Here’s the good news about your brain, “conventional wisdom is that becoming forgetful… is a ‘normal’ sign of aging that happens to everyone…But that conventional wisdom is outrageously wrong.” “…brain degeneration is not inevitable. You can stop it, reverse it, and recover what you have lost.” -Dr. David Perlmutter
When I was 29 I started struggling to remember ordinary words when I wanted to use them in a sentence. I was also experiencing general brain fog where my mind wasn’t as clear or fast, and it was more difficult to follow complex conversations. At 29 years old!! I felt like my mind was slipping away and I had no idea what to do about it. Or what was causing it.
The answers I needed were in The Better Brain book by Dr. Perlmutter. He clearly shares how people are unintentionally hurting their brain health and what can be done to fix that. I learned that many habits and things I was putting in my body were collectively making my brain sluggish and starved for the nutrients it needed. I am so grateful for this book because it has been a resource of hope and a tool that anyone can use to protect and improve their brain function.
I’m going to share what changes I made to get my brain clarity back. (from The Better Brain Book)
One big take away from the book was that I was eating too many grains. I want to say first, that whole grains are not bad for you. They have excellent nutritional value. But the amount of grains I ate per day was too much for my brain and was bogging it down. So I started eating only 2 servings of whole grain per day. (see a nutritionist to determine the best amount for you)
Secondly, I knew that things like potato chips and fried foods have a lot of calories, but I didn’t realize that the type of fat in them was also slowing my brain down. I learned that the brain is made of [mostly] fat so the type of fat I eat determines the makeup of my brain. Dr. Perlmutter details which types of fats are good fats and which ones slow your brain down. So I started focusing on good fats and eliminating the bad ones. I had no idea eating potato chips was working directly against my brain dexterity!
The next one that surprised me was about water. I always drank water from the faucet and thought nothing of it. The Better Brain book says that “well water is often tainted with pesticide runoff from local farms.” And at the time that I read this book I was drinking water from a well. I don’t know if there were any pesticides in the water I was drinking but I know now to get my well water tested. What does that have to do with my brain health? “Pesticides promote the formation of free radicals in the body and challenge the body’s antioxidant defenses.” (Dr. David Perlmutter) And that matters because free radicals are noted as one of the most damaging enemies of the brain.
And in regards to antioxidant defenses, another takeaway is that I started taking a CoQ10 supplement. It is an antioxidant … that the body uses for growth and maintenance. And the brain relies heavily on CoQ10 because “it is one of the few antioxidants that is fat soluble, which means it can get into the fatty brain cell membranes and protect them against free radical attack.” (Dr. David Perlmutter) Taking this supplement daily has been a HUGE help in regaining and maintaining my brain clarity.
I also mentioned in a previous video that birth control was affecting my body’s absorption of B vitamins, which is vital for the brain. So I took a B complex supplement and eventually got off the pill. There are many common medications that affect the absorption of one or more nutrients. You can check out my video for a quick intro on this topic and you can refer to The Better Brain Book for more details.
These are the primary changes I made to regain my brain function. There are so many other tools in the book that I didn’t’ mention! Of the ones I didn’t mention, maybe I was already doing some of them or some didn’t apply to me but they might apply to you. I highly recommend reading the book if you are experiencing brain decline, or just desire to prevent it. It is such a blessing to have found solutions to my brain decline. And it is such a blessing to feel like my brain can keep up again!
And lastly, the book tells you how to reduce your risk for Alzheimer’s and dementia. There’s less that can be done once you have those diagnoses, but Dr. Perlmutter details powerful preventative tools that frankly, everyone should know about. And you can learn about it all in this book.
Make sure you order the right book. Someone recently wrote a book with a Very similar title. The one you want is The Better Brain Book by Dr. David Perlmutter. You can find it using this link: https://a.co/d/7hEe4zA