Brain Grain - 1st half of Chapter 3: "Attention, Carboholics and Fat Phobic; Surprising Truths About Your Brain's Real Enemies and Lovers."

Chapter 3 is pretty dense so I only made it half way through the Chapter yesterday, taking notes.  In this Chapter Dr. Perlmutter talks more about how carbs affect the whole body, not just the brain. The following post contains my take-aways from the first half of Chapter 3.

Dr Perlmutter starts the chapter by mentioning the fact that he has had many patients make a single shift in their lifestyle; a change in their diet which encompassed eliminating gluten, reducing carbs, and adding fats; which relieved many ailments and symptoms such as:

• Lifting depression
• Relieving chronic fatigue
• Reversing type 2 diabetes
• Curing brain fog
• Relieving bi-polar disorder

By making this change, he claims that one can shift his biochemistry to burn fat, tame inflammation, and prevent illness.  Perlmutter basically claims that our bodies crave and need a high-fat/low-carb diet.  He sites evidence that ever since we "scientized" our diets the state of our health in the United States has declined.  As he puts it, eons of habits and culture have been replaced with short sighted nutritional theories that benefit, among other things, commercial interests.  Perlmutter ask us, "Do you think that makers of breakfast cereal really have our interests in mind?"  The following quote is in an inset box at the beginning of the chapter:

 "One of the most profitable businesses for food manufacturers is cereal.  It's one of the only industries that can turn an inexpensive ingredient (i.e. processed grain) into a pricey commodity.  The R&D department for General Mills, called the Institute of Cereal Technology and located in Minneapolis, is home to hundreds of scientists whose sole purpose is to design new and tasty cereals that can command a high price and last for a long time on the shelves."

As a side bar:  I will admit to being bent against Big-Food before I ever read Grain Brain or Wheat Belly, but the more I think about the fact that scientists (rather than cooks) are the ones that design how packaged foods taste, feel, and smell, the more anti-Big-Food I become.

One of Perlmutter's biggest concerns about Big-Food, Big-Pharma, and government involvement in telling us what is healthy to eat is that in the 21st century fat has been demonized and replaced by the concept of "healthy carbs."  In this chapter, Perlmutter explains why this is an incredibly unhealthy trend.  He explains how the body uses fats, both saturated and unsaturated, and why they are so important to our bodily functions.  He points out that there is a big difference between naturally occurring fats and commercially modified fats and oils and, in general, claims that there is health risk to most commercially modified fats.  He calls trans fats toxic.  Good fats, on the other hand, are what our bodies thrive on and cholesterol is a good fat.

Dr. Perlmutter tells us that human dietary requirement for carbs is close to zero.  He points out that way-back-when, our only real exposure to plentiful carbs would have been late summer and early fall, when fruits were getting ripe, and that exposure to plentiful carbs would have signaled our bodies to start producing fat to get through the winter.  Now, our constant exposure to plentiful carbs does the same thing, and our bodies are busy storing fat year round.

Perlmutter claims that obesity has almost nothing to do with eating fats and that it is most closely linked to eating carbs.  He states:

"Eating high-cholesterol foods has no impact on our cholesterol levels, and the alleged correlation between higher cholesterol and higher cardiac risk is an absolute fallacy."

 "Fat - not carbohydrate - is the preferred fuel of human metabolism and has been for all of human evolution."

In this chapter he begins to discuss the difference between healthy fats and unhealthy fats.  Healthy fats are the ones that are high in Omega 3s such as fish, olive oil, flax seed oil and walnut oil.  He sites a study published in 2007 in the journal Neurology that looked at more than 8,000 participants who were 65 years old or older.  The study followed them for up to 4 years.  During the study, 280 participants developed some sort of dementia (most often, Alzheimer's).  Researchers were looking for patterns in dietary habits that correlated with development of dementia.  What they found was that those people that regularly consumed omega-3 rich oils were 60% less likely to develop dementia than those that did not consume such fats.  They also found that those that regularly ate omega-6 rich oils - typical in the American diet - and not Omega-3 rich oils, were twice as likely to develop dementia as people that did not eat omega-6-rich oils.  It was noted that the consumption of omega-3 oils counterbalanced the detrimental effect of omega-6 oils, and cautioned against eating omega-6 oils in the absence of omega-3s.

Vegetable oils tend to be high in Omega-6 and low in Omega-3.  Vegetable oil represents the number one source of fat in the American diet.  It is estimated that hunter-gatherers had a diet that had approximately a 1:1 ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3 oils.  Today that ratio is 10-25: 1.  The following is a list of common fats and their Omega-6 and Omega-3 content:

Canola Oil:         20% Omega-6;         9% Omega-3
Corn Oil:            54% Omega-6;          0% Omega-3
Cottonseed Oil:  60% Omega-6;          0% Omega-3
Fish Oil:               0% Omega-6;      100% Omega-3
Flax seed Oil:     14% Omega-6;        57% Omega-3
Peanut Oil:         32% Omega-6;          0% Omega-3
Safflower Oil:    75% Omega-6;          0% Omega-3
Sesame Oil:       72% Omega-6;           0% Omega-3
Soybean Oil:      51% Omega-6;          7% Omega-3
Sunflower Oil:   65% Omega-6;          0% Omega-3
Walnut Oil:        52% Omega-6;        10% Omega-3

Other studies have supported the above findings.  Diets low in fats result in a higher incidence of Alzheimer's and diets high in fats result in a lower incidence of Alzheimer's.  But it is important to focus on Omega-3 rich fats.  Omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory.  Wild and grass fed meats are higher in Omega-3s than grain feed meat.

Other interesting fat facts:  Higher cholesterol levels correlate to better memory function.  Parkinson's is related to lower cholesterol levels.  People with the lowest LDL levels have a 350% increase in their incidence of Parkinson's disease.   This is because LDLs are a carrier protein that transports essential cholesterol to the brain.  Perlmutter stresses over and over again that LDLs are not bad, what is bad is damaged (oxidized) LDLs.

Free radicals damage LDLs:

• Making them less functional for carrying cholesterol.
• Allowing sugar to bind to them, accelerating oxidation - so that they can no longer enter the astrocyte, the cell charged with nourishing neurons.
• Oxidized LDLs are a key factor in atherosclurosis.
• LDLs become oxidized in a high sugar environment.

Therefore; LDLs are not the enemy, high carb diets which yield oxidized LDLs are the enemy.

Perlmutter states that reviews of multiple studies fail to find a correlation between heart disease and high cholesterol.  He quotes Dr. George Mann, a researcher involved in the Framingham Heart Study:

"The diet heart hypothesis that suggests that a high intake of fat or cholesteraol causes heart disease had been repeatedly shown to be wrong, and yet, for complicated reasons of pride, profit, and prejudice, the hypothesis continues to be exploited by scientists, fund-raising enterprise, food companies, and event governmental agencies.  The public is being deceived by the greatest health scam of the century."

In fact, studies suggest that those with the highest total cholesterol have a lower mortality rate with lower incidences of cancer and infection than those with low cholesterol levels.  In 2008 a study was published in the journal, Neurology, that showed that high levels of cholesterol were a protective factor against Lou Gehrig's disease.

In 2010, a publication in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, discussed a study that examined 21 previous medical reports that covered over 340,000 subjects.  It sited the observation that those with the highest consumption of saturated fats had a 19% decrease in the risk of heat disease.  The article pointed out that there has been a publication bias regarding fat in our diets, towards publishing reports that tend to support the idea that fat is bad.

A subsequent report in the same journal quotes a panel of leading researchers in the field of nutrition from around the world:

"At present there is no clear relation of saturated fatty acid intake to these outcomes [of obesity, cardiovascular disease, incidence of cancer and osteoporosis]."

 The researchers went on to say that research should be directed at,

" biological interactions between insulin resistance, reflected by obesity and physical inactivity, and carbohydrate quality and quantity."

And that is as far as I got with my notes.  I will try to compile notes on the second half of chapter three this weekend.  It's fair to say, in summary, that Dr. Perlmutter is trying to undo the years of exposure that we have had to the idea that "Good carbs," are good for us and fat is bad for us.  The more I read, the more I am convinced that he is speaking the truth.  Today I am getting a physical (the first in many years).  It will be interesting to see what the doctor has to say.

Have a great day, everyone!!!!!!!!