular.”

Omega-3 Fats are Also Vital for Your Optimal Brain Function and Mental Health

Another major culprit that encourages inflammation in your body is rancid or oxidized omega-fats (think trans fats), whereas a diet rich in omega-3 fats helps to reduce inflammation. Healthy omega-6 fats like gamma linoleic acid (GLA), found in evening primrose, black currant seed and borage oil can also help counteract inflammation.

As you may already know, I recommend taking animal-based omega-3 supplements for many types of inflammation, and for optimal brain health. Most alternative health practitioners are also well aware of the benefits of omega-3’s for depression. While all omega-3 fats possess immune-boosting qualities, omega-3 fats from marine sources (EPA and DHA) are more biologically potent than omega-3 fat ALA found in plant sources such as flax seeds, and are more potent inflammation fighters. My favorite source of omega-3 fats is krill oil, as it has several advantages over fish oil.

Artificial Sweeteners and Depression

The artificial sweetener aspartame is the number one source of side-effect complaints to the FDA, with over 10,000 complaints filed and over 91 symptoms documented that are related to its consumption. Among them are mental adverse effects such as depression and panic attacks. The following video will familiarize you with some of the terrifying side-effects and health problems you could encounter if you consume products containing this chemical. Unfortunately, aspartame toxicity is not well-known by doctors, despite its frequency.

A number of studies have shown that aspartame has a detrimental effect on brain function, neurological, cognitive, and behavioral health. For a listing of such studies, please see my Aspartame Studies page. For example:

• In a 1986 evaluation of reactions to food additives,⁴ aspartame (in commonly consumed amounts) was linked to mood alterations (anxiety, agitation, irritability, or depression), headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and fatigue
• A 1993 study⁵ found that individuals with mood disorders are particularly sensitive to aspartame, suggesting its use in this population should be discouraged. In the clinical study, the project was halted by the Institutional Review Board after a total of 13 individuals had completed the study because of the severity of reactions within the group of patients with a history of depression
• A 2006 study⁶ found that high concentrations of aspartame can cause neurological symptoms, including memory and learning problems
• In 2008, researchers asserted that excessive aspartame ingestion might be involved in the pathogenesis of certain mental disorders (DSM-IV-TR 2000) and also in compromised learning and emotional functioning⁷

Humans Cannot Compensate for Methanol Toxicity

Aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. (This is in sharp contrast to naturally-occurring methanol found in certain fruits and vegetables, where it is firmly bonded to pectin, allowing the methanol to be safely passed through your digestive tract.)

Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone marrow, where an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) converts it into formaldehyde, which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. Interestingly, and most importantly, humans are the only animals that do NOT have a protective mechanism to compensate for methanol toxicity...

Both animals and humans have small structures called peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of chemicals. Peroxisome contains catalase, which help detoxify methanol. Other chemicals in the peroxisome convert the formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last step occurs only in animals. When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.

So, in humans, methanol is allowed to be transported in your body to susceptible tissues where this enzyme, ADH, then converts it to formaldehyde, which damages your protein and DNA, which of course can lead to all sorts of health issues.

Don’t Be Fooled by the Aspartame Propaganda

Aspartame proponents claim it’s harmless, pointing out that phenylalanine and aspartic acid can be readily found in whole foods. However, comparing aspartame to whole food is really comparing apples to oranges.

In a normal protein like meat, fish or eggs, phenylalanine and aspartic acid comprise 4-5 percent each of the total amino acid profile. This is how nature intends the human body to encounter these two amino acids and there is nothing wrong with these substances if they occur naturally in a proper balance with other amino acids. But in aspartame the ratio of these two amino acids is 50 percent phenylalanine and 40 percent aspartic acid (with 10 percent methyl ester bond, aka wood alcohol, a known poison).

In other words, on a percentage basis this is a massive quantity of two unnaturally isolated amino acids that are simply not found in this ratio in nature, bonded together by a known poison. The result of this chemical cocktail is a sweet tasting neurotoxin.

As a result of its unnatural structure, your body processes the amino acids found in aspartame very differently from a steak or a piece of fish. The amino acids in aspartame literally attack your cells, even crossing the blood-brain barrier to attack your brain cells, creating a toxic cellular overstimulation, called excitotoxicity. MSG is another excitotoxin, and works synergistically with aspartame to create even more damage to your brain cells.

The truth is, aspartame should never have been approved, and it should not be on the market, considering how many complaints the FDA has received by people who experienced frightening and devastating side effects from it. (To get the back-story of how it got approved in the first place, please see my previous article Proven Unsafe But FDA-Approved: Are YOU Still Consuming This Man-Made Poison?)

The only way to put pressure on the FDA to address the very real hazards of aspartame (and other artificial sweeteners) is to keep adding to the mounting pile of complaints. So please, if you experience an adverse reaction to any aspartame product, I urge you to call the FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator in your area, and file an adverse event report.

Key Factors to Overcoming Depression

There’s no doubt in my mind that radically reducing or eliminating all forms of sugar and artificial sweeteners from your diet is a crucial step to prevent and/or address depression. Quite simply, if you fail to address the root of the problem, you could be left floundering and struggling with ineffective and potentially toxic band-aids for a long time. Your diet does play a huge part in your mental health so please do not ignore the impact sugar and artificial sweeteners might be having. Here are six additional strategies that can help you even further:

1. Exercise – If you have depression, or even if you just feel down from time to time, exercise is a MUST. The research is overwhelmingly positive in this area, with studies confirming that physical exercise is at least as good as antidepressants for helping people who are depressed. One of the primary ways it does this is by increasing the level of endorphins, the "feel good" hormones, in your brain. It also helps to normalize your insulin and leptin signaling.
2. Eat a healthy diet – A factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your mood and ability to cope and be happy, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental health. Avoiding sugar and grains will help normalize your insulin and leptin levels, and eliminating artificial sweeteners will eliminate your chances of suffering its toxic effects.
3. Optimize your gut health– Fermented foods, such as fermented vegetables are also important for optimal mental health, as they are key for optimizing your gut health. Many fail to realize that your gut is literally your second brain, and can significantly influence your mind, mood, and behavior. Your gut actually produces more mood-boosting serotonin than your brain does.
4. Support optimal brain functioning with essential fats– I also strongly recommend supplementing your diet with a high-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat, like krill oil. This may be the single most important nutrient to battle depression.
5. Get plenty of sunshine – Making sure you're getting enough sunlight exposure to have healthy vitamin D levels is also a crucial factor in treating depression or keeping it at bay. One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels. Vitamin D deficiency is actually more the norm than the exception, and has previously been implicated in both psychiatric and neurological disorders.
6. Address your stress– Depression is a very serious condition, however it is not a "disease." Rather, it's a sign that your body and your life are out of balance. This is so important to remember, because as soon as you start to view depression as an "illness," you think you need to take a drug to fix it. In reality, all you need to do is return balance to your life, and one of the key ways to doing this is addressing stress.

   Meditation or yoga can sometimes help. If weather permits, get outside for a walk. But in addition to that, I also recommend using a system that can help you address emotional issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. For this, my favorite is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). However, if you have depression or serious stress, I believe it would be best to consult with a mental health professional who is also an EFT practitioner to guide you.

Related:

The Aspartame Trap: You May Be Unknowingly Ingesting this Toxic Sweetener

America's Deadliest Sweetener Betrays Millions, Then Hoodwinks You With Name Change

Dumbing Down Society Part I: Foods, Beverages and Meds

12 Food Additives to Remove From Your Diet

Health Tip For 2013: Go All Natural — Ditch The Artificial Sweeteners!

The 76 Dangers of Sugar

The Aspartame Trap: You May Be Unknowingly Ingesting this Toxic Sweetener

America's Deadliest Sweetener Betrays Millions, Then Hoodwinks You With Name Change

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Made These Seniors' Brains an Average of 11 Years Younger in Only 40 Hours

Story at-a-glance

• Research into brain plasticity has proven that your brain continues to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity, which means that cognitive function can be improved, regardless of your age, and cognitive decline can be reversed
• A key factor or ingredient necessary for improving brain function or reversing functional decline is the seriousness of purpose with which you engage in a task. In other words, the task must be important to you, or somehow meaningful or interesting
• There are computer-based brain fitness programs designed to help improve cognitive function in six different areas in about 40 hours, and can be used by any age group
• To optimize your brain fitness, the following lifestyle factors can help: daily physical exercise, focusing on your body movements and your environment, engaging in new learning throughout your life, staying socially active, and practicing “mindfulness”

How Innate ‘Plasticity’ of Your Brain Allows You to Improve Cognitive Performance and Prevent Age-Related Decline

Video: Dr. Mercola and Dr. Merzenich on Innate Brain Plasticity

Dr. Mercola:

It was once thought that any brain function lost was irretrievable. Today, research into what's referred to as "brain plasticity" has proven that this is not the case. On the contrary, your brain continues to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity.

Aside from toxicity, our modern lifestyle plays a part in cognitive decline, as described by Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California, who has pioneered research in brain plasticity for more than 30 years.

He founded Scientific Learning Corporation in Oakland, California, and Posit Science in San Francisco; both specialize in science research into brain training software.

Dr. Merzenich's career arose from an interest in philosophy, and a fascination with the nature and origin of the human persona and individuality, and how brain processes might account for the evolution of our individual abilities. He believed that in those who have learning disabilities or develop psychiatric illnesses, the natural progressions of these brain processes must have encountered errors.

Use It or Lose It — the Principles of Brain Plasticity

The inherent plasticity of the brain was discovered some 30 years ago, and not long thereafter, animal models demonstrated that brain deterioration and aging were in fact reversible, provided the appropriate brain engagement. Dr. Merzenich describes brain plasticity as follows:

"The basic concept is simple. The brain changes physically, functionally, and chemically, as you acquire any ability or skill. You know this instinctively. Something must be changing as your abilities improve, or as new abilities emerge. You are actually remodeling your brain machinery by 'practicing' the skill; those physical changes account for your learning.

Actually what the brain is doing is changing its local wiring, changing the details of how the machinery controlling your behavior is connected. It's also changing itself in other physical, chemical, and functional ways. Collectively, those changes account for the improvement or acquisition of any human ability.

You probably haven't realizd it, but as you acquire an ability – for example, the ability to read – you have actually created a system in the brain that does not exist, that's not in place, in the non-reader. It [the ability; the brain system that controls the ability] actually evolves in you as it has been acquired through experience or learning."

As Dr. Merzenich explains, your brain is designed and constructed to be stimulated and challenged, and to carefully examine, resolve and interpret your environment. During the early days of mankind's development, keeping track of the details of immediate human environments was imperative for survival.

Today, however, we tend to try to remove ourselves from the details of life. For example, instead of keeping track of appointments and to-do lists in our head, we use electronic gadgets with reminder features. Our streets are paved and lit, requiring virtually no attention to navigate from one location to another. And if you don't sufficiently challenge your brain with new, surprising information, it eventually begins to deteriorate.

"Generally, by the third or fourth decade in life, you're in decline," Dr. Merzenich says. "One of the things that happens across this period is that you go from a period of the acquisition of abilities to largely using abilities that have been acquired earlier in life. By that I mean to say, most of the fundamental skills that you apply in your profession or in your everyday life are things you have mastered at a young age, and you're now doing them in 'automatic pilot' mode.

To a large extent, you're operating most of your day without really being consciously engaged in the things you're doing. You're substantially disengaged: 'sleepwalking through life.'

This inattention to detail is substantially a product of modern culture. Modern culture is all about minimizing environmental challenges and surprises... about enabling brainless stereotypy in our basic actions so that our brains can be engaged at more abstract levels of operations. We're no longer interested in the details of things in our world. Because our brains are highly dependent in their functional operations in recording information in detail, they slowly deteriorate. Without that recorded detail, memory and brain speed are compromised."

Contributing Factors to Cognitive Decline, and How to Counteract it

With age, brain researchers have found that there's an increase in "chatter" in your brain. Dr. Merzenich explains:

"Your brain becomes less precise in how it's resolving information as you're operating and listening in language, as you're operating in vision, or as you're operating in controlling your actions. We actually record these 'noisier' processes within the brain as you age. In fact, we can correlate the growing 'chatter' quite directly with the slowing down of your processing.

You know, every older person is slower in their actions, slower in their decisions, and less fluent in their operations than when they're younger. They're slower because the brain basically is dealing with information that is represented in its machinery in a fuzzier, more degraded form."

What research into brain plasticity shows us is that by providing your brain with appropriate stimulation, you can counteract this degeneration. A key factor or ingredient necessary for improving brain function or reversing functional decline is the seriousness of purpose with which you engage in a task. In other words, the task must be important to you, or somehow meaningful or interesting — it must hold your attention. Rote memorization of nonsensical or unimportant items or even heavy work at non-challenging tasks will not stimulate your brain to create new connections or neurons.

Dr. Merzenich has been instrumental in the development of a kind of "brain gym" environment — a computer-based brain training program that can help you sharpen a range of skills, from reading and comprehension to improved memorization and more. The program is called Brain HQ.¹

"There are some very useful exercises at www.BrainHQ.com that are free, and using them can give a person a better understanding of how exercising your brain can drive it in a rejuvenating direction. Using exercises at BrainHQ, most people, of any age, can drive sharp improvements in brain speed and accuracy, and thereby rewire the brain so that it again represents information in detail," he says.

"Basically, what you're doing is reducing the chatter -- the 'noisiness' -- of the processes in your brain. That impacts your capacity, for example, to record and remember that information. When the information the brain is shipping around in its machinery is in a degraded form, when it's fuzzy, when it's imprecise, all of the uses that it makes of it are also degraded. When you rejuvenate those elementary abilities, you significantly recover your 'higher' brain powers."

Who Can Benefit from a "Brain Gym"?

Everybody's brain is plastic, including yours, so no matter what your age or current level of brain function, your brain can improve to some degree or another. Dr. Merzenich and his colleagues have specialized in training children, primarily those with learning disabilities or impairments, using similar approaches. More than 4 million struggling kids have been trained so far. But seniors and adults of all ages are also using these programs at BrainHQ.com in increasing numbers. Individuals in all age groups have been found to reap significant rewards.

Children operating in the 10th to 20th percentile of academic performance are commonly able to improve their scores to the middle or average level with 20-30 hours of intensive computer-based training.

"That's a big difference for the child," he says. "It carries most children who are near the bottom of the class, on the average, to be somewhere in the middle or above average in the class. And that gives struggling children a chance to really succeed and in many cases excel in school."

Careful controlled studies in seniors have also been reported in scientific journals. After 40 hours of computer-based training, the average improvement in cognitive performance across the board was 14 years. On average, if you were 70 years old when you underwent the training after 40 hours of brain training, your cognitive abilities operated like that of a 56-year old. Equally strong or even greater effects were seen in 40 to 50 year olds using the program. Individuals who worked on the BrainHQ exercises at home did just as well as those who completed training in a clinic or research center.

How to Implement a Brain Training Program

So, how does such a training program work, and what's the optimal way to implement it in order to maximize the benefits?

"One of the great advantages that we have is that there's a very large body of scientific information that informs us about the optimum brain training approach," Dr. Merzenich says. "It comes from understanding, on a scientific level, the basis of what controls brain change. We know how the machine operates to control its own remodeling. We know that you have to be engaged attentively, and in a sense that the more attentively focused you are on the training tasks, the greater the positive benefits of training.

We know that rewards have to occur, or information or feedback about how you're doing have to occur, in a specific and timely way to drive the optimum changes in the brain. The way difficulties change in the task are also crucial for driving changes with highest proficiency.

One simple thing we do is to [continually] adjust the difficulty level of the task, so that every trainee is at a level in which they get most things correct but they're still capable of error. Because only when you're in this demanding situation, only when it matters to the brain, does the machinery turn on to change the brain. We actually regulate this, and as the person progresses session by session, day by day, they notch up their performance to higher and higher and higher and higher and higher levels."

Ideally, it would be wise to invest at least 20 minutes a day. But no more than five to seven minutes is to be spent on a specific task. When you spend longer amounts of time on a task, the benefits weaken. According to Dr. Merzenich, the primary benefits occur in the first five or six minutes of the task.

You can typically improve yourself to the highest practical or possible level in anywhere between five to a dozen brief sessions of seven or eight minutes each. Again, having a sense of purpose is crucial.

"When it matters to you, you are going to drive changes in your brain," he explains. "That's something always to keep in mind. If what you're doing seems senseless, meaningless, if it does not matter to you, then you're gaining less from it."

Dr. Merzenich developed a website, Brain HQ.com, to help take advantage of the brain's ability to repair.The Brain HQ website has many different exercises designed to improve brain function and it also allows you to track and monitor your progress over time. While there are many similar sites on the web, Brain HQ is one of the oldest and most widely used, and its programs are supported by dozens of published science studies and the most complete confirmation of behavioral benefits and brain rejuvenation.

How Your Daily Lifestyle Can Improve Your Brain Function

Aside from engaging in a computer-based brain exercise program, Dr. Merzenich lists several things you can do on a daily basis, as part of your day-to-day lifestyle, to help maintain optimal brain fitness:

• Get 15-30 minutes of physical exercise each day, and when exercising, think about using your brain to control your actions. That means, skip the iPod and instead take in the details of your environment.

  "Reconstruct the environment you're walking through in your mind. Basically, we are constructed to take in the details of our physical environments, and to interpret and reconstruct them. That's a critical form of exercise for us basically to refine our navigational skills and abilities in this sense – to basically look at the landmarks, to look at the details, to record them in detail," he says.

  Secondly, look for and take note of surprises in your environment. "If you walk across the landscape and are paying attention, you cannot take a walk for 15, 20, or 30 minutes without being surprised or delighted many times," he says. "And the brain loves surprises, because surprises mean that they must be engaged to interpret what they mean."

  Lastly, pay attention to your physical body. "You should feel yourself again. When's the last time you actually thought about the feelings of your body in motion?"

• Spend about five minutes every day working on the refinement of a specific, small domain of your physical body. Dr. Merzenich explains:

  "That is to say, move in a very variable and controlled way – variable in speed, variable to reach a target, for example, with your big toe or your little finger or the small of your back or the motion of your jaw. Pick a specific refinement target to work on, every day. I do that in a systematic way, because I'm trying to maintain the fidelity of the neurological control movement. I know that I'm very much thinking about the feeling in my movements as I do that."

• Find ways to engage yourself in new learning as a continuous aspect of your life, such as taking on new hobbies or learning new skills.
• Stay socially engaged.
• Practice "mindfulness," in which you're attentively focusing on the world around you again, as if you're seeing it for the first time.

  "Look at the wonder in the flower. Look with curiosity again at the movements of the lizard. Engage in the details of the world and in life. Associate what you hear with what you feel on your skin," he suggests. "It's incredibly important that you engage the brain and all of its details of how it's drinking in information, because this again relates to the fidelity with which it will represent it for all of its operations."

Nutrition and Brain Health

Another factor that cannot be overlooked is your diet. Foods have an immense impact on your brain, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental and physical health. Just like exercise, avoiding sugar (particularly fructose) and grains will help normalize your insulin levels.

This is an important aspect, as sugar causes chronic inflammation that disrupts your body's normal immune function and can wreak havoc on your brain. But sugar also suppresses BDNF, which is important for proper memory function, and appears to play a significant role in depression as well. At least we know that BDNF levels tend to be critically low in people with depression, and some animal models have suggested low BDNF levels may actually be causative.

The medical literature is also showing that coconut oil can be of particular benefit for brain health, and anecdotal evidence suggests it could be very beneficial in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Ketone bodies have been found to feed your brain and prevent brain atrophy. It may even restore and renew neuron and nerve function in your brain after damage has set in. Ketones are what your body produces when it converts fat (as opposed to glucose) into energy, and a primary source of ketone bodies are the medium chain triglycerides (MCT) found in coconut oil. Other dietary recommendations to preserve and improve your brain health include the following:

1. Optimize your vitamin D levels through safe sun exposure, a safe tanning bed and/or vitamin D3 supplements.
2. Take a high-quality animal-based omega-3 fat. I recommend consuming high quality krill oil to meet the optimal amount of omega-3 fats needed to achieve good health and fight cognitive decline.
3. Avoid processed foods and sugars, especially fructose – Excessive sugar and grain consumption are the driving factors behind insulin resistance, and the strategies that protect your brain are very similar to those for avoiding diabetes. There is simply no question that insulin resistance is one of the most pervasive influences on brain damage, as it contributes massively to inflammation, which will prematurely degenerate your brain.

   Ideally, you'll want to restrict your total fructose consumption to below 25 grams a day. This includes refraining from eating too many fruits, if you normally eat a lot of them. If you consume more than 25 grams a day of fructose you can damage your cells by creating insulin and leptin resistance and raising your uric acid levels.

4. Avoid grains – Even whole, organic grains will convert to sugar in your body and spike your insulin levels.
5. Avoid artificial sweeteners – Aspartame, for example, is an excitotoxin that can literally destroy your brain cells. There are many studies showing the dangers of aspartame. For example, one study published in 2000 found that aspartame shortens the memory response, impairs memory retention and damages hypothalamic neurons in mice.
6. Avoid soy – Unfermented soy products are another common food that should be avoided if you want to maintain healthy brain function.

   One well-designed epidemiological study linked tofu consumption with exaggerated brain aging. Men who ate tofu at least twice weekly had more cognitive impairment, compared with those who rarely or never ate the soybean curd, and their cognitive test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older than their current age. What's more, higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight. Shrinkage does occur naturally with age, but for the men who had consumed more tofu showed an exaggeration of the usual patterns you typically see in aging.

   Dr. Kaayla Daniel has written an excellent book, The Whole Soy Story, which covers the health dangers of soy in great depth and I highly recommend it to anyone still under the illusion that soy is a health food.

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